—Kevin Shields has a habit of making it sound like the most reasonable thing in the world one minute – bands are loud, he shrugs, but most gigs are “laughably quiet … something you’re consuming, not being consumed by” – then admitting that My Bloody Valentine reached a point where they were playing at such volume that they were causing structural damage to venues. “Chunks were falling out of the ceiling. It sounds like an exaggeration, but I’m serious – we were really concerned that eventually some roof was going to fall down,” he says. “It was a matter of time before a serious accident happened.”

Not everyone was impressed. There is a bootleg recording circulating among fans of a late 80s London gig degenerating into chaos – the sound man has given up and fled the building. Shields says that was one of the less extreme reactions. “At one gig, a butcher was literally chasing my sister with a cleaver – he wanted to chop the cable because it was shaking his shop so much when we were doing You Made Me Realise. The police turned up and arrested our tour manager during You Made Me Realise. They arrested him, put him in the car, questioned him and let him go and when he got back we were still playing it. Countless, countless situations.”—