GEAR TALKS: Nick Chaplin of Slowdive

I n the years following their 1995 break up, the image conjured by the mention of Slowdive was one suspended in amber; the five contemplative, porcelain-pale, twentysomethings cloaked in white-golden light on the Souvlaki album cover.

Only the band’s second studio album, Souvlaki was recorded in 1992 and released in 1993 via the infamous Creation Records. Although hampered by the shifting tides of UK music criticism upon initial release, with one Melody Maker reviewer stating that he’d “rather drown choking in a bath full of porridge” than listen to the record, Souvlaki has has amassed an ardent cult following over the past three decades. Widely heralded one of the ‘big two’ shoegaze LP’s, it ranked second in Pitchfork’s 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time, conquered only by My Bloody Valentine’s equally venerated Loveless.

Speaking with Slowdive’s original and current bassist Nick Chaplin, I was curious to find out what the band’s relationship to shoegaze as a phenomenon is now, with its pejorative connotation having all but been forgotten.

“Well yeah, I mean, it’s definitely changed. We try not to think about it too much, but you can’t deny that it’s a big important part of what the band is, and was. Certainly back in the 90s we were young and we didn’t wanna be pigeonholed, man. We were like, no, we’re unique, so we didn’t want to be a part of that. And [shoegaze] was only very briefly something positive in the 90s in the music press… initially, the bands that were a part of that scene were sort of, adored by the music press, but it was a very short period of time and the backlash came very quickly. And so, none of us wanted that term associated with our music at all.”

“But then, over time, decades pass… we’re sort of quite comfortable with it now really, to be honest it’s like – it is what it is.

“I went to a music store in Reading to get some spares for the tour the other day with my 15-year-old son and the guy in there was like “oh, what sort of music do you play?”, and I hate these situations in music shops – I don’t want to play bass guitars in front of people, I just want to get what I need and leave. But you know, my son was like, oh, he’s in a shoegaze band! And I was thinking ah, he’s not going to know what that is, but he was like “oh great!” and started rattling off… So yeah, it’s like, a total genre now, like heavy metal or punk or whatever. So, you know, embrace it, you’ve gotta embrace it haven’t you.”

Slowdive officially reformed in 2014, and thus the band are in a unique position, having been active at two very different points in their personal lives and in the record industry respectively. When asked if he’s perceived a major shift from the 90s to now, Nick emphasises that the band’s 2010s experience of touring and releasing music has been a far cry from the disarray of former label Creation.

“Releasing records on Creation, it was just chaos. Creation was chaotic…. you know, there was talk of us maybe releasing the record in 2017 by ourselves, because we didn’t have a relationship with Dead Oceans, the label, at the time. But we were open to having a relationship with a label, we weren’t sure that we could really manage it ourselves…

“The great thing is, now people can [release independently], which maybe wasn’t an option back in the 90s. But for us, I think, at our time of life, we thought we needed a partner, a label to help us out. And Dead Oceans are obviously very independently minded… they kind of reminded us a bit of creation – in that they’re all young, they’re all into it for the right reasons – just without the chaos. And without the drugs.”

Being that collectively, the band are in a very different phase of life than they were when their first two albums were released, and are now also spread out across the UK, Nick tells me that their writing process, helmed by lead singer and guitarist Neil Halstead, has also evolved somewhat.

“For this [forthcoming] record, there’s a couple of exceptions, but most of the songs were pretty fully realised in Neil’s head… he’ll take it all away and cut it all up and mix it together and then we give it to a mix engineer to kind of finish off. He’s quite a traditional songwriter. His solo career is very sort of folksy, just an acoustic guitar and acoustic instruments and singing songs about Cornwall where he lives. And so, a lot of Slowdive songs actually come from that, then we just add the band’s kind of… aesthetic?”

When I explain that Mixdown is an instrument and audio tech publication, and that I am thus chomping at the bit to ask him about Slowdive’s signature tools, Nick laughs and tells me he is probably the worst person in the band to be speaking on the subject. However he’s certain of what is (unsurprisingly) the equipment most integral to the band’s sound.

“We’ve worked out that the only two pieces of equipment we can’t do the show without are Neil and Christian’s pedalboards. Which might not come as that much of a surprise. Everything else we can cope with, you know, if the guitars don’t show up it’s alright you can just borrow them, but the pedalboards are pretty much crucial, and Neil and Christian have spent decades building them up.”

“Back in the 90s we had two boxes, they were Yamaha FX 500 boxes, and they had the traditional Slowdive sounds preprogrammed on them so you’d just hit a number and it would sit on top of the amp, and eventually we had them rack mounted, and that was it! And then the guitarists had basic distortion pedals, and maybe some chorus and reverb or whatever, but it was all through these little FX 500 units whereas now all that’s gone, and the guys have got these huge suitcases with about 50 million pedals on them.”

With our time almost up, though he’s admittedly not a tech-head, I can’t resist asking Nick about what’s on his current bass rig. “I struggle with coordination, so I can’t have too many pedals… I’ve got a Hotcake overdrive and a Boss Bass Chorus and a tuner and that’s basically it. I don’t even have that many basses. At the moment I’m playing a Fender Jazz Bass, one of the newer active ones, I used to have a Jazz back in the 90s which was a passive one, and it never had enough grunt really for onstage, I used to always use the Musicman Stingray on stage because that was the one that would really cut through, and the rest of the band could always hear that big sound – and whenever I brought the Jazz out they’d be like, are you even playing?

“But I always wanted to go back to the Jazz cause I like the neck and I like the shape, so this time around when I saw that they’d produced some active ones that are slightly more powerful sounding I picked up one of those. That’s what I’m using at the moment. That and a Gibson Thunderbird, which I like ‘cause it looks metal.”

BY ISABELLA VENUTTI