Creation’s founder, Alan McGee, hauled the band into a meeting and told them that their next record must be a pop record. Labelmates Oasis, as leaders of the erupting Britpop scene, became one of Creation Records’ most lucrative acts, while Slowdive were increasingly a source of frustration. It wasn’t foot-on-the-monitor stuff, it wasn’t macho stuff.”īy the mid-90s, macho stuff was what was selling records. Shoegaze, adds Halstead, “wasn’t necessarily about rock posturing. “It was very laddy,” says Goswell of the Britpop scene. There was a machismo in their music, too. Bands such as Oasis, Blur and Suede brought a punchy directness that made shoegaze seem, well, a little bit fey. It wasn’t helped either by the arrival of Britpop. Photograph: Photoshot/JA Barratt/Photoshot/Getty Images It wasn’t helped by the fact that you two both had classic cars,” she says, gesturing towards Halstead and Chaplin, “and we posed for a photo with those.” None of us are from rich backgrounds, none of us went to private schools. I don’t know why they thought we were so posh. It was, she insists, “a load of bollocks. “That’s when I thought: ‘I’d better get a job.’”Īlthough Goswell seems largely unfazed by the ordeal – “People had just moved on, hadn’t they?” she says with a shrug – there was one aspect to the backlash that still infuriates her: the assumption that “we were all really, really rich”.
“It almost overtook the music,” says Chaplin, “in that you’re trying to put out records, you’re doing it seriously, and then every week you’ve got this constant mocking in the press.” The final death knell came during a show in Coventry, when Savill looked out into the audience, “and there was a woman just mopping the floor.” Chaplin remembers it, too. In a world in which NME and Melody Maker were the major tastemakers for anyone who cared about guitar music, it was no longer cool to be a Slowdive fan. Manic Street Preachers’ Richey Edwards declared, “I hate Slowdive more than Hitler,” and the band became an easy target for derision. Slowdive’s introspective stage presence was rebranded as self-indulgent and superior, and they were dismissed as middle-class musicians with nothing to say. Almost as soon as it was given a name, shoegaze – so called because of the bands’ tendency to look down at the floor during live shows – became what Goswell describes with a tone of faux self-pity, “the genre of ridicule”.
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