FEBRUARY 16, 2024. Backstage at the Brighton Dome, Slowdive are preparing to take the stage for the first date of their UK tour. But first, there’s some star-spotting to be done. Neil Halstead – the band’s main writer, guitarist and co-singer – peers at a framed photograph of Pink Floyd hanging on the dressing room wall, commemorating the live debut of The Dark Side Of The Moon here in January 1972. “Oh, Pink Floyd played here,” he announces to the rest of the room. “Fantastic!” At the same moment, Halstead’s four-year-old son Albert wanders past, alongside guitarist Christian Savill’s teenage daughter and her excited schoolmates. It’s a contented, middle-aged scene. “When we were doing the band from 18 to 23, we pretty much lived together for six years,” Halstead says. “It was everything to us all, we had tunnel vision. Now we have commitments, so we slip in and out of Slowdive. Our most intense period was when we were kids, that’s still the touchstone for everything that happens for us.”
Comparisons between Slowdive then and now are never far from the band’s thoughts. In the early ’90s, Slowdive bristled with potential, standing with My Bloody Valentine, Ride and Lush in shoegazing’s vanguard as they finessed their woozy, immersive psychedelia – until Britpop elbowed them out of the way and they finally split up in 1995. “We were a band out of our time,” Halstead reflects. “Slowdive was dead and buried,” Rachel Goswell, the band’s co-vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, agrees. Yet since reforming in 2014, Slowdive are, improbably, bigger than ever. Last year, Everything Is Alive, their second album since reuniting, was their first Top 10 hit in the UK and four other countries; a clear indication of how influential their initial run of records became on artists like Tame Impala, Grizzly Bear, Frank Ocean, DiiV and many others.
Among Slowdive’s young acolytes are their UK support band, London’s Whitelands. “I’d been listening to Midwest emo, and shoegaze and emo have this link,” singer Etienne Quartey-Papafio explains. “Then Slowdive released their [selftitled reunion] 2017 album and that was thevery equalising music that spans across generations and class.”
