Slowdive

Named after a song by Siouxsie & the Banshees, Slowdive was formed by two childhood friends in Reading (Berkshire), UK, in 1989. Rachel Goswell (vocals, guitar, keyboards) and Neil Halstead (vocals, guitar) formed the short-lived The Pumpkin Fairies with drummer Adrian Sell, and recruited guitarist Christian Savill to rename themselves Slowdive. Noticed at a gig with Five Thirty, the band signed to Creation Records and in 1990 released the demo as a critically acclaimed EP. After several changes, drummer Simon Scott took part in the recording of the Holding Our Breath EP (1991), which reached number 52 in the UK charts, while the single "Catch the Breeze " topped the independent charts. Affiliated with the shoegaze scene at the turn of the 1990s, Slowdive produced their debut album Just for a Day (1991), in which a wall of guitars and keyboards masked the singers' voices. Rated No. 32, it took the band on a U.S. tour to support Blur, before the release of the Blue Day EP (1992), which featured a number of old tracks. Back in the studio, the quartet were joined by bassist Nick Chaplin and Brian Eno, who played keyboards on two tracks, for the sessions on their second album, Souvlaki (1993), which reached no. 51 and re-established the balance between instruments and vocals. An alliance of dream pop and shoegaze, it was received with mixed reviews before becoming a benchmark of the decade. A new drummer, Ian McCutcheon, was hired for the next album, Pygmalion (1995), which explored the shores of ambient music. Immediately disavowed by its label, Slowdive split up, and its two founding members continued with the drummer under the name Mojave 3, which released five albums of pop, folk and country rock between 1995 and 2006. Following various solo and band projects, Goswell and Halstead announce the return of Slowdive, who embark on a festival tour in summer 2014 and work on a fourth album, Slowdive, released three years later on the Dead Oceans label. After a first appearance at the Glastonbury festival in June 2023, the album Everything Is Alive follows three months later, entirely composed and produced by Neil Halstead, who had conceived it as an electronically oriented solo album. Rated #6 in the UK and #1 on the independent charts, it reached #63 on the Billboard 200 in the USA.