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[28.9.06] [Stevens]
DIARY OF A SHOEGAZER
 'Diary of a Shoegazer' was a regular satirical 'Thrills' feature in the NME circa 1991. Since, by all accounts, my last set of thoughts on shoegazing set 3:AM's traffic soaring, I've been asked to make this a regular column, though there'll be no piss-taking, you can be assured of that. So, if my mentioning shoegazing sets traffic soaring, then please take a moment to imagine Andy Bell stood atop a hill, Rickenbacker fully engaged, plucking the fade-out solo of 'Leave Them All Behind', beckoning the world over to come live in the Thames Valley or at least catch Slowdive at the Town and Country Club.
For the first then, I'd like to turn my attention to a neglected gem of the era. No Chapterhouse or (shudder) Catherine Wheel here. Black Tambourine's only album will have pedants head-scratching in that regard. Complete Recordings isn't even a proper album but a collection of their entire recorded output, from singles to compilation CD tracks, all 10 songs of it (they only managed four gigs during their brief existence as well). Hailing from Silver Spring, Maryland, a largely insignificant series of strip malls in suburban DC, Black Tambourine represented the early explorations of an English sound that would later come to be defined by Velocity Girl (a successor act) and a whole host of forgotten bands on labels like Slumberland and Teenbeat. In doing so, Black Tambourine are regarded as an overtly derivative US act who shamelessly plundered the Mary Chain's back catalogue and had more in common with (Scottish) jangle thrash like the Shop Assistants and the Pastels. You can label them jangle thrash all you want, but the fact remains that by so studiously copying Psychocandy-era Mary Chain and its influences, the end product comes out sounding like early Ride. You can judge for yourself here on their MySpace.
Black Tambourine, almost hailing from the city of hardcore but not quite, is the point where shoegazer met jangle thrash, a sound developed in isolation concurrently with the genre's finest but wholly ignored at the time. This is no venn diagram exercise, after all the lines where one genre ends and another begins is not the territory of self-loathing indie pedants but an excuse to marvel at acts who insist on avoiding capital letters on their cover art (see also the recently-reformed Secret Shine, where shoegazer met indie pop).
ABOUT THE WRITER
 A. Stevens lives in London, where he is one of the editors of 3:AM, contributes to Through A Glass Darkly and is curating the forthcoming set of Social Disease events. He recently edited The Edgier Waters anthology.
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