It became known as 'the holocaust section', the point in every My Bloody Valentine show, during You Made Me Realise, where the Dublin band would embark upon an painfully loud, open-ended, improvisational white noise freak-out which, on more than one occasion, caused audience members to shit themselves.
"That can happen," bandleader Kevin Shields acknowledged in a 2013 interview with The Guardian. "But there's always someone who'll shit themselves at the slightest excuse."
Talking to Ireland's Hot Press magazine in 2003, Shields explained how the infamous musical experience came to be.
"It was like a Sonic Youth improvisation thing," Shields explained to writer Peter Murphy. "Initially we started playing it live exactly the same as the record, and then we liked that bit and it got longer, and then it got to the point where at its most extreme it was probably 40 minutes long.
"The interesting thing was taking something that was like reality and messing with it to the point where it was so loud, basically people would imagine all sorts of things happening. It wasn’t just making noise with guitars; it was like an out-of-body thing.
"I used to watch the audience, and a certain portion at a certain point would let go of any kind of control, it was so loud it was like sensory deprivation. We just liked the fact that we could see a change in the audience at a certain point, and it always happened, every night... About a third of the audience would resent it, and two thirds would like it."
One unforeseen consequence of 'the holocaust' was the effect that the improvisation would have on security staff at the venues which the Dubliners played.
Shields explained: "On one British tour we actually had to hire a top security guy that ran one of those big security firms to be with us to interface with security at the venues, because the effects of this noise could also provoke the people who worked at the venue and they’d usually freak, there’d be a lot of threats, a lot of aggression, and taking it very personally on the audience because of this noise. And I realised it was quite weird, but we actually had to protect the audience."
My Bloody Valentine will play a rare hometown show at Dublin's 3arena on November 22. Look for tickets here. And do bring earplugs if you go.
