“You’ve already done it, the first thing people want to talk about with My Bloody Valentine is Kevin’s guitar rig,” laughs Marc Carolan.
“It’s obviously a point of interest as it is a big monolith, it physically dominates the stage but when you think about the songs, although the guitar is paramount, it’s not in a vacuum!”
Marc, a live sound engineer and mixing expert with a career spanning the best part of three decades is right, I’ve fallen into the vortex of intrigue surrounding the band and their creative leader Kevin Shields.
Since My Bloody Valentine’s initial forays in the mid to late eighties, they have become the stuff of sonic legend, maintaining a tantalising trail of detail around themselves and their music. As with so many fans, I’m left to collect what I can, constantly wondering how the group gets THAT sound out of their instruments.
Their 1991 album, Loveless, is deservedly heralded as a classic. It pushed more conventional indie guitars into bold and blistering new pastures. In the years after, with little new music released, various reports of studio struggles only added to the myth until they eventually returned to the stage in 2008, with their third LP 'm b v' following in 2013.
Last year’s four live outings marked the band’s first UK headline jaunt in a decade with gigs in Dublin, Manchester, Glasgow and London’s Wembley where this writer was among 10,000 onlookers almost literally blown away by their performance.
Marc, who is known for his tenure with guitar band Muse, has been a fan since the band’s early days.
“I’m of an age that I was an MBV fan when Loveless came out,” he states. “It’s funny, when I was part of an independent label, we used to do recording sessions with emerging bands and one of them recently sent me a photo of me in the [My Bloody Valentine] Glider EP t-shirt. They made the point that I’d progressed from wearing the t-shirt to mixing the band.”
Marc’s musical adventures began as a kid, playing guitar and experimenting with his dad’s drum kit. He began recording with tape decks, bouncing sounds between them before Amstrad brought out its Studio 100.
“It was really cheap, had a radio tuner, four microphones, a turntable too,” Marc says. “No one had ever done anything like it and I wasted many hours experimenting with it trying to figure out how to record.”
From these beginnings, Marc went to college in Dublin to study electronics and telecommunications. While his studies didn’t stoke the creative fires, he did become involved with a group of friends who had brought an eight track, Tascam TSR-8 tape recording studio. Without knowing how to use it, they turned to Marc for help.
“I started working with them, we launched a label, then the first thing we recorded, the Roadrunner label picked up,” Marc says. “It was the first thing we released by a band called Wormhole, a real lo-fi record and first thing I recorded on an eight-track."
Afterwards, Marc continued to work within Dublin’s independent underground scene producing, recording, getting gigs and generally hustling before one of the acts he worked with - a rapidly-rising indie band called Bawl - were signed.
“They asked me to do sound for their tour and I went on the road with them,” he says. “I’ve always moved between producing and touring, then ended up working with this guitar band JJ72 who had a little bit of success. They opened up for Muse, I started working with them and never looked back.”
Marc’s career has subsequently grown since then, having now worked with Muse for 25 years ever since their early releases. With nine albums under their belts, he cites his experiences with Matt Bellamy’s group as some of the most joyful of his career.
“What I love about them is how you can put them in a club, a theatre or a stadium, and they are brilliant across all of these slightly different disciplines,” Marc says.
“They are able to do all of them, they are famous for big productions but they started the last tour at the Exeter Cavern and blew everyone away. They are just brilliant musicians.”
According to Marc, the ability to establish connections with artists is just as important as his technical abilities in his role as a sound engineer. He’s also always had a preference for doing things his own way too, ever since those early days.
“Back when I was doing the toilet tours, I used to try and convince the manager to try and give me some budget to hire outboard such as Tube-Tech compressors, really great reverbs. I used to blag the manager so I could bring that stuff into the Camden Falcon,” Marc laughs.
“Despite some of the questions I got asked, it wasn’t a waste of time, it just differentiated me slightly from what else was happening. It made me stand out from what was going on.”
Another skill that has helped him is an ability to know when it has been time to take on a new project.
“It’s not just about getting opportunities, it’s also about realising you’ve been given an opportunity too and going with it,” Marc explains. “I remember when I started working with Muse, everyone said how JJ72 were going to make it big. But I thought that Muse could do it and I’m glad I stuck to my guns.”
In Turn Your Head into Sound, a recent book on My Bloody Valentine by journalist Andrew Perer, avant garde composer Caterina Barbieri is quoted on the impact of hearing Loveless. She describes it as an ‘alien’ record. “It has such a different perception of time and space,” Barbieri writes “You can almost disappear into the sound. There’s a feeling of surrender to the wall of noise.”
Barbieri’s description is a suitably apt way of detailing the My Bloody Valentine live show too. It was through a past connection, Paul Timoney, an independent promoter in Ireland, where the opportunity arose for Marc to work with the band. He was asked to join a call with Kevin to share his thoughts on utilising modern PA technology in arenas.
“I was asked what I would recommend as an approach,” Marc explains on his involvement. “Kevin was wondering if we needed loads of delays or all of this different kind of kit and I offered my advice as an independent person with my experiences in these settings. They liked me on the call and shortly after they offered me the gig.”
Marc had previously witnessed My Bloody Valentine play in the flesh but not since their last headline show in Dublin in the early nineties. He’d also been at their set at Coachella in 2009 but was preparing to mix the Cure rather than taking their performance in.
With only his memories to rely on, his first port of call was to revisit the back catalogue and delve deep into the details.
“One thing that struck me, there’s a misconception about the vocals being buried,” March says. “They aren’t, they’re an absolute integral part of the melodic structure of the songs. They are not in your face, but melodically, they are absolutely key to the music. One of my approaches was to bring the musicality and the melodies more to the fore and the band had been thinking that way as well for a while.”
For Marc, this is an analytical approach he likes to adopt with all his artist clients when preparing to work with them ahead of a show.
“When you know you’re going to be mixing an artist, you go back and listen with a different headspace,” he says. “You have to revisit the songs and work out what they need in a live setting. This is how I work with all my artists; music first, then we apply tech to the music, not the other way around.”
As part of the tour preparations, Marc had the chance to visit Kevin Shields in his studio and spend some time going through the band’s tracks.
“I had this really cool afternoon with him, he obviously has this amazing knowledge and ears,” Marc says. “He sat me down with Loveless and broke it apart for me, that was fascinating and really helped inform what I was trying to do.”
“Also, just getting to understand his analogue ethos, we talked about different kinds of compressors and preferred EQs. It helped me build up a picture of what I was going to use and how I was going to use it.”
A Midas XL 4 console was at the heart of the mixing side of the recent shows, a large format analogue console. It’s a piece of kit that might have been more alien to other engineers but Marc has been a fan throughout his career.
“I only stopped using it day-to-day with Muse in 2017,” he states. “So comparatively, it’s relatively recent in terms of my experience with it. I used it with Muse all the time for a long time so I knew it very well.”
“However, as Muse developed, I have employed a hybrid approach. At the heart of it is the analogue console but there is a digital part which handles extra elements and automation. That’s what I did with MBV, so using the Avid S6L was part of this, although it was still skewed towards the analogue.”
Of course, volume is a concept that fans, journalists and music lovers around the world will often heatedly discuss and debate in relation to MBV’s music.
The breakdown of You Made Me Realise is often extended into new and ear-shredding shapes that could knock you over and go on for as long as the band wants (and venue curfews now enable). From looking online, there are countless threads and Reddit chats with fans obsessing over how loud it can get. But Marc feels this is missing the point of what the band is trying to achieve.
“Some people are obsessed with numbers and volume but I tried to find a feeling,” he says. “For FOH, I specifically did not have the SPL reading up on the screens, because people were staring at it from the barrier, so to relieve ourselves of that felt really freeing.”
Marc also likes to mix dynamically, shifting between the loud and more subtle, softer sections of the band’s set. By doing so, the ears of the audience can be surprised and excited rather than being repeatedly bludgeoned by volume.
“It’s an approach I’ve honed over my career,” he says. “There are parts of the show that are extremely loud but the whole gig is not like that. If you come out of the gates and it’s super loud and stay there, then your brain adapts and after three songs, it doesn't have the intensity. Instead, I’m trying to use the musical dynamic of the songs to find places where we can push and pull, push and pull on the audience without it being gimmicky or obvious.”
This latest round of arena gigs for Marc comes after a career spent working in live spaces of this magnitude. There were some critics of the venues’ size when the run of dates was announced but this setting is where the band can perform and sound their best.
“It’s obvious that they belong in these spaces,” says Marc. “The scale of the music lends itself to this size of venue, judging by the reaction of the audience, everyone felt like this. We did a live rehearsal at the national stadium in Dublin, this boxing venue with a 1,500 capacity - it was a set to shake the dust off as they hadn’t played a show together for a while.”
The preparations for the run of dates certainly paid off - the reviews were unanimous about the brilliance of these gigs and, as an audience member who had never witnessed the band in full flow, it was something else to behold.
“I had to use every bit of skill I had. You’re dealing with extreme challenges,” Marc says. “A loud guitar set up, quiet vocals alongside the weight of expectation and huge audience hype. I hadn’t realised what a banger Soon was live, that always felt like a big moment in the show. Only Shallow, Cigarette in your Bed was an unexpected monster, with the 1-2 punch at the end.”
More gigs with the band are expected with a Royal Albert Hall show in the diary for March 2026 but Marc is also looking to other clients including Muse and Snow Patrol too. His final words are around advice for live sound engineers.
“It seems obvious but listening is so important,” he states. “Listening to what the songs are, to what the artist is trying to tell you and not letting any preconceptions about what you think the artist is trying to say get in the way of your role. People can get overly focused on the tech aspect too and can become too absorbed with it when actually, it’s all about doing what’s right for the music."
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