Who is guided by voices

Their true Matador debut came in with Alien Lanes, which, despite a five-figure recording allowance, was constructed out of home-recorded snippets on the cheap. After sessions for a concept album entitled The Power of Suck were aborted, the band assembled Under the Bushes Under the Stars out of their first track studio sessions, recorded with Kim Deal and Steve Albini among others, in These records were primarily self-released.

Because GBV alumni were regularly featured, and songs from these albums were frequently included in GBV setlists, they are informally considered to be part of the GBV canon. Pollard created a new incarnation of Guided by Voices with Cleveland glam rockers Cobra Verde in The following album Mag Earwhig! Initially produced for Capitol Records, Do the Collapse was repeatedly delayed and finally released in mid on pseudo-indie label TVT. In the UK it was released on Creation Records. Featuring a slick, heavily processed sound previously foreign to GBV albums, Do the Collapse failed to catch on at radio, and was for the most part greeted with mixed reviews.

Two more box sets of unreleased songs, Suitcase 2 and Suitcase 3, were released in October and November , respectively.

In , Pollard announced he was disbanding Guided by Voices following the release of the Half-Smiles of the Decomposed LP, and a final farewell tour. A full reunion tour was subsequently announced, with the band selling out nearly every date. A third, The Bears for Lunch, followed in November. Another album, English Little League, was released in A sixth reunion album, Cool Planet, has also been announced for May 19, Pollard played every instrument on the album.

He was self-conscious, and he lacked confidence; he felt he'd be misunderstood. After leaving school, Pollard and Mitchell formed their first group, Anacrusis, and played heavy metal and prog covers in Dayton bars in the late 70s.

Those songs came in a torrent, drawing on Pollard's love for 60s pop, 70s prog and the nascent new wave, and setting the pace for a prolific work-rate he has more than 1, songs with the US performing rights body BMI. And then he'd write that song. I thought he was amazing. By the time of Sprout's arrival, the tepid response from a local live scene more interested in covers bands than new music meant the band no longer played gigs.

Real-life commitments anchored the members of GBV, preventing them from taking to the road and finding more welcoming ears: Pollard, married with two children, taught at elementary school; Fennell was a substance-abuse counsellor; Sprout was an illustrator; Mitchell worked at a sandpaper factory. At weekends, however, they would congregate with like-minded friends to drink beer, play records, and commit the endless gush of Pollard pop to tape on four-track recorders and cheap tape decks at Sprout's house, or Fennell's laundry room, or Pollard's basement known within GBV mythology as The Snake Pit.

Financed by their day jobs, GBV self-released five albums of psych-rock and subterranean pop between and ; boasting titles such as Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia and Same Place the Fly Got Smashed , they were pressed up on vinyl in runs of each, and given to friends and family.

It's an awful expensive hobby you got, making these records that nobody even cares about,'" remembers Fennell. They didn't have to understand it. The important thing was, we understood it. GBV's fifth album, 's Propeller, was intended as their last. But Propeller — featuring enduring GBV anthems , shoestring prog-rock epics and affecting Beatlesesque fragments — was their strongest album yet.

Copies found their way out of Datyon — to Cleveland, where Scat Records offered the group a record deal, and to New York, where alt-rock royalty seized upon this strange group about whom nothing was known in a pre-internet age. Glowing notices in the US and UK music press followed and suddenly GBV were no longer toilers in the wilderness; the group's seventh album, 's Bee Thousand , won album-of-the-year accolades in Spin magazine and the Village Voice.

Not bad work for a bunch of weekend warriors. They wined and dined us. I got steak and lobster, so I was happy as hell. Pocketing the advance from Matador, they quit their day jobs and took to the road, the core foursome joined by local law-student and bassist Greg Demos, a regular figure at their weekend recording sessions. Added to the bill of 's touring Lollapalooza festival, GBV's classic lineup crawled out of the basement a fully formed and dynamic rock band , led by their beer-drinking, high-kicking frontman.

They showed twice the energy and charisma of the younger bands on the bill. Not just power, but stamina: their headline shows would run for three hours or more, with ever-changing sets of or-so songs, despite their prodigious drinking they would have a bathtub filled with cans of beer on stage; on their final tour, they added bins marked "piss" and "puke". Finding a devoted audience who understood their music was the sweetest reward after years unappreciated in the wilderness.

It was late, but it came. Their first two albums for Matador, Alien Lanes and its follow-up Under the Bushes, Under the Stars — still packed with those basement recordings of dubious fidelity — were the classic lineup's finest releases, but also their last. The weekend warriors were struggling with life as professional rock'n'rollers. Sprout — Pollard's de facto right-hand man, as lead guitarist and co-songwriter, was first to exit.

I decided I couldn't tour any more. Bob understood — he was even willing to put the band on ice until I was ready. But I told him it was gonna be a long time before I was willing to leave my kids. Drummer Fennell's exit, meanwhile, was more painful. I went into rehab in , and was clean and sober for 15 years," he says. But it was like swimming with sharks.