Chapterhouse

Chapterhouse came out of Reading in 1987, when Andrew Sherriff, Stephen Patman and Simon Rowe decided that guitars ought to shimmer rather than slash. They cut their teeth on stages shared with Spacemen 3, which tells you plenty about the druggy, droning ambitions at play, and by the time the shoegaze tag was being hung on every band that stared at its effects pedals, they were one of the names it fitted best.

Sherriff and Patman traded guitars and vocals, Rowe added a third guitar, Russell Barrett took over bass from Jon Curtis in 1989 and Ashley Bates held down the drums. Whirlpool, their 1991 debut, is where they sound most like themselves: "Pearl" and "Mesmerise" wash in on layers of fuzz and murmured, half-buried voices, pretty and woozy in equal measure. Blood Music followed in 1993, and a year later it was over.

It came back in the oddest way. In 2008 Ulrich Schnauss asked them onstage at the Truck Festival in Oxfordshire to play his cover of their "Love Forever", and the reunion stretched to a pair of London gigs and 2010 tours of North America and Japan.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.