The Long Play Sessions : Simon Reynolds - Still in a Dream with Rudy Tambala

Join us at The Long Play Sessions for an immersive and intellectually charged evening with acclaimed music critic and cultural historian Simon Reynolds, as he discusses 'Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984–1994'.

In Still in a Dream, Reynolds picks up where Rip It Up and Start Again left off, tracing the underground explosion that followed post‑punk: the rise of shoegaze, noisepop, slacker rock and grunge. Drawing on his first hand experience as a journalist embedded in the scene, Reynolds captures a moment when guitar music turned inward and expansive at the same time — when distortion, volume and texture became vehicles for emotion, alienation and altered states.

From the shimmering dreamworlds of Cocteau Twins and Slowdive, to the visceral noise of Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement, Reynolds explores how this music reflected the psychic climate of the time: youth disaffection, political conservatism, and the last flourish of analogue culture before the internet remade everything. Both personal memoir and cultural analysis, the book is as much about how music felt as how it sounded.

Far more than a scene-by-scene history, Still in a Dream examines why this era continues to echo through contemporary music, fashion and attitudes — and how its ethos of experimentation, withdrawal, intensity and beauty reshaped the possibilities of rock music for decades to come.