Chapterhouse look back on debut album Whirlpool 35 years on

Chapterhouse are looking back on Whirlpool, their 1991 debut album, 35 years after its release, and marking the anniversary with their first-ever shows in Argentina.

The band will play Mar del Plata on October 3 and Buenos Aires on October 4, performing Whirlpool front to back before a second set of favorites, B-sides and Blood Music tracks. "People really liked hearing it that way, because I guess it's a different way of approaching a live show," guitarist and vocalist Andy Sherriff told Indie Hoy.

Whirlpool wasn't recorded in one place. The band started at UHF studios in Rugby, the same room where Spacemen 3 recorded, before moving between other studios to finish and mix the record. Two songs, "Pearl" and "Breather," were tracked on the same console the Sex Pistols used for Never Mind the Bollocks, giving them a brighter, poppier edge than the rest of the album.

Sherriff traced the band's roots to Reading in the late 1980s, where Chapterhouse formed alongside friends in Slowdive and Moose. He said the scene that would later be labeled "shoegaze" barely existed as a category at the time. "In that moment nobody called it shoegaze," he said. "It was really just Ride, Chapterhouse, Lush, barely a handful of bands."

One of the band's wildest memories came at Reading Festival, where they played immediately after Nirvana. Kurt Cobain had thrown himself into his drum kit and hurt his arm, and organizers pulled the band offstage. "They basically kicked Nirvana off and told us, 'you have to play now,'" Sherriff recalled. With about 15 minutes' notice and 70,000 people watching, the band scrambled to tune up and go on.

Chapterhouse split in the mid-1990s and reunited for a 2010 tour of Japan and the US. Sherriff said this run feels even bigger than that one, helped along by younger bands citing Whirlpool as an influence. "It's really nice to know that there are people who are genuinely interested in our music now, and that they're young," he said.