For journalists and musicians alike, My Bloody Valentine have become one of the most namedropped bands in the world. "It's astonishing how often they are cited," agrees broadcaster, fan and long-term MBV champion Dave Fanning. "There has never been an Irish band that has done anything like what they've done. I don't even know of a single band in the world that sounds anything like them, let alone in Ireland."

I'll never, ever forget the first time I heard My Bloody Valentine. In 1990, a friend excitedly played me the lead track from the Glider EP, which coincidentally he had taped off the Dave Fanning show. The song was called Soon and it was headspinningly good, combining gentle waves of noise with a strident house/hip-hop beat and a strange otherworldly riff.

On that afternoon, Soon sounded like something from another planet, simultaneously familiar and completely alien. At a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Brian Eno claimed Soon "set a new precedent for pop" and deemed it was the "vaguest" piece of music ever to get into the charts. "If Steve Reich or Glenn Branca had been responsible for it," he said, "they would have been given an award by the classical music establishment."

My friend took great pride in the fact that the two founding members of the band who had authored this staggering piece of music, Kevin Shields and Colm ó Cíosóig, were from the locality. Initially, I don't think this really bothered me so much, as I'd just heard something radical and thrilling that I couldn't get out of my head.

It's believed My Bloody Valentine formed in Dublin around 1984, but as Kevin Shields once recalled in a rare interview with RTÉ, "Everyone seemed to be forming a group around '78/'79. They wouldn't actually play an instrument, but just put a band name on their jacket. So this 12-year-old asked me to be in a group, a real group, as that's what all the nerds and weirdos actually did. That was about 1980 and we used to rehearse every Sunday."

Kevin and Colm jammed in a number of bands, including The Complex with Liam O Maonlaí, who later formed the Hothouse Flowers. Colm ó Cíosóig knew Liam from Coláiste Eoin in Booterstown, a vibrant hub for musicians that also counts various members of Kíla, Moving Hearts, The Frames, Na Fíréin and (ahem) Rattle and Hum among its alumni.

They formed another group with Dave Conway, who assumed the stage name Dave Stelfox and suggested outlandish band names such as the Burning Peacocks, before they settled on My Bloody Valentine. Dublin was hardly a hot-bed for avant-garde art rock at the time, but there was one local singer and group that the fledgling band looked up to.

"Our singer lived in Finglas and Gavin Friday lived in Finglas, so I used to often walk by him," Kevin Shields recalls. "One day I got the courage to say we were in a group and ask him for any advice. He just said, "Get out of Dublin." At the time, the Virgin Prunes did these mini tours of Europe, so he gave us all these names and addresses. One person got back to us with a show in Holland, so we emigrated for one gig. We meandered around Europe for about eight months and then we went to London."

My Bloody Valentine weren't hyped up to the hilt or hailed as the next big anything, simply because they just weren't good enough yet. In the early years, they were a curious yet derivative hybrid of morbid goth and flowery indie pop. MBV produced a string of reasonably well-received EPs, This Is Your Bloody Valentine, Geek!, The New Record by My Bloody Valentine and Sunny Sundae Smile.

Most of the reverential hoopla that now surrounds the band stems from their two full-length studio albums, especially Loveless, a work that has probably spawned more myths and half-baked rumours than any other record of recent times. However, it really shouldn't be forgotten that My Bloody Valentine were dab hands at releasing brilliant, fully-formed EPs. The "extended play" four track format has sadly become a lost art form with the advent of downloading.

From August 1987, My Bloody Valentine produced some knockout EPs, starting with Strawberry Wine, the first release with new members Bilinda Butcher and Debbie Googe after Dave Conway's departure. Their first release for Alan McGee's Creation label, You Made Me Realise in 1988, was a creative and critical breakthrough. The lead title track still closes every My Bloody Valentine concert.

My Bloody Valentine's debut album, Isn't Anything in 1989, launched a thousand watery imitators in the nascent scene that became known by the horrible tag "shoegaze", a reference to how bands would supposedly stare at their shoes while creating a wall of noise.

Even though everyone still bangs on about how long it supposedly took to complete the follow up, Loveless, the reality is somewhat different by contemporary standards. Now, long gaps between album releases have become standard.

Loveless and Radiohead's OK Computer are probably the two most celebrated and revered albums of the 1990s. 1991 was a particularly good year for music, as the world was graced with Nirvana's Nevermind, Screamadelica by Primal Scream, Blue Lines by Massive Attack, Spiderland by Slint and Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub.

In winter '91, MBV embarked on a European tour that the writer and author David Cavanagh describes as a "unique chapter in live music". A staple of the set was a raucous, strobe-drenched version of You Made Me Realise that sometimes lasted up to 40 minutes. The band nicknamed this elongated middle-eight "the Holocaust".

"Usually people would experience a type of sensory deprivation and they would lose a sense of time," explained Kevin Shields. "It would force them to be in the moment, and since people don't usually get to experience that, there'd be a sense of elation. There would be a feeling of, 'Wow, that was really weird, but I suddenly heard this symphony ... ' It was such a huge noise with so much texture to it. It allowed people to imagine anything."

For all the excitement and awe My Bloody Valentine inspired, they didn't play live very often. In May 1992, I faced the agonising choice of seeing either Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds or My Bloody Valentine.

Cave and MBV were playing on consecutive Saturday nights in the SFX, but there was absolutely no question of being able to afford a ticket for both shows. After much deliberation, I plumped for Nick Cave's Irish debut, thinking that MBV were bound to be back quite soon. I've since seen Cave at least half a dozen times, while on August 30, 2008, I'll finally have the long-awaited pleasure of seeing My Bloody Valentine on an Irish stage.

On June 20, 2008, My Bloody Valentine played their first full concert in 16 years in the Roundhouse in Camden. Personally, I found the first half of the performance surreal and rather hard to come to terms with. It was out of this world brilliant, but it was only when they played Soon that it really dawned on me what I was witnessing.

According to unsubstantiated reports, the volume reading at the Roundhouse peaked at 128 decibels. Others allege that it touched between 130 and 132 decibels. To put this in context, the Guinness Book of Records abandoned the entry for loudest band in the world so not to encourage deafening volumes, but before they did, the Who were the world record holders at 126 decibels.

The noise of a plane taking off from an airport runway is approximately 120 decibels and the so-called "threshold of pain" is somewhere between 130 and 140 decibels. Free earplugs were given out on the door of the Roundhouse, the proper in-ear kind rather the cheap wedges of foam you get in a chemist. As well as providing invaluable protection against tinnitus, they enable the listener to experience different frequencies and fully appreciate the powerfully intricate MBV melodies.

After five nights in the Roundhouse, My Bloody Valentine's roadshow moved north to the Manchester Apollo and then on to Glasgow's Barrowlands. The Barrowland Ballroom in the East End of Glasgow is renowned for its superb acoustics and sprung dance floor, voted the best venue in the UK and the second best in the world by touring bands.

The first night in Glasgow on July 3 was my pick of the tour. Given the smaller environs, it was astonishingly loud, rendering the London gig somewhat tame. Despite using earplugs, I could still feel the molecules of sound flowing through the air and my legs shuddered during the show's climax.

At a concert in Le Zenith in Paris on July 9 this year, the venue lowered the volume as French law states live concerts can be no louder than 106 decibels. During the customary deafening crescendo that is You Made Me Realise, the amplification on the bass drum and bass guitar was pulled. The band stopped playing and Shields is reported to have mimed the signing of papers, possibly referring to a clause in their contract that allows them to play at their own preferred volume.

Barry Hogan of All Tomorrow's Parties, who promoted the UK tour, valiantly attempts to sum up the transcendental intensity of the MBV live experience. "My Bloody Valentine define the word sonic," he says. "Their live sound is like nothing else. It's harsh but beautiful. For years, we have seen or worked with various noise acts, but after seeing the band live, everyone will re-evaluate what they are doing. Everything else is like Diet Coke to My Bloody Valentine's real thing. To say it has raised the bar is an understatement."

At Electric Picnic on August 30, My Bloody Valentine will walk onto an Irish stage again. It's also an understatement to say that music fans in this country have sorely missed them. In that moment, make some noise for this homecoming. Believe me, it will be reciprocated. n

- Eamon Sweeney