The origin story of the most important Irish band of the 21st century begins on a grey and misty Saturday in 1978, at a martial arts competition in south Dublin.

“This kid that I met at a karate tournament said that he wanted to form a band,” is how Kevin Shields, who was then an aspiring guitarist, would recall his first encounter with a novice drummer named Colm Ó Cíosóig.

Together they would go on to form My Bloody Valentine, pioneers of a dreamy, marrow-melting sound that has influenced everyone from Radiohead to Tame Impala.

“He was only 12 and I was actually 15 at the time, but he was the same height as me, so it didn’t seem that strange,” Shields said.

The strangeness came later, as the friends embarked on one of the most unlikely and ground-breaking adventures in Irish music. Few other Irish bands have had anything approaching the impact of My Bloody Valentine, who are about to reintroduce their avalanche of otherworldly and cathartic noise with a sell-out tour that kicks off at 3Arena next week.

As they take to the stage in Dublin they’ll be latecomers to their own party, their unique combination of introversion and noise having inspired arena-conquering megastars of the calibre of Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails and U2, who drew heavily on Shields’s woozy, disembodied guitar for their finest album, Achtung Baby.

As first encounters go, that long-ago crossing of paths of the shy, diffident Shields and the moderately more outgoing – though hardly extroverted – Ó Cíosóig has nothing like the mythological aura of the encounter between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (on a train platform in Kent) or John Lennon and Paul McCartney (at a garden fete in suburban Liverpool).

Yet, judged by the musical reverberations that would follow, the birth of My Bloody V