Ride/Photo: Ride
It was early August 1996, and I was about to fly to England for my first honeymoon. We were sitting in a huge British Airways plane in business class (BA had kindly upgraded us, upon learning we were on our honeymoon) on the O’Hare tarmac, awaiting clearance to take off. Once we had the go-ahead to lift off (or whatever they call it), I pressed play on my Sony Walkman, starting the tape playing of my copy of Ride’s “Going Blank Again.” As the gigantic plane accelerated down the runway and lifted off, the kick-off cut, “Leave Them All Behind,” began playing in my ears. It begins with about twenty seconds of a bubbling, high-pitched synth part (think of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”) and then the drums kick in, quickly joined by a compelling and tuneful bass part, and then roaring electric guitars cut in like chainsaws held by competing shoegaze lumberjacks. This plays as the ground becomes a blur, the city shrinks in size, and even the sky starts to fly by. After over two minutes of this sonic maelstrom, the song reduces to the beginning: electronic bubbling, drums punctuating the silence like firecrackers, and this time the guitars roar back in sync with the bass part, like the jet engines kicking into overdrive. Finally the vocals arrive, sung by both singers and composers in Ride, Mark Gardener (who wrote this one) and Andy Bell, singing “Wheels turning around / into alien grounds / pass through different times / leave them all behind.”
By that time, I can only imagine we must have been over Ohio, and maybe even West Virginia, as the song concluded more than eight minutes later. I let the tape play as the plane progressed “across the pond,” and the rest of “Going Blank Again” is almost as good. The first song is followed by the retro-1960’s groover, “Twisterella” and a cavalcade of extraordinary songs that rock in that typical woozy, shoegazey way, concluding with the sprawling, neo-psychedelic “OX4,” which itself clocks in at over seven minutes. “Leave Them All Behind,” the radio edit, which is only just over three minutes long and I can’t bring myself to listen to, became Ride’s bestselling single, but the whole record is fantastic.
No bands are fond of labels, and Ride weren’t happy being labeled shoegaze (allegedly so named for the musicians spending all their time staring at their guitar pedals while playing live) and lumped in with “the scene that celebrates itself.” But unfairly or not, the band came up around the same time, formed in Oxford, England in 1988, and Gardener admitted to PopMatters in 2003, after their “best of” compilation was released, that they “liked the noisy bands of the time” and went to see their acts while attending art college, including shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine; the British-invasion-inspired The House of Love; Manchester/Madchester’s Stone Roses; and NYC no-wave innovators Sonic Youth. To that list, Bell added Spacemen 3, Loop, Dinosaur Jr., The Fall, Pixies, as well as “older stuff like The Beatles, Stones, the Velvets, and the Stooges,” he told Under the Radar in 2013.
The quartet, also including the talented bassist, Steve Queralt and rapid-fire drummer Laurence “Loz” Colbert had only played six live shows when they put out a demo that caught the ear of a DJ, who passed it on to Jim Reid of The Jesus and Mary Chain, who shared it with Creation label’s Alan McGee, and the “Smile”’s release, collecting two early EPs, arrived in 1990. The opening guitar parts of “Chelsea Girl” bring to mind Hüsker Dü, but once the singing starts, it’s clear that this is 1960s-inspired, C86-vein Britpop, but with guitars squalling and squealing that don’t shy away from some whammy-bar riding. But the second cut, “Drive Blind,” comes off as a statement of intent. Beginning with a repeating phrase of high guitar notes, the second guitar comes in like a tidal wave about to wash the road away. “Like A Daydream” is a dynamic synthesis of the band’s Beatles-esque approach, filtered through the wash of guitars. The whole record’s a revelation (and bears repeated listens), but their first real album that followed was a masterpiece.
“Nowhere,” released stateside that same year, was a collection of highlights too numerous to catalog, but suffice it to say that the band had coalesced their sound into an integrated approach designed to bowl over the listener. From the feedback squall of the opener “Seagull” to the winsome, pulsing “Polar Bear,” the backbeat-led lighter-than-air “Vapour Trail” (which concludes with a lovely string part, a mature touch for a band only two years into their career) to the concluding title cut, which simmers and literally washes away as the sound of waves on a shore and a crying seagull rounds out the denouement. While it’s not typically a recommended approach, in some ways you can judge “Nowhere” by its cover, a sea swell that’s become iconic in the same vein as Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures,” although in no way as ubiquitous. The record holds together as a whole remarkably well, even considering that the last three tracks were taken from an earlier EP, “Fall,” and appended to the end of the original running order.
Even factoring in “Nowhere”‘s status as an undeniable masterpiece, I think 1992’s “Going Blank Again” was even better. It showed the band stretching its legs beyond their signature, woozy, shoegazey sound, at times reveling in their sonic maelstrom of guitars and at others, embracing a psychedelic, shagadelic sixties’ groove straight from a British event analogous to a Warhol happening in the United States.
During the New Music Seminar in 1992 in NYC, I got a chance to see them play, and that alone was worth the trip, but mostly what I recall was how important bassist Queralt and Colbert’s drums were to the band’s live sound. Another nascent act in the scene, fellow Brits Pale Saints (whose guitarist and co-founder Graeme Naysmith recently passed away at fifty-seven) opened.
June 1994 found Ride thoroughly embracing those throwback impulses, which you might guess from the album’s title, “Carnival of Light,” named after a lost Beatles song. While it wasn’t exactly “Spinal Tap II: Jazz Odyssey,” it was still a departure, drawing inspiration from acid-drenched, Nuggety acts like The Creation, whose “How Does It Feel To Feel?” they cover (and who before that had inspired the name of McGee’s label). While it’s not a perfect record—the pendulum may have swung too far from their roaring, electric guitar-based shoegaze roots—there are still too many highlights to mention. The album signals a change of direction from the outset of the first track “Moonlight Medicine,” which Mark Gardener begins by playing a tamboura, and features Hammond organ from Deep Purple’s Jon Lord. It’s bookended by Bell’s “I Don’t Know Where It Comes From,” which starts with (and prominently features throughout) a children’s choir à la The Rolling Stones song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” So, maybe not the most original record that Ride released, but there’s plenty between the opener and closer to love, although, at the time, the critics did not agree.
By the end of 1994, Ride themselves had soured on the record, internally referring to the record as “Carnival of Shite.” As Andy Bell told The Guardian in November 2022:
Ride were about loud guitars, submerged harmonies and exciting drums—a wash of sound. By “Carnival of Light” and “Tarantula,” we’d picked off those elements until we were left with a shoegaze band trying to play classic rock, but I have made peace with it. It’s got a lot of good tracks, like [Gardener’s] “Moonlight Medicine” and [Bell’s] “Birdman.”
It’s interesting to note that Gardener receives a writing credit on four of the first five songs (excepting Colbert’s “Natural Grace”), whereas Bell composed the last six (which excludes the Creation cover). That’s not by coincidence. The story goes that by this time the guitarists and chief creative forces were not even on speaking terms. Andy Bell refused to have any of his songs appearing “next to” any of Mark Gardener’s songs, despite the logical impossibility of this arrangement—the compromise was to give Gardener the A side of the album, and Bell the B side.
Looking at the cover of Ride’s 1996 album, “Tarantula,” provides a visualization of how the band must have felt making it. The viewer is looking down the barrel of a gun, with a hand shown holding it, finger on the trigger. Having said that, there are some solid songs on this release too. Opener and single “Black Nite Crash” is a rocker (inspiring a Seattle band by that name to form in 2002 (now if we could only get a band inspired by the lyric “rattlesnake handshake” to form, they could tour with Cunning Like Cobras and The Hÿss)). “Castle On The Hill” is a lovely acoustic number. But Gardener only receives two writing credits on the album, and Bell gets sole writing credit for the other ten. It doesn’t take a math whiz to figure out the statistical probability of what happened next. Ride broke up after “Tarantula” was recorded (Gardener walked out while it was being mixed), but before the album was released. Creation deleted it from its catalog a week after its release.
Given the acrimonious nature of their split, the odds on a reunion were almost as long as reuniting The Beatles or getting XTC to tour again. But pretty much out of nowhere, all four members of Ride reunited and started playing festival gigs in the United States and Europe in 2015, following that with proper worldwide tours. They discovered that they enjoyed playing together so much that they came up with three new albums: 2017’s “Weather Diaries,” 2019’s “This Is Not A Safe Place” and “Interplay,” released this March (all via Wichita). All are uniformly excellent (their most recent record was a slow grower for me, but it’s also a winner) and picked up right where the band should have, perhaps after “Going Blank Again.” The foursome are all talented musicians and first-rate songwriters, and given they were mostly in their late teens when they formed, their newfound maturity has them “seeing eye to eye,” as the lyrics from the song “Last Frontier” say. While Andy Bell wrote all the lyrics (during the pandemic) on “Interplay,” each member receives equal composition credit on each song. As Bell sings on the final song on the album, “remember what’s in the past is gone, and yesterday is just a song.”
While they may have mellowed a tad on their most recent three records, that may be for the best. It’s a fool’s errand to attempt to recreate lightning in a bottle or some such string of clichés. Ride phase two, amazingly enough, has been together longer than their original incarnation, and I for one am looking forward to seeing who else they will leave behind this time.
Ride play Chicago’s Metro, 3730 North Clark, on Thursday, May 16. The show is 18+ with doors at 6:30pm and Knifeplay opening at 7:30pm.
