RIDE
After a short break, Oxford’s reunited ’gaze rock heroes prepare album five.
Their collapse in ’96 was not terrific. But Oxford’s reunited shoegazing psych-rockers have vowed to rectify that. We join them in the studio for a pre-mixdown preview of their new LP.
Ride were lionised for their layered early ’90s psych pop EPs, and albums Nowhere and Going Blank Again. But they split in 1996, having being mugged by Madchester and besieged by Britpop. How to react to such drastic shifts in public taste? “Go underground for a bit,” says singer/ guitarist Andy Bell, “and come back when it’s blown over.” After touring America and Europe in 2015, the comeback will also include a new album. We’re sat with Bell, Ride bassist Steve Queralt and producer Erol Alkan in the latter’s Phantasy Sound set-up in north London to hear some of it. As Alkan lights up some vibe-purifying sage, Queralt recalls starting work in October 2016 at Vale Studios, Worcestershire. “Mark [Gardener, singer/guitarist] introduced us to it. It’s like a spa for boys, a great big manor house, the food’s brilliant and you see nobody… and there’s a studio there.” Sessions took just 17 days, using ideas devised on tour and before, as well as new creations. “Being on tour, playing all your old songs you wrote and created when you were 18, 19, it does connect you with the energy of that,” says Bell. The material is varied. Integration Tape, influenced by William Basinski’s avant-ambient The Disintegration Loops series, was improvised on the day they announced their reunion in November 2014. ”It was our way of celebrating getting back together,” says Bell, who played an effects pedal through a reverb unit. “We ended up plugging in and playing a one-chord ambient shoegaze jam. That was the first noise we made, we were paralysed by fear.” Elsewhere, Charm Assault brings riffing, howling beat pop (it concerns “the general parade of cunts that we have in front of us in the news at the moment,” says Bell). Eco-unease song Weather Diaries combines Ride’s dream pop shimmer with anthemic moves suggestive of Bell’s time in Oasis, while Home Is A Feeling is, says Queralt, “the closest we get on the album to a traditional Ride sound. We didn’t want to go in and make a record that everyone wants us to make – i.e. sounding like it was 1991 again – but I think we’re guilty of it on that song.” Says long-term fan Alkan, seeing them play Charm Assault live in Brighton convinced him the auguries were good. “In the studio, everything that was going down was going down really quick,” he says, “because it felt like the hard work was already done.” Having returned to creative and collaborative health, are Ride redeeming unfulfilled promise? “Maybe the first few gigs on the reunion tour had that euphoria,” says Bell, “but now it just feels like we’re a working band again, in a cycle of album/tour. The album doesn’t feel like a grand statement – I’d like to think of it more as just the next Ride album, rather than a real celebration of being back, in big letters. Just imagine we’ve been doing stuff all this time.” Ian Harrison
“THE FIRST NOISE WE MADE, WE WERE PARALYSED BY FEAR.”