“I’M DEFINITELY looking forward to having a proper pint of Guinness, because I had two terrible ones in Helsinki yesterday,” says Steve Queralt, Ride’s resident bass god on the subject of the globe-trotting Oxford shoegaze legends’ return to Ireland this week for a trio of shows in support of their hit new album, Interplay.
Formed in 1988, the sonic cathedral constructing guitar quartet are currently more in demand than ever, having kicked off 2024 by taking their noisy yet melodic psychedelic rock out to America for a run of dates alongside The Charlatans.
Ride - which still features all of its other original members in Andy Bell (guitar/vocals), Mark Gardener (guitar/vocals) and Laurence ‘Loz’ Colbert (drums) - recently returned from a tour of Australasia with Mercury Rev, including their debut gig in Mongolia, apparently now an up-and-coming territory for indie rock.
Indeed, things are currently so hectic in the Ride camp that the aforementioned Helsinki show somehow didn’t even make it onto their website.
“The deal was, we had to play Nowhere and Going Blank Again, in full,” explains Steve of this festival appearance centred on Ride’s classic 1990 debut and equally feted 1992 follow-up - Creation Records’ first ever Top 20 and Top 10 albums, respectively.
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“But they only gave us 90 minutes to do it, which is impossible. So we just dropped the songs we don’t like.”
Monday night’s show in Belfast will see Ride returning to The Limelight, where they made their Irish live debut in May 1990 during a year which saw them signing to the ultra cool Creation Records label and enjoying the first flushes of national success with their superb early EPs, Ride and Play.
“I remember we turned up late,” recalls Steve of this early visit to Belfast in an era when major British acts would often skip the north due to the Troubles.
“I think we’d missed the ferry and had to travel up to do the Scottish crossing. We got there very, very late, but I remember it was a chaotic gig. Therapy? were the support and we got an amazing reaction from the crowd.
“It was a bit like our recent show in Mongolia - people were just so pleased that we’d made the effort to come and play for them.”
Ride repaid Belfast’s enthusiasm with return visits over the following years, right up to and including their final tour, for 1994′s Carnival of Light, a record which found them attempting to shake off their ‘shoegaze’ tag by co-opting the retro sounds and aesthetic of 1960s/70s west coast rock.
Sadly, by the time the album came out to middling reviews and muted fan response in June 1994, the taste-making weekly music press was far more interested in all things Britpop - particularly Ride’s reliably rambunctious Creation labelmates Oasis.
Indeed, The Carnival of Light tour coincided with the release of Definitely Maybe, which topped the charts (another first for Creation) on the night the Liam Gallagher-fronted band made their Belfast debut at - you guessed it - The Limelight.
With the Gallaghers still at Number One when Ride rolled into town again just over a week later, the writing was on the wall for what proved to be a wholesale changing of the indie rock guard.
“We almost had Oasis supporting us,” recalls Steve of the Carnival of Light era.
“We did ask them, and they were up for it. But within a few months, it was like, of course they’re not going to come out on tour with us. They’re now massive.
“It happened so quickly for them, and rightly so. They were such a breath of fresh air. At the time, there was no-one quite like them.”
Ride struggled on for another year or so, playing their final UK date for over 20 years in December 1994 - ironically, supporting Oasis. An attempt to record a fourth album in 1995 resulted in chief songwriters Mark and Andy falling out and the band splitting. The largely forgettable (barring its thrillingly brutish single Black Nite Crash) Tarantula was released ‘posthumously’ in early 1996, by which stage Britpop was all-conquering.
To add insult to injury, Ride guitar ace Andy Bell - who enjoyed success with his new Creation-signed band Hurricane #1 in the wake of Ride’s split - then replaced Paul McGuigan on bass in Oasis and went on to play in Liam Gallagher’s post-Oasis group Beady Eye.
Which begs the question: will Ride have to take a few weeks off next summer to allow Andy to moonlight with the Gallaghers?
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“Nobody knows,” Steve responds.
“They are keeping it very close to their chest. It might be a band of 20 members - I mean, Noel’s band is about 20 members strong, isn’t it? So who knows?”
Ride fans have often pondered why it was Andy and not Steve who got the call from Noel to join Oasis in 1999.
“I’m only the second best bassist in Ride, " he explains, modestly.
“I mean, Andy’s a really gifted musician. He’s an amazing guitarist, and he can properly play piano. He’s also a great drummer and a great bass player too. Nothing’s beyond him.
“He stayed in the Creation camp after the band finished, whereas I’d kind of had enough of the music industry at that point. And he really loved Oasis, he was a massive fan right from the get go. So I think when they were looking for a bassist and he put his hand up, that was it.”
Having reconvened in 2015, Ride’s 21st century run has now outlasted their original stint in the shoegaze trenches. Thus far, as well as celebrating their early Creation releases, the band have released three critically acclaimed new albums on former Creation man Dick Green’s Wichita label in Weather Diaries (2017), This Is Not a Safe Place (2019) and this year’s Interplay, the latter pair sending them back into the Top 10.
“Yeah, taking 20 years off was a good move,” deadpans Steve on the secret of their recent success.
“Maturity has a large part to play in all of it. I think we’ve just kind of followed our noses a little bit more and done what’s come more naturally to us, rather than back in ‘92 when we decided ‘let’s make kind of a west coast American sounding record’, even though it was way outside of our normal lane.
“It was a bit like Beyonce doing a country album, you know? Only Beyonce is quite good at going outside of her lane.”
