Ride

IT’S been five years since Ride reformed, and according to guitarist and vocalist Mark Gardener, the creative energies sparked by this momentous event are as strong as ever. “When you still have the creative magic, you can just come back and create good music, and I think that’s what’s happened,” he explains. “We could just enjoy the Ride thing again, which is a hell of a thing to be inside.”

The quartet have met up to discuss the brand-new This Is Not A Safe Place LP – their very fine follow-up to 2017’s reunion album, Weather Diaries. They’re also taking Uncut through all the records they’ve produced during their career, including 1990’s shoegaze classic Nowhere, which gave their engineer a nervous breakdown and angered a Del Amitri-loving next-door neighbour, and the controversial West Coast detour, Carnival Of Light.

Along the way, the band discuss their lost “ambient reggae” tunes, hanging out with Public Enemy and their disastrous cover of “Windmills Of Your Mind”, which traumatised producer George Drakoulias.

“We were just too shit to play it,” remembers bassist Steve Queralt. “George was tearing his bushy hair out! And then for some reason afterwards he didn’t want to do the album with us…”

SMILE

SIRE, 1990

This American compilation neatly collects their first two EPs, “Ride” and “Play”

ANDY BELL [vocals/ guitars]: The first EP was done in Union Street in Oxford, which was a small basement studio that we saved up for. I think we were there for a couple of hours one afternoon. It turned into a hostel in the evening – we came back from getting something to eat and there was a girl with a backpack in the studio.

At that time, we had no interest from anyone other than Cally