RACHEL Goswell, from Ride’s contemporaries and fellow labelmates Slowdive, remembers the levels of energy experienced at a typical Ride concert. “They were like an indie Beatles. Girls swooning left, right and centre. But they just kicked arse live. And were exciting to watch. I never tired of watching them when we did shows together.” In a short space of time, Ride found a significant audience; each of the band’s first four EPs performed well, with their fourth – “Today Forever” – selling 68,000 copies. Shake Appeal’s Adam Franklin, now leading Swervedriver, recalls enjoying Ride’s rapid ascent. “We were recording our first EP, ‘Son Of Mustang Ford’,” he says. “They’d released their second, ‘Like A Daydream’, and were on Top Of The Pops. We were having a dinner break on Thursday night watching the TV, thinking, ‘Fucking hell, these kids we only discovered a year ago are now on Top Of The Pops! It was exciting, something new was happening.”
Undoubtedly, despite all the praise lavished on other Creation signings like My Bloody Valentine, House Of Love and Primal Scream during that time, Ride delivered a series of milestones for the label: the “Ride” EP gave Creation their first ever singles position (72), while the band’s full-length debut album Nowhere, released in October 1990, gave them their first Top 20 album (11). “As far as I was concerned, it was all progressing as planned,” says Bell. “I’d read the Beatles books. I knew what the score was. This was the blueprint and we’re following it. It felt like it was the natural progression of things.” Nowhere arrived at the end of a remarkably busy 12 months for Ride. Pivoting on the psychedelic interaction between Gardener and Bell’s guitars, it is an incredibly focused album; from the melancholic curlicues of “In A Different Place” to the propulsive sweep of “Polar Bear” and the LP’s beautiful coda, “Vapour Trail”. “Nowhere was us as young men, going through college, making music, playing gigs and getting this excitement and the tension,” notes Colbert. “It was this big, washy, noisy collage; an art statement. Then we were musicians! We’re in a band! In a recording studio! And we have to do album No 2! It was completely different. We’d been around the world, maybe twice. So when it came to Going Blank Again, we were in a completely different place.”
“At the start, songwriting felt more collaborative,” reflects Gardener. “As time went on, Andy was bringing in more than his fair share of music. I was writing more on Going Blank Again. But even so, it felt that we were operating well as a band. I’d written ‘Leave Them All Behind’ and I recall sitting with Andy and he said, ‘“Wheels turning round”, that’s good, stop the line there.’ We did a lot of editing work like that on each other’s songs. It always made them better.”
Going Blank Again continued Ride’s impressive trajectory into 1992. Such was the band’s confidence in their new batch of material that they chose to lead off the album with an eight-minute single, “Leave Them All Behind”; it reached No 9 in the chart, while its parent album peaked at No 5. “You’re in your early twenties with four other people who were your best friends at the time,” says Queralt. “Playing a different show every night, getting drunk, getting up late, sitting in a bus watching the motorway fly past, going to a new town, people wanting your autograph, signing record sleeves; it was fantastic. There’s nothing I’d have rather have done in my early twenties than that.”
All the same, Ride’s schedule was arduous. Between 1990-’92, they played 281 shows, and their 1992 itinerary took in 12 countries. “To keep that level of performance up is tough,” admits Gardener. “It’s not just you. There’s three others and everyone’s trying to do the best they can all the time. Steve had a baby, he couldn’t even be there for the birth.”
“We were in America,” adds Queralt. “There was the question of leaving the tour to go back home to see my son born. ‘No, I’ll choose the band.’ Which is a dreadful thing to say. I remember at the time thinking, ‘I’m never going get another chance to do this.’ Play in America, that is. It was quite a selfish thing to do. I got the phone call and at that moment it dawned on me that this is the biggest thing in my life; my son’s just been born.”