In The Studio With
Ride frontman Mark Gardener chats to Danny Turner about the shoegaze tag and the driving force behind their seventh album, Interplay
Labelled ‘shoegaze’ by the British music press for their overt use of guitar pedals during live performance, Oxford-based four-piece Ride garnered significant success for their psychedelic, guitar-drenched approach to alt-rock. Although initially compared to the equally pioneering My Bloody Valentine, Ride would take a more melodic, song-driven approach as emphasised on a trio of early EPs that set the stage for their 1990 debut album, Nowhere.
As the band progressed with chart-friendly albums Going Blank Again and Carnival of Light, Ride began to move above and beyond the shoegaze pack to become one of Britain’s last great rock bands until creative differences caused relationships to fracture. By the time they had released their fourth album Tarantula in 1996, co-guitarist Andy Bell had largely taken over vocal duties from Mark Gardener, before himself departing prior to the LP’s release.
Following a 20-year sabbatical, Ride proclaimed they had “unfinished business” and returned in 2017 with Weather Diaries. Produced by Erol Alkan, the album harked back to former glories, garnering immediate critical acclaim. Now releasing their seventh album, Interplay, as the title suggests, Ride’s fractured relationships are long since repaired and their seamless chemistry rarely more apparent.
How do you feel about Ride’s association with the shoegaze genre? Has it been a benefit in terms of helping to cultivate an audience or pigeonholed you into an era?
“Initially, shoegaze was a derogative term that was thrown at us by English journalists when grunge and Nirvana kicked in because we were obviously not them. It then became a genre-describing word, but it’s hard to know whether it’s been a benefit or not. It’s a pretty broad church in the sense that anybody that uses a bit of atmospheric guitar suddenly becomes ‘shoegaze’, and I suppose we’re seen as early pioneers alongside My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins.
I’m a huge fan of both bands because they make great, interesting music, but for me it’s just about writing good, atmospheric songs. If I think of the genre as a ‘sound’, it’s not that interesting.”
It was interesting to read Andy Bell say that The Smiths were quite inspiring to him, which can also be detected in your sound, on occasion…
“When I think about our influences back then, I was into rock stuff, early hip-hop, electro and ska, but The Smiths were a big coming together for Andy and I when we were at school. They really spoke to me, alongside obvious classic ’60s bands like The Beach Boys, The Beatles and The Velvet Underground, who were important in relation to how we wanted to present ourselves. When Steve [Queralt, bass
