review: RIDE - ‘OX4 - The Best Of’
(Ignition) - Released 24th September

So, the story of Creation Records has been written and passed into folklore. All the main players were there - Oasis of course, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, Kevin Rowland…. Odd though that the band that actually made the label and saved it from bankruptcy was offered such a small walk-on part. Because it’s so easy to forget just how important a band Ride were in every sense.

Back in 1989 Creation, the label that defined mid/late 80s indie cool, were going under, mainly due to My Bloody Valentine’s studio extravagance. With the possible exception of The Smiths, guitar bands were strangers to the asinine, overproduced charts. Oh, and David Gedge was considered the nearest thing to an indie pin-up. Cue four extremely fresh-faced art college tykes from Oxford. They looked like an absolute dream at a time when even the most far-fetched pop svengali imagination couldn’t have considered such a thing as indie sex symbols. More importantly, their music could burn holes in the sky. They took Creation into the charts for the first time and their subsequent album sales kept the label afloat until its billion-selling stars came along.

It takes about ten seconds of the opening riff of debut single ‘Chelsea Girl’ to remind you of a time, before Shed Seven, Travis, Stereophonics and Starsailor, when indie guitar pop (say it loud, say it proud) could sound like magic itself. In many ways Ride weren’t innovators at all: their early songs simply took parts of the Valentines, House of Love, Sonic Youth, The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Stone Roses and wove something new from them. But it was their raw fusion of white noise and shimmering melody that was so fresh and new. Andy Bell’s keening voice, contrasting with Mark Gardener’s more angelic tones, both lost amide the fury of their own musical making, bolstered by Loz Colbert’s battering ram drumming and Steve Queralt’s juggernaut bass rhythms. Nothing on this Best Of compilation quite captures the band’s awesome live presence but the production on tracks like ‘Dreams Burn Down’, a howling, cyclic storm of a pop song, lends the band room to display their expansive wings.

To be honest it’s the earliest songs that still sound the best: the giddy sparkle of ‘Chelsea Girl’, so often copied but never bettered; the vast musical snowdrift of ‘Drive Blind’ with its crushing rejoinder, and the almost timorous ‘Vapour Trail’, as warm and delicate as ‘Drive Blind’ was cold and all-consuming. Christ, when you consider the sad sacks that pass for ‘new’, ‘alternative’ rock music nowadays, Ride then sound like something from outer space. Those first two years saw Ride surpass all the constraints of the indie underachievers that had pre-empted them while always outshining their contemporaries in the burgeoning New Indie scene (notably Inspiral Carpets, Charalatans and Carter). In doing so they pretty much invented the genre that became known as shoegazing, helped not a little perhaps by their lack of interview prowess - Ride also near enough invented the “we write songs for ourselves and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus” non quote.

The songs here from the end of that period, like ‘Twisterella’ and ‘Leave Them All Behind’ (their only Top 10 hit) find Ride locked into their own definitive sound, abetted by bigger production, but the cacophony of guitar noise that swamps the songs is still a reminder that at heart they were still arch noiseniks on a mission to simultaneously worship and destroy pure pop music. 1994’s ‘Birdman’, the first single from ‘Carnival of Light’, was the turning point. It was the time when Andy Bell took over the reins as Ride’s chief songwriter and signalled his increasing fascination with more classic rock influences. The open ferocity gradually made way for a more psychedelic drift, Deep Purple’s John Lord was recruited to play keyboards and Ride’s sound achieved stadium proportions. Subsequent singles like ‘How Does It Feel To Feel’ and ‘I Don’t Know Where It Comes From’ were steeped in 60s Modernism with heavy nods to The Beatles, although Andy’s own ‘Apollo 11’ remix of the latter (sadly not included on the reissued ‘Carnival of Light’) stands up with the very best of Ride.

‘Tarantula’ was Ride’s swan song but they finished on a high with the barnstorming ‘Black Night Crash’, which basically sounded like Squeeze jamming with Motorhead and proved that however far Ride had moved on from their early journeys into noise, they could still kick out the jams as hard as anyone.

From there it was onto a less than amicable split and assorted misadventures with Hurricane #1 and The Animalhouse, neither of which came close to recapturing the Ride magic. ‘OX4’, released on Oasis’ management’s label, is a timely reminder then of a band, maybe overshadowed in their own locale by Radiohead, who made a serious difference at a difficult time for good music. They took indie into the Top Of The Pops studios, were a major influence on the likes of Oasis themselves (who, of course, Andy Bell now plays with), as well as many others and leave us with a legacy that still stands up to any amount of scrutiny. Those of you who know and love the story already won’t need too much reminding of as much. For those too young or simply foolish enough not to have loved them the first time round, ‘OX4’ is a pretty neat introduction to Oxford’s first great band. But don’t stop here - find time to lose yourself completely in their back catalogue.

Sue Foreman (from Nightshift)