R.I.D.E.

Andy Bell: ‘R.I.D.E.’ was a demo by Loz which included lots of ideas, but all based around the riff he came up with on a sampler. Loz, Steve, Mark and Erol worked on making this into a track by playing live to it one day. I was away from the studio at a funeral, and when I got back, we were all buzzing with the sound of it - sounding pretty much identical to how it sounds now.

Steve Queralt: During August 2018, me and Loz spent some time rehearsing all the possible backing tracks for the album so that we would be up and running before recording started. During this time we worked on the drums and bass for ‘R.I.D.E.’ but were still stuck for something epic on the bass to match the hugeness of the beat. The studio team had just taken delivery of a bunch of new stomp-boxes, one of which was a massive overdrive pedal from India. This changed the whole mood and we suddenly found ourselves heading in the right direction, the track was finished off really quickly.


Future Love

Andy: Written as light relief after a lot of heavier songs, it comes from me messing about with a John Martyn guitar tuning. I made a very “Solid Air” type track first, and then when the guitar was still in the same tuning busted out this one very quickly.

Loz Colbert: There was a buzz about this song from Andy’s demo onwards. I got goosebumps as the final take went down at Assault and Battery.. A pure RIDE track, it feels great to play live this one.


Repetition

Andy: I was listening to a lot of Joy Division (‘No Love Lost’) and PiL (‘Public Image’) and built a backing track like that with lyrics all about our art school days in 1988.

Loz: It’s like an art manifesto in a song this one. Me, Mark and Andy recorded our voices in the basement at Vale to become the robotic ‘chant’ crew, in the chorus


Kill Switch

Andy: Loz wrote this song and the demo was acoustic but really lo-fi and punky. Erol helped us work it up into a real beast at a band demo session at a studio owned by one of Jethro Tull.

Loz: We ended up summoning the spirit of The Stooges. This track was a punishing one for us to record live when we finally got to Assault & Battery, so you can hear some shouting at the start!


Clouds Of Saint Marie

Andy: Loz said he liked this when he heard it among some other demos of mine, it’s a bit like ‘Future Love’ in that it’s a melancholy love song set to a really upbeat melody.

Loz: There’s a bit of ‘Union City Blue’ by Blondie to this, just the feel of it. When I heard it I saw us playing on a roof or onstage at a festival and it felt good.


Eternal Recurrence

Andy: My favourite bit of guitar playing on the album - I had my jazzmaster tuned to DADEAA, a Thurston Moore tuning, which I used on every album track, and on this one it ended up sounding like ‘Purple Rain’ by Prince. It’s Steve’s track, with words by Mark.

Steve: The track has ended up sounding pretty true to the demo but Andy’s guitar part and Mark’s vocal elevated it to another level. It’s possible that the track will continue to evolve as we start to play it live. The parts are loose enough for everyone to keep exploring without having to stay too faithful to the recorded version. It probably means no two performances will be the same.

Mark Gardener: Another great instrumental demo and vocal idea from Steve. I kept the vocal top line close to his original idea. Before the recording took place, me and Andy knocked around some lyrical ideas I’d had and thought would work with this track. These words were the result of that session. A couple of the lines of the song “Now all is ahead and not here” and “Don’t look again” reference a moving and disturbing programme I watched about survivors first hand reports of the Bataclan Paris terrorist attack. The rest of the song references the loss of innocence and getting older!


Fifteen Minutes

Andy: The first song I used that Sonic Youth tuning for. It is influenced by late period Sonic Youth. One of the first songs written for the album.

Loz: When we heard Andy’s demo it spoke straight to our no-wave mentality. This was the first song we recorded for ‘///’. Track 1, day 1, at Assault & Battery.


Jump Jet

Andy: Steve made the backing track and typically for Steve it has tons of synths on it. I wrote the lyrics, they’re about work. At one stage I wanted to call the album “wheels of industry”… but that didn’t last long.

Steve: The original demo was created in the wrong key which meant the singers struggled to get a comfortable take. So the song ended up being parked during the main recording session. Believing in the track, Andy’s guitar hook and vocal melody being too good to discard I gave it another go back at home, recording the parts again over Loz’s drum take but this time in B which is the tried and trusted ‘RIDE’ key (Leave Them All Behind, Seagull). This seemed to work well and it ended up replacing another song which we felt was not quite up to scratch. Erol and Andy added a layer of distorted growling guitars and Mark recorded the vocals at his new studio in Oxfordshire. The song is a truly collaborative effort.


Dial Up

Andy: Sonically it’s influenced by Beck, probably the least “live” sounding track on the record, thought it would be a challenge to get ready to play live but actually we just rehearsed it up and it sounds good to go..


End Game

Andy: We supported Mogwai a couple of years ago at a big gig in Glasgow and this is me trying to write a track with the same grandeur.

Loz: This one felt like recording a soundtrack; dynamically, it has a huge range…


Shadows Behind The Sun

Andy: One of my favourite Mark songs, lovely to play on. Reminds me of seeing him sing at the Nick Drake tribute concerts he did a while back.

Loz: There’s a great evolution to this: it starts small and just grows…

Mark: ‘Shadows Behind The Sun’ was written in a small batch of songs and writing before any thoughts / recordings / deadlines of ’This Is Not A Safe Place’ in 2017. I had originally earmarked it as a potential song for a more low key solo record after singing and performing Nick Drake tribute shows backed with a French chamber orchestra called the Colour Bars Experience for a small European tour. It definitely continues that kind of flavour and mood. I was greatly encouraged by Andy’s reaction to the song after he heard the demo. After that it entered into the running for the Ride album and - whilst keeping it pretty faithful to the original demo - it turned out really great with the band and Erol’s input, which took all up many levels.


In This Room

Andy: The title of the album came from this song. It accidentally became one of two “epic” tracks on the record - it was supposed to be 3 minutes 30 but when we recorded it, it became 9 minutes long and started feeling like a final track.

Loz: Another great ‘band take’ moment that took place last thing at night, lights low… When we heard the playback, it felt like a version of the song that was larger than the sum of its parts.

Future Love: Andy Bell On Ride's Continuing Path
Guitarist reveals the secrets behind new album 'This Is Not A Safe Place'...

Ride's return has added a curious new chapter to their work.

The band's collapse always seemed the most final, the most visceral of their peers, collapsing amid fractious discussions and even more fractious music.

But their incendiary re-union shows proved that a vital spark still remained, and this permeated their wonderful 2017 album 'The Weather Diaries'.

Working prolifically, Ride followed this with a full EP of new material, while live engagements swept across Europe, to the Far East and then South America.

Heading straight back into the studio, the band linked up once more with Erol Alkan, whose input helped 'The Weather Diaries' reach full fruition.

New album 'This Is Not A Safe Place' continues their return, and at every point it feels entirely natural, a completely unforced but enormously progressive step from a truly seminal British band.

Clash caught up with guitarist Andy Bell to find out more.

Ride seem to be in a very creative spell right now. Has the songwriting process been completely ongoing?

Yes it has. We’re going to Australia pretty soon, and in theory that’s part of ‘The Weather Diaries’ tour. We’ve been trying to put certain places together – like our South American shows recently – but it was so sporadic that there were some long gaps.

We did some shows in the Far East at the beginning of 2018, came home, and there was a gap of a few weeks. For whatever reason, I just started writing loads of tunes really quickly. It’s not my normal style, but it was quite a prolific little period.

I guess it was that which started the ball rolling, as I ended up with a number of new demos in quite a short space of time. I sent them round to the rest of the guys, and they passed back some ideas. It all came together pretty fast.

By the time summer came round that year we were pretty much rehearsing fully-written tracks, sitting in a studio that Jethro Tull’s drummer owned and playing the songs through, then having a big listening session in there. We were inspired, we thought the songs suited a specific drum sound, so we were playing PIXIES records, and Nirvana’s ‘In Utero’ album. Anything with a Steve Albini drum sound we were like: yeah!

We talked to Erol Alkan, and he suggested using Assault & Battery for the drum recording. We didn’t have the budget to do the whole album in there, so we did a week in there and then went down to our normal studio. But in that first week when we did the drums, we also got loads of guitar and bass done, too. So it’s almost like we made the album in that week and then messed around for months afterwards!

But everything about the record has been the same – we start writing one tune and suddenly we’ve got 15 tunes; you record the drums and suddenly you’ve got full tracks. Almost too easy! Definitely, for me, the easiest record I’ve ever made.

In some ways, for me, it doesn’t feel like a legitimate follow up to ‘The Weather Diaries’ because it’s happened so quick. I feel like there is a weightier follow up that we’re going to do, but in the meantime there’s this that has just turned up. But this album has become something in its own right.

Erol Alkan seems to add so much to Ride’s creative process.

I think it’s just a very natural relationship. When we first got in touch with him we felt like we were making quite an adventurous choice, that might lead to an album that was massively different to what we’d done before. But to our surprise, really, he turned out to be a lot more in the rock world than we thought. He was really, really good at getting a rock sound, as he had actually produced a lot of that before.

We hired him for the more experimental electronic side – and we did get that, but we also found there was so much more attached to it.

Really, with Erol, it’s a producer role – he takes on that responsibility, and he’ll see things through to the end. He’s there at the mixing, he’s there even through promotion – his stamp is all over it, he’s really invested in it emotionally. It’s perfect for us, and I can see it continuing even further.

Erol wants to tap into that original Ride spirit – as opposed to the sound – and that really comes through on the new record.

Exactly. And because he had that connection – he grew up on the recordings, and appreciated who we were – that gives him the perfect perspective to take part in what we’re doing now in 2019.

How much of those initial Assault & Battery sessions have made it through to the final release?

Half the album was done in the first week. The rest we added afterwards. It was pretty quick.

So in terms of those overdubs, is there an example of a significant change? Or did you remain true to that initial week?

There’s one that I really remember. Basically, I’d written a lot of songs on this same guitar, that I had put into an odd tuning. Then I left that guitar sitting in that same tuning, and started – almost as a laugh, really – putting that guitar on every song… and it is, actually, on every song on the album. It does something Sonic Youth-y to every track.

Then later at the residential studio we were sat working on Steve’s song ‘Eternal Recurrence’ and it’s become this big, epic, slow synth song, and I didn’t know what to do with the guitar part.

So I thought, well, just try that guitar in the weird tuning, and I started playing along with it and because of the chords of the song what I played ended up sounding like ‘Purple Rain’ by Prince. It sounded so cool, so we recorded it – I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but we used that take, and that’s what’s on the album.

The band have been moving so quickly, was there a point during the final mix where you finally grasped the scope of what you’d completed?

Well, that’s where Erol is good because while we were working at Assault & Battery he was doing his own, Lee Perry style dub stuff, where as we were doing takes he would take parts of the guitar and bass and put them through reverbs and delays, and record them as separate tracks.

Even when we didn’t keep those specific takes Erol would find a way to get something extra out of them, that ended up making it to the final record.

Again, with ‘Eternal Recurrence’ – it has a lot of that on it, where it swirls around, like a mist on the track. So you might hear ghost parts, where the takes weren’t kept but the echo was kept.

‘Ghost parts’ is such an evocative phrase – it could perfectly describe ‘Clouds Of Saint Marie’, for instance.

What I like about the record is that we used a lot of the same techniques over every track, and I’ve always liked that sort of thing. I remember reading about Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’, and they had the album compiled before the overdubs happened, so the backing singers and guest musicians could appreciate it as a whole album.

So essentially, they could play through the entire album in a take. It’s a bit like that, where you use the same thing across the full album. And it was so fresh – if we liked it, we would just use it again.

‘Future Love’ was a fantastic single to return with, do you remember what spurred that track?

It was written just after the first bunch of tunes. I had written about seven or eight, and they were all pretty heavy, pretty downbeat, and pretty depressing, and I think I needed a bit of light, a bit of brightening. There’s a very airy, loved up feeling in that song, although the words are still quite melancholy, in a way.

‘Future Love’ is – again – an out of standard tuning, but it’s an acoustic instead of an electric. The back-story, I suppose, is that I was sitting on YouTube that morning, and someone had posted a video of John Martyn playing ‘Solid Air’ at his last gig. And he was absolutely plastered – he goes to play the first note and he breaks a string.

He seems like he’s so drunk he can’t even talk, but he changes the string, tunes up, goes into the tune and it’s… one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.

That day I was working in the studio, and thought: I need to figure out that tuning, so I looked it up online, tuned the acoustic to that tuning, and made a song out of it.

Next morning I played it back again, and realised I’d made a shit tune, basically. Got frustrated about the whole thing, and started playing a really fast tune on the same guitar in that same tuning, and that’s ‘Future Love’. It’s a fast, lighter in mood version of the ponderous thing I had done the previous day.

The electronic material you’ve released as GLOK has taken on a life of its own – how does that impact your compositional sense more generally?

Some songs you write and you know from the start that it’s a Ride song, but other times you might be working on some music and you get quite far into it before you know what type of song it will be.

The GLOK thing has really taken on its own identity the past few years, and it’s a great way of getting music out there that won’t end up being a song. It seems like my music falls into two piles: one pile are Ride songs, the other is electronic music. It’s just a way of getting that to be heard.

I saw you at the Moth Club in London earlier this year…

That was crazy volume in there! It was intense. In a lot of ways it was really authentically similar to how it would have been in 1989 because we couldn’t hear ourselves at all. But I like that feeling sometimes.

We’ve really enjoyed having technology move on across the last 20 years, so during the re-union tour we could hear ourselves in the monitors, and we had a lot more control over the sound. But once in a while it’s great to do a gig that is completely mental, and that’s what the Moth Club gig was.

How long can you keep up that level of live commitments, do you think? Do Ride have a full break in their sights, or are you simply enjoying each show you play?

Well, we go to Australia next, and we’re going to play new songs. It turns out they’re going to get two albums for the price of one! I guess we won’t really stop touring. The gaps get longer as the tour peters out.

We’ll try and do as many festivals as we can on this tour, and then because the festival season is all year round now anyway we’ll just do what we get offered. And when that stops we might even have another album on the way! At the moment there’s a momentum that we all want to keep going.