Enjoy the Ride: Legendary Shoegazers Make Triumphant Return

Andy Bell and Mark Gardener of Ride, Coachella 2015 (photo: Getty Images)

Andy Bell played bass with Oasis from 1999 to 2009, and with Liam Gallagher’s Oasis spinoff band Beady Eye from 2009 to 2014. But long before that, he was a founding member of the seminal shoegaze group (and Oasis’s Creation Records labelmates) Ride, who recently reunited for a string of triumphant shows in Ride’s native Oxford, England, and in Southern California. Sitting backstage with Yahoo Music at weekend one of the Coachella festival, right before Ride’s stellar Gobi Tent set, Bell seems happy to be back with his old bandmate, Mark Gardener. But of course, the conversation eventually veers towards the subject of Oasis, who headlined Coachella (with Bell) in 2002.

Sure, Bell wasn’t in the original, “classic” Oasis lineup, but if he were ever invited to participate in an Oasis reunion, would he? “If I was asked to, I would, yeah, of course. Absolutely. You’d have to hold me down not to,” he answers without hesitation. But Bell isn’t holding his breath. “It’s really a question for Noel and Liam [Gallagher]. If that makes them happy, they should do it, and if they’d rather not, that’s equally fine with me.”

While Ride was never as popular on this side of the pond as Oasis, the band had a devoted cult following, and in many ways Ride appealed to a similar audience. “It’s like another version of the same thing, in a way — both rely on guitars. We’re basically guitar bands,” says Bell, though he adds: “The difference I can feel is that we don’t put much showmanship into it. With Ride, we’re tied to our pedalboards; we’re like ‘shoegazers.’ What Oasis had different was this incredible frontman, who had this massive presence onstage: Liam, one of the best frontmen ever. So it gave them a completely different dynamic.”

“But Ride made your fingers bleed the other night!” jokes Gardener (referring to Ride’s sold-out, pre-Coachella warmup show at Los Angeles’s Roxy), as he gestures to Bell’s calloused hands.

Yes, truly, judging from Ride’s Roxy appearance and Coachella weekend one set, the band has lost none of its sonic power since breaking up in 1996. While Ride’s split wasn’t acrimonious like Oasis’s — “It was just a collective crash, I think. We lived in each other’s pockets for years and years. I think it’s very natural that you’re going to hit a point where you just need to become free birds again,” says Gardener — until recently, Gardener and Bell assumed that Ride was never, ever getting back together.

“It just became almost like we couldn’t think of any more reasons not to do it. It felt like we were getting more and more noise of people saying, ‘You guys should do this, this is the right time,’” Bell says of this reunion. “And inside myself, I kind of was starting to feel like that. Maybe since I saw the Stone Roses get back together… they were one of my favorite bands when they were going, and it made me very happy to see them again, so it pushed that little button in me that was like, 'Maybe we should do this.’”

Adds Gardener: “Naturally a path started to clear… I started to think two or three years ago, after the Roses and My Bloody Valentine [reunited], to seriously think, more than I’d ever felt, that there was sort of unfinished business with Ride. Maybe there wasn’t ever going to be a peace of mind if we didn’t do this.

“I can only sort of say how I was feeling about it, and lots of things trigger that, like death. I lost my dad and things like that,” Gardener continues. “You suddenly start to think that time isn’t forever. So I think for me three years ago, I started to seriously think, 'I really want to do this again.’”

Both Gardener and Bell are humble and dismissive when asked about Ride’s influence on alt-rock music today. “I don’t know, really,” Bells shrugs. “I hear a lot of music I like, and I can’t tell whether it’s us or whether it’s just people with the same influences, you know? But I think the set of influences that formed our band have stayed in people’s consciousness since the late '80s. The roots of it is the Beatles and the Stones and the Velvets and the Byrds, but then in the late '80s there were a lot of really good guitar bands, like Spacemen 3, House of Love, a lot of indie music that had really interesting sounds. I think that influential time certainly pushed us into forming the band in the first place, and I think that music is still making people form bands. So we’re maybe some of the first to be influenced, rather than influencers ourselves. We were just ripping people off at the time. No one was quite sure who was first!”

For now, Gardener, Bell, and Ride’s Laurence Colbert and Steve Queralt are concentrating on playing their old (and, yes, very influential) classics like “Leave Them All Behind,” “Drive Blind,” and “Vapour Trail” before considering recording new material. “I feel like we’ve been sort of loved into existence again. People loved our music to such an extent that we’ve been offered these gigs, and it’s rolling and rolling now, so I want to make sure that we’ve satisfied that love and put it back,” explains Bell. “And then maybe after we’ve finished our tour, then maybe new stuff. I don’t know.”

Until then, it’s best just to enjoy the Ride, so to speak. Ride will play Coachella weekend two this Friday at 5:25 p.m.

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