CAN it really be 32 years since Ride unleashed their debut album to expectant indie kids and critics up and down the country?
The question came to mind as yours truly and hundreds of veteran shoegazers dusted down their Breton t-shirts and gathered at SWG3 in Glasgow on a bright Tuesday evening.
The Oxford quartet, a thoroughly welcome and revitalised presence on the alternative music scene since reforming in 2014, were in town as part of their belated anniversary tour for Nowhere, their debut album from 1990.
While the band’s floppy fringes are long gone, it did not take Ride long to demonstrate that they have lost none of the raw power that caused such a stir and convinced Alan McGee to sign them to his influential Creation Records label in 1989.
Launching proceedings with the squalling feedback that presages the opening bars of Seagull, Ride, present here in their original and only line-up of Andy Bell, Mark Gardener, Loz Colbert and Steve Queralt, barely stopped for breath as they ripped through Nowhere in the album’s original running order.
Ride, who burned brightly before fizzling out in 1996, always were a formidable force in the live arena. But now their sound is even more muscular, as one friend aptly observed after this week’s show, with the passing of years bringing even more depth and texture to their musicianship.
At a packed SWG3, Ride contrived to lift towering tracks such as Dreams Burn Down, Polar Bear, Paralysed and Decay to even greater heights, raised up by the guitar interplay of Gardener and Bell – all chiming Rickenbacker and fuzz-driven rhythm – Queralt's undulating bass and the rapid-fire patterns laid down by Colbert – surely the finest drummer of his generation.
Titular track Nowhere, definitely one for the Ride purists, brought the main part of the set to a close, but there was more to come in an encore of highlights cherry-picked from the two chapters of the band’s career.
Lannoy Point, from 2017 comeback album Weather Diaries, and Jump Jet from 2019 offering This is Not a Safe Place, showed in abundance that Ride are as relevant now as they were three decades ago.
There was then a welcome airing of Unfamiliar, the shimmering lead track from 1991’s Today Forever EP, but the set was fittingly closed by Leave Them All Behind, the eight-minute epic that opens ’92 album Going Blank Again and signature track of this most cherished of English guitar bands.
With that it was all over for Ride in Glasgow, but out they most definitely are not.
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