Not Being A "Mega-huge Band" Like U2 Has Given Ride More Freedom

In 2000, after the break-ups of shoegaze icons Ride and his post-Ride outfit, The Animalhouse, Mark Gardener retired from the music business. He retreated to rural France, and worked with a building crew that restored medieval structures. “Which was quite interesting, quite rewarding. In music, you can work for so long on something without seeing any results, but, here, the products of your labours were so tangible,” Gardener says. “But, then, ultimately, there’re times when you’re out in the cold, standing in a hole, digging a foundation, and [you] think: ‘Where did it all go wrong?’”

Throughout the early ’90s, so much went right for Ride. The English outfit’s first two LPs, 1990’s Nowhere and 1992’s Going Blank Again, were hugely successful, beloved albums. But, during the recording of 1994’s Carnival Of Light, Gardener and the band’s other creative leader, Andy Bell, fell out, and the LP was literally divided: Gardener’s songs filling side A, Bell’s songs side B. By 1996’s Tarantula, the band had splintered. All that bad blood, and the failure of The Animalhouse to amount to much, made digging holes in French villages appealing.

“I got a lot of soul food from being in France,” Gardener recounts. “I was running on empty before then, from the whole experience of being in Ride. I needed something in the real world, in nature, to put some petrol back in the tank. And, then, after a couple of years of that, I thought ‘Well, I don’t want to be doing this my whole life’, and then it felt good just to start playing music again.”

“I was running on empty before then, from the whole experience of being in Ride. I needed something in the real world."

Growing up in Oxfordshire, Gardener had always loved music – inspired by a ‘cool’ uncle who tragically died young – and had dreamt of being in bands. “But I thought it was never going to happen,” Gardiner offers. “The odds of you doing anything with it – let alone making a career out of it – are just stacked against you. It’s just a mad pipedream.”

At Cheney School, though, he met Bell, who harboured the same dream, and saw it as far more attainable, another art project to be tackled. Still, when Ride – Gardener, Bell, bassist Steve Queralt, drummer Laurence "Loz" Colbert – formed, their ambitions were modest. “We’d play a few shows, have a bit of a laugh together, then that’d be that, time to go do something more like a normal job,” Gardener offers. “[I] had no notion that, wind the clock on a couple of years, that we’d be doing world tours, be signed to Creation, that our lives would never be the same again. It’s shaped our existence. The lives that we’ve had are a lot to do with Ride. That’s how people are going to remember us: we’re always gonna be those guys who were in that band Ride.”

After reforming in 2014, Ride have viewed their own project with a sense of respect. Though they initially just signed on to play reunion shows, Gardener offers that “if you’ve gotten back together just for nostalgia, just to sell the back catalogue, then it’s going to be a dead-end, eventually”. So, they’ve made two new albums: first 2017’s Weather Diaries, now their sixth LP, This Is Not A Safe Place. The number one goal for making this new LP, Gardener says, was “to not mess up the legacy of Ride”, but there was more freedom than fear in that notion. “We’re not U2. We’re not a mega-huge band. We never became fashionable back in the day. We didn’t come and go with a trend. All of that has given us the freedom to keep exploring our creativity.”

In touring and recording again, Ride have been blessed with the perspective of a “second chance”, both in terms of the ephemeral nature of success – “These sort of things could end any minute... Don’t get complacent with any of it, appreciate that we’ve got it again, don’t mess it up” - and in appraising their own worth. “With the years away,” Gardener says, “you’ve had time to understand your band objectively. When you’re in the middle of it, you can’t have any objectivity. Now, we can appreciate that we did do something good, something that people loved, and that continued to grow in our absence. Now, we can return that love back to the people.”