Ride's French tour in November 1994 was really successful: great concerts, excellent audience reaction (except in Bordeaux where the venue was only half full and where the band played their worst concert), and cheerful atmosphere within the Oxford team. So successful indeed that Andy would gladly have done a few more dates!
Kicked off in Tours (the night before the first gig in Nantes) with a "Beaujolais Nouveau" drunk night, it ended in Nancy with the traditional champagne. Meanwhile there had been the climax of the Zenith venue in Paris which was celebrated in the middle of Pigalle until early in the morning.
The concerts were pretty similar to those played during the UK tour, except a bit shorter - At The End Of The Universe was sadly missing. Anyway the audience was conquished, even those who had been slightly disappointed with the album. Everyone agreed that really Ride on stage are unchallenged. France is definitely doing it good for Ride: it's the only country where Carnival of Light sold more than Going Blank Again and where 7 dates could be organized outside Britain.
At the exit, after each concert, bootleg posters were sold: an honour only reserved to selling artists!
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The Jericho Tavern is a mythical place for Ride fans, this is where everything started, or sort of. So when I learnt that Ride were going to play a secret gig in the tiny venue I just couldn't resist the trip! It is threated with closure as a live music venue in favour of being transformed into a "theme pub" and Ride wanted to show heir support for the campaign to keep the music going.
The icing on the cake was provided by the support act who was none other than Idha accompanied by Jason for a wholly acoustic set. When they walked on you could feel they were pretty nervous but their nervousness soon burst into laughter when they realized after a few chords that they had forgotten to plug in their guitars! With such a brilliant entrance, they couldn't go wrong! And indeed Idha's shy and delicate charm was perfectly matched with Jason's assurance and humour. Their acoustic guitars and contrasted vocals blended in perfect harmony and a feeling of languid well-being was in the air. Idha had chosen to play several promising new songs as well as covers and ended with Neil Young's "Like A Hurricane". A blissful moment.
Ride walked on stage soon after 10.00. But the funny thing is that instead of coming from the back of the stage they came from the audience! Well, the concert was definitely very special! The band were looking great and enthusiast; the gig was highly thrilling, sweaty and rocking; and the crowd was wild and happy and jumping up and down throughout the set. What else could you wish? Well something a bit special, maybe a new song, or a very old unreleased one, something to mark the event. The tracklist was actually pretty similar to the one played in France a few weeks ago (and in England earlier in the year). They started off with Seagull because, I was told, it's what they've always started with at the Tavern, and concluded with a brilliant Chelsea Girl at the end of which Ride improvised a very long and weird instrumental cut in the middle by a short but hot cover of I Wanna Be Your Dog. By the length of it and the way Andy kept changing his chords to further prolonge the song, it looked like the band never wanted to leave the stage! Something special, did I say? However the moment I'll remember for ever (because I loved it) was Mark's very last move when he reached out to Andy and they both shook hands in a dual show of victory and friendship. At that very moment I felt Ride had reached a climax of serenity and confidence. The big time is yet to come.
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And here is another view of this gig...
Invading Ride's territory
I feel that I really can't thank you enough for your recent note I received last Tursday, informing me of the Ride gig the following night in Oxford. I couldn't believe it! I rang the Jericho Tavern and they told me of the limited 200 tickets being sold at 1pm. I realised they would sell out rapidly. I caught the bus to Oxford in the morning and managed just to buy 2 tickets (one was for a friend who arrived later). Once Tricia and I arrived at the Tavern we couldn't get over how small it was. We were reminded of our favourite pub back home. At the bar I turned around to see Andy and Idha. I found the whole idea of seeing them, Mark and Loz, Steve wondering around socialising by my side very bizarre indeed! They've always been upon a stage whenever I see them in person, not accessible in any way! Then I felt like all the people were staring at me as if "who the hell are you? We don't recognize your face!!" The paranoia set in as I felt I'd invaded Ride's own personal and private gig for their friends and supporters in Oxford. As Idha began I soon forgot my paranoia. After all I know in my heart that when Ride albums and singles first appeared on record shop shelves in Australia, I bought them!! I've sent a copy of "Melody Inn" back home to a close friend and she loves it.
Now of course, Ride! I managed to squeeze right up the front on Steve's side. I thought that being in the front row was something in Paris. It seemed this time we were practically sitting on the stage with them! They were just Fantastic!! I could actually watch Laurence play the drums for once so clearly. It's an incredible thing to see and the whole atmosphere was brilliant! I can't believe I was there. I kept thinking during the night that you were in the Tavern somewhere and how much I wanted to thank you for letting me know about it. I appreciate it a great deal and it was a fantastic night.
Melissa Murphy, London
Five hours ago I was leaving Brussels and now I'm sitting on the stage of the Jericho Tavern with Andy by my side, ready to do the final interview in 1994. When I first entered the Tavern, just off the coach from Heathrow Airport, the four Ride members were arriving at the venue one by one and setting up their instruments. Two bikes (Steve's and Loz's) laying in a corner gave evidence that this gig was a little bit special. So did the size of the venue which could almost be your living room! And I'm told the 200 tickets (plus 50 guests!) have sold out in 2 minutes in the afternoon. How will all these people fit in?? (as it turned out they fit in very, very tightly!). Yet at this time of the day, the place is quiet, everyone's chatting, Dave Newton is distributing Christmas presents sent by the Abbey Road studios (watches) and it feels like some friends have gathered for an afternoon tea rather than a soundcheck. In fact the soundcheck will be very short. The Tavern's sound engineer knows his job well and it only takes 30 minutes to sort out everyone's little problems with microphones and monitors. After that, Mark, Steve, Andy and Loz are to sign a hundred of posters that will be sold after the gig and then they're off, on their bikes or on the bus. Except Andy who's staying for a while longer because his wife Idha and a friend called Jason are supporting Ride tonight and they also do a - very short - soundcheck ("we're professionals" smiles Idha). I take this opportunity to ask Andy to do an interview and he nods before I can finish my question. So when Idha and Jason leave the stage, we climb on and start rewinding Ride's 1994 film.
We all thought 1994 was going to be a big Ride year with an album, various singles and lots of gigs. But at the end it wasn't as big as we expected it to be, was it?
Andy: Yes, I know what you mean. We had quite high hopes because first, we thought we could go to America and, you know, that didn't happen; then we thought we'd do lots more touring and expected to do more in England as well but it just didn't work out. So as far as playing live is concerned, I think we'll play live a lot more in 95. I hope so because I do enjoy it.
What happened with the European tour? Why did you only play in France?
Well, again, we said we wanted to go and play everywhere and we were told it was hard to get such a tour. The only place where we came up with a good tour was France. That was a really good tour.
I've been told that the album hadn't sold so well, except in France where it sold more than Going Blank Again. Yet it was given excellent reviews everywhere, so what went wrong?
The thing is we didn't pick up any new fans. We probably kept the fans we already had but a few of them left because of all the changes after the last two years. What we've learnt is to try and keep going as much as possible and keep putting things out regularly. You don't get anything when you miss out two years and everyone forgets about you. I don't think we communicated with everyone with this record. The people who bought it bought it because they were sorry for us in a way!
This is maybe due as well to your unfortunate selection of singles. Birdman, for instance, was a great song but much too long for a single.
That was Alan McGee's choice. I won't say he is to blame for it going badly but the reason he wanted to choose that as a single was because it sounded more like a song of Nowhere. It was the closest thing to our early Ride songs on Carnival of Light. It's noisy, it has the style of Nowhere rather than Going Blank Again. The Carnival of Light songs are different. It's a strange album to pick singles from. If you go for the obvious single, like I Don't Know Where It Comes From, one of the poppy ones, people think immediately "ah, they've gone really poppy" and believe the whole album is really poppy. Whatever you choose as a first single after two years is quite important. Maybe we chose wrong, maybe that was the best thing to choose anyway. It's hard to make the right decision.
And was Alan McGee also responsible for chosing How Does It Feel To Feel as the second single? Mark called it a "mad rock move" and I can't agree more with him!
The choice was made by another record company guy; one working for the American record company. I really like that song. I think that could have been a great single if we had had a couple of big hits before, it would have been like the good third one.
Finally, the third single, I Don't Know Where It Comes From, was released after the UK tour which is not logical...
Yes, well, we tried to do something clever and we ended up being stupid! You know, everytime you do an album you have to try a new plan if you're not happy with the way the last one went, which we never really are because the only one with which we had a real success is the first one and that was a real accident. That was because we couldn't do anything wrong. We were just coming up and popular. So with the second album we tried to do something different by putting a single out and then touring when the album's released. That kind of worked but everyone forgot about it one week after the album came out, which was bad.. The highest point was the very moment when the album came out and after that it's just, like, gone. That was a bit demoralising. That started off the whole depression period. We had to do a big world tour after that even when the album wasn't pushing itself to too many people.
Did it sell less than Nowhere?
It sold about the same but the single did better. Still we felt like it should have been a bit bigger. The thing every band feel is that they can always be more popular.
Who came up with the ideas of the remixes on I Don't Know Where It Comes From?
We were planning to get these things remixed by lots of people. We gathered together and thought of what we could do. We could be a bit inventive with that single because it was off the album. The album had already come out so we wanted the single to be a bit different for people to get into it. So when we had all the people we asked, some happened and some didn't happen. At the same time I said I'd like to go in and do one and everyone said ok. I had an idea, bits and pieces of sounds that I wanted to sample and put on. I went into Abbey Road and did it.
Is it true you're interested in space and UFOs?
Not in a serious way. I wouldn't mind if it was true, I'd really like it to be true but I haven't seen any proof of it. I really want someone to come up to me and say "I've got proof that there are aliens in my kitchen" and show me the aliens and I'd be really happy then! Or take me to a UFO! I'm interested in it but not in a way that I want to go and search for it. I want someone to come to me because I'm a bit lazy. I want to see a TV programme about it!
It seemed the band regained much of its enthusiasm after the UK tour. Was it the turning point of the year?
Yes, well I really like to play live as a thing. I had a really bad time with touring in certain circumstances, when other things were happening around the band. It made it very hard for me to want to tour. But actually playing live as a thing is really brilliant. You can't really beat it. It's better than being in the studio because it's an instant response, which is good. France and England were really good. In England Manchester was the best. France was really good fun too. Yet we started playing better towards the end. I started to sing... You know everyone was saying to me that I don't put efforts to singing live because I'm always worried about my guitar playing. But if I do think about it, I can try to do both things. I've really set out to be a good musician and a good singer at the same time. And at the same time, have fun, drink a lot and fall over.
You and Mark seem to take different musical directions. The songs that each of you wrote for Carnival of Light clearly divide the album into two parts.
Yes, it's true. Well we're just two different people. However at the moment both us are really into the same kind of bands. The new stuff we're working on at the moment is popular with everybody unlike some songs on Carnival of Light. For instance even though I was really into doing Endless Road and Crown and Creation the rest of the band wouldn't totally enjoy doing it even though they thought it was quite good. At the moment we're all working towards the same thing, which is the way it should be really.
Have both of you already written new songs?
Yes. I work a lot at songwriting, well it's not really work, it just comes naturally to me I think. I was recently looking to the songs I've written and I realized I basically write a couple of songs a month, or something like that. If we don't do anything within six months, I got about twelve songs. With Mark it tends to be more like he goes in and actually rehearses and that's how the songs happen. He writes more in a big lump. So far we've been rehearsing and we've recorded a little bit. We didn't want to do any demos because we got scared of that by the last time. That was the main problem with Carnival of Light: the three or four best songs for me were Let's Get Lost, Walk On Water, She Gives Me Sunshine and Crown of Creation. With these four songs I thought "great, we're going to have a great album". However we demoed so much in the studio, we demoed all the songs almost five times each, and by the time we were working with John Leckie, we were so bored and just forgot what we were supposed to do. So now, each time we even run through a song, it's really precious, we don't want to waste it. We wait til we get into the studio and then do it because I think you get the best performance out of something when you've just written it. Everything I've written in the last year I've saved up, taped it once, not listen to it and just leave it. When we'll get in the studio, I'll bring the tape out and play it and then we'll all work on it and hopefully record it in the same day, which should be perfect.
What are your plans for next year?
We know we're going to go in the studio on 2 January... Actually it might be the third! The studio is booked from the 2nd but we're not going until the 3rd. We're letting the crew set up the equipment and then go in the morning, when we're refreshed. We'll record until the end of January and then go to Japan for a ten-day tour which will be kind of...weird. It's still a weird country... Then we're coming back to England again and hopefully there'll be something finished pretty soon after that. What we are planning to do is do a song a day and do good rough mixes by the end of the day. Maybe we'll have twelve songs by the time we go away. Oh, more. It could be twenty songs, but you don't know. And then come back and finish it all off. Then we'll try and arrange some nice big tour of England, something like twenty shows all in lots of small places.
Small places?
Not really small! But quite small. Just to reach people in the same way as we did the first tour. That was brilliant, you know. It's better than playing to 4000 people when you don't see anyone and you only see security guys who're always in a bad mood.
But it must be exciting to play big venues as well?
Yes it's exciting but all we want now is to get back that sweaty feeling of playing in small places.
You're talking about a big UK tour. Aren't you scared of getting too much pressure again like it happened in America in 1992?
No because America's different. It was a whole different situation. We are now a lot more happier. The period between the second and third album was really tough on us and we could have split up then. I think now we will enjoy touring a lot more. After a week in France I was thinking I wouldn't mind carrying on and staying on the road a little longer because it's fun. If you have the right people and if you feel happy, then it's alright. The worst situation is when you feel like you're trapped, or if you start to feel paranoid. In America it was a lot of things put together. There was a lot of loneliness and stuff but I don't want to get into it and feel sorry for myself again. Also in England it's much easier because if you feel like it you can go on a train and go home. Whereas in America you can't really escape from it and you have to make a big effort. But if we start to feel really tired, we'll just stop again.
Are you still going to try and sort things out in America?
You can't do anything to guarantee making it in America even if you have the best music in the world. You tour a whole year and still can't guarantee it. The way we feel about it at the moment is that we've been there twice, did two really long tours and got blown off of the third tour. So really it's up to them now, if they want us to go, then we'll go. We'll probably do exactly what they want us to do. As long as we feel they want us to be there, if they're going to push the band and help us because we can't do it on our own. We do need someone there saying "Ride are great" and no-one's really saying that.
Well I think Chrome Waves tried to organize a petition to be sent to Sire.
There's a possibility of us leaving Sire anyway because the people with whom we're working in Sire are leaving and I think we'll actually be changing company, but I don't know yet. If we do, I think it could be a good thing. It'll be everywhere, in Europe too. But I don't know what's going to happen.
Do you already know who's going to produce the album?
I don't think we're going to have an actual producer. We're using the engineer. It's going to be like a co-production. He'll be mainly engineering, which means basically recording and making sure the sound is good. But I know pretty much how I want it to sound and he agrees and everyone really agrees on it. We want to do it without time coding or click tracks, which is like a digital metronome. We don't want any of that. We don't want it to be overproduced, not add anything apart from the vocals.
Will Nick Moorbath play on the album?
Yes he'll be playing on it. Probably not much though. We'll choose a couple of songs that he'll play on because we don't want to sound like The Charlatans. Once you start playing a Hammond organ all over the place, it gets a bit...It sounds great but we are really a guitar band and we don't want to put off for the sake of it. I think we'll be having Hammond organ definitely on Walk On Water because that's been really good live.
Are you still going to release Walk On Water?
Yes, that's going to be on the next album. We were also thinking about releasing a live version of Let's Get Lost as a single because we did record it in France every night but we didn't get a version that was quite right. I think if we did it in the studio again, it'd be a bit boring. Plus we've got a great version on TV. A month or two ago we did it on TV for the AIDS benefit, for the Lighthouse programme. It's just going to a TV studio in London and playing two songs. We did the Small Faces song, That Man, and Let's Get Lost. It's really turned out great. We tried to buy the rights to it as well so we can put it on our video. It's a much better version of Let's Get Lost than on record.
You keep mentioning a video that you want to release with live and off-stage footage but...
Yes, it's gone again, isn't it?! Well it's probably going to come out next year. The video that we're going to release is nearly finished. It's going to be different from the other videos we've done. We did Brixton and I think we're going to do an Albert Hall one somewhere, maybe just in America because they paid for it. Anyway, we had the Albert Hall filmed and that's going to get released somewhere. But our one is really the story of us doing Carnival of Light which we could release sometimes early next year, maybe when the first single comes out. But in a way it would be quite nice to continue it, just making it a bigger story. It's going to be about three weeks long!
In December there was a - late - review of Carnival of Light in a Belgian magazine. It said that Carnival of Light was the forgotten masterpiece of 1994 and it was such a shame that so few people had bought it.
That's obviously what I think! I don't know how good an album it really is. It was an expensive album and it sounds nice but I don't know how good it is! I think the next album will be a lot better, in a real direct way. You'll be able to hear exactly what we do on stage, you'll get the feeling that we're actually playing live. Hopefully.
Everyone agrees that Ride is more a live band.
Yes, we do as well. We agree with that.
Bernard Butler said: "People think that making music in groups is about democracy. It's not true. Someone has to take charge." What do you think of it?
Well I know what he means. You can never have a really democratic situation. There'll always be someone who'll speak their minds and others who won't. For instance if I want something to sound a certain way, I will say it and I go on to say it until it sounds that way. Otherwise there'll going to be a big fight! I won't let anything happen that I don't want to happen unless someone beats me in the argument. I would probably three years ago but no longer now because I feel that it's more important to have an integrity.
Oxford, 16.12.94.
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