Loop Ride

More from the Snub TV archives, indie and alternative culture from the late 80s and early 90s as filtered and recorded by the BBC 2 youth culture team. First up, Loop, walls of guitar noise from Croydon, South London, formed by Robert Hampson along with his girlfriend Becky Stewart and James Endeacott. John Wills replaced Becky and Endeacott left to work at Rough Trade where he played a key role in launching both The Strokes and The Libertines. He's also a crate digger with some interesting compilations out (Unlock Your Mind With Morning Glory from last year is a good starting point). Some of the photos of early Loop touring the UK are in Sam Knee's photo book The Scene In Between are definitive shots of the era. Loop are on the cover and a certain subset of indie '88 encapsulated- narrow black jeans and winkle pickers, brown suede, long bowl cuts, leather biker jackets, amps, guitars and Transit vans. 

In 1989 they appeared on Snub, a seven minute clip with interviews, visuals and their music. The interview with Robert is very of its time, maybe the origin story for the 'we make music for ourselves and if anyone else likes its a bonus' line but the music is a blast, overloaded guitars, single minded riffs and glorious repetition. 

Other band members came and went. Loop released three albums of loud, very noisy, psychedelic space rock, all volume, fuzz and three chord riffs- 1987's Heaven's End, Fade Out in 1989 and Gilded Eternity in 1990. The Stooges, Krautrock, late 60s counter- culture re- imagined in late 80s south London. Can you imagine this being on early evening, mid- week BBC 2 now? 

Got To Get Over It was the final song on Fade Out, a blaze of guitars playing the same riff over and over while sludgy drums and distant vocals compete in the background. It breaks down into a swirl of FX and noise, thunder and feedback, a guitar wailing as a weather system closes in around it. Simplistic and purist, an idea taken to its end point.

Got To Get Over It

Also on Snub in 1989 and also very much into distorted guitars and noise but a little younger, were Ride- their first TV appearance was on Snub, the Oxford teenagers playing live at The Town And Country Club. The clip shows them playing Drive Blind, released on their first EP on Creation in January 1990. 

Drive Blind is a Mark Gardener song, one the reformed band still play live now, a little more able to hear themselves and each other now than they were back then. God, how young they were. And we were. 

Drive Blind

Forty Five Minutes Of New Order- ish

I heard Your Silent Face on Friday night- not for the first time obviously- and it floored me once again. There's something about it that is very special- the rippling Kraftwerk inspired keys and synths, Hooky's bass and the mechanical drumming, Bernard's serious lyrics completely undercut by the 'why don't you piss off line', the way it gloriously skips between euphoria and melancholy. It's much more than all of that, one of those songs that is way more than the sum of the parts. It inspired me to start a New Order mix for my Sunday series but then I changed tack almost immediately. Rather than just sequence of load of my favourite New Order songs (almost all of which would be from the 1980s) I thought it might be more interesting or more fun to do a Your Silent Face/ New Order inspired mix and see where it took me. It took me here...

Forty Five Minutes Of New Order- ish

• New Order: Your Silent Face
• Galaxie 500: Ceremony
• Gorillaz ft. Peter Hook and Georgia: Aries
• The Liminanas and Peter Hook: Garden Of Love
• Ian McCulloch: Faith And Healing
• The Times: Manchester 5.32
• Ride: Last Frontier
• New Order: Isolation
• Mike Garry and Joe Duddell: St. Anthony: An Ode To Anthony H. Wilson (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Your Silent Face opens side two of Power, Corruption And Lies, New Order's second album, released in May 1983. It's now seen as a New Order classic, a landmark album, the fusing of dance and rock, light and shade, a band stepping out of the shadows of Joy Division and the first NO album Movement. Your Silent Face had the working title KW1 (the Kraftwerk one). Funny story about New Order and Kraftwerk- the Dusseldorff robots visited New Order in their Cheetham Hill rehearsal space/ HQ and sat open mouthed as the band showed them the kit they used to make Blue Monday. 'You made that record using... this?' 

Galaxie 500's cover of Ceremony is a beauty, a slowed down, slow burning version, ringing feedback, the guitars gathering in intensity, and Dean's upper register voice smothered in echo. Ceremony was New Order's first single (and in a way, Joy Division's last). It was released as a 12" in 1981, twice, with different sleeves and slightly different versions. Galaxie 500's version came out as a B-side on their Blue Thunder 12" in 1990. At the time the nine year gap between 1981 and 1990 was an eon, the 1981 world and 1990 world two totally different eras- for New Order as much as anyone. 

Gorillaz got Hooky to play bass as part of their Song Machine project in 2020. Aries is I think the best 'New Order' song of the 21st century. Murdoc, Noodles, 2D and Russel Hobbs/ Damon Albarn together with Hooky's bass totally nailed what NO should be sounding like now. 

Four years before Gorillaz got Peter Hook to sling his four string guitar around he hooked up with French duo The Liminanas. Garden Of Love is (again) a great 21st century 'New Order' song, slightly fragile, slightly woozy, psychedelic garage rock, the bassline wending its way to the fore and staying there. 

Ian McCulloch's Faith And Healing is virtually a New Order cover- it sounds so much like a off cut from Technique he probably should have given them writing credits. It came out as a single in 1989, taken from Mac's solo debut Candleland. 

The Times was one of Creation mainstay Ed Ball's projects. In 1990 as The Times he released Manchester as a single, a hymn to a city at the centre of a youth explosion. Hooky's mentioned in the lyrics. It's also a tribute to the sound New Order had on 1985's Lowlife. It couldn't be more Lowlife unless it came wrapped in a tracing paper sleeve. I sometimes it think skirts the line between ridiculous and brilliant. I can imagine it making some people cringe but I think it has charm. Once, driving through France it came on the car stereo on one of the mix CDs I'd burned for the trip and made me briefly, stupidly homesick. I got over it- I mean we were on holiday in France for fuck's sake.  

Last Frontier was on last year's Ride album, Interplay. It's an Andy Bell song, soaring, chiming guitars and on the money drums. It sounds like a close cousin of Regret (the last truly great New Order single, released back in 1993. Although actually, I'm happy to listen to arguments for Crystal, released in August 2001). 

Isolation is a Joy Division song, from their second/ final album Closer. It's a stunning song, the collision of electronic drums and real ones genuinely thrilling, along with the synth and bass. Ian's words are bleak, a man at the end of his tether. This version is by New Order, recorded for a John Peel session in 1998. They still play it live- they did it at Wythenshawe Park last August. 

Mike Garry and Joe Duddell's St. Anthony: An Ode To Anthony H. Wilson is a song I come back to often, Mike's A to Z of Manchester music endlessly listenable and at times very moving. For his remix Andrew Weatherall, a huge fan of Factory, turned the song into a nine minute Weatherall tour de force, complete with a version of the Your Silent Face bassline. Which is where I came in. 

Forty Minutes Of Dreams

While searching through my music folders and files recently I was struck by the number of songs I had that have the word 'dream' or 'dreams' in the title. A rich source of songwriting inspiration. They say hearing about other people's dreams is really boring but I don't think that's always they case. My own dreams have become really vivid and at times quite disturbing in the three years since Isaac died (and also since I started taking statins for high cholesterol a year and a half ago). Waking up having dreamed of Isaac, him being there and talking to me, is always a startling way to start the day (or the middle of the night). It takes a moment for me to realise it was a dream and that he's not there. Sometimes that half asleep- half awake state can be really pleasant and attempting to go back to sleep to go back into a nice dream is something that I'm sure lots of us do. 

Whatever the reason for dreaming, the brain/ consciousness sifting through stuff and pulling things from the dim and distant past into our sleeping state along with bizarre and random, surreal situations, is a rich vein of inspiration for songwriters- both musically and lyrically. Ambient music often seems like an attempt to make music that can soundtrack dreams. The blur and fuzz of shoegaze and psychedelia likewise. As all this percolated through my head on the road coming home from work one evening last week it seemed that a dreams mix was in order. 

Forty Minutes Of Dreams

• Kevin McCormick & David Horridge: Glass Dream
• Kim Gordon: Dream Dollar
• Spatial Awareness: Dream Food (SA Dub)
• Suicide: Dream Baby Dream (Single Version)
• Lunar Dunes: Pharaoh's Dream
• Ride: Dreams Burn Down
• Mark Peters: Red Sunset Dreams
• Sheer: Mezcal Dream
• Spirea X: Chlorine Dream
• Blade Runner Soundtrack: Deckard's Dream

Kevin McCormick is a Mancunian guitarist who released several albums of minimal instrumental music in the early 80s. He met bassist David Horridge in the late 70s and in 1982 they recorded Light Patterns, a minimal, gently psychedelic/ ambient album. Largely ignored, the album and others by Kevin were re- released in 2021. Last year Kevin released a new album- Passing Clouds- which is lovely and can be found at Bandcamp. 

Kim Gordon's solo album from last year, The Collective, passed me by a bit but it's a powerful piece of work, a jolt of electricity, hip hop drums, noise and Kim's NY blank cool. 

Spatial Awareness released Dream Food as an EP last year, an electronic trippy delight with this dub as a dreamy counterpoint. 

Suicide's Dream Baby Dream is one of those songs, an all timer. It came out as a single in 1979, a repetitive synth, drum machine and vocal blur of brilliance, a song lost in its own state of warm, blissful ignorance, the synth patterns circling endlessly. A track that could be loped for an hour and not outstay its welcome. 

Lunar Dunes' Galaxsea originally came out in 2011, post- jazz, post- punk, dubby global tracks 'for truth seekers and interplanetary vacationers'. The band included former members of Cornershop and Transglobal Underground and took the 1960s and 70s West German bands as their inspiration. Pharoah's Dream is at the centre of Galaxsea and rattles along in a cosmische and future jazz way.

Dreams Burn Down was on Ride's 1990 debut album Nowhere, a shoegaze classic, crunching FX guitars, slow motion drums and typically youthful lyrics about lost or unrequited love. Live Dreams Burn Down is massive, a wall of sound and sensation. 

Mark Peters is a guitarist from Wigan. His solo albums, 2017's Innerland and 2022's Red Sunset Dreams, are big Bagging Area favourites. The title track of the second is a rippling ambient instrumental, the wide open spaces of the American West crossed with north west England psychedelia. 

Sheer is Sheer Taft who in 1990 made one of the era's best wobbly Balearic dance records, the mighty Cascades. In 2022 Sheer Taft, now residing in Spain rather than Glasgow, made a follow up, an album called ...And Then There Were Four, a Spaghetti Western album with Andrew Innes and the late Martin Duffy from Primal Scream on board.

Jim Beattie was a founder member of Primal Scream, leaving to form Spirea X who released an album in 1991, Fireblade Skies. The debut release was a single the year before, Chlorine Dream, guitars from The Byrds, attitude from Glasgow, drums and vocals from 1990. 

An expanded, full length version of the Blade Runner soundtrack, The Esper Edition, was unofficially released and has done the rounds as a bootleg for years. The film deals with all sorts of themes dreams being one of them. Deckard's Dream is one minute and ten seconds of Vangelis/ ambient sound. In the film Deckard dreams of a unicorn, the meaning of which has been argued about since the film's release in 1982. 

Fifteen

Happy New Year! 

This blog is fifteen years old today. Bagging Area was born with a whimper on 1st January 2010, with the intention of seeing if I could do it for a year and no real plan for what I was going to write about. Here we are a decade and a half later with 5, 939 posts under my belt, over 18, 700 comments from people from near and far many of whom are now actual friends in virtual and/ or real life, and over 4, 666, 787 page views (at the time of writing). I didn't expect it to be as central to my life as it has become and can't really conceive how I could do without it. Micro- blogging and social media have their place, sharing music and with the capacity to make similar connections, but there's something about long form blogging, the process of writing, that sets it apart. I'm sure it's an outdated form of internet expression in an age of Tik Tok and Instagram Reels but it works for me and many others. The comments, the connections and the conversation, are really what make it so thank you to everyone who reads and leaves comments here (or when I share posts on Facebook). There's more of the same to come in 2025- apart from a list of artists/ songs on a notepad next to the computer and a few ideas for Saturday and Sunday posts I've no real plans beyond the next few posts, but something always comes up. 

To celebrate Bagging Area's fifteenth birthday here are a trio of fifteens in song and a poster. Andy Warhol famously said that, 'in the future, everyone will be world- famous for fifteen minutes'. And he didn't even know about YouTube at that point. Two of the songs here (I think) are inspired by or refer to that quote. The first is by Johnny Boy, a Liverpool boy- girl duo from the mid- 00s who released a legendary 7" single, You Are The Generation Who Bought More Shoes (And You Get What You Deserve), a 60s girl group inspired song that was a proper music blog song, shared countless times all over the place. Their sole album included this...

15 Minutes

Thundering drums, squealing guitars, hand shaking percussion, more multi- tracked girl group vocals, an 00s feel (think The Go- Team et al).

Ride's second re- union album was 2019's This Is Not A Safe Place, an album that drew from Jean- Michel Basquiat, Sonic Youth, and post- punk, all undercut by some squally electronics. Fifteen Minutes is three minutes fourteen seconds of indie rock with some kiss off lyrics about someone who's had their fifteen minutes and who has been bitten by karmic retribution, the song interrupted by bursts of  Goo- esque dirty guitar 

Fifteen Minutes

Thirdly, a fairly obscure Joe Strummer song, the B-side to the Island Hopping single from 1989. 15th Brigade (Viva La Quince Brigada) is a song from the Spanish Civil War, Joe singing in Spanish. There's a song of the same name written by Christy Moore, a tribute to the Irishmen who fought in the war against fascism in Spain in the International Brigades, Irish socialists who were also know as the Connolly Column. As far as I can tell the two songs aren't the same song. 

15th Brigade

And finally, a Factory records fifteen. In true Factory style the catalogue number Fac 15 wasn't given to a record but to a poster and an event (just as Fac 1 had been a poster). Fac 15 advertised the outdoor gig held jointly between Factory and Liverpool's Zoo Records, the two independent labels meeting half way in Leigh. I cycle through Leigh quite often- the idea that the cream of 1979's post punk bands played in a field there is always faintly ludicrous and totally brilliant, as is the poster's advice about how the post- punk youth of Manchester and Liverpool should get there. In terms of value for me it's second to none. It was however very poorly attended- the other bands on the line up watching whoever was on stage often comprised half of the total watching crowd. Accounts from the few who attended report that Joy Division were breathtaking. 

 

Ride Live At New Century Hall And A Forty Five Minute Mix

I saw Ride at New Century Hall on Friday night- they are a superb live band right now, powerful and punchy, light and shade both represented, noise and melody. In an interview Andy Bell once said that his vision for the band came to him when at home listening to The Beatles while his mum was vacuuming, that blend of 60s melodies (with twin vocals) and a wall of noise and fuzz. Tonight they have plenty of all of that. They open with Monaco from this year's Interplay album, straight ahead modern rock with a glossy sheen, Mark Gardener centre stage and in good voice. They finish the main set an hour later with Seagull, the huge shoegaze tour de force that opened Nowhere in 1990, the song where they transcended their MBV and JAMC influences.

In between there are songs from almost every point in their back catalogue- new ones like the sweeping, Byrdsy Last Frontier and anthemic Peace Sign with its spirit of 1969/ 1989 chorus, 'Give me a peace sign/ Throw your hands in the air/ Give me a peace sign/ Let me know you're there' stand out.  Future Love from 2019's This Is Not A Safe Place album. The crushing, wall of noise teen angst of Dreams Burn Down. 1992's Cool Your Boots, the Withnail And I sample kicking it off and the band powering into it, Loz and Steve proving they were indie rock's secret best rhythm section, Andy's squally guitar at the centre of the storm. The last two are Seagull and before that Vapour Trail, Andy's epic, romantic song from 1990 that closed their debut Nowhere, the crowd singing the cello part, a sea of middle aged shoegazers and indie kids la la la la- ing as the band wind down and stop, grinning at us and each other. 

The encore spans the years again, in reverse. Light In A Quiet Room followed by Leave Them All Behind, twin guitars and vocals, distortion and thunderous drums, the one where they left all their peers behind. Then Chelsea Girl, from their first EP, the red roses one on Creation when they (and we) were barely out of our teens, young and full of dreams. 

After the gig we have a chat with Andy Bell in the bar downstairs. I thanked him for giving us his cover version of Smokebelch for our Sounds Of The Flightpath Estate Volume 1 album and said he was honoured to be part of it. 

In October 2022 I put together a mix of Ride songs from the re- union years. You can find it here. To complement it I've done an early years for today's Sunday mix, from the first EP to Going Blank Again, singles, album songs and EP tracks/ B-sides. Two sides of a c90 tape. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Early Ride

• Cool Your Boots
• Seagull
• Sennen
• Like A Daydream
• Dreams Burn Down
• Taste
• Leave Them All Behind
• Vapour Trail
• Chelsea Girl

Cool Your Boots is from 1992's Going Blank Again. The album was very much a step on from the debut Nowhere, confident and wide screen, shoegaze but buffed up. Leave Them All Behind is a single from the same album- it reached number nine in the charts and got them onto Top Of The Pops. On release it had a statement feel, Ride are back and have left the others behind. Hammond organ intro, Mark and Andy on twin vocals, tumbling rhythms and endless guitars (especially in the full nine minute version).

Seagull opens Nowhere, the fastest song on the album and a ferocious piece of indie guitar rock. Nowhere is in some ways a classic debut from that period, 1988- 1993- eight songs in forty minutes with ebb and flow, a sound that permeates every song, a sleeve image that hints at what lies inside, a self contained piece of art. Dreams Burn Down comes from the same album (and was the A-side on the Fall EP, out in October 1990 with three new B-sides, the third of four four song 12" EPs, a run of records and songs that stand alongside Nowhere) . Vapour Trail is the last song- 12 string guitar intro with a repeating chord pattern that keeps resurfacing throughout the song, Loz's brilliant on- the- note drums, Andy's voice and love song lyrics and then the two minute coda with cello. A proper last song on the album feel. 

Taste was on the Fall EP, a new song along with Here And Now and Nowhere (the title track from the album that wasn't on the album). Three minutes of noisy indie rock with a vaguely euphoric vocal. 

Sennen was on Ride's EP Today Forever, four new songs released in March 1991. A video album was made for the EP, each song getting its own video. The video for Sennen is exactly what some of us looked like in 1990/ 1991- fringes, long sleeved t- shirts, baggy jeans, hooped tops, desert boots. The song is all strummed guitars and a stop start rhythm, stoned harmonised vocals, the Byrds the morning after a night at Phuture. 'The memory fades away', Mark and Andy murmur, the vocals themselves sounding like a memory fading. Sennen is I assume named after Sennen Cove in Cornwall. 

Chelsea Girl is from the Ride EP, released in January 1990. A new decade. The first song on the first release on Creation to make the proper charts. The first Ride song most of us heard. A two and a half minute thrashy marriage of noise and pop, the Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine in there for sure, but its own thing too. 

Imagine It Create It

One of the treats of this week that keeps repeating has been the arrival of our album, Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 1, arriving in physical form through people's front doors. The first copies started to fall onto door mats a week ago and there's been a stream ever since. My copy arrived on Saturday morning an to say it's a been a thrill is an understatement. 

When I was younger records had a mystical power, they cast a spell and there was a ritual connected to playing them- the black vinyl and the way it crackled slightly when pulled out of the sleeve, the spiralling groove with the stylus sitting within it, the magical sounds that emanated from this piece of plastic via the arm of the record player and out of the speakers, the sleeve with art or photo on the front and the world of credits, track titles, sleeve notes, and thank yous on the back or inside. And even though DIY culture has been part of the musical world I've been inhabiting since I first started buying records (the philosophy that anyone can make a record was part of both punk and its aftermath and acid house), the idea that a twelve track album in a gatefold sleeve with an array of top quality tracks, all connected to Andrew Weatherall, with my name, picture and sleeve notes written by me would some exist as an actual physical artefact, is a little mind blowing still. That mystical power of black plastic and a cardboard sleeve still exists. It was there last Saturday when I opened the package and slid the album out, Personality Crisis's brilliant artwork in my hands, the gatefold opening up with my sleeve notes on the left and the credits and thanks you's on the right (and a dedication to Isaac too, another proper moment), the pair of discs inside paper inner sleeves... the magic is right there. 

The twelve tracks are all absurdly good, everyone involved has sent us music from their top drawer. The opening track is a Two Lone Swordsmen ambient track (not a genre they explored that in that much depth) from a CD promo issued solely in japan twenty years ago called Still My World. We managed to get Rotters Golf Club to license it for our album, something that still has me shaking my heard. Sons Of Slough, Ian Weatherall and Duncan Grey, follow with a chunky, chuggy monster called Red Machine, recorded live at their soundcheck at The Golden Lion last August. Timothy J. Fairplay's Centurion Version, closes side 1, Tim's own tribute to the planned follow up to his and Andrew's Ruled By Passion, Destroyed By Lust album (as The Aphodells), a rocking synth dub track. Flip the disc over and  you find Justin Robertson and his Deadstock 33s and a wired, tripped out dub ode to Todmorden and The Golden Lion, a very FXed vocal talking about happy valleys and UFOs (the Todmorden UFO society meets monthly upstairs at the pub. A friend who moved into the area and who attended a meeting was treated with deep suspicion by the regulars who thought he might be from the government). Curtains Twitch On Peaks is followed by the huge sounding Tough On Chug, Tough On The Causes Of Chug by Richard Sen, thumping, driving electronic music. Disc 2 kicks off with Rude Audio's sleek dub techno track Running Wild, driving bass, guitar, keys and rocking dubbed out drums. Jesse Fahnestock's 10:40 comes next, a circus organ riff transplanted from a fairground to acid house with Emilia Harmony's  blissed out, otherworldly vocal a siren call. Side 4 has Sean Johnston's Hardway Bros and the self- explanatory Theme For Flightpath Estate (how ace is that? We have our own theme??). Cosmic disco of the kind he plays at ALFOS with a nod to Andrew Weatherall's Walk of Shame within it. The Light Brigade come next (it's a pseudonym due to the artist being contracted Heavenly but the notes on the gatefold  credit the writing and production to David Holmes so you can probably make you onw mind up about who it is). Human : Remains sat unfinished and homeless on the shelf for twenty years before being dusted down, sharpened up and released on our album, a track that surges with krautrock drums and layers of synths, keys and bass. We finish with Andy Bell's cover of Smokebelch, a gorgeous, lilting cover version, Andy's fingers moving up and down the strings of his guitar audible, piano and guitars and FX, the perfect way to close the album. Andy began it on the day Andrew died in 2020 and finished it for our album back in October. As I've said and keep saying, a record full of moments that have had me/ us pinching ourselves at almost every stage, from the first week we had a 'yes' to our proposal to this week when the record arrived at our homes. 

The album's sold out online. There are some copies available from today at The Golden Lion, at AW61, a weekender to celebrate what would have been Andrew's 61st birthday. Tonight Radioactive Man and David Holmes will rock the Lion with Matt Hum and Rusty and Rotter. There are some copies due to land at Piccadilly Records soon and some more at London's Stranger Than Paradise Records. All these things make me shake my head and pinch myself again. Yes, I will be going to Piccadilly Records to photograph our album in the racks. 

In an interview many years ago Andrew Weatherall spoke of what he did being in the spirit of 'the grand amateur'. I think that's us too. Waka, the man who runs The Golden Lion, said on Facebook this week, 'Imagine it: create it'. And that's what we've done. 

I can't post any of the songs- we only got the license to put them out on vinyl, so there's no digital release. Some of you may have copies of the album. If you do, I hope you're enjoying it as much as we have been. We've already started contemplating the part of our album's title that says 'Volume 1'. 

Tim Fairplay posted his copy on Tuesday with the comment that the first band he ever saw live back in 1992 aged thirteen was Ride, on their Going Blank Again tour, adding it was kinda cool to ned up on the same album as Andy Bell. Both Tim and Andy have new material out elsewhere too. In February Tim released a six track EP/ cassette on Belgian label Pinkman called Convictions That Stick, six slices of Timwave electro, thunderous jacking grooves, squelchy synth sounds and strobe lit keys. It's here. 

Andy Bell and the other three members of Ride have just released their third album since reuniting, a twelve song monster called Interplay. It's got guitars and synths, a big sound made for playing live, nods to various 80s and 90s guitar bands and among the soaring chord sequences, towards the end, is this low key beauty, Essaouira, possibly a tribute to the Moroccan town that became a hippy haven in the 60s, with shuffling drums, samples, blissed out guitars and a dreamy, shimmering haze. 

Ways Of Seeing

This is the wall at the back of our cupboard under the stairs, one of those cupboards that when you open it everything- the ironing board, the hoover, the stepladders, a pair of shoes- falls out on you. Or at least it was- it's been sorted now. Sorting it revealed the wall which looked to me like an abstract expressionist painting from the 1950s. It's gone now too, painted white. 

This pair of songs are both new, came out recently and although they don't sound much like each other have become linked for me- I've been playing them back to back and they evoke similar feelings in me. Firstly the latest song from Khruangbin, May Ninth, a promise of springtime coming. Someone said recently it's beginning to feel if not like spring then at least like the end of winter. May Ninth makes me feel exactly that. It is just over three minutes long, the sonic equivalent of sunshine, the delicate guitar playing, the notes ringing and rippling like a happy Vini Reilly, the drums just so on it as to be perfect and the bass padding away as the words waft by, 'Waiting for May to come... Just another day'. Something very close to pure feeling in a song, an emotional hit and a few minutes of optimism for the end of February.

I've been pairing it with the latest single from the forthcoming Ride album, an Andy Bell song called Last Frontier, four minutes of soaring, chiming indie rock with an early 90s New Order feel (if this song had been on Republic it would stand alongside Regret as the album's best moment). Over streamlined bass and drums and twin guitars Andy songs of 'Ways of leaving/ ways to say goodbye/ Ways of seeing/ Seeing eye to eye/ Without losing our way'. Like Khruangbin's May Ninth, it's emotive and inspiring, music that makes you feel something.  

Peace Sign

Some weeks in blogging things just come together nicely, in a way that wasn't planned but looks like it could have been. On Tuesday I wrote about Slowdive's 2023 album Everything Is Alive, an early 90s shoegaze band proving re- unions can be about new music not just the past (and making new music as god as or even better than the music they made first time around).  On Wednesday I posted Hardway Bros' cover of Smashing Pumpkins' 1979 and the ethereal remixes of the song by Andy Bell (as GLOK). Yesterday I got home to an email from Andy's other band Ride with details of a new album, Interplay, out in March and a new single, Peace Sign, out immediately.  

Peace Sign opens with a burst of feedback and some rapid fire drumming and then a wall of swirling guitars and a Prophet 5 synth. Andy says the song's lyrics were inspired by the free climber Marc- Andre Leclerc and the film The Alpinist, and the chorus, 'Give me a peace sing/ Throw your hands in the air/ Give me a peace sign/ Let me know you're there', is a lovely slice of optimism in a world that sometimes doesn't look like there's a great deal to be optimistic about. The drums keep hammering away, the bass thumps along, the guitars chime and burn, the words and harmonies flow forth, and it all sounds like Ride reborn again. 

Back in 1992 Ride released their second album, the follow up to their 1990 debut Nowhere, a record of shoegaze perfection. On Going Blank Again they took twin overdriven guitars, a wall of FX pedal noise, twin vocalist harmonies, a strong sense of melody and a powerful rhythm section and fused them all together in one package. Andy Bell once said he got the idea for what Ride should like when he was sitting at home listening to The Beatles while his mum was hoovering, that conjunction of melody and noise.  On Cool Your Boots they nailed everything together, a song that opens with  a line sampled from Withnail And I ('even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day') and then go all in, a descending chord sequence, blissed out vocals about having '50 states of mind', pummeling drums and fills from Loz and more guitars. The last three minutes are 90s guitars and drums heaven. 

Cool Your Boots

Polar Bears

Ride and The Charlatans began a double header tour of North America yesterday, the two bands swapping headlining duties each night. Pet Shop Boys and New Order did a similar thing last year, as did Suede and Manic Street Preachers. I can see the attraction for the bands- split the costs, shift more tickets, play slightly shorter sets without the pressure to be top of the bill every night. For the fans too, it's a winner- in the combinations mentioned here there can't be many people who'd pay to see one of the bands without even the slightest interest in seeing the other. If Ride and The Charlatans want to repeat it over here, I'm definitely in. They played together back in the early 90s, a tour of seaside towns billed as the Daytripper tour (I say tour, it may have Brighton and Blackpool only). 

Back in 1990 both bands released their debut albums, The Charlatans Some Friendly in October and Ride's Nowhere a week later. Both albums had songs titled Polar Bear too. I think I remember reading somewhere that the bands became aware each other were writing songs titled Polar Bear and both went ahead, finding some kinship in it. 

The Charlatans' Polar Bear was a live favourite, the group having built up a fanatical following following the release of debut single Indian Rope. It chugs in on funky guitar and organ, a distorted woodwind topline snaking around for two minutes before Tim steps up to the mic, voice quite low in the swirly mix, singing about  a girl who's 'freezing to death with no clothes on/ She doesn't know what day it is', the song bubbling up for the line, 'I've never had one of those'. The verse, 'Life's a bag of revels/ I'm looking for the orange one', was a fan favourite, inspiring a fanzine and oft quoted in reviews in the music press. Later on Tim gets more oblique, 'Have you seen my polar bear?/ It's the white thing over there'. Polar Bear split opinions in the group, some thinking they didn't do the song justice and overproduced it, others wanting it to be a single. In the end, with Martin Blunt threatening to quit if it was the next single, they put out The Only One I Know instead which would seem retrospectively to be the correct decision. 

Polar Bear

Ride's Polar Bear was the last song on side one of their debut, a Mark Gardener written song, and also has lines about an unnamed girl. 'She knew she was able to fly', Mark sings, 'Because when she came down/ She had dust on her hands from the sky/ She said I touched a cloud'. The guitars are a squall of noise, the drums and guitars grinding their way forward through the intro. The second verse contains one of my favourite Ride lines, the sort of line only a nineteen year old can get away with, one of those profound middle of the night thoughts that seem daft in daylight, stoned silliness- 'Why should it feel like a crime?/ If I want to be with you all the time?/ Why is it measured in hours?/ You should make your own time'. We should all make our own time eh? I might do it today.  

Polar Bear

Music Is The Answer

It would be overly dramatic to say that music has saved my life this year but there's no doubt it has been there to pull me through and has provided moments where I have been, temporarily, transported out of myself. Grief has been permanent- changing but still permanent- and music has been one of the ways through which I have been lifted out of it, even if only for a few minutes. 

Back in December 2021, in the week or two immediately after Isaac died, I didn't listen to any music. The grief was so raw and so harsh, so present in my body. I never knew that emotional pain could be so physically painful, that it could actually hurt so badly. There was a Saturday afternoon in December were I sat in our back room. It seemed like it was dark all day and that that particular Saturday afternoon would drift on endlessly forever. Eventually I played a record from the pile near my feet, Promise by SUSS, which I'd bought not long previously (although it came out in 2020). SUSS play ambient Americana/ ambient country, and the album is a quiet wash of gentle drones and sounds, pedal steel, e-bow guitar, mandolin and so on, with loops. If I remember correctly, I just needed something to take away the silence in the room, ambient music to provide something else to focus on while sitting staring into the room. 

Home

As the afternoon wore on I was able to sit on the sofa and listen to wordless, largely ambient music and it helped in some way. I played both sides of Promise and when it finished I plugged my phone into the stereo and played what was then the latest in Richard Norris' monthly Music For Healing ambient releases, December. The music couldn't take the pain away but it seemed to provide something, a salve of some kind. After forty minutes of Music For Healing I pulled out a record from the pile near to me, the records that were either most recently bought or taken from the shelves because I wanted to listen to them- the pile was all from before Isaac's death. A few records in was the recent re- issue of Victorialand by Cocteau Twins. The gauzelike guitars, ambient-ish haze and Liz Fraser's voice all became part of that afternoon. 

The Thinner The Air

During 2022 I've been to lots of gigs, more than in any single since the late 80s/ early 90s I think, when gig going was cheap and weekly. Some were bought as presents last Christmas- we had no time to do any real Christmas shopping for each other in the aftermath of Isaac's death. In January I saw Half Man Half Biscuit at the Ritz. A month later we saw John Cooper Clarke with Mike Garry and Luke Wright at the Bridgewater Hall. I saw John Cooper Clarke again in November at the Apollo supporting Squeeze courtesy of a friend with a spare. A few weeks ago the same friend gave me a ticket for Stereolab at the New Century Hall. In between I've seen a revelatory Ride doing Nowhere at the Ritz, Paul Weller at the Apollo, Andy Bell upstairs at Gullivers, The Charlatans doing Between 10th And 11th in full and then the hits at the New Century Hall, Echo And The Bunnymen in imperious form at Manchester's Albert Hall, Ian McCulloch solo (with a band) at Nantwich Words and Music Festival, Pete Wylie and Wah! at Night And Day, Warpaint (also at the Albert Hall), Pet Shop Boys at the arena and Primal Scream at Castlefield Bowl. Quite a few of these were courtesy of the generosity of friends, something I'm really grateful for. 

At some of these gigs I've cried, sometimes completely unexpectedly and overhwlemingly. At Echo And The Bunnymen in February the opening chords and first verse/ chorus of Nothing Lasts Forever reduced me to a mess of tears, I almost dissolved completely. In September The Charlatans' North Country Boy made me cry, Mike Garry's poetry did it, Pete Wylie did it more than once, Pet Shop Boys too with Being Boring. None of these tears have been a bad thing, they've all hit an emotional spot that connected me to Isaac in some way. As well as the tears (and the looks from other gig goers that a middle aged man crying at a gig can bring, followed by me shrugging and smiling) these gigs have provided moments where I've been transported out of myself for a while- for a song or for an hour. Good gigs can do that anyway, provide an act of communion between band and crowd, between music and people, but the act of being transported away somewhere else is a magical one and not much else has been able to do it this year. 

In October I DJed at the Golden Lion in Todmorden as part of The Flightpath Estate group, five of us supporting and warming up for David Holmes. The memories of that afternoon and evening still linger and of Holmes' set in that packed pub, four hours of dance music, the transportative effect of music once again lifting me up and out of myself. 

In a year where grief and pain have been ever-present, where the physical manifestations of bereavement have been there almost every single day, where the loss of Isaac has been such a huge sucking black hole in our lives, music in all its forms- that long ambient afternoon last December, experienced live at gigs, listened on record, streamed through the computer, listened to via headphones while out walking, bought from Bandcamp and burned to CD to play in the car, played on a tinny portable speaker on a balcony in Gran Canaria in July- has often been the answer. It won't bring Isaac back- nothing will- but at times it makes being without him something that can be borne or briefly make the loss and his absence fade for a while. 

Vapour Trail, the final song from Ride's Nowhere when it came out back in 1990 and the set closer at the 30th anniversary tour, was a beautiful moment at the Ritz, a crowd of middle aged and their late teenage/ early twenties children singing along to the swirling guitars, pounding drums and Andy Bell's declaration of love. Music is the answer. 

Vapour Trail

Forty Minutes Of Reunion Ride

The pair of albums Ride have made since they reformed- Weather Diaries from 2017 and 2019's This Is Not A Safe Place plus the four track Tomorrow's Shore EP from 2018- show a band who haven't reformed just to play the heritage rock circuit, hawking their three decades old back catalogue round to crowds who want a night of nostalgia (though they do that too, and one of the best gigs I've been to this year was the band's 30th anniversary of Nowhere tour at the Ritz back in April so please don't imagine I'm being a bit sneery about heritage rock although I appreciate I was a tad critical of Primal Scream's Screamadelica gig in July so maybe don't come here expecting consistency). 

Ride's re- union has produced a slew of good songs that stand alongside the older ones. At The Ritz six months ago after they'd played Nowhere, the second half as a mix of old and new, three re- union songs played alongside Twisterella, OX4 and Leave Them All Behind, and they all blended in perfectly, played by a band more than up for it, old tensions resolved and new sounds and kit allowing them to stretch out. The mix below is eight songs made since they reformed, three of which they played at The Ritz (Kill Switch, All I Want and Lannoy Point). 

Forty Minutes Of Ride

• Pulsar
• All I Want (GLOK Remix)
• Kill Switch
• Lannoy Point
• Future Love
• Catch You Dreaming
• R.I.D.E.
• Cali (album version)

Pulsar was the lead track on Tomorrow's Shore, a soaring piece of melodic space rock, as good as anything they've done. The EP was closed by Catch You Dreaming. All the reunion records have been produced by Erol Alkan and mixed by Alan Moulder

Lannoy Point opens Weather Diaries. All I Want is from that album too, here in GLOK remix form, Andy Bell remixing his own band. Cali is for me the album's highlight and their finest reunion song, six and a half minutes of blissed out, post- shoegaze guitar rock. It was a big part of the soundtrack to our summer holiday on the Atlantic coast of France that year too and always reminds me of the sand dunes, beaches and sunsets around Messanges, Bayonne and Biaritz. 

R.I.D.E., Kill Switch and Future Love are all from 2019's This Is Not A Safe Place album, Future Love in particular sounding like The Byrds reborn for the 21st century. 

Monday's Long Song

Eleven minutes of early 90s guitar wrangling from Ride, Mark Gardener and Andy Bell twisting their guitars and FX pedals into all kinds of shapes and noises. If you can play twin guitar without any obvious verse/ chorus structure or words for more than ten minutes and keep it interesting and exciting, you've got something going for you, as the Ride boys prove here (especially as they were not long out of their teens when they recorded this).

Grasshopper was the B-side to the Leave Them All Behind 12", out on Creation in February 1992. Leave Them All Behind is an epic long song itself. 

Grasshopper 

First You Look So Strong, Then You Fade Away

Ride were welcomed on stage at The Ritz last Thursday like returning heroes, a 90s indie re- union where the group have made new music that stands alongside the songs and albums of their/ our youth. The gig and tour was postponed from two years ago, a anniversary tour for their 1990 debut Nowhere, and advance clips from elsewhere made it seem that they were on fire, a run of rapturous gigs. Arriving on stage at nine they set about playing Nowhere in full, in order, kicking straight into the full pelt indie/ shoegaze/ Byrds-y assault of Seagull, feedback ringing, drums pounding and vocal harmonies at the centre with that loopy bassline driving it. Nowhere as Andy Bell tells us, 'is a funny album, it starts fast and then slows down'. The band play it like it's new material, energised and enthused by the reaction of the crowd and their own rediscovery and expansion of the songs. If anything, the songs sound better live in 2022 than the early 90s recorded versions- the twin guitars scorching and soaring where they need to, the harmonies spot on and the rhythm section underpinning it all. Loz Colbert's drumming is a sensation in itself and Andy Bell switches between pedals and guitars, noise and melody. Paralysed burns slowly, Dreams Burn Down is an epic bedsit anthem and Vapour Trail is greeted by a mosh pit, and a mass singalong as the song finishes and the crowd take over, something approaching hysteria. 

After the album is done they play some songs from the period- the beautiful, 60s/ 90s guitar pop of Taste, the harmonica- led fuzz and feedback of Here And Now and the huge, skyscraping set closer Nowhere, breaking down into feedback and the static distortion of waves lapping against a shore as the band wave goodbye. There's an encore of course, where the old and the new get blended together and the crowd are dancing, bouncing, singing and waving hands in the air, the indie kids of 1990 (now all grown up into middle age) and their children (also now grown up) blasting out the lines together. There are two songs from the re- union album Weather Diaries (Lannoy Point and All I Want), a tour debut for Twisterella (because the support band bdrmm were bugging them to play it), OX4, Kill Switch (from 2019's This Is Not A Safe Place), a delirious Unfamiliar (from 1991's Today Forever EP) and to finish Leave Them All Behind, the eight minute opener of 1991's Going Blank Again and the perfect set closer, twin guitars fed through FX pedals, massive bass and drums and those Byrdsian harmonies filling the Ritz, 'just let it flow/ just let it flow', the sounds spiralling round and round, caught in a loop of noise and harmonics. 

Vapour Trail

All this and I had a chat with Andy Bell afterwards too. 

Now You're Looking Back

This song came out in March 1991, the lead song on a four track EP from Ride called Today Forever. It followed their debut album from the year before, Nowhere. At the time I wasn't too fussed but now, thirty years later and heard on the heels of the Ride re- union and Andy Bell's releases as himself and as Glok, it sounds like a superb blast of early 90s shoegaze/ rock, fading in on a crystal guitar line before the bass and drums punch their way in and pull you in. Then there's walls of fuzz, twin distorted guitars and Byrdsy toplines and those trademark vocals, slightly behind the music. 

Unfamiliar

Here they are on Top Of The Pops looking impossibly young. They were young but they look really young. Long sleeved t- shirts, fringes and avoiding looking down the camera's lens.

Fast forward nearly three decades and they put out Weather Diaries in 2017. This was my highlight, a beautifully, swooning piece of 21st century alt- rock, driving bassline, chiming guitars and lovely twin vox from Mark and Andy, singing about summer love and the beach and in the 'summer is gone' a real sense of loss. There's a soaring, keening guitar line over the chorus and then a dive back in that really hits the spot.

Cali 

Here they are in session for KEXP, older and wiser. 

It's Been So Long And We've Come So Far

This Friday last year was the day schools closed to all but a small number of children of key workers. I vividly remember taking our Year 11's final assembly and then sending them on their way, their last year cut short, no exams, no prom, no 'proper' leaving, the rites of passage truncated. Three days earlier our son Isaac had been told to begin shielding and that's where he's been ever since, cut off from the rest of the world. I remember feeling last March that we were in this for the long haul, that the school year was probably going to be seen out in lockdown (and biting my tongue when some of the kids suggested that they'd be back in a few weeks- some adults too seemed to think that three weeks lockdown would be enough to see Covid dealt with). But to be here a year later, still in lockdown, is still hard to fathom. A whole year. In this part of the country, apart from a brief spell last summer when the government paid people to go to restaurants and spread the virus, we've been living under some form of lockdown or tiering restrictions ever since. A year of living in lockdown has taken its toll on people in all sorts of ways but it also shows that people can adapt and get used to anything if we have to and that most people do see that in extreme times sacrifices have to be made for the greater good. 

I've kept up my habit of walking most evenings. Sometimes now there's still a bit of light in the sky, the dusk pushed back a little further every day. I noticed two nights ago while walking round in the dark that the blossom has suddenly appeared on the trees. I've started listening to music while walking. It's a good distraction- otherwise I just go over frustrations with work or whatever in my head and come back having had some exercise but not really feeling any mental benefit. Listening to music through headphones always adds a slightly cinematic feeling to walking, the music wrapped around your head like a personal soundtrack. This song by Ride came on in my headphones two nights ago and it floored me, the combination of guitars, waves of FX, the twin vocals and that drop out part, when everything falls away to just the grungy bassline. The lines, 'Always keep your eyes on the pulsar/ Guiding you home from wherever you are/ We're on our way home from another star/ It's been so long and we've come so far', were almost enough to move me to tears- the potency of pop music eh?

Pulsar

I can't think of any other bands who have reformed in middle age and who have done it as well as Ride. I wasn't too fussed about them first time around. I bought their debut EP and then a couple of others from the first shoegaze phase but lost interest after that. Their re- union hasn't been just for the payday, a jaunt around the heritage circuit playing the greatest hits. They've recorded two albums and several EPs/ singles that are better than the ones they made as young men- songs from Weather Dairies like Lannoy Point, All I Want and the superb lost summer shimmer of Cali, Pulsar and Cold Water People from Tomorrow's Shore and Future Love from This Is Not A Safe Place to list but a few. They've done it right- a sense of unfinished business, with age and experience and a determination not to get it wrong twice. 

Repetition

Ride's forthcoming album This Is Not A Safe Place promises to be an adventurous and shape-shifting affair. Brand new song Repetition has a synthesised bassline, huge krautrock drumming and the feel of band who have morphed way beyond from where they started. Put this along side Andy Bell's GLOK. More please.

Future Love

Ride's second life has taken a lot of us by surprise. I wasn't a huge fan first time around, a few songs notwithstanding, but age, time and experience have given them something either they didn't have then or that I didn't notice. They also prove that re-unions need not solely be for nostalgia or money, making an album (Weather Diaries in 2017) that had several very good songs on it and then followed it with an excellent e.p. (Tomorrow's Shore in 2018).

This new song was released onto the internet last week, ahead of an album in August. Future Love is Rickenbacker led indie disco gold, the guitars and harmonies improving on each subsequent play, with Erol Alkan back at the controls and on production. A good way to start May.

Tomorrow's Shore

Ride put out a song last year, Pulsar, that ended up being one of my favourite songs of 2017- Pulsar, a  dreamy bass driven guitar song about space and life and travel. They released it on vinyl last week with 3 other new songs including this one, Catch You Dreaming, a Ride song dominated by synths. Catch You Dreaming is about a couple watching the end of the universe. I like the science fiction concepts behind these songs- makes a change from the usual guitar band stuff.



The second track on the 12", Keep It Surreal, is my current pick, a short, sharp burst of guitar mangling with a falsetto vocal. You can buy it (and the whole ep) digitally or on vinyl here.

Pulsar

The return of Ride and their position close to my stereo is something I definitely wasn't expecting this year. I wasn't too bothered about them back in the early 90s, a couple of songs aside, and their Britpop incarnation was of no interest to me at all. But the 2017 Ride and their Weather Diaries album (a couple of songs too long maybe but a good record and Cali is one of my favourite songs this year) and now a new single- all of these things are pleasing me. This new song, Pulsar, has a lovely throbbing distorted bassline, highlighted by a drop out twice, and some beautifully FX laden guitars. Erol Alkan's production gives everything a hard shine. Good stuff.

Cali

I expressed the view on Twitter recently that the new single from Ride is a lovely thing, shot through with an end of summer feel. Opinions were divided: some suggested that the new album is superb, party due to Erol Alkan's production and the simultaneous crunch and shimmer of the guitars; some could hear The House Of Love in the twin vocals; some suggested that it was alright, fine in a traffic jam on the radio but lacking true greatness; some suggested my mid-range hearing is shot.

I'm still into it several days later. From the opening bass intro, and diving bass runs through the verse, to the twin guitars and slightly out of focus vocals, it shimmers and swoops. The single version is shorter than the album one (which has an extended ending part) and the surfing video seems apt. An online reviewer suggested that hearing men in their forties sing lines like 'Kissed you on a beach and I was saved' is a bit embarrassing but I don't buy that. When payday finally arrives I shall be buying the album.