LONDON ¨C ¡®I¡¯d never seen anything like it!¡± says Ride frontman Mark Gardener as he recalls the first time the recently reformed shoegaze pioneers stepped foot on Japanese soil.
¡°We touched down at the airport and there were 300 people there, all with daffodils, chocolates, toys and sweets,¡± he says. ¡°We were totally unprepared for it! We were like, ¡®What do we do with this? We need a van to put all of this in.¡¯ We¡¯d watched footage of that Beatlemania thing, but it really was like that. It was totally mad.¡±
That was 1990, two years after the Oxford four-piece formed (including guitarist and vocalist Andy Bell, drummer Loz Colbert and bassist Steve Queralt), a point in time by which Ride was already in the middle of a dizzying ascent: signed to Creation Records within months of its first gig, along with My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive the band was soon heralded as being at the forefront of a movement that became characterized as shoegaze (so called because band members would supposedly play gigs staring down at the effects pedals responsible for ear-bleeding sonic assaults). In Ride¡¯s case, though it shared its peers¡¯ wall-of-sound dynamism, a knack for melody and youthful yearning ¡ª not to mention some luscious locks and killer pouts ¡ª stood the group apart. Its debut album ¡°Nowhere,¡± voted 74th best album of the 1990s by Pitchfork, remains seminal 25 years on.
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