Ride, Glasgow review: 'gorgeously dreamy'

Andy Bell of Ride | Karl Walter/Getty Images

Ride, SWG3, Glasgow ★★★★

Anyone unwilling or unable to enter the Oasis ticket-buying frenzy, yet still feeling the accompanying wave of 1990s nostalgia, could have done far worse than take in this latest Glasgow date of Ride’s instead. Guitarist and co-vocalist Andy Bell, of course, is a bona fide former member of Oasis, who played with and wrote a few songs for the Mancunian stadium-botherers from 1999 on.

 

Ride themselves, meanwhile, are one of the quieter bands to have emerged from the same 1990s Creation Records milieu as Oasis. Compare the humble thanks and polite request for permission to play an encore offered here by Mark Gardener – whose voice alongside Bell’s still creates a gorgeously dreamy, faraway effect – and you’ll realise the two groups shared little beyond a label, a sometime guitarist and similar taste in records.

 

Ride’s own reunion a decade ago was modest, picking up where they left off (their four-piece founding membership has never changed) with three new albums of music which matches their best. Not only was a large proportion of this concert taken up with their post-2017 music, but more than a third of its 16 songs were from this year’s new album Interplay.

 

Few bands of Ride’s generation could do that without inspiring widespread comfort breaks among the audience, but here the sleek indie rock of the brand new Monaco, Last Frontier and Light in a Quiet Room blended with the youthful jangle-pop of Twisterella and Vapour Trail, the shoegaze-heavy Cool Your Boots and Seagull’s battering psych-rock squall.

 

The set’s structure meant the gig was like tripping backwards in time, and the audience were deep in the depths of Ride’s catalogue – and possibly their own memories – by the time the glowing, evergreen Leave Them All Behind segued into the closing Chelsea Girl, a song as punk as this band ever got.

As they left the stage with a cheery wave from Gardener and a grateful crowd photo from drummer Loz Colbert, the old line about nice guys finishing second seemed void.