Songs About People # 90 Howard Hughes

And while I'm reposting, off to see Ride play tonight so here's another thing I wrote from a few months back.

Ride are an odd one. Their recent reforming and series of gigs has taken me back to the original records and made me think about them in a way I never bothered to first time round. Writing this blog might also have something to do with it. To me at the time, though I enjoyed the noise that they made, they seemed like a bunch of nice and slightly fey Home Counties boys with little to say and a vast array of effects pedals to help them disguise that truth with waves of sound.

Perhaps age had something to do with it. I was pushing my Mid-Twenties when they first emerged which was probably a few years north of their main constituency. The band themselves were nearer their early Twenties when they broke big and their core audience a few years younger than that. These few years meant a lot. I'd already given my heart to R.E.M., The Smiths and The Velvet Underground in the Mid-Eighties and had limited emotion to impart on a set of reticent middle-class introverts who seemed vaguely wet behind the ears even if I liked the tunes.

I'm probably more disposed to them strangely twenty years on. Just as Shoegazing, a scene which was at least partially ridiculed at the time by the British Music Press has gathered a measure of respect and even reverence it never had first time round in the years since. Now Ride seem vaguely like older statesman, partly because it seems apparent now that were they a British guitar band to emerge now with the set of songs that they released in their first few years together they would absolutely sweep all before them.

In retrospect it seems clear that Ride were one of the very last British bands to really arrive and proceed to let out an absolute avalanche of notable tracks during the course of their relatively short career. In the tradition first established by The Beatles, Stones, Who and Kinks and maintained by The Clash, The Jam and most obviously The Smiths, theirs was an incredible work ethic and sense of urgency despite the apparent lethargic edge to some of their recorded output. It seems inevitable given the way the music industry and the way we all live and consume in general  has changed in the intervening years that we may never see the like of these bands ever again in the UK. It feels like a shame somehow, as if a certain sense of popular, shared communal excitement and release has gone forever in exchange for the comparative mundanity and introversion of  settee, Internet and boxsets. 

Of course I'm aware that I'm a middle aged bloke spouting on! So back to Ride and one of the tracks released on the several excellent EPs they released over the course of their career. In this case in a supporting role to Twisterella, the second single from their second album Going Blank Again. Like so many of their songs, the vocal is vaguely nondescript, barely there in this case, but once the instrumentation kicks in, particularly the organ (Hammond I imagine), it makes a pretty strong case for itself. The connection with Howard Hughes? I guess they were feeling a little sorry for themselves. Even reclusive. Trust me, it happened quite a lot in the South of England during the early Nineties.