We Just Have to Change the Speed: Andy Bell Interview

The regenerated Andy Bell explains the backstory to his recent solo work as well as adding insights into his parallel Ride and GLOK lives

To some shoegaze connoisseurs, Andy Bell’s legacy could happily have been signed and sealed for good with Ride’s “Vapour Trail” from the band’s seminal 1990 album Nowhere. Yet there has been far more to his career than just that totemic moment of musical history. Across the quartet’s trailblazing early EPs, the said Nowhere LP and its 1992 follow-up Going Blank Again, Bell along with teammates Mark Gardener, Loz Colbert and Steve Queralt buried a time capsule of melodic dreaminess and dissonance that has been dug up for renewed direct affection and as a source of influence over the last decade or so.

Whilst Ride’s third and fourth albums (1994’s Carnival of Light and 1996’s Tarantula) saw creative fortunes fade and the band subsequently split, in recent years they have redemptively reunited – after Bell having served in Oasis and Beady Eye in-between times – as a live enterprise and with renewed vigour in the studio (for 2017’s Weather Diaries and 2019’s This Is Not a Safe Place long players).

Some might have been content with one creative rebirth, but Bell has also undergone two more on top of the reformed Ride; under the electronica-based GLOK pseudonym (notably with the debut Dissident LP in 2019 and numerous remix commissions) and under his own name (for last year’s kaleidoscopic The View from Halfway Down album on Sonic Cathedral). It’s arguable that it’s been with the latter creative venturing that Bell has fulfilled his modern-day renaissance man role with the most deserved aplomb. Bringing together many strands of his career to date and fusing them with newer or previously unexplored sonic elements, The View from Halfway Down proved to be one of 2020’s most elevating moments in an otherwise difficult year.

Now, this bona fide solo recording detour is extended through a worthwhile postscript selection of remixes, acoustic versions and non-album cuts across a sequence of 12”, 10”, 7” and CD releases – dubbed the ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’ series in reference to their obvious physical dimensions as well as in wry homage to the 80s Richard Briers-led sitcom of the same name – which collectively broaden the horizons and burrow beneath the surface of The View from Halfway Down.

Caught up with on email towards the end of March, Bell gregariously shed some extra light on his unexpectedly productive last twelve months… and plenty more besides.

How have the last twelve months or so of lockdown life been for you as a working musician? It must obviously have disrupted your group activities but it seems to have boosted you as a solo creator. Have Ride’s writing and recording activities still been brewing behind the socially distanced scenes? Would your first self-billed songs-based debut album have appeared so soon without this period of existence?

Hard! But not impossible. I’ve had to find new ways to keep it moving creatively. I would say it’s been an interesting process. Of course I’m really missing playing live. Online gigs don’t cut it for me, it’s just not the same feeling, I’m desperate for that feeling of being onstage with Ride again. With that said, I have enjoyed reaching out in various ways online with informal performances, streams and stuff, so it’s been good to have that small feeling of connection with an audience. I’ve tried to keep learning and trying new ways to connect.

In answer to the Ride question about new stuff, no, we’ve been on a break since our tour was cut short by Covid, and we will be until the lockdown lifts. My album happening was a result of the lack of Ride activity combined with the pandemic. I was planning to follow up my 2019 solo debut 7” for Sonic Cathedral with another single, a 12”, in the summer of 2020, but that ended up expanding into an album because I had all this time.

Signing with Sonic Cathedral seems to have been a fruitful fit for The View from Halfway Down. How did you hook up with Nathaniel Cramp who runs the operation?

Me and Nat have been mates for a while. I’ve known him to chat to for a few years but we never worked on anything together until, after a bit of a heavy night a few years ago, he kindly put me in a taxi and got me safely home. I phoned him the next day to say thanks, and to say let me know if you ever need anything, which after a while he did, and I ended up doing a remix for The Early Years. That was the start of a beautiful friendship! So, when Nat asked me to contribute to their singles club in 2019, I was happy to be involved, and that led to my solo stuff happening.

Were the endeavours and support of people like Nat, in keeping the flame alive for Ride and many of your onetime 90s peers, a contributing factor in being able to reunite the band and in pursuing solo projects after your time in Oasis and Beady Eye?

Yes, I think that Nat, and people like him, definitely kept the flame alive for our music. Thank you Nat! 

For some of your devout followers, it seems that what you did with Ride’s last two of four initial albums as well as your stints in Oasis and Beady Eye would largely rather be forgotten about or at least be considered less important. Given that Ride’s two-album-reunion so far and The View from Halfway Down seem to have partially picked-up from a point somewhere just after Going Blank Again, would it be fair to assume that you share some of that view?

What – so basically my entire music career?! Haha! It’s no secret that I am not a fan of the third and fourth Ride albums, although they do kind of have their moments. But I am mightily proud of all of the music I made with Oasis and Beady Eye. I learned so much from the Gallaghers and in fact all the bandmates I had in those bands, which contributed massively to the fact that the music I’ve been involved in since has been so bloody ace, if I do say so myself. Those years were like being on loan to Barcelona, before coming back to your home team.

Were all the songs that ended up on The View from Halfway Down always destined for a self-billed solo album? “Love Comes in Waves” and “Skywalker” appear as if they could easily have become Ride songs but other tracks less so…

There was a growing pile of material that hadn’t been right to use in bands and was not electronic enough for GLOK. There seemed to be a few which felt similar, with quite a small and intimate folky sound. This was the initial idea. Right after David Bowie died, I spent a few weeks in and out of Gem Archer’s studio, with an Archtop guitar, doing a tune a day. I’d put down one guitar track, bass, drums, some piano maybe. A typical example would be “Cherry Cola” but I did around twenty songs in total. This was before both of the Ride comeback albums, so by the time I came back to the tunes a few years later, for Sonic Cathedral, there were more in the mix, and by that time I’d jettisoned the minimal idea in favour of the more layered sound which the album has.

“Indica” and “I Was Alone” suggest that they could have been influenced by late-period Spacemen 3 or Spritualized’s Lazer Guided Melodies. Would you recognise such inspirations?

I was a huge fan of Spacemen 3 and yes, Recurring was a big reference point for “Indica”, I wanted to do a song with the feel of “Big City”. Actually, “Indica” isn’t really that much like it in the end, I still haven’t made that “Big City” song yet, but it definitely informed the way I constructed it. And “I Was Alone” definitely harks back to the Playing with Fire album, which was a favourite of mine in the early Ride days. 

Contrastingly, “Cherry Cola” feels like a motorik take on solo-era Syd Barrett whilst “Heat Haze on Weyland Road” leans more heavily into your electronic explorations under your GLOK pseudonym. Was it important that your first proper solo album should be stretched across your full sonic spectrum? Did you also intend to make The View from Halfway Down feel simultaneously easy-going as well as focused and flowing? 

My biggest priority was the flow of the tunes into a whole. The headspace that lockdown gave me was the opportunity to curate all of this music into something coherent. When I was first asked by Nat to come up with something for the singles club 7”, I thought for a long time about what to give him. I selected two songs, “Plastic Bag” and “The Commune” which weren’t from the Gem Archer sessions, no drums, just atmospherics and an intimate and personal feeling. This was to set the mood for whatever came next, it just felt like a good starting point. 

From here I planned to expand into a 12” of two longer songs, but when it became clear that these weren’t going to feature much in the way of vocals, I was really stumped. It would have been “Indica” and “Heat Haze on Weyland Road”, two longer tracks, but I didn’t want to make an instrumental single! So, for a while I was considering other options for this 12”, that’s when I started pulling out the Gem session tracks, I was thinking of using four of those, all short songs, but then there would have been no long tunes! It was doing my head in, to be honest.

Nothing felt right until I asked Nat if this could possibly be an album instead of a 12” single. I thought that might be a big issue but he was like, “yeah cool, we just have to change the speed!” In other words, no big deal. And once I had the okay from Nat, I took the four Gem tracks, the two long tracks, worked in two more, and it immediately started to feel coherent. I work best in four song sets. An EP or an eight-track album is perfect for me. It’s to do with attention span and the practicalities of vinyl mastering. 

To come back to the question, it was important that it had a spectrum of music across the forty minutes, but it was all constructed to work together, my priority at all times was how the tracks complemented each other. I’m not sure if I knew exactly what I was going for, I was guided by my instincts, I had a really strong sense of when it was wrong, and eventually, I arrived at a place where it felt right, and that’s when I stopped! It was a process I went through on my own, so it’s all the more gratifying that the album has been received pretty well.

Do the remixes and acoustic versions of tracks from the album – that are set to come out piecemeal across several sizes of vinyl and rounded-up with your previous Sonic Cathedral single on the Another View CD compilation – reflect that these songs have strong yet flexible qualities which meant that they could have gone in several different directions with their original incarnations?

I don’t know, I suppose so! This set of releases was hatched after me and Martin [Jenkins] got on the beers after a gig we did together. Again, with him, it also started off as one EP of remixes, but then he heard my first solo single and wanted to do that too, and before long we were looking at a whole series.

Did you discuss or collaborate on what you had in mind with Martin Jenkins – AKA Pye Corner Audio – for his set of remixes or did you largely leave him to it?

I left him to it. I’m a massive fan of what Martin does, and he did it perfectly on these remixes. I think he is a perfect foil sonically for the music I make on my own, so we might revisit this again on new music, I’d love to work with him again.

This remixes and alternate versions bundling-up project – which you’ve christened ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’ – also includes a charming cover of “Perfume” by Paris Angels. What led you to acoustically remould this surprisingly still fresh but largely forgotten dance-rock gem first released in 1990?

Because the album was released during lockdown there was hardly any way to promote it, except for doing remote sessions for radio. XS Manchester were doing a thing where they asked artists to cover songs by Manchester artists, and I picked this Paris Angels song because I always loved it. 

You’ve also just snuck out another low-key EP under your electronic GLOK alias, in the shape of the That Time of Night 12” and download. To these ears, it unpeels like a post-lockdown clubland bliss-out anthem of sorts in the making. Was it conceived with a return to communal musical spaces in mind or at least a yearning for them?

Well – thank you! That’s exactly how I feel about it! It was conceived for both reasons I suppose – missing that feeling, and anticipating the return of it. I guess it has been designed to be heard during lockdown, as a reminder that at some point in the future we may all get to have that feeling again. 

Does this 12” mark the return of GLOK in a wider sense?

Yes, I’m working on a new GLOK album as we speak.

How do you think GLOK sits between your official solo stuff and your work with Ride? Has it been helpful to have a semi-anonymised outlet with less expectations and historical weight that also allows you to connect with the currently very healthy electronic music scene?

I think it all sits together pretty well. The edges are blurring now, which I enjoy. You have GLOK remixing Ride, electronics creeping into my solo record, vocals occasionally getting used here and there in GLOK music. There are no rules to it anymore. I have a residency at my local coffee shop in North London, Lo Fi, where we stream a variety of musical things I do. I’ve been jamming along to loops I made from songs by Ride, GLOK, my solo album backing tracks and unreleased music, doing a mixture of DJing and live playing. It’s been a lot of fun and has really got me thinking about all the possibilities when live music really kicks off again in the future. 

I really enjoyed your live acoustic instore Ride set at Rough Trade in Bristol around the release of This Is Not a Safe Place. Would you ever consider putting something like that out in recorded form?

Thanks. I agree, the Bristol acoustic set would make an amazing live recording. There’s so much Ride live stuff recorded on multitrack now. We have the complete set from our Barcelona gig of the 2020 European tour, that would make a great live album. We’ve decided that the time isn’t right for this right now, but I hope we get into this at some point.

Are there any plans to do another comprehensive archival tidy-up program for the Ride back catalogue, with many of the pre-reunion releases going in and out print over the last few years?

I think there might be a couple of things in the pipeline which should keep fans of the back catalogue happy. 

Will you be watching Irvine Welsh’s co-authored new film about Alan McGee’s Creation Records career? 

Yes, I’ll give it a watch for sure. 

Do you think that the Creation story – for which Ride are very much part of the mid-period – should also be remembered more for the variety of work that it put out rather than just the hedonism and big hitters? Its lifespan seems to have been historically over-positioned in a similar place as Factory Records, leaving out some interesting sub-plots.

I know what you mean but there are many ways to tell the story, I think potentially this could be one of the more entertaining ways to tell it! If people want to get into the details there are books which get into all that. If this film brings people in and makes them want to dig deeper, that’s a good thing.

Although the 90s were perhaps an easier time to be a musician making a living, with more sustainable income to be made from actually releasing records for example, do you find it easier in other ways now that fertile music scenes contentedly co-exist without being set arbitrary expiry dates by the once powerful weekly music press?

I like a lot about the way things are now, despite the fact that the deck seems to be stacked against musicians in a lot of ways. I don’t know if it’s me or the way things are generally, but I have so much interesting stuff going on, I’m working with many great people, and making the exact music I want to make without anyone telling me what to do. 

Finally, what else do you have planned for the foreseeable and mid-future? Is another official solo record on the cards and would you like to present some of the first one live eventually?

Yes, and yes. I’m up for all of it.

andybell.bandcamp.com

soniccathedral.co.uk

Main feature image photo credit: Shiarra Bell