It has been 12 years since I last interviewed Mark Gardener. The then-21-year-old singer/guitarist of the great Oxford indie group Ride had just woken and stumbled into the Warner Music office with his drummer Loz Colbert, giddy and aglow from partying all of the previous night. It was their first time in LA, and they were humming with energy: gleefully talking about playing on Brian Wilson’s piano at the party the night before, collecting stacks of CDs from the Warner vault, and declaring that their album Nowhere to be “the best debut album of all time.” This was a few weeks before their first US tour, which brought them to the Roxy in LA for two glorious nights in April 1991.
 
“I was possessed for those first Roxy gigs,” Mark, now 33, recalls. “Just absolutely…I was buzzed completely by being here. I’d read all the books -- No One Gets Out of Here Alive -- [rolled] into LA - joints, chaos…We really meant it, and we all felt like that. Those gigs were phenomenal. We were total believers in what we were doing.”
 
A dozen years on, Mark looks happy and relaxed in a much more tranquil part of LA: on an impossibly steep gravel road high atop Echo Park, a historic Mexican neighborhood where his girlfriend lives. His frame is still thin under his small denim jacket. His once-pale baby face is now sharply chiseled and tan. The hair which once hung like fringe over his eyes is now cropped to the scalp and dyed peroxide blonde, and a black spike runs through his left earlobe. One thing that hasn’t changed is his easy boyish smile, revealing the little gap between his front teeth.
 
I follow Mr. Gardener down a little concrete ribbon alongside a hill of overhanging trees and a slope of profuse ivy and tall grass. After a full two minutes of zig zagging down this remote path, a house appears at the edge of a cliff, overlooking the Interstate 5 freeway but invisible to it from below.
 
While Mark waits for his girlfriend to come home from work, he pours red wine into two mismatched juice glasses and sits on a colorful patchwork couch next to an old potbellied stove. The Amelie soundtrack plays faintly in the background, and stacks of records litter the floor: Love’s Da Capo, several Nuggets compilations, Meat Is Murder, and a healthy dose of late ‘60s-early ‘70s classic rock LPs purchased from nearby Amoeba Records’ used bin.
 
Mark has just returned from a month of reintroducing himself to old and new fans in a series of intimate acoustic sets across the US and Canada in part to promote the OX4: The Best Of Ride compilation out on San Francisco’s The First Time Records, but more importantly, to try out a clutch of new material that marks the proper start of his solo career.
 
“I would have had reservations about just coming and doing a Ride tribute set, but I knew I had new writing,” Mark says. “I always fancied that the early thirties is the time to sort of try to do my Neil Young kind of thing, and I’m the right age now to do that, you know. I just needed to know for me self that, one, for an ultimate test of new material, and for me just to get out there with an acoustic, and there’s nowhere to hide -- just see if you can pull it off.”
 
Mark’s gig at LA’s Knitting Factory -- his fourth solo show ever -- is something special. The old Ride songs embrace you like old friends with all their youthful dreams still intact, but what’s really exciting is the first peek at the new material: “Turn,” “To Get Me Through,” “Magdalen Sky” (actually an oldie -- written and recorded back in ’97), and particularly “Snow In Mexico” are positively gorgeous in their stripped-down form, pointing to bright horizons, as promising as the spring sun filling the room through the big windows where photos of Mark and his girlfriend line the pane.
 
Retired Sire Records boss Howie Klein is by Mark’s side before the Knitting Factory gig, lending moral support just as he did with Seymour Stein when they brought Creation Records under the Sire banner in the US in 1991. And though Mark is currently without a label, his first LP will take shape over the next few weeks. He’ll be playing a few British dates with Oxford combo Goldrush (who will play Crazy Horse to Mark’s Sr. Young) before recording his new songs with them.
 
Mark and Goldrush are a nice fit -- two Oxford music scene vets who have respectively tasted major label indifference (Goldrush with Virgin, Mark with his late group Animalhouse at BMI), both looking to return to certain core values. Plus, they both take a liking to the country life: Goldrush rehearse in a farmhouse outside Oxford, and Mark recently converted one of his aunt and uncle’s barns into a home/studio in France’s underpopulated Lot Valley.
 
Mark’s Ride royalties not only paid for My Bloody Valentine’s Lovelessand saved Creation from bankruptcy before Oasis came ‘round, they enabled him to buy a home in Oxford, which he’s renting out while he troubadours his songs around the world. Constant traveling has never bothered him much. The least homesick member of Ride during the years of touring that quickly aged his old group, he is a self-proclaimed “vagabond,” a man without baggage, figuratively and literally -- quite at home on the road. So what continues to drive him, now that he’s supposed to have grown older and more comfortable?
 
This prompts a laugh that is more like a choke.
 
“ I’ve not known that level of comfort,” Mark calmly reassures. “I think that’s why I still am really hungry. I just wanted to get my life to the point where I wasn’t governed by having to pay the rent -- just live this little simple existence for a while with nothing, basically. On nothing. Once you’ve been in that place, then you know it’s all right. More than that, when you’ve lived with nothing in that sense…You know, Bob Dylan says, ‘You got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’ And it’s just totally prophetic, those words are for me.”
 
The sun is disappearing over the hill, and the room is growing dim. Mark has not touched his wine.
 
“ When the idea came up for the tour -- I was staying at my sister’s at this point -- I just went to my room and started strumming some of the old Ride songs again, and I just thought, ‘God, some of those just sound so great acoustically.’ A lot of them started their life like that, and it was really nice.”
 
As a longtime Ride fan, there was definitely a rush felt when hearing songs like “Chrome Waves” (from ‘92’s Going Blank Again) for the first time in years.
 
“ It’s the same for me,” Mark says with full enthusiasm. “Pretty much the whole tour for me was like a strange rush thing. I love that song [“Chrome Waves”]. It’s one of my favorites. Andy [Bell] was the main guy behind that, and I swear to this day he doesn’t even realize how brilliant it is.”
 
For those who grew up with Ride in the early ‘90s, you know very well how brilliant they were. They coexisted with the Madchester scene, but their music came from another dimension entirely. They made no grand political or social statements, yet their songs were quietly full of meaning. They presented themselves as a collective, and as a consequence shunned any individual spotlight that an Ian Brown or a Damon Albarn brought to the covers of The Face or NME. They didn’t give any particularly life-changing sound bites, but their records were powerfully transcendent. Their propulsive Hollies-meets-Mary Chain melodies were exhilarating and cathartic, especially combined with the self-awareness that their place in the sun was to be as fleeting as (to borrow their words) a smoke ring or a vapour trail. Not only that, they were far more prolific than any of their peers -- this quartet of art school dropouts in their early 20s had a new single full of great new songs every few weeks during their first three years of existence. And talk about confidence -- how many bands do you know who would relegate songs the caliber of “Here and Now,” “Taste,” and “Don’t Let It Die” to B-sides?
 
Alas, it was too good to last, and tensions within the group began to inform their music so that by ‘94’s Carnival Of Light, a double-LP still not without its highlights, the magic had begun to dissipate. Carnival came out just after a certain record called Definitely Maybe captured the imagination of a nation’s youth, and it would be Oasis, not Ride, who would carry the torch for Creation Records and secure a massive international audience.
 
Andy Bell felt the competitive advantage of Oasis the strongest, and gave voice to his fears, feeling that Carnival wasn’t up to par with Oasis’ debut. Mark felt a little differently about what he calls a “passing of batons.”
 
“ I didn’t really share it [the intimidation of Oasis] so much as Andy,” Mark explains. “I think Andy didn’t see how good things were around him. Noel [Gallagher] was in the studio a lot when we were doing Carnival Of Light, and he was just a guy from Manchester who used to come and hang out. Really nice guy, and we were just working away.
 
“ Noel basically dropped in a tape at one point which had ‘Live Forever’ and a couple tracks - it was just amazing. And of course Alan [McGee] had heard it by that point and knew he was on to a good one.”
 
The news in late ’99 of Andy Bell joining Oasis as their bass player was tough to take, and the overall feeling from Ride devotees was dismay at how the mighty had fallen.
 
“ I was a bit surprised at first,” Mark admits, “but I knew that at that point Andy -- I think he had a rough time with Hurricane [#1], and I think he just got to the point where he just wanted to play music and not be the focus, not have to deal with all the press.
 
“ At the time I knew he was really happy to get that gig. He was really into Oasis, so I was really happy for him, and happy for Oasis, ‘cause I thought, ‘Well, they’ve got a brilliant player there, which they maybe didn’t really have before, and someone who can also write amazing songs. So I thought, ‘Well, Noel, that is just a class move. If you let these people breathe…But now it’s sort of…Andy -- one instrumental on the last album? He should have had half of that last album. I know that he must at times feel that…I mean, I know Andy’s an incredible guitar player when he’s on fire. It’s like, you know, sorry, but I don’t think Noel would get close to him.
 
“ I’m not in any way putting down Noel. [He’s] written so many brilliant, brilliant songs, and he’s already done enough to be able to go to the grave and be really happy with what he’s done. But there’s definitely an element now which everyone agrees isn’t there now with Oasis, and I think there are still hungry elements within that group. I’d just go, ‘Andy, just write. Let’s have some songs.’”
 
That Mark speaks so endearingly and honestly about his former bandmate shows a shared understanding of Andy’s talent and insecurities -- a sincere empathy with the feeling that maybe your glory days as a musician might be behind you.
 
“ I always feel like that,” Mark says, his soft voice having long made peace with the past. “Even two days ago I had my guitar, was starting to write again, and then you think, ‘Well, maybe that’s it. Maybe I can’t write another good song.’ And then about a few hours later, something happens, and it’s like, ‘Man, this is wonderful.’”
 
The room is now almost completely dark; the sun has nearly set. The front door opens, and in walks Mark’s girlfriend holding a bunch of fresh flowers. I bid them farewell; it is their last weekend together for some time, as Mark leaves for England in two days. And as I stumble back up the green domain on the hill, I think how fitting it is to have just set our clocks ahead for daylight savings. With Mark Gardener always comes the feeling of early spring, as does the late evening sun gracing the wild hills atop Echo Park.

back to top