Wichita Recordings co-founder Dick Green has told Music Week he believes Ride’s new album, Weather Diaries, is “possibly the best record they’ve ever made”.
Green, who along with Wichita co-founder Mark Bowen, worked with Ride when the band were signed to Creation Records in the 1990s, added: “It’s very contemporary, if they were a new band, I’d sign them”.
Green’s full interview appears in the latest edition of Music Week. He was speaking alongside Bowen and Red Light Management’s James Sandom, who manages the group.
Meanwhile, Ride singer/guitarist Andy Bell described the process of making Weather Diaries as “brilliant”, adding, “The camp is happy”.
Ride, who scored Creation its first Top 75 hit with their self-titled debut EP, split in 1996 before reuniting to tour Europe and America in 2015. Opening up about their return, Bell added: “We qualify as heritage but we don’t see it like that. People want to see us play Vapour Trail again and that’s fine. The old songs are great, they were the jumping off point for us to be a real band again. The shows this year will be like when we were 19: volume, energy and people getting lifted by the music.”
Singer/guitarist Mark Gardener explained that some of his lyrics on the album drew upon the group’s reunion. “The lyrics on White Sand are my summation of the feeling of doing something that felt so familiar, while also feeling that lots of time had passed,” he said. “Singing about reunion, there’s a melancholy there because things have changed, but in another way they haven’t at all. We just wanted to write something honest.”
Read the full interview in the magazine, out now, or click here to read it online.
Weather Diaries was produced by Erol Alkan and is out now.
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