Sometimes They Come Back...
I met one of my real heroes yesterday, Mark Gardener of the criminally underrated Ride... Who came to prominence as part of the Creation records stable in the early nineties.
His band wrote the first thing I ever learned to play on guitar - the opening riff to Drive Blind, and they're also responsible for several other tunes that I can't imagine never having heard - and that had an influence on my life that is hard to quantify; Chelsea Girl, Taste, Dreams Burn Down, Nowhere, Seagull, Leave Them All Behind, OX4, 1000 Miles, Let's Get Lost... The list goes on and on and on...
Mark's got a very good new LP out called These Beautiful Ghosts, some of which you can hear on his myspace page... And whilst that's the point of this blog entry, I'd also like to use it to thank him for a fascinating and frank interview - which you can read in April's issue of the magazine... Here's a bit I've transcribed already...
I take it that – in the beginning – you weren’t to technically minded… So you picked your guitars because they looked cool? I mean, I associate you with the Rickenbacker…
"The first guitar I bought for the band was a Fender Jaguar, ‘cause it just seemed to be a noisy guitar…"
Well, it was the one associated with that scene – the Valentines et al…
“Yeah, exactly… But beyond that, I heard this Radio show, on Radio One or something, that told the story of the Rickenbacker – and I realised that so many bands that I absolutely love - The Byrds, The Beatles – used them. The guitar sound that I associate with them is the Rickenbacker.
"It also does that trashy 60s thing well too… So I decided that the guitars I’d buy from then on would be Rickenbackers. We actually ended up with a deal, where we’d get them from Rickenbacker in California, and they were making them to our request… So I was like; ‘this is great’ (laughs)… And I still use them. I have this 12-String with the John Lennon body but instead of the ¾ neck it’s a full-length neck. That was on a load of the big Ride recordings. They make a great noise as well, a really trashy, tinny sound…
“It’s funny, ‘cause I met Johnny Marr in New York recently, and he was on that documentary… We sat and talked about it… He’s another of my heroes.”
The Moral: Even Your Heroes Have Heroes... And sometimes they turn out to be top blokes :-)
His band wrote the first thing I ever learned to play on guitar - the opening riff to Drive Blind, and they're also responsible for several other tunes that I can't imagine never having heard - and that had an influence on my life that is hard to quantify; Chelsea Girl, Taste, Dreams Burn Down, Nowhere, Seagull, Leave Them All Behind, OX4, 1000 Miles, Let's Get Lost... The list goes on and on and on...
Mark's got a very good new LP out called These Beautiful Ghosts, some of which you can hear on his myspace page... And whilst that's the point of this blog entry, I'd also like to use it to thank him for a fascinating and frank interview - which you can read in April's issue of the magazine... Here's a bit I've transcribed already...
I take it that – in the beginning – you weren’t to technically minded… So you picked your guitars because they looked cool? I mean, I associate you with the Rickenbacker…
"The first guitar I bought for the band was a Fender Jaguar, ‘cause it just seemed to be a noisy guitar…"
Well, it was the one associated with that scene – the Valentines et al…
“Yeah, exactly… But beyond that, I heard this Radio show, on Radio One or something, that told the story of the Rickenbacker – and I realised that so many bands that I absolutely love - The Byrds, The Beatles – used them. The guitar sound that I associate with them is the Rickenbacker.
"It also does that trashy 60s thing well too… So I decided that the guitars I’d buy from then on would be Rickenbackers. We actually ended up with a deal, where we’d get them from Rickenbacker in California, and they were making them to our request… So I was like; ‘this is great’ (laughs)… And I still use them. I have this 12-String with the John Lennon body but instead of the ¾ neck it’s a full-length neck. That was on a load of the big Ride recordings. They make a great noise as well, a really trashy, tinny sound…
“It’s funny, ‘cause I met Johnny Marr in New York recently, and he was on that documentary… We sat and talked about it… He’s another of my heroes.”
The Moral: Even Your Heroes Have Heroes... And sometimes they turn out to be top blokes :-)
posted by John Moore at 4:13 PM
1 Comments:
It's funny how these things go around: genius will always out. Johnny Marr was on the BBC 4 Folk thing I was waffling about in another post - playing with Bert Jansch and showing just what a master of subtle style he is. Nothing flashy - just some very, very musical playing.
Talk about spanning the generations!
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