Following right on from David McAlmont, but in a very different way, here’s someone else who is “underground in plain sight” so to speak. Andy Bell has played on big, global stages with Ride, and then even bigger ones with Oasis, but as his more recent solo output has shown he’s anything but a determinedly mainstream musician. In the last few years, his spacey, Krautrock-y explorations as GLOK, and the remixes of his psyche-pop songs under his own name have sited him very much in the grown-up, cosmic zone around the late Andrew Weatherall – with whom he collaborated on a couple of projects, too.
Not sure who first suggested Bell, me or Brian, but it was an instant agreement one and he was on our hit list early. Brian actually shot the pics quite a while back, but between life catastrophes at both ends the interview took forever, and I was riddled with Covid when we spoke on video call, so I wasn’t sure how it had turned out. I needn’t have worried: Bell is charm and clarity personified, he speaks in perfectly formed sentences and his memories and insights are fantastic.
We covered experiences from small clubs to mega stadia and back, joined dots from the rawest experimental sound into the heart of the mainstream, and even took a trip down a parallel timeline where Ride had gone the way of another Oxford band. To strengthen the wider Bass, Mids, Tops and the Rest project there were some lovely little intersections with David McAlmont (via Art Garfunkel) and Maria Uzor (via Beatles movies). It all ends up with a heartening sense of dedication to the artistic cause, so make sure and take it all in, because it’s another lovely chat. Here it is:
What are you working on at the moment, Andy?
The big picture is there's a Ride album ready to go, and we are now in that thing of doing sleeve artwork and stuff like that. It's just been mastered it was done by John Davis, who's sadly passed away very recently, but he'd done a bit of work for us in the past and was so good. I can't really say more about the album because now we've got to wait for the press release to be perfected and put out, but we're really happy with it and that's going to be out probably early next year. And we're still doing a few dates here and there: we got into an endless loop of touring the first album, what started out as a 30th anniversary tour of Nowhere and we're still doing it. Covid delayed it by a year, it should have started 2020, but everyone said, don't worry keep going, it's like the Euros, we'll call it the 30th anniversary even if it's now 33 years... So we're doing more of that even in January next year some more dates with The Charlatans in the US, which we've already had fun doing this year, so going back to finish up the other places. No doubt on that tour we'll be playing some stuff off the new album as well as playing the first album. The shorter your first album is, the more time you have to play other stuff you'd like to play, and thankfully our first album is fairly short!
And how do you fit GLOK around that?
It just gets in the cracks, you know? I am doing this UK tour which is the first time I've taken GLOK on tour – that starts on Thursday, and is a kind of delayed reaction album tour. I put the album out a year ago, and for some mad reason it ended up being a dance chart number one. I think being completely honest with about it, there was a terrible problem with the pressing plant, which delayed it so long that by the time it came out it had sold enough to be a number one that week. I think that must be the reason.
You built up critical mass of preorders?
Critical mass of preorders yes. It seems like marketing genius but it was a series of lucky events.
It's wild that people will order something, get the digital but then the vinyl drops through the letterbox six months or a year later.
I'm SO sick of it, Joe. I think it's killing the vinyl thing, the buzz. That's not a buzz, it's like VAR1, it's really shit.
But isn't the flip of that that it prolongs the life of a record, like people get a second wave of excitement when they finally get that hard copy?
I want to get the record when I've ordered it! I'd been meaning to order that Sonic Boom and Panda Bear album because it was my album of last year2, finally got round to it on the week that the Adrian Sherwood version3 was announced, thought OK I'll buy them both together and I've got Reset and Reset in Dub ordered... then the confirmation email said these will arrive on or after the 28th December! Like, I don't want them after Christmas! I want them now! With the last solo record I made, Flicker, I got it mastered and sent off to manufacture.... I didn't say a dickie bird to anyone about the album until I had it in my hand because I was so anxious about this pressing plant thing at that time I was right in the thick of it with the GLOK album that was so delayed... I think we had to change pressing plants because to try and mitigate this whole thing, our label had tried to be clever and gone with a smaller pressing plant that was promising a quicker turnaround, but it ended up getting swallowed up into the whole black hole of delays and it ended up worse and we had to go back to a major one. When I say major, there's no real major ones, but you know what I mean.
And what does the GLOK live show consist of?
It's a one man show, it's me with decks and a guitar rig. So I play guitar with the same pedals around me that I had when I did this thing called Space Station for a while. That was another Covid-related production where I was just seeking a bit of connection so I started doing streamed gigs in a cafe, and that spread out into doing real gigs in front of people when things opened up a bit. The way I got round not being able to be close to other musicians was to do it like I was DJing, so I'd be remixing backing tracks, re-editing to make them work better live and have more control, looping it, then jamming over it. And it was at its best when it was completely improvised, I really, really enjoyed that.
So I've taken the bones of that, and added visuals by my friend Chris who goes under the name Innerstrings4. He does a lot of really, really good visuals for shows. I just saw him doing it for the James Holden show at EartH I didn't know it was him, and I was saying to my mates, “Oh this is so amazing, this is like Chris's visuals but better!” Then I was messaging Chris well, I put the show on my Stories and Chris messaged me to say “Oh you were there?”, I said “Oh were you there too? It was amazing”, and he said “Yeah I did the visuals for it.” [gulps] But yeah, I was, wow, so impressed and hopefully it'll be similar for people at the GLOK gigs. So yeah the tour will just be the two of us in a car going round the UK.
It's funny when you say “decks” it's a very different thing from back in the day: CDJs and a modern mixer are as close to sampler setups as they are to traditional turntables.
It is, it's good, there's lots of control, you can get involved in a lot of filtering and tones stuff and have a lot of different things going at once. I feel like CDJs are a bit maligned, but they're great.
OK so that's where you're at now, let's go back to the roots... what sort of music did you grow up around?
My dad went to Magdalen College, Cambridge in the mid-60s, and he bought the Beatles records that came out during his student stay which was With the Beatles, Hard Day's Night, Beatles for Sale, '63, '64 time. Then a little bit later, he bought the Simon & Garfunkel album Bridge Over Troubled Water which was, what, '69? Then that was it for pop music. Other than that it was classical. My mum was a little bit musical, she played piano, on and off in church, at the Baptist church in Oxford. My dad apparently had a folk duo at college as well, playing Bob Dylan songs with a mate of his but I don't know, I've never seen him play guitar. He talks about it, but I've never actually seen him play, and I'd have thought I would've done by now. So yeah, not much pop music but I used to play the Beatles records to death... then later he'd take me to record fairs, there'd be one in Oxford town hall every couple of months. The Beatles was definitely the way in. I was about 10 when John Lennon got shot and that year or soon afterwards they put all the movies on TV. Me and my friends became big Beatles fans – It's funny, it was only ten or so years after the band was still going... it felt like a whole other generation, but it wasn't that long in time, was it?
Without the internet the past really was that much more distant, right? We didn't have access at all unless something came on TV.
Yep. So I was taping stuff off TV to a cassette recorder. The famous New Order “Blue Monday” performance, I got that. I got Aztec Camera on cassette doing a live set that I guess was on Old Grey Whistle Test. I was into music, definitely. I started going to gigs, all at the Apollo Theatre in Oxford, and it was Siouxie & The Banshees on the broken leg tour, 84 I think, with Robert Smith playing guitar maybe? Have to fact-check that but I think he was playing guitar5. Then after that Aztec Camera, The Smiths... I was getting to be mates with Mark Gardener who'd be the singer for Ride. At that point we didn't go to any gigs together but he was going to ones there too, he went to see The Damned, I remember.
Then we joined forces and started going to gigs together, we went to see things like That Petrol Emotion, the indie gigs that were coming to Oxford Poly, which was next door to our school. We were still schookids seeing That Petrol Emotion, Mighty Lemon Drops, that kind of mid-80s, late-80s indie. We were big into The Bunnymen, Smiths, Cure, all that sort of thing. But we also used to go to Boodles, the cheesy nightclub in Oxford city centre, and it was that kind of rare groove time, so I was buying those records as well. Quite a decent spread of music, not just guitars and indie. There was a lot of records around then sampling old funk stuff, so I remember buying that More Funky People6 compilation which had a lot of really, really famous samples on, lots of James Brown, JBs, Bobby Byrd's “I Know You Got Soul”, and there was a lot of chart, radio pop at the time sampling those so that was an education, something I liked. Things like Young MC. And then when Stone Roses said they liked Young MC I felt validated!
So as soon as you were out and about, it seems like you had a definite musical, cultural focus. Did it feel like you were part of something?
Yeah I got a Smiths t-shirt at the gig, it was the Meat is Murder tour, and I never became a vegetarian – or not for quite a few years later – but at the time I wore that to death. In fact I cut the front off and sewed it onto the back of my denim jacket, and I had Morrissey glasses and a quiff. That was my first dressing up, joining in moment.
I guess that was German army coat time too?
Yeah. And the Echo & The Bunnyment coats, what do you call them? A student coat... Trenchcoats? Big grey coats anyway... we used to wear them.
Obviously acid house came along, was that of any interest?
Well I did buy “Voodoo Ray” on the original pressing. The odd thing. Not a whole collection of music. But “Voodoo Ray” has stayed with me the whole time. I feel like as I've learned more about music and the whole thing, the roots of house, it feels like I get the same thing out of “Voodoo Ray” as I do out of Mr Fingers. That was a touchstone for me getting into doing electronic music myself, that one guy in a bedroom with simple equipment thing. A punk or lo-fi approach to which I found a really really good, tantalising way in.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Bass, Mids, Tops and the Rest to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.