90 - Ride with Steve Queralt (Oxford)

90 - Ride with Steve Queralt (Oxford)

Author: Rock n Roll Book Club November 15, 2025 Duration: 53:29

This week we are joined by Ride bassist Steve Queralt to discuss his new album Swallow - which is out now on Sonic Cathedral featuring contributions from Emma Anderson (Lush) & Verity Susman (Memorials).


We also delve into the history of Ride starting in Oxford in the late 1980s where Steve met Andy Bell & Mark Gardner at college, even making a recording of Freedom by George Michael with Andy.


What we now know as the classic Ride sound comes together organically in rehearsals & after almost signing for Warners the band come to the attention of Alan McGee & end up signing with Creation Records.


The first 3 EPs come out in quick succession followed by debut album Nowhere in the autumn of 1990. Tours with Lush, Slowdive & the Pale Saints follow & 2nd album Going Blank again is produced by Alan Moulder following a positive experience with Alan mixing the previous album.


The lead single Leave Them All Behind clocks in at over 8 minutes in length & breaks the top 10 of the singles chart, reaching number 9, marking probably the commercial peak of the shoegaze genre.


Things start to unravel on 3rd album Carnival of Light with John Leckie producing. The album comes out in 1994 but fails to reach the heights of its predecessors - and amid tensions within the band & after quickly releasing the Tarantula album, Ride come to an end in 1996.


Ride do reform in 2015 & it becomes one of the more successful reunions of recent years producing 3 albums & a number of tours & high profile festival appearances, including playing debut album Nowhere in its entirety.



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Hosted, Produced & Edited by Simon Cardwell

Music by Andy Maxwell


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The Music Maps Podcast from the Rock n Roll Book Club isn't your typical music show. It's an audio expedition where geography is the guide. Every episode starts with a specific location-a city, a venue, a forgotten roadside attraction-and uses that place as a launchpad to explore the sounds, stories, and scenes connected to it. You might find yourself deep in the blues clubs of Chicago one week and tracing the underground punk threads of a small European town the next. The conversations are wide-ranging, connecting the dots between iconic artists and obscure movements, all anchored to a point on the map. Listening to this podcast feels like adding a new, richly detailed pin to a global atlas of musical influence. It’s about the context behind the chords and the cultural soil from which genres grow. The result is a continuously evolving, deeply human portrait of how music and place are inextricably linked, one fascinating destination at a time.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

Music Maps Podcast
Podcast Episodes
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