A powerful run-through of Ride’s classic second album, at an unfortunately terrible venue.

My last gig of 2022 was unfortunately also the second worst of the year. However, unlike Suede’s show at the Electric Ballroom the previous month, which takes the dubious crown as not just my worst gig of 2022 but the worst Suede show I’ve ever been to, the deficiencies of Ride’s gig were largely not the fault of the band.

This was Ride doing a 20th anniversary show for “Going Blank Again” at a new and achingly trendy underground venue on Denmark Street, HERE at Outernet. It’s an album that holds a hugely special place in my heart. When it came out in 1992, it was the springboard into a world of discovery into the murky and mysterious world of UK indie music for my 17 year old self. I stopped wishing I had been born decades earlier so that I could have witnessed Bowie in his definitive 70s years, and instead revelled in the glorious era of music that I was lucky enough to live through as a teen. In as much as music was my life back then, then this album definitely changed my life.

So of course the prospect of hearing the album in full was a glorious one. However, two things were not in my favour this day, one being entirely my fault – I’d been out with a friend the night before and had had a particularly stomach-shredding hangover all day. By far the worst aspect of this gig, however, was the venue.

The street-level aspects of Outernet are actually pretty cool – a couple of rooms with swirling light shows in which I’ve spent many a pleasant Saturday afternoon. The music venue HERE is located four stories underground, and definitely as visually enticing as the outer galleries, with its bars suffused in a neon glow and modern fittings throughout. But the gig space itself was, as we say in the NHS, ‘not fit for purpose’. A scarily packed room with no areas of breathing space at the sides, which you might expect in older, theatre style venues, meaning that I had to retreat to the bar area near the loos to avoid the crush. However, the design of the room meant that from here, the view was obscured by massive pillars. At least they had placed screens on them so the band was still viewable, but going to a gig only to watch a band on a screen next to the toilets is not my idea of fun. In an added twist of surreality, every two or three minutes cleaners would whizz round the bar/loo area mopping the floor around your feet. It was definitely the oddest gig experience I’ve had in years.

To focus on the positive, Ride were, of course, brilliant, and the tracks from “Going Blank Again” sounded fantastic. It was particularly great to hear lesser-played tracks like “Making Judy Smile” and “Time of her Time” alongside the well-worn classics like “Leave Them All Behind”, “Chrome “Waves” and the eternally majestic “OX4”. The only downside to their performance was the eye-searingly unattractive backdrop to their set, a flickering nightmare of glaring abstract images. It would have been so much more fitting to have seen images of Ride from the period as they played through the classic album.

The disappointment of this gig is intensified when you think how brilliant it could have been at Brixton Academy, or Hammersmith Apollo, or quite frankly any other venue in London. As my stomach was still not quite recovered from my previous night’s alcoholic intake, and getting more and more painful as the gig progressed, I only ended up staying through the album set and made an exit as they were hammering through “Grasshopper”, inwardly apologising to my 17 year old self.

The good news is Ride are of course back in 2024 with their imminent album “Interplay” and a series of gigs ahead. All being well, I’ll be seeing them very soon at a Rough Trade album launch show, and I fully expect it’ll be a much better experience than this one from November 2022.