'I'd never seen anything like it!" says Ride frontman Mark Gardener as he recalls the first time the recently reformed shoegaze pioneers stepped foot on Japanese soil.
"We touched down at the airport and there were 300 people there, all with daffodils, chocolates, toys and sweets," he says. "We were totally unprepared for it! We were like, 'What do we do with this? We need a van to put all of this in.' We'd watched footage of that Beatlemania thing, but it really was like that. It was totally mad."
That was 1990, two years after the Oxford four-piece formed (including guitarist and vocalist Andy Bell, drummer Loz Colbert and bassist Steve Queralt), a point in time by which Ride was already in the middle of a dizzying ascent: signed to Creation Records within months of its first gig, along with My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive the band was soon heralded as being at the forefront of a movement that became characterized as shoegaze (so called because band members would supposedly play gigs staring down at the effects pedals responsible for ear-bleeding sonic assaults). In Ride's case, though it shared its peers' wall-of-sound dynamism, a knack for melody and youthful yearning — not to mention some luscious locks and killer pouts — stood the group apart. Its debut album "Nowhere," voted 74th best album of the 1990s by Pitchfork, remains seminal 25 years on.