An interview with Steve Queralt

The shoegaze legend talks going solo for the first time, getting Lush's Emma Anderson to sing instead of him, flirting with electronic music, and why Ride dropped shoegaze for '60s rock.

If you had asked me at any point in the past 30 years which member of Ride would release my favourite solo album, bassist Steve Queralt would not have been my first pick. Or second. Or even third. Considering he always kept a low profile, it was tough to even think of what the music would sound like. But thanks to Sonic Cathedral, the shoegaze-reviving label I profiled last summer, the world finally gets to hear what kind of music the 57-year-old would choose to make as a solo artist. (Update: Queralt’s Swallow is my favourite solo Ride album, for what it’s worth.)

Following in the footsteps of Ride bandmates Mark Gardener and Andy Bell (drummer Loz Colbert, who has played with everyone from The Jesus & Mary Chain and Supergrass, has yet to fly solo), Queralt has given into temptation and prepared Swallow, his debut solo album. After the release of Ride’s seventh album, Interplay, in 2024, the time is right for Queralt to pursue this endeavour. Earlier this year, Bell released his third solo album, pinball wanderer, also through Sonic Cathedral, giving Ride fans plenty to chew on as the band takes a much-needed break.

Swallow isn’t actually the first music Queralt has recorded outside of Ride. In 2022, he put out a collaborative EP with writer/filmmaker Michael Smith called Sun Moon Town. Going back and listening to it, the EP hints at what he would attempt with Swallow by merging his shoegaze history with post-rock and ambient-electronic soundscapes. But Swallow really is something completely different: a proper, fully-formed album that finds Queralt indulging in his own musical interests while inviting friends such as Emma Anderson (Lush) and Verity Susman (Electrelane) to give some of his music a human voice. (Queralt refuses to sing himself.)

How does it feel to have the spotlight on you alone for the first time?

It's not something I enjoy that much. I'm dealing with it. I wouldn't call it a spotlight, really. But it's a little nerve-wracking, taking full responsibility for something. I'm used to being a quarter of a band, where we take the blows as a four-piece and we take the praises as a four-piece. But this is all down to me, so yeah, it's nervy times.

Your bandmates Mark and Andy have released solo material before. Did they try and pass on any advice to you?

Andy's been really supportive. I sent him some really early demos and he gave me some pointers on how he would do things. Like, “That could be a Ride track, that could be a Ride track,” etc. Andy's always been really supportive.

When he's saying “that could be a Ride track,” is he's saying to keep that song for Ride?

I don't know, actually. I mean, that's how it all started. Basically I put two tracks together, two backing tracks, one of which is on the record, and I presented them to the guys in the band, like I normally do. But we were kind of between projects and considering doing an EP to follow up This is Not Safe Place. So these tracks were put forward for if we were going to do that, but obviously we didn't. So they were shelved and I carried on writing. Then eight tracks later, I kind of thought, “Why don't I have a go at trying to put my own record out rather than just saving these tracks that might or might not ever get used by Ride?” And that's how it all really started. So over the next couple of years, it was all about putting those songs together and trying to find people to work with and to sing on the backing tracks.

Is this the first time you'd ever really thought about doing an album of your own?

Yeah. I did an EP a couple of years ago, a collaboration with the poet/filmmaker, Michael Smith, who did some spoken word over these long, epic prog-electronica type tracks that I made. So I got some confidence from that and I could use my set up at home to make music. It was good enough. So I guess I'm quite pleased that those two tracks weren't used for Ride, and I was able to take them back and build them.

Swallow to me doesn't sound like a Ride album, but it does sound like an album that could be made by someone in Ride. You kind of touched on it, but was there ever a moment where you had to make some changes to a song because it sounded a little too much like Ride?

Yeah, I think the answer to that is that when I write a track that I think would be good for Ride, it gets put into the band sphere and chewed up a little bit. Andy will put his mark on it, Mark will have some ideas, and Loz will have some ideas. So we kind of work through a compromise; what the original vision was may not be the finished version. This time I was able to make my own decisions. I didn't have to worry about what Mark, Andy or Loz would think of it. I didn't have to think, “Does it need to sound like Ride?” It could just be as long as I liked it, that's all that counted. And yeah, you're right. There are a couple of tracks on there, like the opening track, that wouldn't work on a Ride album. The closing track wouldn't work on a Ride album either. So I was able to indulge in my own tastes and make music that I enjoy listening to rather than making something I felt was good enough for Ride. Or think, “Can I imagine Andy singing on it? Can I imagine Mark singing on it?” That kind of thing didn't matter.

How did you find making all of those decisions on your own? Was it easy for you to determine when a song was complete?

Yeah, I think it was. If anything, I think I overcooked things. I do like to layer things up and up and up and then put strings on top. So, yeah, I had no one to kind of pull me back. Some of it is quite dense. It's the way I work, and it's similar with the songs that I write for Ride. The demos I put forward are quite polished and fully realized. I don't really like to put forward any sketches or rough demos. I like to take it as far as I can before I either pass it on or use it.

Obviously, Andy has been releasing music with Sonic Cathedral. Did it just make sense for you to work with Nat and the label to release Swallow? Who approached who?

I wanted it to come out and Sonic Cathedral felt like a natural home for the record. I'm not afraid of being shoegaze-y, so it was my first choice. Fortunately, Nat said yes. If he hadn't I don't know what I would have done with it. Maybe I would have self-released it or touted it around other labels. But Nat’s always been really supportive. He was someone that I sent early demos to just for some feedback. When I got the finished record to him, he said that he would put it out as the final endorsement that I had actually made something that was relatable and I didn't have to be quite so nervous about it.

Did this happen before or after Ride played the Sonic Cathedral 20^th anniversary party in the fall?

This happened before the anniversary party. I remember Emma coming along to that show, so I think she and I had already worked together on it. That was a really enjoyable show. The atmosphere in the crowd was different than a Ride show; there was more of a celebratory feel about it. I know it was an anniversary celebration, but it really did feel like that.

How did it feel to relive your performance from the Reading Festival in 1992 and play the whole set all over again?

I think it was Nat's idea to do that set, and we were like, “Really, you want us to play ‘Making Judy Smile’ live?” It's a strange set with the John Lennon cover. I think because it was a strange set for us to play, it made it even more special and more enjoyable.

The throwback Reading ’92 t-shirts Sonic Cathedral made were very cool. I loved that you guys reprinted those.

Yeah, I actually don’t like those very much. I can't believe we did those back then.

I found an old interview with you from 2001 where you revealed that before Ride formed you were in “various synth orientated bedroom bands which I regard as the ‘80s equivalent of being a bedroom DJ playing cutting edge minimal deep house.” Swallow flirts with electronic music. Was that just a logical path, to go back to electronic music?

I think making electronic music is a temptation for all musicians because you've got all that equipment at your fingertips. If you have Logic downloaded on your on your Mac, then you have access to all sorts of amazing synth sounds. And so it's quite an easy route into making music, and so much easier than it was when I was in a bedroom synth band, where you have two or three keyboards, a drum machine, a bass guitar and a four-track tape recorder. It was a lot tougher then. You had to play in time. But yeah, I've always been fascinated by keyboards and synthesizers. I went through a phase of really liking everything that was released on the ZTT label. I used to love Trevor Horn’s production; those huge soundscapes where he used a Fairlight and everything. Lots of really lovely digital reverbs and delays and huge pad sounds. And that's what I was into when I wanted to make music like that. It's amazing back then a Fairlight would have cost me something like $40,000 to buy, and now I got I’ve got an app that cost me £30 and it's just as good. A purist would probably say it doesn't sound anywhere near as good as an original Fairlight, but it's good enough for me. I think just having everything at your fingertips now makes the temptation to make electronic music very easy.

And I read that Mogwai was an influence for some of the more guitar-based pieces? I know Ride has played with Mogwai before. Have you ever talked to those guys about music before? I bet they likely listened to Ride when they were teenagers.

I like to joke that Mogwai wouldn't have existed if it hadn't been for Ride’s “Grasshopper.” With that song I think we invented post-rock. Obviously I'm not being serious. I'm a big fan of instrumental music, and so that was that kind of enabled me, or gave me enough incentive to make that record. Originally it was going to be a fully instrumental record because I don't sing and I don't write lyrics, so that was the obvious course to take. No one wants to hear me sing and no one wants to read my lyrics, believe me. But what I found is that I'm not actually that good at doing that kind of post-rock-y stuff. I can do a few things, but some of the tracks that I put together for this album were really screaming out for vocals, which is why I approached people to collaborate. So, yeah, Mogwai were an influence and also an artist called Mark Pritchard, who’s more on the electronic side. I love the way he puts albums together where he’ll make a spoken word track, then a track with some haunting sample rotating through it and some instrumental tracks as well. So that's the kind of thing I was aiming towards.

I was going to ask you about whether you'd given any thought to singing. Have you ever tried singing just to see what it sound like, or is the idea just too cringeworthy?

It’s cringeworthy. I mean, I did. There are a couple of old Ride tracks. I think I sang on “Like a Daydream” and maybe “Here and Now.” But just oohs and ahhs in the background. But that's, what, 30 years ago? I haven’t been near a microphone since.

Ride and Lush toured together in the early ’90s. Did you write “Lonely Town” and “Swiss Air” for Emma to sing or did the idea to ask her come after you'd written them?

It was definitely afterwards. I had the backing tracks ready. It was actually the track “Messengers.” There's a vocal sample towards the end of it and when I played it back that suddenly reminded me of Lush. So that's where the idea of approaching Emma came from. I said, “I've got these tracks. Would you be interested on singing them?” And she said, "But I don't sing." And I said, "Of course you do. We were on tour together. I watched you almost every night,” and she was saying, "No, I don't what you watched. I do write a lot of the stuff and I write a lot of the lyrics, but Miki [Berenyi] was always the singer. I did a few backing bits.” So she said, “Unfortunately, no, I wouldn't be able to do it.” And then about a year later she got back in touch with me and said, “Right, I found my voice. I'm making my own album. If you're still interested, send me some stuff and we'll maybe give it a go.” So that's the story of Emma. One of the tracks sounded like it needed a Lush-type vocal on it so I got my wish a year later.

Ha, that would have been insulting if she had put out Pearlies and then she never returned your call. I remember seeing Lush live a few times and seeing her sing too. It was also nice to hear Verity Susman again on the record. I was a big fan of Electrelane, who I thought were getting back together. What brought her to mind for her contribution?

Debbie [Ball], who used to look after the Ride socials and was also in Electrelane briefly, was one of the first people I asked for ideas of who might be up for singing on a few songs, and Verity's name came up. So I contacted her and she immediately said yes. Her track was one of the first that came back to me and it was quite a moment hearing that, because up to that point, it was still just eight instrumental tracks. Verity got involved, sent me back an idea, and it was that point that I thought, “Oh, this might be able to work after all.”

Once you had the tracks done with Emma and Verity, were you ever looking to provide vocals for the rest of the songs?

No. I wanted to keep some of the longer, more post-rock ones as instrumentals. Like “I Don’t Know How To Sing,” which is a bit tongue-in-cheek, we were going to get vocals on that. I remember talking to Matt, the guy who mixed it, saying, I really want someone to sing on this. But I had a holding sample, the one that we ended up using, and Matt did a mix with it quite loud in the mix and it actually sounded pretty good. So we decided that we didn't need anyone singing on it. This is quite a kind of quirky track where we're just using that sample over and over again. So that stuck.

Will you be playing solo gigs?

I would love to, but unfortunately putting a band together is quite expensive, way beyond my means. That's not to say it'll never happen. I would love to put a band together and I'd love to sort of try and play these songs live, but as it stands at the moment, it's impossible.

Do you pay much attention to what's going on with shoegaze these days? Because it's really having a moment, both old and new bands. As a long time fan of that music, it’s kind of shocking to see.

Yeah, I wish I could explain it. But I think Slowdive have just done a really good job of being 100% pure shoegaze, and never, ever changing. Like they are doing it really, really well, and not, you know, going off and doing their reggae album or their jazz fusion album. They've stayed in that lane. And I think they've gotten a bit of help from TikTok. The way that they've kind of paced their career has been really interesting as well. Like, we've put out three albums in in the last ten years and we've been on tour relentlessly. They've just about squeezed two albums in that time and they've stayed away and built up this hunger. And that's been good for us too because the bigger they get, the more Slowdive fans seem to hear about Ride and maybe come and see our shows as well.

Even though shoegaze was derided in the ’90s, it did shine briefly. It just didn’t take over the mainstream charts the way that Britpop or grunge did. So it didn't really get that big. And I think because it didn't get that big, it didn't burn out and people didn't get tired of it. Shoegaze briefly held its head above the water and then kind of sailed away again. And in the meantime, over the next ten to 15 years, there were shoegaze bands popping up in Japan, in America, in South America, just keeping the whole movement alive. Then when Slowdive came back and when My Bloody Valentine came back, and our band came back, there's was already an audience there waiting for it and not just people that were into shoegaze 30 years ago. So there's a new audience there waiting for these new bands to come along as well.

What do you recall of first hearing shoegaze used for Ride’s music?

It was definitely meant as an insult. And of course, as grunge and Britpop came along, they both had larger than life frontmen, and it was all about being quite brash and being very confident, whereas shoegaze bands were too embarrassed to be on stage. You could criticize the lyrics for not really having much meaning, they're very ambiguous. You know, they're all about flying, they're about dreams, they're about, you know, non-tangible things. And then there was Kurt Cobain singing about very definitive things, and Britpop shouting and being very in your face. Shoegaze was more these student-type bands that had nothing to say, and you couldn't hear what they're trying to sing anyway. There was no showmanship because they're interested in looking at their guitar effects, looking down at their shoes. But the term was quite insulting at the time.

You mentioned how Slowdive stuck to one thing and didn't change their sound. The first Ride album I remember listening to was Carnival of Light in 1994. A friend of mine was a massive Ride fan, and when I met her, she had just bought that record. And then Tarantula followed, after the band broke up. Those two albums were so different from the music Ride was making beforehand. I’ve gotta say, it was a confusing time to be a fan. What do you remember from that time with those two albums signalling to the end of the band?

So what happened was, obviously, we made Nowhere and we had no idea that it would be quite that big. So when we went in to do Going Blank Again, we were we were feeling quite good about ourselves and feeling quite confident. We'd done a kind of lo-fi guitar album with Nowhere, so we wanted to spread our wings a little bit. We had Alan Moulder in from the start. We were starting to use keyboards and synths at that point. You know, there are some shoegaze-y songs on there like “Leave Them All Behind” and “Mouse Trap,” but it was a very natural album for us. We didn't go in saying, “We need to do X, Y, and Z, we need to do this.” We just went in and made the album that felt good to make at that time for us. And again, it seemed to work.

Carnival of Light was very different. I think we decided that we wanted to make an album that was a bit more prog rock, a bit more West Coast Americana-sounding because that's the music that the band was listening to. We were listening to Neil Young, The Byrds and Pink Floyd. We were no longer listening to The Smiths, Echo and The Bunnymen, My Bloody Valentine and The House of Love. We were going back in time. So that's the reason. It was a very preconceived idea of what that album should sound like, and slightly or wrongly, you know, that's what we did. And that was the first point in our career where our trajectory cooled off and it flattened. We weren't used to that. It sounds a bit conceited now, but you know, we were still wondering, “Why aren't people loving what we're doing? We're Ride and you know, we make great records. We've made this record and everyone's gone a bit cool on it.”

We did a tour, and the tour went okay, but it was a real sense of us no longer progressing. We had hit a plateau and I think panic set in as a result. Instead of talking about what we should have done next, which was stop after Carnival and take some time and reflect on what we want to do, we rushed in and made another album, which was Tarantula. That album was so rushed. I think the songwriting was pretty weak, and Andy won't mind me saying that. However, I think the sound of Tarantula is actually really good, and the playing on it is actually really good. I think the guy we used as a producer, Digby Smith, caught us playing really well together. So, it's good in that respect. It's just the songwriting and the lack of direction that lets it down.

Plus we also felt that the band was done at that point. We were really going through the motions of, “Let's just put another record out, and see what happens.” But yeah, it was the beginning of the end. So I think with Carnival it was a sudden “oh shit, we've taken a wrong turn!” We should have done what Slowdive did and just stayed in our lanes. We shouldn't have tried to reinvent ourselves as a rock band. We should have made another record that felt natural to us instead of forcing a sound upon ourselves.

When you were making Tarantula, obviously, Britpop was underway. Was that something that the band was paying any attention to?

Yeah, I mean, Oasis had come along at that point, their first album had come out and they were on Creation as well. So, it doesn't matter what you think of Oasis now or what they've become because that first record is still really good. And hearing those songs for the first time was like, “Wow, this band is really, really special.” The other big Britpop band Blur, they had some amazing songs, but that “Parklife” side of Blur really didn't do it for me. I prefer something like “Death of a Party.” But I didn't have time for the Britpop movement at all when it came along. We weren’t that interested in being a part of it. Oasis caught our attention, but that's about it. And I think by the time it got big with bands like Sleeper and Menswear, Ride were done.

Speaking of Oasis, do you have plans to see Andy play with them this summer?

Yeah, we're going to see him on in August at Wembley. So that should be exciting. We'll see how the bass is played properly.

Is it weird seeing him play the bass when he doesn't do that in Ride? I remember when he joined Oasis and I was surprised that Andy Bell was playing bass.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny because we just finished a European tour, and you could tell on the last few dates he was he was really going for it when he was playing guitar. I think he knew that this was his last chance to play guitar on stage in front of people for a while, and he was really gonna enjoy himself. But he's a very good bass player. He can play. He's a really good drummer, he's a great guitarist, he's a really good bass player, great at the keyboards. He's just a very talented musician. He can do things on the bass that I can't do. But I do my thing. I don't think he would have ever come up with a “Leave Them All Behind”-type bass line, but he could probably play “Twisterella” a lot more interestingly than I can.