Smash hit

In the early 1990s, shoegazers used melody and concision to infiltrate the mainstream with a new brand of left-field noisepop. At the forefront of this movement were Ride, an Oxford band fronted by the photogenic Mark Gardener, who, the music press decided, was going to bring the underground to the masses. The project was given an extra push by the fact that the band — including Andy Bell, now of Oasis — liked three-minute tunes as much as they did noise.

“Growing up, I was subjected to a lot of Beatles and Beach Boys,” recalls Gardener. He considers the music made by Ride et al to be the last stand of old-school indie, when it was synonymous with sonic exploration, before it became “a marketing concept”. “Shoegazing,” he says, “pushed everyone to make interesting music with guitars.” He’s delighted that Ride paved the way for their fellow Oxford pop radicals, Radiohead. “I remember their manager telling me, ‘If our debut album sells half as many as yours did, we’ll be made up.’ We made it possible for them to happen, definitely.”

Gardener once appeared on the cover of NME alongside the Charlatans’ Tim Burgess, that other pouty-mouth. It was a summit meeting of alt-rock’s prettiest boys, only from two supposedly rival camps: shoegazing and “baggy”, the latter the designation for the indie-dance then coming out of Manchester. In some ways this prefigured the Battle of Britpop, between Blur and Oasis, with the fey, southern, middle-class student shoegazers in their hooped T-shirts and Chelsea boots on one side and the tougher, rave-rocking proles in their outsized Joe Bloggs jeans on the other.

And yet, as da Bank points out, they had much in common, with blissing out their priority. “When I was 16 and walked down Portsmouth high street everyone got on, whether they were into goth, baggy, rave or shoegazing,” says the DJ. “I was a bit schizophrenic: half-baggy, half-gazey with my bowl haircut, tight jeans and sister’s make-up. I’d be clutching the latest Ride 12-inch and the first Stone Roses album. Maybe the shoegazers were into dope and the ravers into Ecstasy, but they all just wanted to have a good time.”

At the height of shoegazing in 1991, Britain was crippled by recession, there was a war on in Iraq and people were feeling the crunch. They wanted music that was high on elegiacal melancholy and escapist fantasy. It’s not difficult to draw parallels with today. “Ulrich Schnauss said there’s a new wave of shoegazing because things are tough for people again, and they’re seeking escape in music,” says Mark Peters. For the Engineers’ front man, nu-gazing is an opiate for troubled souls, a new religion. “It’s like an atheist church where anything is possible. Mainstream rock has rules and commandments; this music throws all that away. It goes beyond art. It’s about purity of emotion and human experience.”

Sci-Fi-Lo-Fi Vol 3: Shoegazing 1985-2009 is out now on Soma; Cathedral Classics Volume One is released by Sonic Cathedral on April 20

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