What you're less likely to know is that Ride have inspired my writing more than any other band, musician, or composer. They've not just been the background music while I'm writing - over the years they've provided prompts for a grand total of five stories, some more successful than others. Here's the rundown of my five Ride-inspired moments of creative genius... and failure:
1) 'Last Love' - This story was one of the first I wrote, and my first to be published. Printed in local fiction collection Shorts From Surrey, it was largely composed while I walked back from Ride's infamous Brixton gig in 1992. The incident in question - a stabbing at a concert - was actually an anecdote I'd heard about a Megadeath show several months earlier, but the rest of the story is 100% Ride. Some people still tell me this is their favourite story of mine, which I'm sure must be some kind of insult.
2) 'The Memory Engine' - It wasn't until I listened to 'Time Machine' again that I realised how much this story owed to it. Originally published in Roadworks magazine, it told of an amateur time-traveller who builds a time machine without realising that it's worked.When pieces start to go missing at night he's convinced that it's an act of sabotage, when in fact it's actually the machine slipping backwards through time. The ending in particular owes a lot to the lines "Losing control, landing back in this year/Did I ever move? Did I disappear?". My personal favourite of these stories, which probably means that no one else enjoyed it.
3) 'Drive Blind' - Rather unsurprisingly, this was inspired by the Ride song of the same name. Written in 1995 (I think), it appeared in four weekly installments in the St. Andrews student newspaper, of which I also happened to be Assistant Editor. Otherwise I doubt it would ever have seen the light of day. An early attempt at sub-William Gibson cyberpunk, it made little sense unless you were already familiar with the song. Still, I think I managed the cliffhangers pretty well.
4) Unnamed Playground Story - Okay, this probably did have a title... but I can't remember it. What I do remember is labouring over it on an old manual typewriter in my student bedroom, slowly filling the waste basket with balls of white paper encrusted with Tipp-Ex. Loosely based on the song 'Not Fazed' and the instrumental B-side 'Grasshopper', it tackled parallel storylines in which children scrapped at school and dinosaurs tore at each other in a tar pit. Awful stuff.
5) Unnamed 'Close My Eyes' Story - Not much to say about this, other than the fact that I can remember almost nothing about it. I think it had something to do with suicide, and - given my teenage angst - it's likely that a girl was involved. It may even have evolved into a later story which also ended in suicide, although I think that was an entirely different depressing tale. Since then I've been highly suspicious of writers who end a story with a suicide. It always feels so grubbily adolescent.
If you aren't familiar with Ride, none of this will mean very much to you. So here, for your viewing pleasure, is a video of 'Drive Blind' (see story #3), recorded live at Brixton Academy in 1992 (see story #1). Somewhere in the foreground you may occasionally spot the back of my head.
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