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Oct 09, 2020 Ride By Christopher Roberts

Andy Bell, founding member of ’90s British shoegaze band Ride, has released his debut solo album, The View From Halfway Down, today on Sonic Cathedral. Now that it’s out you can stream the whole thing below.

Previously Bell shared the album’s first single, “Love Comes in Waves,” via a video for it. “Love Comes in Waves” was one of our Songs of the Week. Then he shared its second single, “I Was Alone,” via a video for it. In a press release Bell described “I Was Alone” as “a Spacemen 3-influenced song about dealing mentally with solitude” and the track also made our Songs of the Week list.

Bell began writing the album in 2016, but shortly after, Ride’s live reunion tour became a full time return, and the band released two albums and embarked on two world tours. When the pandemic hit, Bell decided it was finally time to work on and release his debut solo album, sharing the first single today on his 50th birthday.

The View from Halfway Down was engineered by Gem Archer and mastered by Heba Kadry.

Bell had this to say about the album in a previous press release: “I’ve always wanted to make a solo album, I’ve always said I would do it, although I never imagined it happening like, or sounding like, this one does. I’d been sitting on this pile of almost finished tracks, along with all the other hundreds of ideas that had fallen by the wayside since I’ve been making music. Lockdown gave me the opportunity to find a way to present it to the world.

“The album is not about songwriting. There aren’t many verses or choruses, because this album is about sounds, a listening experience.”

Ride reformed in 2014 to do some touring and finally released their first new album in 21 years, Weather Diaries, in 2017 via Wichita. That was followed by the 2018 EP, Tomorrow’s Shore and then 2019’s This Is Not a Safe Place.

Read our 2017 interview with Ride about Weather Diaries.

Read our 2019 interview with Ride about This Is Not a Safe Place.

Until Weather Diaries Ride hadn’t released a new studio album since 1996’s Tarantula, which was put out after the band split up and was poorly received. The quartet’s original run lasted from 1988 to 1996 and included four studio albums (Nowhere, Going Blank Again, Carnival of Light, and Tarantula). In 2015 they also released Nowhere25, a 25th anniversary reissue of their 1990-released debut album Nowhere. A few years ago we interviewed Ride’s Mark Gardener and Andy Bell about Nowhere and you can read that article here. And then in 2015 in another interview we did with Gardener he went through Nowhere track-by-track and you can read that here.

After the initial run in Ride, Bell formed the band Hurricane #1 in 1997 and then was in Oasis for 10 years (from 1999 to 2009), as well as in Beady Eye (a band that featured many of the later members of Oasis, including Liam Gallagher, but not Noel Gallagher, from 2009 to 2014).

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