Hello – here with a quick check-in as I recover from vacation and try to get re-acclimated to life at home.

As a band, Ride are pretty online with a regular presence on all your usual platforms and channels, but did you know they had a Bandcamp? No, not the rideox4.bandcamp.com site that offers all their releases since 2017’s Weather Diaries for digital sale and which anchored the Bandcamp Guide To Ride which I pointed to in November 2022.

No, I’m talking about the Ride Archive site which they launched in April 2022, with a complete recording of their May 23, 2015 show at Manchester’s Albert Hall, one of the first shows of their first UK reunion tours. At the time, they declared:

To kick off a summer of live shows, we’ve made our 2015 Manchester Albert Hall show available to download, exclusively on https://ride1988.bandcamp.com/releases

This is the first of a series of releases featuring exclusive and rare recordings.

@RideOx4Official

I’ve no doubt they had the best of intentions in keeping the series going, as they were deep into their archives putting together the 4 EPs compilation that came out that November, but at the moment the series is exactly one release long, even if that release is an epic 18 tracks long.

As new material was still not being discussed in mixed company, it’s a comprehensive run through their ’90s material. There’s video clips aplenty from the show on YouTube but nothing complete so I’ll let you wade through the fan footage yourself if that’s your scene. I’m happy just listening to this immaculate audio document which features cover art of a sketch of the venue by Andy Bell.