Ride - Forum Theatre, Melbourne, Australia - November 30, 2022
It's a few years delayed, but Ride made their way to Australia for the
Nowhere anniversary tour. I've not been to the Forum before but it's a very nice looking venue, and it holds 2,000 people when sold out like it was tonight.
The opening act was Moaning Lisa, three women and a man from Canberra playing indie rock. They opened the set with a land acknowledgement, and then played six and a half songs for their half hour set - the highlight was an untitled new song that saw the non-singing guitarist play slide guitar with a drumstick. They were very flattered to be playing before Ride, but joked that we were a very polite audience who was saving our energy (this is the same audience where one guy lit up a cigarette in the middle of the Ride set, and a bunch of middle aged men jumped around in some weird approximation of dancing).
Ride came on about ten minutes later than they were meant to, but they walked on and kicked into it - they sounded great, the instruments were all super well mixed and the bass in particular chugged along. They seemed to have a few technical issues, as one of the guitar techs kept running over to Andy to switch out guitars and similar, but I didn't hear anything that made me think things were clearly wrong. The vocals were great too, all through the night - probably the highlight of the set was the closing number for the album, 'Nowhere', which was played for twice as long as the studio version and had great moody dynamics.
A lot of thanks go to a friend from the shoegaze Facebook group who stood near me during the show and went to a bar with me afterwards. I didn't get a setlist (though I did get a photo of it), but I did get drunk and go to Federation Square to watch the soccer - where a nice Colombian boy bought me a drink and then vanished into the crowd
