Shoegazer pin-up boy Mark Gardener was last seen storming out of Ride’s final 1996 mixing sessions in a cloud of ill will. He went on to form the electro-psych Animalhouse, a band that collapsed under the weight of major-label mismanagement. Gardener then spent the next few years away from music, woodshedding in rural France, then sorting out his head in an Indian ashram before quietly assembling his first solo album, These Beautiful Ghosts (United For Opportunity), in partnership with Oxford alt-roots quartet Goldrush.

Where do you call home these days? Are you living in Oxford again?
Yeah, I’m looking out at the old tube stop station at the moment. I dunno where I live anymore; I’m just a gypsy at the moment. I’ve spent more time in New York than anywhere recently. That was my home for a little while but now I’m looking at a list of tour dates and I’m off again tomorrow straight to Europe. So music’s been keeping me busy and out of too much trouble.

I noticed you’re coming to the U.S. in September for some shows.
I’m doing a slightly more stripped down version of the new album tracks and two or three Ride songs. I’m supporting BRMC and playing with Joe Bennett and this woman named Cat Martino. I’d love to be taking the full band out, but we’ll be back with Goldrush in tow; the plan is to come do my own tour in December with them. That’s exciting, but in the meantime, people will start getting some of the songs aired in a more stripped-down way. That’s the only way I can do it at the moment because of budget constraints, really.

These songs seem like they were originally conceived to be quieter and simpler.
Yeah, some of the stuff, I wanted it to feel exactly like that. Some of it has quite a bit of background stuff going on; others are much more stripped down. As a rule, I just wanted the whole thing to feel really emotionally simple; not hiding behind any veils, here’s my confusion, and there you go. [Laughs]

When I wrote MAGNET’s shoegazing feature a few years ago, I worked like hell with your management to try to track you down for an interview, but it turned out that you were in India and we just couldn’t get it together.
Oh, right ... [Ride was] on the cover of that one. That was you? Well, all right. That was quite a good one! It seemed to really help jump-start the whole shoegaze revival that seems to keep going on and on, especially in America, interestingly.

Well, like I said, it probably would have turned out better if I’d been able to interview you for the story. There were quite a few different angles that played out as the conversations went on.
Well, Andy (Bell, Ride guitarist/vocalist) is good at that sort of thing, and I’m happy with how it turned out; it’s all good. Me and Andy are still very tight, so that’s cool. I would’ve been impossible to track down at the time, anyway; I was probably doing some sort of strange detox in India or levitating somewhere. [Laughs]

What were you doing during your time away from music?
Basically, I was disillusioned with the music industry as a consequence of having dealt with the BMG label over here with the whole Animalhouse thing and how it ended up being a waste of time, really. My house in Oxford had pretty much turned into a nightclub, so it was a good time to move out. I moved to France for a while, became a bit of an eccentric hermit, living in the middle of a walnut orchard. And I wanted to get myself out of the situation where you start thinking, “I have to do my music in order to pay the rent.” I didn’t want to get back to the feeling I had around (Ride’s 1990 debut) Nowhere, where you just do music because it’s all you want to be doing. Two years after living a very isolated life in France, I started doing some acoustic shows, and realized that there were a lot of people still interested in what I’m doing. I’m glad I’ve seen it through and made this record. If my record just gets to those people who’ve come out to support me recently, then that’s great—I have very modest expectations. The bulk of the album started from songs I wrote during my time in France, and some in India. I ended up being there for six months when I originally only planned on being there for three weeks. I missed the plane home on purpose. I started in Goa, went south to Kerala, ended up in an ashram for a while—as you do, where you start out doing some yoga and end up hanging out with Hare Krishnas, looking at life from a different angle completely. I wouldn’t say that I found myself, but I would say I lost a lot of my old self, which was all probably good stuff to lose. People there really don’t have much of anything at all, and they’re happier than most of the people I know here. It was good on a lot of levels. And I wasn’t strung out or anything on drugs, but it was a chance to have a bit of a detox and go full hog. I came back feeling fantastic, energized and ready to go.

There is a real spiritual thread that runs throughout the new album. Also, your songwriting seems to have picked up some new flavors along the way. “Rhapsody” could almost be a classic Who track, like Pete Townshend snuck into the studio back during the days when he was studying with Meher Baba. There are things here that maybe weren’t in character for Ride but would really stretch out the listener’s mind if they were open to it.
Well, I hope you’re right. The cool thing with Ride is that we never made the same album twice. Maybe we overstretched people’s minds at times, but it kept it really interesting for us. Likewise, with this, I feel a broader kind of guy having spent 15 years with music in my life, and that’s enabled me to travel and see a lot of things. It all starts with the underlying fact that music worked best for me in my life when I’ve been involved in that “open” process; it’s when more normal things about life start creeping in that it all starts to turn into a bit of a disaster.

Just listening to you talk now, it reminds me of a conversation I had with Andy (Bell) after he’d decided to join Oasis. He said, “I’d rather support a great band than lead a good one.” It seems the two of you have chosen diametrically opposed ways of staying involved in music after Ride dissolved.
Yeah, I guess so. I can see Andy’s point of view. If you’re gonna go play for a band, well, Oasis is pretty great going, eh? [Laughs] From my point of view, I’ve always felt a frustration that there was a lot more I wanted to say and do before I go “that’s it” and hang my guitar up or whatever. This stuff’s been burning away in me for a long time. If I hadn’t seen this record through, then I think my life would’ve been pretty terrible. It became a personal mission in the end, like a mountain to climb; it was all self-financed, by choice. I wanted to do that, to control it in that sense. I’m not a big control freak, but I did want to control who I played with on the record, how I wanted to mix it. I just wanted to shift all the veils away, I didn’t want to hide behind anything anymore. Now that I’ve listened to it, it feels like a bit weight is off me. Also, it seems that I’m back on the flow, and the next one will be easier to make.

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