Ride guitarist and songwriter Andy Bell releases his third solo album pinball wanderer via Sonic Cathedral on February 28. The first single is a cover of The Passions’ post-punk classic ‘I’m In Love With A German Film Star’ – retitled ‘i’m in love…’ – with vocals from Dot Allison and guitars from Neu!’s Michael Rother.
It’s out now on all digital platforms and also as a Bandcamp exclusive 12” vinyl single featuring remixes from Justin Robertson and GLOK.
“I went through a stage of playing the guitar part for that song at every Ride soundcheck,” says Andy of The Passions’ 1981 original. “Erol Alkan has always maintained it’s ‘proto shoegaze’ and I agree.
“Dot has been a friend of mine for a long time now. Like many people of a certain age, I loved One Dove, and when I booked her to DJ at a club night in Sweden in about 2004, she levelled the place by playing ‘Ace Of Spades’ by Motörhead at 3am and we became mates. I played on some tracks on her last album Consciousology [released on Sonic Cathedral in 2023] and this was her returning the favour.
“Then Michael Rother from Neu! also ended up on it. I met him at his show at the Barbican and asked him to remix the song, but he decided he wanted to play guitar, which took everything to a whole new level.”
Watch the video by Chris Tomsett aka Innerstrings below.
It’s a heady collection of eight songs that marks the start of a new sonic chapter for Andy. While his two previous solo releases (2020’s The View From Halfway Down and Flicker from 2022) were based on material he had been accruing since the 1990s, this one is entirely new, and also rather unexpected. Its mix of psychedelic melodies, Can-via-The Stone Roses grooves and Arthur Russell-style textures is perfect for both deep-listening headphones moments and cutting across the coolest, most understated dancefloors.
Perhaps even more surprisingly, the album went from half-finished to being fully recorded and mixed in one intense all-night session in the middle of July, which started with Andy mixing the lead single.
“I was leaving for a tour the next morning and I had to mix the single before I left. Hearing Michael’s parts in the mix was such an incredible feeling; it fired me up to keep on recording and mixing into the night.”
This almost alchemical reaction resulted in Andy delivering the completed album the following morning. It’s perhaps his finest work to date; a quintessential nighttime record, one to let yourself slip through the gaps in the notes and revel in the moment.
The opening track is the chiming ‘panic attack’, a far too catchy ode to late-night, blue-faced doom scrolling, which sees Andy reaching for “the feel of a particular couple of seconds near the end of The Byrds’ song ‘Why’”. He claims he failed, but if failure sounds this good then it’s surely no bad thing.
Meanwhile, the introspective ‘madder lake deep’ is about a dream Andy had where he got so lost staring at a painting that he fell into it. “I don’t have synesthesia, but some music can take solid form or sometimes liquid form for me,” he explains of the track, which is essentially the Cocteau Twins in watercolour.
And also, in miniature. “I took inspiration from Turnstile’s Glow On and made some songs that are too short. This one is supposed to be dreamlike and when you wake up from a dream there’s that moment of, ‘Wait, what just happened?’, which is echoed here by you thinking, ‘Why did the song end too soon?’”
In contrast, the eight-minute-plus ‘apple green ufo’ is an epic alien groove which forms the centrepiece of the album. “I had this riff on an acoustic and it was kind of like one of those Led Zeppelin folk bangers, but I brought it into the Serge Gainsbourg world and gave it a glass of absinthe,” jokes Andy, who points out the influence of Dougie Wright’s bass and Dave Richmond’s drumming on Histoire de Melody Nelson on the album. In fact, these loose-limbed rhythm tracks were the starting point for everything and were laid down with the help of Andy’s old Oasis bandmate Gem Archer. “The album started from the drums up. I love playing drums and Gem is great at recording them. All the melodies and lyrics came out of that.”
The lyrics of ‘apple green ufo’ are about meeting a mystery unidentified soul and wondering what to show them here on Earth. In doing so it references The Simpsons and ET and is essentially what Second Coming should have sounded like.
The title track is Andy’s new theme tune, which see him transition from Flicker to flipper as the self-styled pinball wanderer. It’s an instrumental and kicks off the “pure vibes” second half of the record.
With its synth pulses and elastic bassline, ‘music concrete’ is another almighty groove. It’s also one of two tracks to feature Andy’s dog, Dexy, as is ‘the notes you never hear’, a short, sweet and sincere shuffle again inspired by some of Turnstile’s more reflective moments.
The album closes with ‘space station mantra’ which came about after a visit to the La Monte Young Dream House in New York. “Afterwards, I read about the concept of Anahata Nada which is the white noise that the universe makes,” explains Andy. “Kind of like the canvas all other sound is painted onto. I used this phrase to finish off the record, to hopefully spin the listener off into the universe.”
And it does. It’s a near six-minute motorik murmur and the perfect peroration for pinball wanderer – an otherworldly collection of intergalactic wizardry.
The full tracklisting of pinball wanderer is:
1. panic attack
2. i’m in love…
3. madder lake deep
4. apple green ufo
5. pinball wanderer
6. music concrete
7. the notes you never hear
8. space station mantra
The CD also includes:
9. i’m in love… (Justin Robertson’s Deadstock 33s Remix)
10. i’m in love… (GLOK Remix)
11. i’m in love… (Justin Robertson’s Deadstock 33s Dub)
To mark the release of the album, Andy will embark on his first ever solo acoustic tour, playing in independent record shops, beginning with an album launch party at Stranger Than Paradise in London.
He plays the following:
February 27 – Stranger Than Paradise – London
February 28 – Truck Store – Oxford
March 2 – Slide (outstore at Esquires) – Bedford
March 3 – Resident – Brighton
March 4 – Just Dropped In – Coventry
March 5 – Piccadilly – Manchester
March 6 – Jacaranda – Liverpool
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