Ride and The Charlatans played Big Night Live – 2/2
A co-headlining winter tour from two U.K. vets packed out the Causeway Street dance hall last Thursday.
You’re inherently stepping into a weird scene when seeing a rock show at Big Night Live, one of Boston’s newest and most embarrassingly-named rooms for live music. Mid-tier EDM parties and the occasional hip-hop gig are the venue’s bread and butter, which in practice means that it’s a space laid out for bottle service sections and VIP “experiences” moreso than a greying GA shoegaze crowd. Lanes to and from the main floor bottleneck, sightlines are lacking and the rear half of the room is a labyrinth of booths and barricades. I point all this out now because despite BNL (it’s even bad as an acronym) having opened in 2021, this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to properly review a show there. To that end, it’s almost shocking how ill-fitting the space feels for a concert crowd of any kind; it’s practically designed to keep the audience’s attention away from anything happening on stage.
But none of this is the fault of our subjects here, of course. And regardless of the setting, diehards queued up underneath the glowing visage of DJ Pauly D (headlining the room that same weekend) for last week’s doubleheader bill of British time-travel. Shoegazers Ride and baggy/Britpop crew The Charlatans hail from different sonic corners of the isle’s alt-rock landscape, but were certainly contemporaries in their early ’90s breakthroughs. Both bands hearkened back to those days on this North American run, which saw them trading off headlining spots and each playing through a classic early record in full.
For Thurday night’s show, it was The Charlatans and their ’92 sophomore effort Between 10th and 11th up first. The band’s sound would evolve and modernize over time, but this early Charlatans era found them zoned in on a danceable soul-and-psychedelic swirl. The fivesome brought that sound charging to life on stage, with a mix heavy on Tony Rogers’ vintage organ tones and drummer Peter Salisbury and bassist Martin Blunt’s grooving rhythm section. Frontman Tim Burgess played ringmaster to the party, effortlessly charming an already-ecstatic, ever-smiling. flag-waving crowd.
Following a slightly re-shuffled revue of Between and a handful of greatest hits from The Charlatans, it was Ride’s turn to pump up the evening’s quotient of both volume and chemical smoke to close out the night. An oceanic blue hue, suited to the palette of the band’s classic debut Nowhere, saturated the stage as they locked into the driving rhythm of opener “Seagull” and kept the pedal down for the duration.
Nowhere isn’t Ride’s only great record, but it’s undoubtedly their most iconic, and its charms are no less potent 33 years on from its release. The band has remained a consistent quartet through their initial and reunion runs, and the sustained chemistry of its four players (guitarists/vocalists Andy Bell and Mark Gardener, bassist Steve Queralt and drummer Loz Colbert) shone in full force during an air-tight and bracingly loud run through the record’s eight tracks and accompanying B-sides.
By result of a generous curfew or simply a desire to play, the night kept rolling from there, well past the concise encores of earlier shows on the tour. A sampling of Ride’s post-reunion highlights, the debut of a brand new song and a smoldering take on Going Blank Again‘s “Leave Them All Behind” bid the crowd goodnight, bringing an end to a long but surely satisfying evening. It was a big night, you know (live!).
See photos from both sets below.
