Vapour Trail

Andy Bell wrote the words and music, though the credit went to all four, and he sang it, which was rare on their early records. He has said he wrote the riff in a hotel room on one of the band's first tours and that it came out easily. Gardener said the song came mostly from Bell, that a friend's remark about vapour trails helped give it its title, and that he suggested Bell sing it; it closed Nowhere because an album needs a strong last track.

It was recorded at Blackwing in spring 1990 with Marc Waterman. Two Rickenbacker 12-strings play a four-chord pattern over a droning E, the bass follows the chords, and Colbert's drumming is full of fills; Guitar.com heard the snare and tambourine drive of the Stone Roses' Reni. For nearly the last two minutes the band drops away and strings carry a violin and cello figure to the end. PopMatters' AJ Ramirez heard unrequited love personified, and Toppermost read it as wanting more time with someone you love. Bell later said the lyric was quite raw.

Sire released it as an American CD single in April 1991; it did not chart. Kevin Kerslake's video shows the band in grainy, slowed, color-negative film in the Oxfordshire villages of Minster Lovell, Stadhampton and Godstow. Pitchfork ranked it 145th among the tracks of the 1990s, and it plays on a mixtape in The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

I guess it is the one I'm most proud of from that era.

Andy Bell, MTV, 2011

Live

Ride first played it at Aylesbury Civic Centre on 23 August 1990, and setlist.fm counts nearly five hundred performances; it was still in the set in Tokyo in September 2026. Filmed versions come from the Town & Country Club in 1991 and Brixton Academy in 1992, the Reading Festival set of that August was released, and KEXP recorded it in Seattle in 2017. Bell said that when they played it at a War Child benefit after the reunion, you could feel the room change.

It is the Ride song other artists play most on stage, Snail Mail among them. On record it has been covered by Trespassers William, the Divine Comedy, Paula Kelley and INHEAVEN. Robert Smith of the Cure remixed it in 2015 to promote Nowhere25 and said it had one of the best 15-second intros of all time.

The two uploads in the hypersongs web are the Nowhere album audio and Kevin Kerslake's official video.