Oxford’s Ride Sits on Coattails of Manchester Sound : Pop music: All the attention on the acid-house sound has opened doors for unaffiliated bands.

Manchester.

That’s about all you hear when it comes to British rock these days. Such Manchester acts as Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses and Charlatans U.K., and Manchester-influenced bands including Jesus Jones and EMF, dominate the landscape with their hybrid of hip-hop psychedelia and punk attitudes.

“Everyone goes on about, ‘What do you think about the Manchester thing?’ ” said Laurence Colbert, drummer of the band Ride, which is neither from Manchester nor a disciple of its sound.

Ride is a young quartet from Oxford that eschews the Manchester electronic dance beats and sampled sounds in favor of haunting melodies and harmonies set on top of good old electric guitars turned up to a distorted blur. And Ride’s not alone, with the likes of Lush, the Pale Saints and Kitchens of Distinction offering variations on the same approach. (Ride and Lush play the Roxy tonight and Thursday, and Ride moves on to Bogart’s in Long Beach on Friday and Club Lingerie on Saturday.)

But rather than being frustrated at all over the attention paid to Manchester, Colbert, 20, is grateful for the way that scene stimulated British rock, and for the doors it has opened for other new bands like his.

“It got healthy with the Manchester thing, everyone focusing on that,” he said, sitting recently with Ride’s singer-guitarist Mark Gardener, 21, at Warner Bros. Records’ Burbank headquarters.

“Before that it was all out of focus. . . . People were waiting for something to happen, and when something came along people got all excited and panted, ‘Messiah, Messiah!’ So when bands like us and the Pale Saints and Lush came along, we were able to focus on what we wanted to do and people caught on to it.”

Unlike the Manchester and acid-house-related bands, Ride evolved outside of any scene. Colbert, Gardener and singer-guitarist Andrew Bell met two years ago while attending Banbury Art College near Oxford. They hooked up with bassist Steve Queralt, who was working at a record store.

“When we realized we played the right instruments to make a band we got together and jammed and recorded it on a little tape recorder,” Colbert said. “We started at 6 or 7 in the evening and about 11 we realized how long we’d been going.”

Added Gardener, “The more we played the more involved it got and the more art college went down the drain.”

Continued Colbert, “The first song we played was (the Stooges’) ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog.’ And we played ‘Pump Up the Volume’ and other songs and just knew we could make any music we wanted. It was like flexing your wings.

“And we didn’t want that spirit and feeling to end when we got a record contract.”

With that in mind, Ride spent about a year playing club shows around England to hone its act. Their reputation as a fiery live band drew record company interest, but ultimately the band spurned the advances of several major labels, choosing to sign with the smaller Creation Records, which had developed such independent successes as House of Love and My Bloody Valentine.

Creation released two four-song EPs by Ride in 1990 before the band signed in the U.S. with the Warner Bros.-distributed Sire label. The EPs were compiled by Sire on an album titled “Smile.” Ride’s first real album, “Nowhere,” was released in January, displaying a big sound as exhilarating as they say their first jam was, but refined through live concert experience.

The truth is, though, that the band still likes to think of itself in terms of its first jam session: four young lads with no performing experience creating a big rush of sound just for the rush of it.

“We don’t have to think about performing because we’ve created such a big sound,” Colbert said. “That hides the fact that we’re scared to death on stage.”