READY TO RIDE

Ready To Ride is an Anthem mini-album released on 18 December 1985 on King Records' Nexus label. It sits between the debut and Tightrope and runs a little under twenty-one minutes. Two of the five tracks are new - "Ready To Ride" and "Shed", both written by Yoya Fukuda with lyrics by Eizo Sakamoto - and the other three are "Steeler", "Rock'n Roll Stars" and "Lay Down" from the debut, with the vocals alone re-recorded in English. The players are Naoto Shibata on bass, Sakamoto on vocals, Fukuda on guitar and Takamasa Ohuchi on drums. It was issued on vinyl only and was not pressed on CD at the time. When Anthem first appeared on CD in 1987, "Ready To Ride" and "Shed" were added to it as bonus tracks; the mini-album itself did not reach CD until a Blu-spec edition in 2017. The songs from it, along with the English-language versions of other early material, were collected as an outtakes disc in the thirtieth-anniversary Nexus box of 2015.