Ash - Melting Point
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10 years in the business, No.1 albums, awards aplenty, a best-selling singles compilation, and all before their 30th birthdays? Blimey. ASH talk to STARSANDHEROES about moving on, dinosaurs and being ‘almost professional’.
It’s 8pm on a prematurely humid Sunday evening on London’s Oxford Street, and already a handful of variously-attired, surprisingly age-differentiated but equally excitable music fans are gathered outside the firmly closed shutters of the Virgin Megastore. Angie (age: “too young to be holding this beer”) has just stepped off the tube from the Essex suburbs, and is here because “they’re always brilliant live, and really fit as well”. Matt, 24, chugging on an improbably bulbous Smirnoff Ice bottle, has made the trip down from Warrington for the evening and has no idea where he’s kipping tonight; and Peter – “50-something, younger than John Peel anyway” – hails from, uh, Twickenham, and admires their “vim and vigour”, no less.
If you’ve paid attention to the title of this piece, you’ll know of course that these three people, among others, are united on a city pavement in their love of Ash, power-pop’s biggest success story in a decade. The quartet are about to launch their fourth album Meltdown, out at midnight, with an exclusive 11th hour fans-only gig at the aforementioned record shop. They’re not onstage ‘til 11pm, however, and all the tickets have already gone, so what the fans hope to gain from showing up this early is anybody's guess: the fact that they’re all enthusiastically jabbering about which surprise tracks Ash play tonight – "Jack Names The Planets" emerging as favourite – might serve as some clue.
Half an hour later, sitting at a large conference table opposite a politely melting starsandheroes in an airless Virgin interview room, the four members of Ash look like…well, they look like their fans, to be frank. All still well under 30, they seem nonetheless to have signed some clandestine agreement with Neutrogena to stay fresh-faced in spite of all the excess, as long as they continue to serve up the requisite shiny metallic guitar pop nuggets on a regular basis. Let’s look at the facts here: a dozen top 20 singles, two No.1 albums, an Ivor Novello award, a new album which explodes from the speakers with hitherto unimagined melodic ferocity, and no sign of chronic fatigue in any of the band. So after all this travail, how are they feeling? “Not bad,” says singer Tim Wheeler, his beaming grin giving the lie to his understatement.
“I’m down on my knees / In a willing sacrifice / I won’t confess my transgressions / I won’t repent my vice / I’ll pay the price” – "Won’t Be Saved"
To Tim’s right, the rest of Ash nod and murmur in agreement. Goateed drummer Rick McMurray is chipper and cordial; guitarist/singer Charlotte Hatherley, Ash’s most recent recruit but still an old hand at seven years standing, is more reserved but polite; bassist Mark Hamilton will say approximately 19 words in the next half-hour, three of which will be “sexual tension” and “Weezer”. This is by no means the first instore Ash have done: on the release of 1998’s difficult Nu-Clear Sounds album they played at record shops in four countries in 24 hours, a gruelling experience Tim describes as “”too painful” – naturally, the frontman ended the day sharing lines with the pilot. Did they ever imagine, sitting in a garage in Downpatrick in 1993, that this was the life they’d still be leading now?
“That was the one thing we were always asked about when [Ash’s 1995 debut album] 1977 came out,” remembers Rick, “‘Where do you see yourselves in five years’ time?’. A lot of people thought, without telling us, that we’d just implode, and we didn’t know either, it was such a whirlwind at the time”. “We love it too much to ever want to give it up,” Tim says emphatically. Indeed, the implosion could easily have happened when the aforementioned Nu-Clear Sounds album failed to set the world alight in the way its predecessor had. [Tim mentions a documentary, as-yet unreleased, chronicling Ash’s early years, which sounds like it hits the mid-point between Blur’s ‘Starshaped’ and Radiohead’s ‘Meeting People Is Easy’ in fame fall-out terms] Charlotte had joined a band at its first giddy peak and watched from the inside as it threatened to collapse.
“The weird thing about me joining was that I didn’t really realise Ash were a big No.1 band – I didn’t know the history of it,“ she admits. “It was pretty weird joining and headlining V97 in front of 20,000 people, and a few weeks later supporting U2! The first two years were just, ‘whoa’.” Any idea why Nu-Clear Sounds wasn’t a hit? “It didn’t have the singles on it, for a start,” says Tim bluntly. “It was quite a reactionary record, but we thought it was going to be successful.” Rick concurs: “For us as music fans, we though people would want something that changes tack a lot, 'cos that’s what we like in bands. But our casual fans wanted more of the same. It was around that time we started realising, ‘Fuck, this is what we want to be doing for a long time’”.
Ironically "Burn Baby Burn", three years later a massive hit when included on the Free All Angels album, came out of the Nu-Clear Sounds sessions but was omitted from the final album because it sounded too much like ‘1977’. For all this, there are no regrets in terms of the music itself, with both Tim and Rick alluding to the all-important “learning experience” associated with career hiccups. “I mean, some of our fans don’t like the song "Candy",” Tim admits – "Candy" being the sumptuous Walker Brothers-sampling, Dr Dre-influenced ballad on Free All Angels – “We were just trying to make an experimental pop song, but to a lot of our fans it was too pop.”
If Ash’s career since Nu-Clear Sounds is anything to go by, they’ve listened to their casual fans as well as the die-hard obsessives, and worked hard to combine the immediately hummable punk-pop hooks of their early singles with an ever-increasing cacophony of hard rock guitar noise. Follow-up album, 2000’s Free All Angels was, to put it mildly, massive – it spawned five hit singles and Tim earned himself an Ivor Novello songwriter’s award for stand-out single “Shining Light” – and shimmering new album Meltdown looks likely to repeat the trick with at least six potential hits on board. So was Tim surprised to win such a prestigious gong?
“I was surprised, yeah. Actually, I don’t want to sound like a wanker [the rest of Ash collapse into giggles] but I always thought that was the kind of thing I deserved but I really thought would never ever get that. It’s like the Brits, they’ve always been purely a major label thing – we never get nominated because we’ve been on an indie label, but since our label’s merged with East/West, we might end up with a nomination! I’d heard about the Ivor Novellos and thought, fuck, I’d love to get that recognition.”
Since the three Ash boys have known each other since they were at school, with Charlotte entering the fold much later, I wonder how the band dynamic has developed over the years. Who’s who in the Ash family? Tim insists that there is no Mum & Dad – “we’re more like brothers and sisters” – and Mark chips in that Ash’s manager Daz is “like an old uncle”, to giggles from Charlotte. “The tour manager’s always the Dad isn’t he?”, she counters. “When I joined I was the youngest, and took the role of being slightly crazy, but I think now we’re all in about the same place. I definitely felt like the little sister, because I’d never travelled the world and the boys had already been around it several times – I felt slightly naïve since I’d only been to Belgium on a school trip!”
It’ll be fairly obvious by now that Meltdown is a culmination of everything Ash have been through in the last decade – in fact, Tim feels they’ve “definitely” finally cracked the code and may well see this album catapult them to, say, Foo Fighters status worldwide. Recorded in LA with, as it happens, Foos producer Nick Raskulinecz – “he was booking studios within seconds of hearing the demos” remembers Rick – it’s a rock beast indeed with a gigantic hook to match every gigantic riff. Rick: “The new album feels like the start of a new chapter – bit of a cliché – working with a new producer, past our 10-year anniversary, y’know?” And how was recording this time around? “It was almost professional! In the past we’d always been in residential studios, so you always have that cabin fever thing where you feel quite trapped in it. But this time we travelled in each day…that might make it sound like just another job, but it was really fresh for us.” Tim takes up the thread: “We had to drive home, so we couldn’t just stay in the studio and get fucked up listening to music all night!”
“We belong in the gutter / Singing this song” – "Renegade Cavalcade"
Three of Ash are now based in London, with only Rick choosing to stay in Belfast, up the road from his childhood home. What’s it like going back to Ireland now? “We played in Downpatrick a couple of weeks ago, and it was really sweet!” says Tim. Rick agrees: “It was such an exciting day from start to finish – we went back to our old school, and we haven’t walked through the gates in 10 years.” “As soon as we walked in,“ continues Tim with all the pride of a conquering hero returning to the homestead, “all the kids came out of the classroom screaming – the place went nuts! We hadn’t even played our home town for 10 years cos we were always in Belfast, up the road.“ Have they always felt so welcome there? Rick admits that encountering good will “is something very rare in Northern Irish terms – a lot of people are going, ‘who the fuck are you, you cunt?’ – so it was surprisingly cool. People know us from the pubs at Christmas though.” Mark pipes up: “Over the years we’ve won them over – it starts off as resentment, but it’s almost turned into a bit of pride…”
Understandably, Ash are all “really excited” about their imminent European dates supporting the Pixies; Black Francis’s mob were huge formative influences on the trio, along with Nirvana and Teenage Fanclub. I mention that some of Meltdown – in particular the crunchy guitars of album centrepiece "Out Of The Blue" – brings to mind US buzzpop types Weezer, and Tim helpfully points out (to Charlotte’s inexplicable amusement) a picture of Weezer bassist Matt Sharp’s borrowed amp in the album’s inlay. As it turns out, Ash toured Europe with Weezer back in 1995. It’s all starting to fit into place.
All four members of Ash acknowledge Meltdown’s more metallic-edge: Rick’s drumming is the hardest it’s ever been, and Charlotte’s stepped up to the mic for a substantial increase in vocal duties. Tim’s vocal lines have, in his own words, “been pitched a lot higher so I can attack them more”, and Charlotte admits that “we really experimented with guitar sounds on this record. Tim got loads and loads of pedals…we deliberately set out to make it sound more powerful.” Audioslave knob-twiddler Rich Costey’s pinpoint-accurate ear for a widescreen LA rock epic hasn’t done their aims any harm either, despite him apparently looking like “a ginger Quentin Tarantino”…
By now you’ll have heard Ash’s new single "Orpheus" blasting out of a radio many times, and if its storming “Sunshine in the morning / Heading for the open road” chorus hasn’t achieved "Wake Up Boo!”-style Breakfast show ubiquity by July, the world has lost its marbles. Are the band concerned about being seen merely as radio-friendly unit-shifters? It seems not. “A lot of people wake up in the morning really depressed and can’t be arsed getting out of bed,” claims Rick, “but then they hear it on the radio and are like, woo-hoo!”. Follow-up single "Starcrossed", conversely, is a delicious mid-paced paean to Tim’s recently betrothed, and perhaps the most honest lyric he’s ever written; no doubt it’ll be soundtracking much beachside snogging this summer.
“When you first discover dinosaurs, you put them together in very different ways – Iguanadon, which was the first dinosaur that was found, they put it together on four legs and this fuckin’ horn on its nose, they thought it looked like an iguana…I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about…” Rick’s trying to explain the Ash songwriting process – maybe it’s time to leave them to it, as the conversation descends into the realms of the surreal. “The Diplodocus, that’s like a fake dinosaur, or is it Brontosaurus – one didn’t actually exist, it was bits of two dinosaurs…” Tim continues, warming inexplicably to the theme. starsandheroes draws the interview to a close with Rick murmuring about “biodegradable handbags”, Mark shaking his head in disbelief and Tim gamely trying to wrestle some decorum back into the conversation. Tim, can you imagine ever stopping this? “We’ll have to, someday – you’ve gotta stop when you get embarrassing. I don’t think AC/DC are embarrassing, but The Stones…they’re so old…we’ve got at least three more years in us!”
Two hours later, the basement of Virgin Megastore plays host to 100 or so wide-eyed Ash fans, watching the shape-throwing, pogoing four-piece ripping through a fair whack of the ‘Meltdown’ album and a handful of classics along the way. After the gig, the clock strikes twelve and it seems every last fan is queuing up to buy the album and get it signed. Nights like this serve as a timely reminder that life needn’t be all brooding melancholy and inelegant strumming; there’s fun to be had, and the ever-amenable Ash are here to help in the having of the fun. Long may they continue.
“I’m down on my knees / In a willing sacrifice / I won’t confess my transgressions / I won’t repent my vice / I’ll pay the price” – "Won’t Be Saved"
To Tim’s right, the rest of Ash nod and murmur in agreement. Goateed drummer Rick McMurray is chipper and cordial; guitarist/singer Charlotte Hatherley, Ash’s most recent recruit but still an old hand at seven years standing, is more reserved but polite; bassist Mark Hamilton will say approximately 19 words in the next half-hour, three of which will be “sexual tension” and “Weezer”. This is by no means the first instore Ash have done: on the release of 1998’s difficult Nu-Clear Sounds album they played at record shops in four countries in 24 hours, a gruelling experience Tim describes as “”too painful” – naturally, the frontman ended the day sharing lines with the pilot. Did they ever imagine, sitting in a garage in Downpatrick in 1993, that this was the life they’d still be leading now?
“That was the one thing we were always asked about when [Ash’s 1995 debut album] 1977 came out,” remembers Rick, “‘Where do you see yourselves in five years’ time?’. A lot of people thought, without telling us, that we’d just implode, and we didn’t know either, it was such a whirlwind at the time”. “We love it too much to ever want to give it up,” Tim says emphatically. Indeed, the implosion could easily have happened when the aforementioned Nu-Clear Sounds album failed to set the world alight in the way its predecessor had. [Tim mentions a documentary, as-yet unreleased, chronicling Ash’s early years, which sounds like it hits the mid-point between Blur’s ‘Starshaped’ and Radiohead’s ‘Meeting People Is Easy’ in fame fall-out terms] Charlotte had joined a band at its first giddy peak and watched from the inside as it threatened to collapse.
“The weird thing about me joining was that I didn’t really realise Ash were a big No.1 band – I didn’t know the history of it,“ she admits. “It was pretty weird joining and headlining V97 in front of 20,000 people, and a few weeks later supporting U2! The first two years were just, ‘whoa’.” Any idea why Nu-Clear Sounds wasn’t a hit? “It didn’t have the singles on it, for a start,” says Tim bluntly. “It was quite a reactionary record, but we thought it was going to be successful.” Rick concurs: “For us as music fans, we though people would want something that changes tack a lot, 'cos that’s what we like in bands. But our casual fans wanted more of the same. It was around that time we started realising, ‘Fuck, this is what we want to be doing for a long time’”.
Ironically "Burn Baby Burn", three years later a massive hit when included on the Free All Angels album, came out of the Nu-Clear Sounds sessions but was omitted from the final album because it sounded too much like ‘1977’. For all this, there are no regrets in terms of the music itself, with both Tim and Rick alluding to the all-important “learning experience” associated with career hiccups. “I mean, some of our fans don’t like the song "Candy",” Tim admits – "Candy" being the sumptuous Walker Brothers-sampling, Dr Dre-influenced ballad on Free All Angels – “We were just trying to make an experimental pop song, but to a lot of our fans it was too pop.”
If Ash’s career since Nu-Clear Sounds is anything to go by, they’ve listened to their casual fans as well as the die-hard obsessives, and worked hard to combine the immediately hummable punk-pop hooks of their early singles with an ever-increasing cacophony of hard rock guitar noise. Follow-up album, 2000’s Free All Angels was, to put it mildly, massive – it spawned five hit singles and Tim earned himself an Ivor Novello songwriter’s award for stand-out single “Shining Light” – and shimmering new album Meltdown looks likely to repeat the trick with at least six potential hits on board. So was Tim surprised to win such a prestigious gong?
“I was surprised, yeah. Actually, I don’t want to sound like a wanker [the rest of Ash collapse into giggles] but I always thought that was the kind of thing I deserved but I really thought would never ever get that. It’s like the Brits, they’ve always been purely a major label thing – we never get nominated because we’ve been on an indie label, but since our label’s merged with East/West, we might end up with a nomination! I’d heard about the Ivor Novellos and thought, fuck, I’d love to get that recognition.”
Since the three Ash boys have known each other since they were at school, with Charlotte entering the fold much later, I wonder how the band dynamic has developed over the years. Who’s who in the Ash family? Tim insists that there is no Mum & Dad – “we’re more like brothers and sisters” – and Mark chips in that Ash’s manager Daz is “like an old uncle”, to giggles from Charlotte. “The tour manager’s always the Dad isn’t he?”, she counters. “When I joined I was the youngest, and took the role of being slightly crazy, but I think now we’re all in about the same place. I definitely felt like the little sister, because I’d never travelled the world and the boys had already been around it several times – I felt slightly naïve since I’d only been to Belgium on a school trip!”
It’ll be fairly obvious by now that Meltdown is a culmination of everything Ash have been through in the last decade – in fact, Tim feels they’ve “definitely” finally cracked the code and may well see this album catapult them to, say, Foo Fighters status worldwide. Recorded in LA with, as it happens, Foos producer Nick Raskulinecz – “he was booking studios within seconds of hearing the demos” remembers Rick – it’s a rock beast indeed with a gigantic hook to match every gigantic riff. Rick: “The new album feels like the start of a new chapter – bit of a cliché – working with a new producer, past our 10-year anniversary, y’know?” And how was recording this time around? “It was almost professional! In the past we’d always been in residential studios, so you always have that cabin fever thing where you feel quite trapped in it. But this time we travelled in each day…that might make it sound like just another job, but it was really fresh for us.” Tim takes up the thread: “We had to drive home, so we couldn’t just stay in the studio and get fucked up listening to music all night!”
“We belong in the gutter / Singing this song” – "Renegade Cavalcade"
Three of Ash are now based in London, with only Rick choosing to stay in Belfast, up the road from his childhood home. What’s it like going back to Ireland now? “We played in Downpatrick a couple of weeks ago, and it was really sweet!” says Tim. Rick agrees: “It was such an exciting day from start to finish – we went back to our old school, and we haven’t walked through the gates in 10 years.” “As soon as we walked in,“ continues Tim with all the pride of a conquering hero returning to the homestead, “all the kids came out of the classroom screaming – the place went nuts! We hadn’t even played our home town for 10 years cos we were always in Belfast, up the road.“ Have they always felt so welcome there? Rick admits that encountering good will “is something very rare in Northern Irish terms – a lot of people are going, ‘who the fuck are you, you cunt?’ – so it was surprisingly cool. People know us from the pubs at Christmas though.” Mark pipes up: “Over the years we’ve won them over – it starts off as resentment, but it’s almost turned into a bit of pride…”
Understandably, Ash are all “really excited” about their imminent European dates supporting the Pixies; Black Francis’s mob were huge formative influences on the trio, along with Nirvana and Teenage Fanclub. I mention that some of Meltdown – in particular the crunchy guitars of album centrepiece "Out Of The Blue" – brings to mind US buzzpop types Weezer, and Tim helpfully points out (to Charlotte’s inexplicable amusement) a picture of Weezer bassist Matt Sharp’s borrowed amp in the album’s inlay. As it turns out, Ash toured Europe with Weezer back in 1995. It’s all starting to fit into place.
All four members of Ash acknowledge Meltdown’s more metallic-edge: Rick’s drumming is the hardest it’s ever been, and Charlotte’s stepped up to the mic for a substantial increase in vocal duties. Tim’s vocal lines have, in his own words, “been pitched a lot higher so I can attack them more”, and Charlotte admits that “we really experimented with guitar sounds on this record. Tim got loads and loads of pedals…we deliberately set out to make it sound more powerful.” Audioslave knob-twiddler Rich Costey’s pinpoint-accurate ear for a widescreen LA rock epic hasn’t done their aims any harm either, despite him apparently looking like “a ginger Quentin Tarantino”…
By now you’ll have heard Ash’s new single "Orpheus" blasting out of a radio many times, and if its storming “Sunshine in the morning / Heading for the open road” chorus hasn’t achieved "Wake Up Boo!”-style Breakfast show ubiquity by July, the world has lost its marbles. Are the band concerned about being seen merely as radio-friendly unit-shifters? It seems not. “A lot of people wake up in the morning really depressed and can’t be arsed getting out of bed,” claims Rick, “but then they hear it on the radio and are like, woo-hoo!”. Follow-up single "Starcrossed", conversely, is a delicious mid-paced paean to Tim’s recently betrothed, and perhaps the most honest lyric he’s ever written; no doubt it’ll be soundtracking much beachside snogging this summer.
“When you first discover dinosaurs, you put them together in very different ways – Iguanadon, which was the first dinosaur that was found, they put it together on four legs and this fuckin’ horn on its nose, they thought it looked like an iguana…I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about…” Rick’s trying to explain the Ash songwriting process – maybe it’s time to leave them to it, as the conversation descends into the realms of the surreal. “The Diplodocus, that’s like a fake dinosaur, or is it Brontosaurus – one didn’t actually exist, it was bits of two dinosaurs…” Tim continues, warming inexplicably to the theme. starsandheroes draws the interview to a close with Rick murmuring about “biodegradable handbags”, Mark shaking his head in disbelief and Tim gamely trying to wrestle some decorum back into the conversation. Tim, can you imagine ever stopping this? “We’ll have to, someday – you’ve gotta stop when you get embarrassing. I don’t think AC/DC are embarrassing, but The Stones…they’re so old…we’ve got at least three more years in us!”
Two hours later, the basement of Virgin Megastore plays host to 100 or so wide-eyed Ash fans, watching the shape-throwing, pogoing four-piece ripping through a fair whack of the ‘Meltdown’ album and a handful of classics along the way. After the gig, the clock strikes twelve and it seems every last fan is queuing up to buy the album and get it signed. Nights like this serve as a timely reminder that life needn’t be all brooding melancholy and inelegant strumming; there’s fun to be had, and the ever-amenable Ash are here to help in the having of the fun. Long may they continue.
Charlie Ivens
posted by Anonymous @ Thursday, May 20, 2004
