It's Ash! They're Back! Again!

What do you do when your third album has saved your bacon critically, stopped you from going bankrupt, and put you right on the verge of becoming One of the Biggest Bands in Britain ™ again?.  You **** off to America and don’t release another album for three years.  That’s what you do.

But! Fear not! Everyone’s favourite former-punk-poppers Ash (Tim Wheeler, Charlotte Hatherley, Mark Hamilton & Rick McMurray) are back.  They are however packing a dark secret…whereas they previously wanted to make sweet love to you in a y’know, caring way, Wheeler and co. now want to bugger yer bum cheeks with the rod of Satan that is new album ‘Meltdown’.

Gigwise caught up with the band backstage at the Preston leg of their low-key club tour....

Gigwise: OK so you were on the bones of your collective arses after the failure of Nu Clear Sounds.  Then you release Free All Angels – when did you realise you were saved?

Tim: “When Shining Light went to number two, then the album went to number one - that was it, really!”

Rick: “Yeah, before Shining Light’s success and we became commercially and artistically acceptable again, we were broke.  We basically had a grand left in the bank!”

Gigwise: During that whole Free All Angels campaign, what was your peak?

Rick: “Headlining the tent at Reading, 2001.  The NME did this big campaign to get The Strokes onto the main stage, whilst we stayed in the tent.  There were four thousand people OUTSIDE that night, who couldn’t get in!”

There was indeed. Gigwise was one of them. With so many influences on the band being from the States, it has always been a burning ambition of theirs to break over there.  This is despite being dropped by their US label, Geffen, after the disappointment of second album, Nu-Clear Sounds.  They finally secured a stateside release for its follow-up, ‘Free All Angels’, through Kinetic.

Gigwise: You then turned your attention to America.  Were you not apprehensive about going back over there after having failed there before, despite constant touring?

Tim: “We were kind of excited, really.  We hadn’t been back there for a while, and were excited at getting the chance to tour properly.  It was cool, a good buzz the whole time we were there, really”.

Gigwise: Whilst on that tour you started recording ‘Slashed’.

Tim: “Yeah, it’s like a horror slasher film set in a hotel in the Midwest of America, that was meant to be filmed in a week, but spiralled out of control!.  It’s still not finished.  It’s become kind of like a myth.  Along the way we picked up loads of celebrities – Chris Martin, Jonny Buckland, Dave Grohl, Moby, James Nesbitt…  I’m not sure it’ll ever be finished.”

Gigwise: Then there was the tour with Bowie…

Tim: “Well it was actually Moby’s tour - Bowie was just co-headlining it.  Busta Rhymes was on it too.  It was kind of a touring festival.”

Gigwise: So with you lot on first, were you playing in daylight?

Rick: “It was just really frustrating with the lack of people there.  Especially with the midweek gigs – there’d be 200 people there, so we’d be playing to loads of empty seats.”

Gigwise: So mainly apathy then?

Tim: “Yeah.”

Rick: “Some people got it, but with the size of the arenas or amphitheatres, they were just too spread out to get any vibe going.

Tim: “It was just like doing one long tour of sound checks.  It was great going out with Bowie though.”

Rick: “His eyes are funny.  One pupil’s permanently dilated – you don’t know if he’s looking at you or someone else”

Gigwise: How does touring in the US differ to the UK?

Tim: “More hands to shake; it’s different to here in that if you get yer record on Radio 1, then that’s it. Where as there…”

Mark: “We toured with loads of Vagrant bands…”

Tim: “Yeah, loads of bands off of Vagrant Records, who mainly exist from touring non-stop around and around America… and never get played on the radio.”

Gigwise: While you were doing all this touring, did you ever feel as if it was a bit of a waste of time? That you were banging your heads against a brick wall?

Rick: “Well, for a while it was great… but then it was record company politics as usual which really screwed it up.  We were on Kinetic there, which was funded by BMG, who withdrew all their funding.  So, we ended up having to pay for the tour ourselves, and had no money to spend on trying to get Burn Baby Burn on the radio.  So yeah, it was kind of frustrating.”

Gigwise: So where does that leave you now with regards to a US label?

Rick: “Well, again there’s a lot of politics going on, but we’ll probably end up going back over there with Warner Brothers.”

Warner’s subsidiary, East West Records, have recently acquired Ash’s UK label, Mushroom / Infectious (also home to Muse, Garbage and My Vitriol). Meanwhile back in the UK, a serious lag was occurring.  Aside from their greatest hits and it’s superseding single, ‘Envy’ being released in the Summer of 2002, there has been no new Ash product for three years.  This was after ‘Free All Angels’ and it’s 5 Top 30 singles firmly putting the band back on the UK music map, and on the cusp of even greater things…

Gigwise: By concentrating your efforts on the States, do you not think you missed your chance to capitalise on Free All Angel’s success here in the UK?

Rick: “Yeah. If we hadn’t spent that year in the States, we could have got this album recorded and released a lot earlier.  It would have been a different record too.”

Gigwise: In what way would it have been different?

Rick: “Probably more poppy…more along the lines of Free All Angels”

Which is exactly what ‘Meltdown’ is not.  Gone are the ballads, the swoon-some lullabies, even the Undertones/Buzzcocks chainsaw guitar pop for the most part.  Instead, it’s been replaced by riff-centric hard American Rock - even metal in places, which owes more to the Seattle scene than anything from over here.  But then, maybe the public perception of what Ash are really about has always been wrong?

Mark: “Free All Angels had all ballads and stuff on it, which when we were growing up we never thought we’d do in all our lives.  So this is more representative of what we were always about from the start.”