Ash

Girl From Mars! Kung Fu! Oh Yeah! Shining Light! So many hit songs! Ash have got proper solid staying power, having been around for 23 years and weathered a fair few storms on the way. They’re back with a stonkingly epic new album that’ll have you rockin’ out. I spoke to lead singer and all round nice guy Tim Wheeler about Jackie Chan, comebacks and how to stay together as a band. Don’t you know I’m in heaven with you?

What was the music scene like when you were growing up in Northern Ireland..were there other bands around that inspired you?

It was around the time when Nirvana really blew up so there were a lot of teenage bands. We were part of a scene although there weren’t many places to properly play; we’d do collective shows at a village hall. Nirvana inspired the DIY thing for us, and Therapy? from Northern Ireland had become really big as well so that encouraged us.

What was it like when you moved to London and started gigging around the country?

I guess we’d already started having a bit of success by the time we moved to London, a bit of radio play and press coverage, but it was a big shock to the system. It was quite exciting and the music scene was really good in London at the time.

You’ve had a great response over the years, like NASA using Girl From Mars as their hold tone and Jackie Chan using Kung Fu on one of his films. What other highlights have there been in your career thus far?

We had a lot of pop culture references early on, like Jackie Chan, and space, and a lot of times we got quite close to things we were obsessed with. We played at the wrap party for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace because we were such big Star Wars fans. We played with U2 to help promote the Good Friday Referendum, which was a really important show for us, and then getting on TOTP for the first time, having a number one album when we were 19 was crazy, touring round the world, playing Reading Festival…we stayed at Skywalker Ranch a couple times!

Wow! What’s Skywalker Ranch like?

It’s north of San Francisco in beautiful countryside, and it seems like you’re really in nature but there’s this incredible complex there. It’s very very cool.

When Charlotte in 2006 left how come you didn’t replace her?

I think we thought it would be a lot of work to replace her, and we’d had success as a three piece before she was even with us. Also we were starting to experiment with different things in the studio, bringing keyboards in and stuff, so we thought we could replace her with some other elements instead and give ourselves a new direction. Ultimately she was a hard person to replace!

Things went a bit astray not long after that but after a short break you guys managed to reform stronger than before, coming back with Shining Light. Did you think at this point that it might be it for the band?

We never felt like quitting but there were times when things were against us. The hardest point was when we put out our second album Nuclear Sounds, that was a dip for the band. Back in the day it was always a worry that you’d be dropped by your record label if your album wasn’t a success. Luckily we are one of the few bands that came back and had more success. A lot of our contemporaries who got big during Britpop were getting dropped and splitting up in 1999 and 2000 but we stuck at it and worked really hard to come back and that’s what gave us our longevity.

I guess a lot of 90’s bands have come back recently to tour and release new material, but there are so many that have fallen by the wayside who we haven’t heard from again.

You have to be a very committed team as a band, fully believe in it, and have good management. We’ve been through up’s and down’s but that made us stronger. If you take a band like The Charlatans, they do everything together and really stick at it. You have to work out how not to piss each other off!

Between your latest album Kablammo! (2015) and its predecessor Twilight of the Innocents (2007) you released a singles collection, the A-Z Series. What was the motivation for breaking away from the album format, and similarly why have you now returned to it?

Around 2005 we put out the album Meltdown but as we put it out Warner Brothers, who we were signed to at the time, laid off half their staff worldwide and we were definitely seeing music piracy hitting the industry as a whole. Album sales were on the decline and with iPods and iTunes people were listening to individual tracks rather than albums. It felt like a chance to try something different and we were quite excited about being able to record something and release it instantaneously thanks to the Internet. It was a new option for distribution. So we thought we’d try the singles series, and creatively it was really good to break away from the cycle of doing albums which we’d been doing for some time. It was a way of keeping things fresh. Then recently we were pleased to see that albums didn’t die completely, and with people getting interested in vinyl again people were listing to albums in the way they were designed to be listened to. It was a challenge to come back to making an album after a break.

The new album’s epically scuzzy and rocky, tracks like Go! Fight! Win! or Dispatch are very rock-oriented, and there’s also quite a bit of strings. Is this a direction you’d like the band to move to in the future, less indie and more rock?

We wanted stuff that would fit our live sets. The strings element came from doing some soundtrack work over the last few years so I had some contact with a string arranger. I could hear some songs on the new album would be good with strings so it was quite easy to do with my connections. It is pretty rocking and fast, and we wanted to make some songs which were short and snappy, but then there is a mellow side to the record too.

What sort of subjects inspired the new album?

I guess there was a sense of making a comeback which you can hear in some of the songs like Go! Fight! Win! And there are some pop culture references, like Evel Knieval and thoughts about re-emerging.

To what extent has living in America influenced your sound?

I’ve lived here 10 years now but we’ve always been very influenced by American bands; we’ve always loved a scuzzy American guitar sound. There’s great music scene in New York…hip hop seems to rule most of all these days.

What was it like working solo on your own record Lost Domain, which came out last year, inspired by your dad’s dementia?

Some of it was very hard to write but it’s always very cathartic writing songs when you’ve been through a hard time, I’ve always found songwriting an outlet. I’ve always written about what’s happening in my life to try to understand it. When I released the record out into the world it definitely brought a conclusion to things for me. There’s something about putting it out there and talking about it that helped me a lot. I was really worried it might upset my family but they also found it healing. It’s quite a heavy subject but people have said it’s uplifting as well and has helped people. I’m very glad I did it.

Which of Ash’s songs are you most proud of bringing to life and which song are you most excited to play live?

I love Shining Light. It’s taken on a life of its own, a lot of people cover it and it keeps surprising me how that song keeps going. Also I love playing Cocoon off the new album; it’s fast and furious, a good adrenaline rush!

Ash play the Waterfront on 12th December. Tickets available from ueaticketbookings.co.uk