Angels With Dirty Faces

Sometimes I’m bloody glad I don’t work for television. It’s Berlin, it’s about 2am, I’m sitting backstage at the Columbia Fritz with all of Ash, who have just played a blinder of a Paddy’s Night gig, and in a rare moment of clarity, I realise how bizarre we would look on camera.

I’m wearing a foot-high top-hat of some foam-like material, emblazoned with a grinning psychedelic snake and the logo of a well-known stout brand from Cork. Charlotte Hatherley, guitarist, is similarly attired, the only difference being her headgear is coloured green, white and orange. Tim Wheeler, frontman, and Rick McMurray, drums, are both resplendent in matching conical Bishop’s hats, while you can hardly see Mark Hamilton, bassist, for the enormous green dicky-bow he is wearing.

Everyone is in great spirits. The gig was bloody amazing – and probably the first time all day that things went to plan. A litany of early morning headaches, delayed flights and lost luggage meant that Ash’s guitars only arrived five minutes before they were due on-stage. A muted soundcheck had left both the band and their manager fearing the worst. The fact that everyone was suffering from a universal hangover from hell didn’t help. And yet, everything magically came right the second they stepped onto the stage, even if Mark did puke his guts up backstage before returning for the encore.

“It’s bizarre how you can walk off stage, feeling as pissed as you did the night before but in a really good mood, and all day you’ve just been dead,” laughs Charlotte after the gig.

“Live is where we are going to prove ourselves,” Tim admits later. “We are just a full-on energy rush.”

Flashback to an unfeasibly early hour on the morning of Paddy’s Day in Dublin Airport, where Ash are visibly suffering the mother of all hangovers, courtesy of the Meteor Awards after-show party.

Tour manager/sound engineer Ian explains that he is in foul form due to a pounding headache, and yet he still manages to treat everyone – band and airline staff and even a journalist, with courtesy and respect.

Tim is wearing shades, I’m assuming not out of any sense of rock star cool, but more because the light fucking hurts. Rick is reasonably bright-eyed and bushy-Mohicanned, considering his alcoholic endeavours of the previous evening. Charlotte is silent, wallowing in her own private misery. Mark, though, is in a real mess, taking every opportunity to lie down, cover his head and close his eyes, even if only for a few seconds. While the rest of us seem to gradually come to some semblance of humanity as the day progresses, Mark doesn’t look truly alive until he steps onto the stage in Berlin.

Before then, however, we have the small matter of getting from Dublin to the German capital via the capital of Denmark. The flight to Copenhagen is relatively incident-free: in fact, myself and Tim have a pleasant chat about everything from exploding wind-up clocks to favourite movies. A full-on charge through Copenhagen Airport later, we’re on another plane, this time to Berlin, where there’s a welcoming committee of people, but sadly no guitars, which are still in Copenhagen. We’re met by Hilary from the Irish Embassy in Berlin, who organised the evening’s gig, as well as a journalist and photographer from a German magazine for young women, who are running a special feature on Charlotte. The guitarist shows remarkable patience, considering the fact that she spends the next three-four hours with a camera stuck perpetually in her face.

Suddenly, we’re off again, to our hotel, where we barely have time for a quick shower before we’re taxi-bound for the Columbia Fritz. The 700-capacity venue was specially built after World War II as a cinema for American troops, and resembles an old-style American movie theatre.

Ash are straight in the door and onto the stage for a sound-check, followed swiftly by a champagne reception with no less a luminary than the Irish Ambassador to Berlin, who turns out to be very down-to-earth (and very complimentary of this very magazine!). We’re joined by The Frank and Walters, who are also on the bill and have been hiding backstage until that moment. No sooner have we dropped our (champagne) flutes than it’s time for the Franks to take the stage. Paul, Niall, Ashley and Sarah play a super-tight 45-minute set which includes everything from the classic pop of ‘After All’ and ‘Plenty Times’ through to their latest aural creations, centre-pieced by the brilliant ‘Underground’ and the mesmerising ‘New York’.

Ash take the stage by storm, their instruments, including Tim’s prized Flying V guitar, having arrived precisely five minutes before the gig. The place is stuffed with native Germans and ex-pats alike. Songs from the new album are welcomed with almost as much glee as old favourites like ‘Oh Yeah’, ‘Girl From Mars’ and the inevitable ‘Uncle Pat’. One of the most remarkable things about this gig is the great songs they don’t play (‘Wild Surf’, ‘Warmer Than Fire’ and ‘Pacific Palisades’ to name but three) and yet there is not a dull moment from the time they take the stage until they finally vacate it, an hour and a half later.

There is a palpable sense that Ash are on the verge of something big. Talking to anyone in the Ash camp, and you get the distinct impression that they are within a hair’s breadth of crossing over into mass hysteria in much the same way as, say, Oasis did with Morning Glory, The Verve with Urban Hymns, or Travis with The Man Who. Listening to Free All Angels, one would be hard-pressed to disagree. To these ears, it is the most perfectly hook-laden collection of sun-kissed pop songs in many a long summer.

“You only need to buy one album this summer, and that’s our album,” Tim smiles proudly. “It was a bit ambitious but the whole idea was to create an album like Nevermind or Appetite For Destruction: non-stop good tunes with nothing you’d want to fast-forward. You have to strive for that.”

In ‘Shining Light’, they have already released one of the singles of the year. On first listen, you find yourself tapping your feet along with its incessant melody and you think, ‘nice tune’, but repeated listening serves to underline just how good a song it is. Live in the Columbia Fritz, it is perhaps the first sign that this is a great gig: Charlotte and Tim wringing the notes from their guitars, teasing the hooks out with no little style, as well as a good old-fashioned helping of sweat.

The good news for the band themselves and a public starved of real rock heroes is that with Free All Angels, there’s plenty more where that came from. Current seven-inch ‘Burn Baby Burn’ is three and a half minutes of adrenaline and melody, while album opener, ‘Walking Barefoot’ is surely another single-in-waiting. In fact, the latter reduced album co-producer Owen Morris to tears. “He reckons it’s one of the best songs ever written and he’s a very picky kind of guy,” smiles Tim immodestly.

“There is genuine talk of releasing seven singles and I don’t think that’s been done since Michael Jackson,” admits the frontman. “It makes a change for us to be fighting over what the singles are going to be as opposed to worrying if we have any.“

Talk of seven singles is not idle speculation either. As well as the aforementioned trio of terrific tunes, there is the cinematic sugar-coated sweep of ‘Candy’, the teenage punk anthem of ‘Cherry Bomb’, the string-laden, bittersweet ‘Someday’; the heartfelt ‘Sometimes’ and the postively widescreen ‘There’s A Star’.

Rick sums the album up succintly: “With songs this good, you don’t have to fuck around trying to push out the boundaries of music. You’ve got the songs so just play them.” In short, it’s a million miles away from what is regarded as their difficult second album proper, Nu-Clear Sounds.

Keen Ash observers can point out a distinct genealogy, stretching from the adolescent punksters of their debut mini-album, Trailer, right through to Free All Angels. They have certainly come a long way since their early teens, when a young Rick McMurray found himself in the audience for a local punk outfit called Vietnam, which featured Tim Wheeler and Mark Hamilton. “I was there wearing my cowboy boots, saying ‘This ain’t Aerosmith’,” Rick laughs. The Steve Tyler fan ended up joining the band as drummer, and soon after they changed their name to Ash.

“At the time, Downpatrick had a healthy punk scene,” recalls Mark. “There must have been 10-15 bands that everyone knew from school. It was almost like a mini-Seattle. If you weren’t in a band, you were a roadie for a band or your mates were in a band. It was fantastic. I used to make copies of our demos on a crappy douple-tape deck, and we sold 300 demos within a couple of weeks to kids around town. If we sold 300 copies per town, nationwide, we’d have a huge hit.”

Such entrepreneurism aside, by their own admission Ash weren’t the most together band in the world when they entered a studio for the first time.

“We didn’t have a fucking clue at the start,” is Tim’s honest assessment of the band circa Trailer. “We were completely naïve. But we had determination, drive and ambition – there was an energy between us. And we had strong tunes from from the start. We were at the U2 Astoria gig a few weeks ago, when they played their first single. Our manager leaned over to me and whispered, ‘At least ‘Jack Names The Planets’ has a good melody’, so we can still play it in 10 years time.”

Touted in every magazine worth its salt as ones to watch, Ash followed up their early promise with their first album proper, the incendiary 1977, which went straight to Number One in the British charts. It included the singles ‘Girl From Mars’, ‘Oh Yeah’ and ‘Goldfinger’, as well as hinting at a darker, more dangerous side to the band.

“1977 just summed us up at that point,” recalls Mark, “The whole excess. We didn’t know what had hit us. It was just mental.”

They seem a lot happier now than in the months following 1977, when they embraced rock ‘n’ roll gluttony with abandon. In hindsight, do they think that maybe there were a little young when success and excess came knocking at the door?

“I wouldn’t change a thing,” Tim avows. “We learned a lot of lessons on the way. If you write a song like ‘Girl From Mars’ when you’re 16, you don’t hold that back until you’re 24 to release it.”

Their next opus, the oft-maligned but frequently breathtaking Nu-Clear Sounds was very much a reaction to the madness that followed in the wake of 1977. Now a quartet, having been joined by second guitarist Charlotte Hatherley, the sound was dirtier, grittier than before, hiding the melodies of ‘Wild Surf’ and ‘Jesus Says’ under layers of angry guitar – it had more in common with Sonic Youth than The Undertones.

“We went out of our way to make it inaccessible,” admits Tim. “I think, deep down, we wanted to commit commercial suicide – it was very schizophrenic.”

Mark interjects, “We felt that we had a lot to prove to people who thought we weren’t really serious. We tried a bit too hard to be different from what we would normally do.”

Tim takes up the point: “1977 was a great album but nobody ever mentioned that. All people ever went on about was how young we were – we felt we were dismissed as being a bit goofy and teenage. We wanted to be taken seriously a bit, and that was part of the reason why Nu-Clear Sounds is like it is.”

While Nu-Clear Sounds had old guitar-adorers like yours truly drooling, it unsurprisingly failed to blaze the commercial trail left by its predecessor. However, their demons well and truly exercised and exorcised, Tim, Mark, Rick and Charlotte were able to get back to the reasons why they formed the band in the first place for Free All Angels.

“This album came very naturally,” Rick notes. ”We ended up demoing 30 songs for the album and it was the most pleasurable songwriting experience we’ve ever had.”

Tim echoes these sentiments: “I was just writing tunes again and wasn’t trying to be too clever or stylish.”

Some of the songs on the new album, on first listen, sound as unlike Ash as you can imagine. Take ‘Candy’: a saccharine-drenched ballad that wouldn’t seem out of place in Grease, and yet it works really well. In fact, Mark reckons that ‘Candy’ could well be the band’s biggest hit to date when it is eventually released as a single.

“I think when some people hear it for the first time, they’re going to go ‘What the fuck is that?’” Rick admits, “but the more you listen to it, you realise that althought it is taken in a weird direction, it’s just another great Tim Wheeler tune.”

Tim cracks up laughing at this point, patting Rick on the back: “Have I got my own genre now?”

In fact, ‘Candy’ borrows a sample from Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s ‘Make It Easy On Yourself’, which means Ash have to pay Austin Powers’ mate a rather hefty royalty cheque.

“C’est la vie,” Tim shrugs. “That’s what happens if you use samples.”

He then points out that the original incarnation of another new song, ‘Pacific Pallisades’, utilised heavy sampling of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. “It was the most bizarre fucking thing I ever heard in my life,” Rick grins. “Lines from everywhere were stuck together and running right the way through the song – it was really psychotic.”

Realising that Messrs Wilson & Co. would demand large wads of cash for the use of their vocal sounds, Ash wisely decided to remove the sample. ‘Pacific Palisades’ is now recognisable as another quintessential Ash tune, as is Rick’s homage to S&M, ‘Submission’. “You write a dirty old riff, add some dirty old words and it’s great,” laughs the drummer. “It gives me a hard-on every time.”

Free All Angels was recorded in Spain over a two-month period, which Tim describes as “very chilled”, and was produced by the band and Owen Morris, with Alan Moulder in remix duties.

“Owen was demented,” laughs Tim. “You know the way the producer is meant to keep the band in line; it’s the other way around with him. Owen is like the psychopath and Alan is the psychiatrist.”

The album finished and ready for release, Ash then got down to the, ah, serious business of publicly torching 300 Westlife CDs and photographing the moment for posterity. Aside from the obvious reasons, why make such a public statement of their dislike of Cian & Co.?

“Westlife are just the most bland band on the planet ever,” Tim ventures. “Every single one of their songs is like a power ballad that sounds identical to the last one. It leaves you longing for some real bands, real music.”

“I don’t understand why they get wound up by us,” Charlotte interjects. “They should expect it. They’re sitting on a pile of millions of pounds. Why the fuck should they give a shit?”

Mark agrees: “If other bands or other artists take a dig at us, we just laugh it off but they got really upset.”

Westlife’s comeback questioned how Ash could afford to buy 300 of their CDs, conveniently forgetting that the Downpatrick outfit shifted a million units while still in their teens.

Ash are not Westlife-specific with their ire, however. Ronan Keating took exception to comments the band made to NME recently and he and Rick had words at the Meteor Awards. Louis Walsh, too, comes in for a verbal lashing, this time from Mark.

“Louis Walsh is the worst fucking thing that has happened to Irish music in the last couple of centuries,” the bassist spits. “Phil Lynnott is probably fucking turning in his grave.”

Charlotte joins the fray: “Do you know he is putting together a manufactured rock band that is supposed to sound like the next Bon Jovi – isn’t that the most hideous idea ever, another fucking Bryan Adams?”

While we’re on the subject of manufactured pop bands, I wondered if they had seen any of ITV’s Popstars programme. It transpires that, not only have they seen a couple of episodes, they are on more than nodding terms with one of the ‘stars’ who didn’t make the final band, the larger than life Darius.

Tim explains: “He told us he is a huge Ash fan, and that he was in a band who covered ‘Girl From Mars’. We called his bluff and asked him to come up and sing it with us – and he actually did.”

If Free All Angels is the album to propel Ash to humungous fame and fortune on a scale with these manufactured popstars, though, are they ready for it?

“If it does go huge, the fame thing doesn’t phase us too much ‘cos we’ve already been through that with 1977,” Rick muses. “This time round, we’d be much more prepared for it.”

“When 1977 came out, we were in Smash Hits, Kerrang! and NME at the same time,” Tim smiles. “It was surreal, but I think we’ll be ready for it this time if it comes along. If not, we’ll be The Velvet Underground – no worries.”

The Velvet Underground didn’t have the benefit of the internet, however. Ash have embraced the IT generation probably more than any other band on the planet. Their website is huge, and is getting bigger by the day, with news, photos, pen-pictures of the band, as well as rare tracks and video footage from their personal home movies.

”Mark is our resident computer boffin, and a very unlikely one at that. Every time he sits down somewhere, he has his laptop out, and he’s on the web checking out our message board and stuff,” Tim admits. “The internet is so beautiful because it is so interactive – it’s a great tool and medium for bands to get a direct link to their fans.”

The band are constantly filming material while on the road, from brief interviews backstage to live gigs, and their manager, Tav can often be seen, camera in hand, talking to fans after their shows. These ‘home videos’ are being archived on the website.

“You release albums; you release singles and you tour, and maybe someone will be able to go to one show,” Mark notes. “But this archive means that we can give the fans new stuff all the time and they keep coming back to see what has been added to the site.”

While on the subject of the internet, a copy of Free All Angels was posted up on Napster a couple of weeks before our interview, yet you won’t see Ash approaching the site to have their songs removed, as Mark notes: “We have no problems with Napster. Fans will go out and buy our album anyway. They want the artwork and the sleeve. People who use Napster are the biggest CD buyers out there: they are huge music fans.”

It’s not just on the web that Ash are techno-friendly. One of the most interesting additions to Free All Angels is an enhanced feature, which enables fans to create their own videos to accompany any track on the album.

Mark explains: “You select any song from the album and you can pull in any combination from a whole cache of video clips and stills. You can then go on the net and post up your EDL (Edit Decision List), so anyone else who has the album can download your edit, without having to download the actual video files. So fans will be able to watch their friends’ videos on their own PC.”

Ash certainly have a plethora of innovative live footage to choose from for these archives, having played some, shall we say, challenging gigs in their time. These included headlining ‘The Lost Weekend’ in London’s Docklands Arena in place of Nine Inch Nails.

“We were supposed to be the last band on before Nine Inch Nails and we found out that morning that they pulled out,” Rick recalls. “If we had cancelled too, the whole show would have been pulled, and we’re not a band who cancels gigs.”

“We went out and played to a load of really pissed-off goths,” Tim grimaces. “Some people say I look a bit like Trent Reznor, so we thought we’d pull it off,” he grins, “but it was hard work.”

Just the week before our Berlin trip, Tim and Charlotte played an acoustic set halfway up the Swiss Alps for BBC Radio 1. Other notably weird events include the full band rocking out in a San Francisco radio studio at the ungodly hour of 7am and playing on a spaceship in Bangkok.

One of their most high-profile events in recent years, though, was undoubtedly the Good Friday Peace Concert in Belfast with U2, David Trimble and John Hume. A lot of people wouldn’t have expected to see Ash at such an event, seeing as they have never been seen as a particularly political band, having more akin with Star Wars and Bruce Lee movies than the heady world of politics. Yet, a new biography of David Trimble makes reference to the fact that the Northern politician and the rock band actually got on really well. In fact, Ash are still on Mr Trimble’s Christmas card list.

“We had to share a press conference with him, which was really crazy,” remembers Tim. ”Everyone was there, CNN, Sky News, News At Ten. Trevor McDonald mentioning Ash on TV was a bit surreal.

“David Trimble’s daughter is a big fan, and he got us to sign autographs for her,” he continues. ”John Hume was very moved by the whole affair: he was in tears at the side of the stage. He’s a fucking geezer, that guy.”

And what about their relationship with Bono and the boys? Having already supported them on some of the PopMart dates, they must be mates at this stage.

“It’s full-on respect from us,” Tim notes. “They were very good to us and looked out for us. They’re always interested in what we’re up to and bigging us up to people.”

It seems as if Ash have more than a passing interest in the fate of the biggest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world. Perhaps they even have an eye on U2’s crown, which begs the question: could Ash become a stadium band?

“I think we’d rock stadiums,” Tim muses. “I think with this album we could take it to that level. If we were playing arenas now, they would be the most bad-ass gigs you ever saw. We have three and a half albums to choose from – there wouldn’t be a dull moment.”

More than any other track on Free All Angels, surely the closing ‘World Domination’ emphasises their attitude this time around?

“Yeah, that’s a good manifesto,” Tim grins.

“We recorded that song last for the album, and we recorded it live,” Rick enthuses. “It was just a case of ‘Bring it on’. We felt we had just recorded the best album in the world ever ever, and that song is what it’s all about.”

It would seem then that conquering the globe is their aim, and Paddy’s Night was the first victory in a battle that will see them on the road for most of 2001, with the distinct possibility of an Irish festival date during the summer. They’re drawing up their own blueprint though, which begs to differ from the old masterplan: Manhattan can wait for another day; first, they took Berlin.

Free All Angels is available from 20th April on Infectious Records