Ash! Bang! Wallop!

It’s been a year full of triumphs for Ash, so you’d think they’d be well accustomed to lavish praise and congratulations. However, I’ve just compared them to the Beach Boys, and that sound you almost hear is of Tim Wheeler blushing.

“Wow…. Cool as fuck! (pause) …Well, I’m a huge fan, huge. He (Brian Wilson) had this deep… emotion… behind his songs, and at the same time people could listen to them and think they’re kinda bubblegum. But there’s a lot more going on there than you think.”

There’s a lot more going on there than you think: perhaps that sums Ash up in one. It’s not as mad a comparison as it sounds. People like the High Llamas notwithstanding, Ash are easily the chief torch-bearers of the kind of hyperintense life-or-death teenage pop – deceptively catchy, musically complex, unfathomable emotion just beneath the sun-warmed surfaces – that Wilson first shaped in the sand some thirty years ago. They are young masters of that ten-foot-wave bloodrush that the ‘Surfing USA’ era encapsulated and that the anarcho-anger of punk sharpened to a razor-fine point a decade later. And they’re the best band I can think of for coming close to Wilson’s end-of-summer wistfulness, his sun-burned melancholy: the ache of nearly-spent youth, the poignancy of possessing old heads and young bodies. In short, there’s more Wilsonian pain and exhilaration in a single key change of ‘Shining Light’ than in a hundred of Sean O’Hagan’s studied chord-structure perambulations.

In Hotpress earlier this year, Tim Wheeler explained that fourth album Free All Angels was written in an effort to create an album comprised exclusively of “good stuff, with nothing you’d want to fast-forward through.” They’ve just about done it, too: The Strokes could have learned a lot this year about short sharp shocks and nonstop rock action from Ash. But never mind the bollocks: let’s ask Tim about some of the stuff that happened in 2001, in the process of freeing all angels.

God Save the Cian. He aint no human being

First of all, there was the Westlife record-burning incident, wherein a number of the boyband’s platters were turned into ash-trays in a two-finger salute to manufactured pop music. Whether it was a cynical bit of evil-genius PR, a cheap shot from a guitar band with a comeback single in the shops or simply an impromptu Jarvis Cocker-style poke at pop pomposity, it should be remembered that the upshot was a lot of highly amusing column inches and several hundred less Westlife recordings on Planet Earth. I believe the word is ‘Result.’

So what actually sparked the Great Fire?

“I think it was kinda like: everyone didn’t think we’d be able to come back, in that kind of climate, of mass-produced pop overkill. So I dunno, we just wanted to sorta make a little stand, and... It was kinda a punk joke, really.”

Didn’t buying all those records just push them higher up the charts?

“Nah, we were doing an instore in a shop, so we kind of swopped loads of copies of ‘Shining Light’ for them. (evil laughter) It was really funny. It kinda backfired, though, because in the summer, we were doing a festival in Norway, and we were doing a little acoustic thing for this radio station beforehand, and in the middle of this little thing we were doing they decided to have a barbecue of Westlife CDs. And the smoke in this room was so toxic. Honest to God. We nearly got killed.”

So if you hate manufactured pop so much, can you explain why you invited Darius of Popstars [rejected also-ran from ‘talent’-spotting TV show] to sing with you during a gig in Leeds?

“Yeah, well exactly,” Tim says somewhat unexpectedly. “That was the bizarre thing. It was actually the same night that we torched those CDs, as well. So it was almost like a... bizarre contradiction, but... We had met him on some TV show. And he’d come up and told us how big a fan he was, and how he used to cover ‘Girl From Mars’ in some old band he was in. So we just kinda thought... Well, you know... We said to him as a joke, why don’t you come and sing with us. And then we were kinda mortified when he turned up. Our fans at that gig were like, What the hell is goin’ on…”

Did you think you were helping to unleash a new musical force upon the world – that it was a kind of Robbie Williams-crashing-Oasis-type New Pop Phenomenon?

“Er, no, we hoped it would die away as quickly as possible. Luckily he’s had his fifteen minutes of fame,” he concludes. “Well, his ten... His five minutes.”

Yow! Nasty Nigel, your successor has arrived.

If you had auditioned for Popstars, in some insane alternate universe where such things might happen, Tim, what would your audition song have been?

“Oh, god!… (racks brains) …That’s a really hard... (suddenly snaps to attention) ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ by Carl Douglas.”

Life during wartime

Ash spent most of the year touring Free All Angels. 2001 is probably the last year anyone would have wanted to spend on a plane.

“Yeah. We actually went to Japan on September the 11th, so that was a bit freaky. It was midnight in Japan when we arrived, and we got into the rooms, and I switched on the tv, just as the second plane was about to hit. We watched the whole thing live on TV. We were staying right beside the American embassy, so there were all these helicopters going around. And everyone was in shock, ’cos no-one knew what was gonna happen, everyone thought it was the end of the world. And then we had to fly – we had about thirty flights over the next month after that. We were so paranoid.”

Was there ever a moment where you were like: Right, that’s it, we’re going home?

“Yeah, actually. About a week after that, we were in Indonesia, which is like a hardcore Muslim country, and we weren’t allowed to leave the hotel, or anything. We had the whole floor of the hotel to ourselves, and about 250 security guards. It was insane.”

What do you mean, you weren’t allowed to leave?

“Em, ’cos they were really strongly anti-Western there. There were some German tourists who got their heads kicked in, that week, cos people thought they were Americans. That kind of stuff. And there was loads of rioting going on. But still – we did this great gig to about four-and-a-half thousand people.”

Life during wartime Mk2

In October, Ash dedicated ‘Oh Yeah’ to the peace process during a London gig.

“Yeah... It was a sort of good day, it was the Wednesday when they legalised dope, and it looked like the assembly was getting back together, so you know, it was nice to have a bit of optimism back again.”

Have Ash ever gotten any stick for being vocal about the north?

“No, never. I think people realise we’re not out to…” The implied end of this sentence is ‘exploit this cause for a higher profile’. “You know, we’ve never written a song about it, or anything… It’s just ’cos it’s where we come from. It’s a matter that’s important to us.

“The only people who gave us stick was, like, when Ian Paisley called us a ‘Republican band’. (laughs like a drain) It was around the time of that ‘Yes’ gig [with U2 in 1998, to help encourage a ‘yes’ vote in the Good Friday Agreement referendum]. ’Cos they were just, you know, trying to shoot the whole thing down.”

I tell Tim about Jon Ronson’s book Them: Adventures With Extremists, and how, secreted among the book’s collection of funny-scary profiles of the dangerously zealous, is a chapter about the Rev. Paisley. I tell Tim about how, when Ronson promoted the book in Northern Ireland, many people who showed up to meet him were bemused, protesting, “But he’s not an extremist!”

There is fulsome laughter.

“Yeah, right,” sniffles Tim eventually. “Well, he is a complete cunt, but apparently he’s a very good MP, I heard. All the people in his constituency, you know. He apparently really looks after them. Both Catholic and Protestant.”

Je taime Mom Non Plus

This writer’s favourite Ash single of 2001 – in a year of plenty – was ‘Candy’, not necessarily because it’s superior to the others, but because of its unexpectedness, its seductive pop strangeness. Built around a hyper-romantically over-the-top string sample from Bacharach weepie ‘Make It Easy On Yourself’ (“It’s nice to be able to say I’ve written 50 percent of a song with Burt Bacharach,” Tim muses. “My friend Burt”), a Dr Dre piano bling-blings coyly under Tim’s chocolate-box crooning, while his lyrics, typically, bask seductively in eyes-wide-shut ideal-woman fantasism. It’s ace. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any smoochier, Ash re-recorded it in French.

Tim speaks of the French version with a very charming mixture of sheepishness and pride.

“I did it to impress my mum, really, ’cos she was a French teacher.” Oh yeah? Did it work?

“I think she was chuffed, yeah.”

Did you get full marks for pronunciation?

“I think she thought it was alright… Actually, I was in Switzerland recently, and some German-speaking Swiss told me he didn’t think it was very good. But I don’t know what his problem was. No-one in France ever said anything to me.”

Did you find that your singing style changed at all in French? Did you go all kissy-face, or what?

(high-pitched laughter) “I don’t think so... I dunno... Yeah, maybe I might have been a bit more... suave... kinda A Bout De Souffle-ish...” (dissolves into helpless giggling)

Castletown Beer

Another Big Pop Moment for Ash in 2001 was playing the second Slane.

“Yeah, that was incredibly cool... Bono wrote us a nice note, saying you know, ‘Thanks very much.’ He called us his ‘neighbours from the north.’”

You and U2 have had a bit of a mutual-admiration thing going these last few years.

“Yeah. It’s cool they’ve done so well this year, as well. It was an amazing gig.”

Were you chumming it up with them backstage?

“No. But we sort of ran into Ardal O’Hanlon. He was good fun.”

What did he have to say for himself?

“Well, he was sort of wandering around. He didn’t seem to know very many people. He was there to do something with Moby. He got up and sang ‘My Lovely Horse’ with Moby.”

What? Are you making that up? How did I not hear about this?

“He really did! I swear to God. So he was hanging around, and he came and drank with us. Which was very nice, cos he’s one of our heroes.” (giggles)

Oh really? Who else is in the Ash Hall of Fame?

“Em… Oh, Jimmy Nesbitt. We met him this year as well. He’s cool. He’s fucking great.”

In what sense is he a hero of yours?

(pause) “I guess it’s just… nice to see someone else from the North sort of… getting out and doing really well, outside, you know. And he’s a real sweet guy. His uncle’s a really good friend of my parents. And we ran into him in Australia. (suddenly concerned) I don’t wanna sound like some name-dropping twat… He’s just a really nice guy, that’s all.”

Rock Action

Slane notwithstanding, the Ash gig of the year had to be Witnness. A straight-up wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am adrenaline rush from start to finish, it couldn’t have been more mindblowing if they had shot one flawless pop single after another out of a cannon.

Tell me about that rather nifty Flying-V guitar of yours.

There is extensive I’m-glad-you-asked type giggling.

“There isn’t a story behind it or anything. I got it a few years ago, and I’m… sort of... trying to... The Flying V has got such a bad name. I’m just trying to sort it out. At least now, there must be some people growing up who aren’t aware of its status as a dodgy heavy-metal guitar, so… (giggles) But at least my one isn’t a dodgy white one or anything. It’s sort of a classic wood, (audibly grows an anorak). They were designed in 1957, so it was a kind of a space-age guitar, back then. You had all these mad blues guys playing them. And then the ‘80s gave them such a bad reputation…”

That Witnness gig was tremendous. You seemed like an entirely new band.

“Yeah. Yeah. We were really goin’ for it. (thinks) That was kind of indicative of our whole year, that. ’Cos we were meant to be playin’ the second stage, the More tent or something, but then the promoters thought that it would be so jammed that something would go wrong, so they moved us up above Texas, and we ended up closing the whole thing. And it was insane, there were human pyramids and everything, and it was pissing down, but everyone stayed.

“We had a bit of a fright before that gig, actually. Mark [Hamilton, bassist] had some sort of – he thought he was having a collapsed lung – it just hit him, about half an hour before we went onstage. So we had the paramedics standing at the side of the stage for the whole gig. So yeah, it was a pretty wired performance. Straight after he came offstage, he was taken off in an ambulance.”

Now. How life-or-death is that? Brian Wilson would have been proud.