GOING FOR A GONG

IT S BRILLIANT the way he makes it sound so pervy. You know the line, still in her school skirt and her summer blouse ? On the original it s really innocent but he manages to give it a dirty old man with a bag of sweets feel.
Tim Wheeler is putting a journalist out of a job somewhere by delivering his own critique of last year s Heineken/Hot Press Rock Awards show-stealer, the version of Oh Yeah that Ash delivered, complete with vocals from Divine Comedy mainman Neil Hannon and which now features in pole position on the free CD distributed exclusively with this issue of Hot Press.
Busy rock stars and bon viveurs that they are, the makeshift combo only managed to squeeze in one rehearsal before going on stage at the BBC s Blackstaff Studios and battering merry hell out of what had previously been the tenderest of love songs. That the result was magnificent is now there for all to hear on CD.
They ve never admitted it but the Titanic people stole the idea for My Heart Will Go On from Oh Yeah , proffers the Leonardo Di Caprio of bratpop. In fact, we ll have to see if our legal people can get some royalties for us.
The words breath , don t and hold immediately spring to mind. 12 months is a long time in rock n roll, but can Tim Wheeler tell us what his mental state was like on the night in question?
Pissed. Very pissed. I remember being given our awards but the performance and everything after that s a bit hazy. Neil was even worse. The first time he went up, he pecked Ulrika on the cheek but by the time he got his third, he was almost humping her. I can t say I blame him, though as a happily-girlfriended man I want it put on record that I have absolutely no interest in |berbabes.
Cue the sound of collective sobbing from Jayne Middlemiss, Zoe Ball and Denise Van Outen. Tim s memory may be somewhat hazy but I recall Ash getting embroiled in several fights at the apris show party, including a handbags-at-ten-paces job with a Man U-supporting member of the Hot Press staff whose identity cannot be divulged.
That would probably have been Rick. Now you mention it, there were a couple of minor skirmishes but, for once, I don t think it was our fault. I m told I had quite a long chat with Thom Yorke who s an odd sort of a guy but dead nice.
The thing I liked about the Hot Press Awards is that they weren t posey. The Brits, for instance, is all industry types kissing each other on the cheek and saying darling but Belfast was basically just a big piss-up with your mates.
Who actually said, I ve got a beezer idea, let s do a song together?
If the word beezer was used, it would ve been Neil, Tim laughs. I think it came from us we heard he d done Oh Yeah as an encore at one of his shows and when the BBC asked if we wanted to team up, it was an obvious choice.
It s funny, my parents are good friends of his Aunt and Uncle, so even before The Divine Comedy took off, I was given regular updates on how their Neil was getting on in London.
Much to their record company s chagrin, Ash are planning to go AWOL from Rockfield Studios in Wales next week to attend the awards, so that any acceptance speeches that need to be delivered can be done in person. They re up for three gongs Best Band , Best Single and Best Musician .
The others are a bit upset that it s just me who s been nominated for the last one, says their colleague with barely concealed glee. I don t know about this year but we re definitely going to win Best Single in 1999 with the song we re mixing at the moment, Ride The Wild Surf .
Is it a three-minute wham bam thank you ma am pop song or have they gone all sophisticated on us?
It s a sophisticated wham bam thank you ma am pop song! Actually, there are a couple of tracks we re working on which are genuinely completely different to anything we ve done before.
What s the timetable? Ride The Wild Surf should be out in May sometime, with the album following in August. We ve got a fortnight to do before we go to the Awards and another week when we come back, so it s coming together.
While we ve got him strapped to the interrogation chair, what s all this about an outdoor headliner at Killyleagh Castle?
Can I plead the fifth amendment on that?
Certainly not.
If we can get some really cool bands to play with us, yeah, we ll try to do it. We re definitely headlining Sunday night at Reading which I know Charlotte, in particular, is looking forward to.
Talking of the fair Ms. Hatherley, how s she been acquitting herself in the studio?
Terrible. She hasn t made us breakfast in bed or darned our socks once, says Wheeler disgustedly. n
The 1998 Heineken/Hot Press Awards will be broadcast by BBC1 television on Friday April 10th at 10.50pm.