Singles Going Steady

It’s halfway through their ambitious and diverse A-Z Series of singles and Ash seem to have successfully reinvented themselves as entrepreneurial music mavericks. Furthermore, if a Google search is to be believed, Tim Wheeler has put on weight, grown a goatee and begun marketing his own brand of spicy sausage.

“Tim Wheeler, The Sausage King, isn’t me,” says Wheeler, who has also just discovered the meat-obsessed imposter.
“Actually it’s me,” Edinburgh-based drummer Rick McMurray says. “I use Tim’s name to market sausages while the lads are across the water [Wheeler and bass-player Mark Hamilton live in New York where the band has a studio]. That’s what I do with my free time.”
The band’s description of their final years with Warner Music does sound a little like working in a sausage factory. “We were very disillusioned with the industry and the whole cycle of releasing albums,” says Wheeler, “Our last album didn’t do very well with Warners. The accounts department pulled all the marketing when we didn’t get playlisted on certain radio stations. But really we’ve been aware of our mortality as a band since the second album. We had a massive fan-base with 1977 [their second album] and to see that evaporate after one record was hard. We’ve been on edge since then. Then we were touring Europe with Meltdown [their fifth album] when half of Warner’s staff got axed in one day. That’s when we realised how bad it was. The truth is I don’t think anyone has a clue how to make money from music anymore.”
Ash’s own solution to the industry’s malaise was to abandon the album and independently release 26 singles, one for every letter of the alphabet. “I always thought that The Wedding Present doing 12 singles in one year was really cool,” says Wheeler. “And I wanted to go a bit further. I got an iPod and how I listened to music totally changed. Before that I used to only listen to albums, but after that I used to break up albums, throw tracks into playlists and jump around between artists on the iPod. My relationship with music changed and so how I wanted to make music also changed. This way we can treat each song on its own merits. None of the songs need to fit together – the more surprises the better.”
Has it been hard to keep the pace up? “For the next single, N – ‘Dare to Dream’ we basically had the colour of the artwork sorted before we’d finished the lyrics,” says Wheeler with a laugh. “We knew it was going to be good though and it turned out to be a blinder!”
“Tim decided he wanted a hundred guitar lines on the song,” says McMurray. “Only he would decide that when there was a rapidly approaching deadline.” Tim enthusiastically explains how he was trying to emulate the effect of Rhys Chatham’s guitar orchestras, while Rick shakes his head in mock disbelief.
The trio seem to be enjoying this stage in their career. And though they’re not sure if releasing streams of standalone singles is the future for the industry in general, they’re pretty sure it’s the future for Ash. “People get all their information in a constant stream from the internet now,” says Wheeler. “So I guess music should come in a constant stream as well. I can see some people going the opposite direction – the concept album route, but this really suits how people listen to music now and also the way we write songs.”
In fact, he says, it actually takes them back to their roots. “1977 was really a string of singles with a few extra tracks. We were at school and didn’t have time to do an album so we recorded it all in little sessions – ‘Kung Fu’, ‘Girl from Mars’, ‘Angel Inceptor’, ‘Goldfinger’, ‘Oh Yeah’. And that was the most exciting time for the band because every time we recorded we’d add a new element and change how people saw us. I think for us it would be smart to keep recording and releasing like this beyond the A to Z... Probably not on a fortnightly basis, though.”