After going down a few musical dead-ends, and now back to a trio following the departure of Charlotte Hatherley, Ash are once again doing what they do best - punchy, melodic guitar pop. And they've still got a feminine side, singer Tim Wheeler tells Tony Clayton-Lea
Tim Wheeler, the compact lead singer and main songwriter of Ash, is worried. He is sitting by the window of a coffee joint in Dublin's Temple Bar, looking out at people passing by. He gets the occasional HR (heavily recognised) glance, but there are no faces pressed against the glass, there is no one scurrying in from the rain to ask for his autograph. He is, this afternoon, just like your humble correspondent, a no-big-deal face in the window of a coffee joint, chewing the fat with another guy over a tape recorder.
Several hours later, however, in the soon-to-be-refurbished Temple Bar Music Centre, Wheeler - very much unlike your correspondent - is transformed from nondescript, smallish bloke to a rock star with a V-shaped guitar. He sings the kind of punk/pop songs that ricochet off the walls onto the heads of those lucky enough to have nabbed a ticket for the gig, one of an intimate handful Ash are playing in order to beef up some interest in their forthcoming album, Twilight of the Innocents. If Wheeler had intestinal entrails dripping from his hands, you can guarantee that some members of the audience would lap them up, such is the fervour generated. Yet, several hours earlier, stray members of the same audience wouldn't have given him the time of day.
It is this marked division in the life of a reasonably successful rock star that Wheeler has had to deal with over the past few years. Life for even the most ordinary person can be a tricky balancing act; for someone who is virtually invisible during the day and adulated at night there has to be slippage somewhere between fantasy and reality. Put it down to Wheeler's innate sense of civility and common sense, or blame Ash's stop-start career (one year momentum, the next stasis), but, whatever way you choose to look at it, the band are at a crossroads.
Thankfully, the new album is not something that could be left standing at a crossroads wondering which turn to take. Unlike Ash's second album, the under-performing Nu-Clear Sounds, or their fourth offering, the lumbering and metallic Meltdown, Twilight of the Innocents is back to what Ash do very, very well: punchy, melodic guitar-pop songs that pledge allegiance to neither simpering singer-songwriters nor the fusion of rap and rock. This is straight down-the-line Ash, as trim as a town in Co Meath and as lean as a thinly sliced rasher.
There are reasons for the return to the glory days of third album Free All Angels, says Wheeler. First, he and his long-time girlfriend split up. Second, Wheeler moved to New York. Third, his reflective side kicked in. "A lot of my songs come out via the feelings I have, and if I have something emotional going on then I tend to channel it through music. Even some things I don't know about - a song can sometimes tell me what's going on in my head before I've even consciously realised it.
"I was feeling a bit stagnant in my life in general - lots of things, relationships, even the band I felt needed shaking up. I was bored with London, and it seemed a good idea for a change of location. Mark moved to New York first. We were on tour with The Bravery, we did the last show in NYC, and Mark didn't come home. He met a girl and that was that. Rick is in Edinburgh, he lives in a clock tower; it's very Gothic, 10 times the size of my apartment in New York."
New York, Edinburgh, five albums in (five and a half, if you count their 1994 mini-album, Trailer; "the working title for the new album," says Wheeler, "was 5.5"), support slots with U2 at Slane, burning Westlife CDs, recording songs while dressed in women's clothes, opening his A-level results live on BBC Radio 1, using the Internet to establish contact with fans, having sex at the wrap party of Star Wars: Episode One (in a space portal, no less!) and winning Ivor Novello awards with some of the cutest, strongest, most romantic punk/pop songs of the past 10 years - it's a long way from Downpatrick, is it not? Does Trailer seem such a long time ago?
"Not really; I mean, I wrote songs like Girl From Mars when I was 16. When we were 17 we started releasing records. I'm quite work-focused and I see things, albums, in terms of cycles rather than years. Each album marks a point in my life, so it feels as if it's gone pretty quickly. Sometimes, people take you for granted if you've been around for a long time - that's frustrating for me because I don't really feel we've been around for ages.
"There are bonuses for being around as long as we have, though - the likes of Oh Yeah and Girl From Mars have kinda attained classic status, perhaps in a way that bands like Buzzcocks and some of their songs have. That's nice, because whenever we play live songs such as those have become highlights of our gigs. But you're also fighting preconceptions that people have of the band. Unfortunately, you are rarely judged on the new material, the new album, because we have a history, a back catalogue."
What to do, then? Go by gut feeling, instinct, or panic a little and follow a trend. The one time Ash did the latter, reveals Wheeler, was with Meltdown. "That was made at the time when Queens of the Stone Age and other similar bands were around. Metal was coming back with a vengeance, and so we thought that was fun, plugging back into our early influences. But by the time the album was released, all that metal stuff had fallen away and indie came charging back. That was a lesson well learnt - don't ever look at what scenes are around."
The new album was written and conceived in comparative isolation. The times that Ash have written their best songs, claims Wheeler, are when they've been inspired by instinct rather than what other people are sounding like. They always had trouble following up their best records, the lead singer/songwriter grumbles.
"There's something stunting about pressure," he says, gazing out the window. "Nu-Clear Sounds was us kicking against everything that people expected from us; then Meltdown, in a way, was us feeling quite established and thinking we could try anything we liked. The new album, however, is very us. The style of songwriting on it is more natural, more chordally written than riff-based, which Meltdown was. And lyrically, the album is about emotions, feelings."
Another change: guitarist Charlotte Hatherley (who joined the band in 1997) decamped for a solo career, leaving the core unit back at the starting post. Just like it was in 1993.
"Back then, we wanted to be in rock'n'roll and music, and to escape a conventional life, the middle-class path that I felt was laid out for me. I guess we wanted to do what all our favourite bands did: to see the world, to make music, to find myself as a songwriter. There was no clear plan. People asked us back then what we'd be doing in five years' time, but we were just teenagers from Co Down and felt we had to prove ourselves. In the early interviews we felt we had to explain ourselves - I reckon we were quite patronised - but we didn't have an answer to the five-years-time question. We probably thought we'd still be doing it, but I know it was something we didn't want to let go. Still don't."
Charlotte Hatherley, says Wheeler, was the right kind of person to come into the band. She fitted in very well, a good person, down to earth, not at all pretentious, but it was always difficult for her to get into the inner circle of three people that had known each other since school.
"Three guys from Downpatrick and a girl from London - she was younger, too, so it was hard for her to come into that. I think she dealt with it in the best way that anyone possibly could - she drank us under the table."
Therein lies the emblematic demeanour of Ash: they make - sometimes generally, sometimes quite specifically - superb punk/pop music, but oft-times their image is betrayed by their intelligence and upbringing. In other words, they're not very blokey. And their best songs are a bit soppy, aren't they? Brilliant, yes, and rolling from left to right with a pronounced swagger, but covered in love-bites nonetheless.
"We are definitely not a lad's band, and that was a good balance for Charlotte because she's a bit of a tomboy. There's a feminine side to our band anyway, so that worked, too. The songs are romantic to a degree, a little indie Venus among the power chords.
"Where does the romance and reflection come from? I suppose we're faggy straight guys. That's just the way we are - nerdy, introspective guys reading Kerouac more than Playboy. Maybe that comes from my mum - she always pushed books my way. "
Mistakes? Ash have made a few in their day, but they're still of an age where they can trade off lack of experience with zinger songs, which in turn assist them through the haze of infrequent under-performing. Overindulging in alcohol was one such mistake, but then, when you take a bunch of teenagers out of school and put them on the road, they're hardly going to spend their time deliberating over the finer points of Wendy Cope's poetry.
"There certainly isn't the kind of craziness there used to be," confirms Tim. "If you're out drinking all the time you're exhausted. Also, I feel I have a responsibility to do good gigs. It was a gradual thing for me, as I learned more about the way in which the voice can be affected."
Another mistake - and one that almost fractured the spine of the band - was their thankless attempt at trying to break into America. "We really tried and went for it. We fucked it up, however, doing support tours and driving around in a small van - it was gruelling, we almost killed ourselves. We lost momentum, I think. We've always had bigger ambitions, and with trying to put America on our side we overstretched ourselves. Simple as that."
See/HearAsh's new single, Polaris, is released today. Twilight of the Innocents is released on June 29th. Ash play as part of Bud Rising Summer, Marlay Park, Rathfarnham, Dublin, on August 26th
