With four albums under their belts Ash are old hands at the rock game. So why did they decide to go back to basics? They tell Jim Carroll
A few weeks ago Rick McMurray, Ash's drummer, ran into Frankie Poullain, the man with the moustache who plays bass with The Darkness. Poullain and his band were about to embark on a huge world tour, the kind of tour that puts hairs on your chest and can turn the most well-adjusted of human beings into quivering wrecks. Unsure of what was ahead and how they'd cope, Poullain asked the Ash kid for advice about hacking it on the road.
"Just go and get drunk," came the reply.
This afternoon nobody is getting drunk. The Ash boys and girl - McMurray, Tim Wheeler, Mark Hamilton and Charlotte Hatherley - are paying more attention to their laptops, and it's the hotel's free wi-fi broadband access rather than what's in the bar that has the most appeal.
As they limber up for an afternoon of interviews to plug their forthcoming album, it's hard to know whether to be more surprised at the fact that Meltdown is the band's fourth album or at how it sounds. The youngsters who charged out of Downpatrick, in Co Down, to reach number one in the UK album charts with the Day-Glo guitar pop of 1977, in 1996, lost their way a little with Nu-Clear Sounds and found their way splendidly back to the top with 2001's Free All Angels, have been in the US - and it shows.
Assisted by Nick Raskulinecz, the Foo Fighters' producer, Meltdown is pure evil rock 'n' roll, albeit with the pop thrills that scream Ash sprinkled like road dust amid the riffs. The record sounds tailor-made for US radio, which bodes well for further adventures over there. They may have grown up, but the musical charms of the band who took a mere five days to record the Trailer mini-album a decade ago are still intact.
Growing up has brought changes, though, and welcome ones at that. Where once you had to drag quotes from Wheeler, the band's vocalist, and Hamilton, its bassist, the pair now yak away as if in competition to talk the hind legs off a donkey.
"After 10 years you have a hell of a lot more to talk about in interviews," says Wheeler. "It becomes more of a conversation rather than just repeating the same five things over and over again."
There's certainly a lot to talk about today, not least how the success of Free All Angels allowed them to breathe easy again. Thanks to its five hit singles the album sold more than 850,000 copies around the world - and, more importantly, put their bank account back in the black.
"We were right on the verge of bankruptcy when we released Free All Angels," explains Hamilton. "So we were under pressure to make a record which was relatively commercial just so we could survive, and that meant a more pop production. In fact we were one grand away from going under the week before Free All Angels went to number one."
Having spent 2001 taking care of business in Europe, they moved lock, stock and guitars to the US at the start of 2002. There, as Hamilton puts it, they downgraded, got into the back of a van and started playing everywhere that would have them. Support slots with such emo-rock bands as Dashboard Confessional, Our Lady Peace and Saves the Day saw them playing to people who had no idea who they were, but Ash were embraced.
"Those bands never get on the radio or on MTV," says Wheeler. "So they have to tour and tour to build an audience. It's an interesting subculture, because the audiences are passionate about those bands and the bands support each other as well. We spent seven months doing support slots in 2002, and then we spent a couple of months doing our own club dates at the start of 2003."
Touring this way saw the band slowly sell 50,000 albums. With no radio play and no videos on MTV it was all down to playing live. According to Stephen Taverner, their manager, the only reason they sold so many records was because they made a huge effort.
"We've played San Francisco seven times in two years, and the last time we were there, supporting Coldplay, 20,000 people went nuts when the band went on stage.
"Once you're there and you have a presence the industry over there takes you far more seriously. It makes a huge psychological difference, because suddenly you're not some band just over for a week from Europe that they can forget about when you walk out of the room."
Such dedication to cultivating US audiences is rare among European acts.
"Part of the reason why we can do it is that we're still quite young," says Hamilton. "A lot of the new bands who are having huge success with their first album, like The Darkness or Franz Ferdinand, are actually older than us - and we're on our fourth album. We're veterans and we're younger than everyone else. A lot of the bands who've had success in Britain aren't prepared to return to the back of a van. We just got stuck in."
As Ash drove themselves from Austin to Minneapolis and back again, the SoundScan charts showed they were selling albums in the cities they were playing; they knew they were doing the right thing.
Such low-key constant touring became the norm, so much so that Wheeler recalls being shocked when they returned to play festival shows in Ireland and Britain and saw people singing along.
"You forget when you're out there in the US, plugging away, that people back here actually know who you are," he says.
When they first played the US, in 1997, supporting Wheezer and Babes in Toyland, Wheeler says they "larged it with tour buses and everything, so we were quite an expensive operation to run". This time around it was back to basics.
"You have to be aware of the economics," says Hamilton. "You can't go over and large it with a tour bus for seven months. If you do that you're going to run out of funds, and you won't be able to stay over there for the time it takes to make any sort of impact. But we got to the stage on our last club tour that we're self-sufficient. We now don't have to rely on tour-support money from a record label."
Naturally, their embrace of the US rock environment played a huge part in the writing and recording of Meltdown. Gone are the overdubs that dominated previous recordings in favour of a clean, powerful rock sound.
When they began recording the album, it was reassuring to see that rock was back in vogue on this side of the Atlantic.
"Rock was really making a comeback, and that was great," says Wheeler. "It was a lot better time than Free All Angels, when you just didn't hear guitars on the radio. We had a lot more confidence in what we were doing and we didn't have to worry about having chart success."
Their support base and the sheer quality of the album mean Meltdown is set to sell and sell as Ash hit the road once again. Watching the band play a blistering set at Temple Bar Music Centre, it's obvious that playing live is still Ash's ace card. Festival dates, support slots with The Pixies and another US club tour are all sketched in between now and the end of the year.
Wheeler and Hamilton describe what they do as their passion.
"It's what we've done since we left school, and I don't think we'd know how to do anything else," says Wheeler. For Hamilton, though, there's another reason why he wants Ash to keep going and going.
"When we started out people used to ridicule our first band, Vietnam, as being the worst band in Co Down," he says. "Everyone laughed at us, and it gave us the desire to prove them wrong. Whenever people write you off you just want to spring right back. I think we're still proving people wrong."
• Meltdown is released on May 14th on Homegrown/Infectious