Just before their triumphant Free All Angels 21st anniversary celebration show in Birmingham, singer / guitarist Tim Wheeler and bassist Mark Hamilton from Ash kindly made time to talk to God Is In The TV.
Does it feel like 21 years (since Free All Angels was first released)?
Tim: Definitely not…when you think about what 21 years means, it’s such a big length of time. When we think back to the early nineties when we were putting out our records, if we had thought back to the stuff that was 21 years old… say when we put out 1977 (their debut in 1996), it would have been like looking back at records from 1975! Now we’re grown up, it’s a really long time! But it doesn’t feel like it.
You just re-released Free All Angels yesterday; with reissues, do you get tempted to do a ’Director’s Cut’ or maybe mess around with the running order?
Tim: Not with that album, I think it’s kind of perfect the way it is, the same with 1977, if we’d tried to re-do anything on it, it would just kind of lose its magic. The one I would maybe tinker with is (second album) Nuclear Sounds. We switched producers half way through that one, there was a bunch of stuff where we went off in different directions – some could maybe go back in the middle…that would be an interesting one to revisit.
Any plans to do that?
Tim: Not really! Would you change any (to Mark)?
Mark: The only one I would really change would be Trailer (a compilation of early tracks that arrived a couple of years before debut proper 1977)…I think that even by Nu-clear Sounds, we had progressed so much in the studio, but when we did Trailer we were still really naive, still trying to work out what we were doing and very much the producer was in charge, while everything after that was much more of a collaboration. I remember the producer who did Trailer very much ‘directing’ us…
Tim:…which we probably needed as it was our first time in a proper studio.
Do you think of Trailer as actually being the debut?
Mark: It feels like the debut. Obviously 1977 is seen as, well, called the debut album. Usually bands when they start out use up all their first, formative songs on the debut, but we had already used them all up on Trailer apart from ‘Girl From Mars’ which we held back. So 1977 was all new songs. I think if we were to go back and revisit Trailer and remix it, it would probably turn out quite a bit different.
Tim: With Nu-clear Sounds there was a couple of things we were too brutal with, we cut out Charlotte’s great guitar solo on ‘Wild Surf’, and we’d done a really expensive string session for a few of the ballads on that album and we just completely buried them in the mix, so we maybe went too hard in some directions with that but we definitely made it better, all the changes we made with Owen (Morris, producer).
You’re doing a Free All Angels ‘full album’ show tonight, have you seen anyone else do a full album gig? Some artists mix up the order, others play a faithful version…
Tim: Yeah, I saw Van Morrison do an Astral Weeks one in New York, he did that in sequence, that was cool. And I’ve seen Weezer do the ‘blue’ album (Weezer) and Pinkerton both in sequence, that was good, I like when people do them in sequence!
Mark: Then you know what’s coming!
Tim: Most albums are front-loaded with the big songs whereas in a live show you’d probably want to spread them out or leave them till later in the show.
Mark: We’re effectively doing two sets – we’re doing the album then we’ll do like another!
Was it a surprise when Free All Angels flew into the charts at Number One?
Tim: I guess we were really gunning for that because we’d had it before with 1977, and Nu-clear Sounds hadn’t done as well, and our aim was to recreate that…I sort of had that thing where I didn’t enjoy the whole success (of 1977) in the moment as much as I could, because I was really burned out making the record and adjusting to a bit of fame that we were starting to go through and all that, so I was thinking if we could do that all again and have a Number One album, then I’d really enjoy it this time! So we were going for it, but there was tough competition…
Mark: Janet Jackson’s album was out the same week as us! We started out really strong in the midweek charts and all that but she was closing the gap through the week. It was like ’Will we or won’t we get it?’. Traditionally pop stuff sells really well on the weekends…
Tim: ?.. but anyway we pipped her to the post, and then we called her record label and sang ’We’re sorry Miss Jackson’ down the phone!
On a different subject now, you will have seen what happened with ‘Running Up That Hill’ this year. If you could pick any Ash song to have that kind of blanket coverage and second life, which one would you pick?
Tim: It would be kind of nice if it was one of the ones that hadn’t had the credit it should have had, maybe ‘A Life Less Ordinary’ which is a fan favourite, or something from the A-Z series like ‘Arcadia’…but still I wouldn’t complain if it happened to ‘Girl From Mars’!
Mark: There’s lots of songs that we think should have been hits that never were…
I love that A-Z series! (Ash released a whopping 26 singles in 12 months in 2009/10, each with a letter of the alphabet on the cover)
Tim: ‘Dare To Dream’, there’s some moments in it…the drumbeat isn’t too far from ‘Running Up That Hill’! The big toms!
Mark: That’s a good one – ‘Dare To Dream’ was the first single on the second volume of A-Z. It should have been a hit, that one.
Is there a particular Ash song or album that you felt was really underrated?
Tim: Probably the A-Z series, that was a lot of fun. We were releasing it on a format that was a bit ahead of its time. Bringing out digital singles every two weeks, it would have suited ’Spotify time’. It was just a bit early. That was the first thing we did on our own label, so it was harder to push it. We didn’t have the financial clout that we would have had in the past.
When you tour particular countries, are you ever surprised at the reaction to certain songs?
Tim: There’s songs like ‘Clones’ (from 2004 album Meltdown), it’s massive in America. It’s a real fan favourite there.
Mark: At the time it was Number One in the download chart, when that chart was in its infancy, I think it was the first ever week of the download charts and ‘Clones’ was Number One!
Is there an Ash song that you have decided between you that you just won’t play live?
Tim: There’s a song called ‘Envy’ which is a single from the first compilation, (Intergalactic Sonic Sevens), it really needs Charlotte (Hatherley, who has returned to the fold for these special shows) to do it…we did a reunion show with Charlotte about ten years ago and we didn’t get around to learning it and we were determined to do it this time – we just had so many other songs to do, we just didn’t get to do it.
Mark: I think it’s probably the one that’s the trickiest for everyone. A lot of key changes and all of these other things to learn!
Tim: So we’ll probably never ever play that one again even though we like it!
Lastly, if you could pick any artist from any time, living or not, to cover an Ash song, who would it be and which song?
Tim: I’m going for The Beatles, I’m just going straight to the top! The Beatles to cover ‘Girl From Mars’, that would be cool!
Mark: I’m going to pick Sia cos she’s got crazy vocals, and she’d just do a completely different interpretation of something, maybe ‘Dare To Dream’ again!
Maybe Paul McCartney might do a nice version of ‘Gone The Dream’…
Tim: Yeah, he’d nail that…that would be better than us!
Free All Angels is now available again on vinyl, (clear and yellow splatter, no less), for its 21st anniversary, on BMG Records.
.
