Ash are back next month with their eagerly anticipated ninth studio album ‘Ad Astra’, landing on October 3rd as the follow-up to their highest charting album for 20 years.
With just two years between the latest releases from the Northern Irish band, ‘Ad Astra’ features collaborations with legendary Blur guitarist Graham Coxon, and showcases a band enjoying creativity and a resurgence into the limelight.
The new record will arrive shortly after Ash celebrated 30 years of their iconic breakthrough single ‘Girl From Mars’ in August, and it will be extensively toured throughout the UK, Ireland, and Japan from September to February.
We caught up with Ash frontman Tim Wheeler who told us all about the new record. He also discussed working with Graham Coxon, ‘Girl From Mars’, what to expect from the forthcoming live shows and plenty more…
NC: Your new album Ad Astra is out on October 3rd. It’s a quicker turnaround this time, two years since the last album, how have you found the difference in preparation?
Tim: “Yeah, it’s been quite busy. I think this is the shortest gap between albums we’ve had since 1977, and Nu-Clear Sounds. I don’t think we’ve managed to get a two-year gap in albums ever since. We toured Race the Night quite a lot for a year and as we were wrapping up the touring we just started getting into new stuff for this album. Last summer we recorded a bunch of the songs and then it came together pretty fast. It took some long extra days to get it over the line in June, so I didn’t see much of my family for those two months!”
NC: Talk to me about how the themes of the record because there’s a clear space theme throughout?
Tim: “Yeah, Ad Astra is Latin and it means “to the stars”. I just love how it sounds “Ash / Ad Astra“, it’s one of our best album titles I think. Girl From Mars has the lyric “and as I look to the stars”, so I like how it ties back to our past. We had a lot of sci-fi imagery, especially in the early years of the band. We’re such big fans of Star Wars, David Bowie, and Pixies who have a lot of sci-fi in their music, so that influenced us early on. We’ve got some fun things on the record, like it opens with our version of Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss from A Space Odyssey. I can’t wait to open our live shows with that!”
NC: You’ve teamed up with Graham Coxon on the record, how did that come about?
Tim: “Yeah, he’s on a couple of tracks. We’ve known him since the 90’s, he came and watched us play some tiny gigs in Camden and we found out he was quite a big fan. I bumped into him a little bit over the next 10 years and then I was writing some songs for a Britpop era coming-of-age movie in 2014, and the director knew Graham. We got him to play guitar on some of the songs, so we recorded some tracks then. I loved how our two guitars worked well together but the film unfortunately never went anywhere.
“A couple of years ago when he was coming out with his new band The Waeve, he told me he’d been listening back to those tracks. I was quite surprised and thought well he must have enjoyed working with me, I’ve got to ask him to be on a couple of Ash tracks. I’ve always said before, it would be a bit of a dream to get him to play with us. Blur started a few years before us, but a lot of our biggest stuff is around the same time so there’s probably a lot of simultaneous Blur and Ash fans out there.”
NC: You say it was a dream come true to work with Graham. How was the working process, did it live up to expectations?
Tim: “Yeah, it was really good,. He was doing both guitar and vocals on the tracks and he’s got such a distinctive voice so it was really fun hearing that. Guitar-wise, he’s got very unique approach, he can coax noises out of a guitar that no-one else can make. We had like a guitar duel on the last track, it felt like trading attacks on one another. It was fun.”
NC: It does feel like you’ve had a lot of fun on this record. Even with Jump in the Line as the lead single. Tell me about the thought process behind that?
Tim: “We would quite often use it as our live show walk-off song. Our sound engineer would play it as we took our final bow and sometimes Rick would do a funny dance across the stage. Everyone seems to know it but they may not know who it is. It’s such a universal, catchy song. One night we got back to our dressing room and the music was still playing in the main hall and I could hear a different rhythm in my head. I was like, I can imagine this with a Ramones drum beat. I thought we could do a punk rock version of the song, but this was a year before we tried it. The idea had gone into my head and I wanted to see how it would go. I never knew Calypso and Punk Rock could be such a good merger. But it’s really fun and we’ve played it live ever since.”
NC: You talk about having fun. Do you feel at a stage in your career where you’ve earned that creativity now and it’s flowing?
Tim: “We put Race the Night out on Fierce Panda Records and they wanted to make another album with us. So it’s nice when you know you’ve got a label in place and felt like it was a success. The album did really well so it was a good confidence boost for this. It went to #14 and had been sitting in the top 10 of the midweek charts. Then all the streaming data came in and like five Taylor Swift albums just jumped in! But we felt we’re on a good roll, so let’s just keep going.”
NC: These days it feels like it has to be a really heavy PR campaign to get a number one album. How do you feel about the change in the way modern music is consumed?
Tim: “I’m kind of used to it. The charts still seem to be really important for some people but it’s not how I measure things. I feel like it was a much more accurate measurement in the old days, so now we have different expectations and a different perception of what success is. Connecting to any new fans for me is a great thing and also bringing in more of our old fans and making them aware of the new suff. We used to sell over a hundred-thousand albums in our first week, nowadays three-or-four-thousand is seen as a great success, so it’s strange.
“Now, you survive on your live shows, but making a record is my favourite thing. Creating the new music adds new elements to the live shows that prevents them from feeling stale. I just have a way more relaxed view of things these days. I like to go with the flow because I’ve seen so many changes in the music industry over the years that I just keep open-minded and try to adapt every time.”
NC: You’ve got around six months of touring coming up, are you looking forward to a busy live schedule?
Tim: “It looks like a long tour, but it’s not that bad as we spread it out to have around two weeks of the month out on the road, and then quite a lot of downtime. In the old days, we would just cram as many shows into six weeks, and then have a week off, then go again for another six weeks, so it’s not quite as relentless as it used to be for the first 10 years of the band. But it’s going to be great. We’re going to Japan in October and there’s lots of UK and Ireland shows which is nice.”
NC: Is Japan a particular hotspot for Ash then?
Tim: “Yeah, it’s been great for us over the years. We used to go about twice a year, and we go maybe every couple of years nowadays, and Australia around every year-and-a-half. With Japan, I just love our fans out there. They’re very loyal fans which feels amazing.”
NC: It’s nice to see a good run of Irish dates. Is the Irish run in December to get some home comforts at Christmas time?
Tim: “Yeah we always like to do that. At our peak we would normally just play Dublin and Belfast. Now there’s a really good touring market elsewhere like Limerick, Cork, and other cities. So it’s really nice to play in different places.”
NC: What can we expect from the live shows? You’ve already alluded to the opening track. What else does the new material bring to the live show?
Tim: “It’s hard because when you have a new album and a bunch of new material, you want to try it all out and see what jumps out as the strongest. We’re also aware there’s probably a bunch of people coming to see us who won’t have listened to the new stuff and just want to hear the classics. It’s an interesting mix. We’re hoping to push it to six new tracks in the set.
“I remember seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers around 2001, and I was quite an old school fan of their first few albums and had seen them in Belfast in 1992. But by the time I’d seen them in the early noughties, their set had moved on so much to the later stuff like Californication and they hardly played any of the songs I heard them play in the early 90’s. It impresses me when a band can do that but you really need your album to connect and be a big hit. That’s why I quite like doing in-store gigs in the album release week as it’s a good chance to test the new tracks out live and see what works.”
NC: Speaking of live shows, you were recently on stage with Eric Bell and Dan Hawkins before The Darkness show. How did that come about?
Tim: “That was amazing. About a year ago, they had the Northern Irish Music Awards and Eric Bell won the Legend Award. I was asked to perform Whiskey In The Jar with him and it was the first time I’d ever met Eric. I was such a big Thin Lizzy fan. When my big brother moved out of the house he gave me his tape player and a copy of Live and Dangerous. I was at a school jumbo sale one day and I stumbled on another cassette, The Best of Thin Lizzy, but it was completely different to the band I’d heard on Live and Dangerous and I was blown away. I’d heard that Eric Bell was living down in Cork for years and I never thought I’d get to meet him. I think he’s moved back up to Northern Ireland now and lo and behold, there’s this award ceremony where I’ve been asked to play with him. We just got on like a house on fire, it was brilliant.
“And Dan Hawkins is one of the guys I can really chat about Thin Lizzy with, and Teenage Fanclub which is another of his favourite bands. I thought I needed to get Eric down to a show so Dan can meet him. Then I thought, we should play together. Eric suggested playing Whiskey In The Jar again. Initially Dan just wanted to watch and fanboy from the side, but then I said are you seriously turning down the chance to play with Eric? And he was on board and we played together at the end of our set. It was just a brilliant moment and the crowd went nuts. Eric’s 77 but he still plays guitar as well as he ever has.”
NC: You’ve had a 30-year career, in those moments is it nice to feel like a fan again?
Tim: “It really was. that’s how I felt like the first time at the awards and then I was able to chill a bit more the second time and enjoy it. We had dinner with Eric and he asked how the band was going. He couldn’t believe we’d been going for over 30 years. He told me he didn’t know I could play guitar so well – it was such a crazy compliment, I’m still processing that one.”
NC: Speaking of 30 years, it was just the 30th anniversary of Girl From Mars. Can you tell me about the impact of that song for Ash?
Tim: “I’d seen recently on social media it had been 30 years since the chart battle between Oasis and Blur. And it was the week before Girl From Mars came out, so that summer came flooding back to me. Girl From Mars was kicking off, we were on Top of the Pops, just in the middle of the Blur/Oasis feud and chart mania. It was an amazing time. I’d just left school and played Glastonbury a few weeks later. The radio was just being hammered with awesome songs and a lot of guitar music, so we dropped this song at the right time. We recorded it in our Easter break before final exams at Rockfield Studios. Oasis had just been in there recording ‘(What’s The Story) Morning Glory’, so it was mad.
“Nowadays, maybe it’s due to streaming, you end up having one song that you become known for amongst most people. It just blows up way more than any others. Girl From Mars is that for us. I guess it’s nice, there’s something really cool about the recording. Our producers did an amazing job so hats off to those guys. I guess it’s just a strong song that stood the test of time. It’s got a really good energy to it, and a little bit of nostalgia. There’s also a slightly bittersweet vibe to it. So I guess it’s just a really nice little cocktail, whatever it is.”
NC: When a song gets so popular, you sometimes hear of bands’ relationships with the song changing and artists disassociating themselves with it. Was that ever the case for you?
Tim: “I think I’ve always been proud of it, and it’s always been fun and easy to play. It always gets such a strong reaction and I guess there’s nothing in it for me to be sick of. There’ve always been nice moments with it. I remember a couple years after it came out, we were working in Surrey. We went out for a Bonfire Night party at someone’s house and I remember walking into this friend’s house and hearing people next door singing Girl from Mars. I was like, this is just mind-blowing. The song I wrote in my bedroom in Northern Ireland when I was 16 is being sung here and it’s a part of people’s lives. That’s magic for me.”
NC: You mentioned coming through with Oasis just releasing ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory’. You’re now releasing a new album in parallel to the Oasis reunion, the biggest story in music. What’s your thoughts on the Oasis reunion?
Tim: “I guess it felt inevitable but I didn’t expect it to be as insanely huge as it is. It’s astronomical. It’s a good thing because it might open up younger generations to that 90’s era, and there’s a nice nostalgia about it. There’ve been some great reunions I’ve seen recently. I saw Blur come back and then Pulp at Glastonbury. During the peak of ‘Common People’, I felt myself starting to cry, it was so good and so emotional. We also did a show with Supergrass in Spain this year which was great, and then I really liked playing alongside Manic Street Preachers and The Charlatans. We are three bands who have never split up so I liked that about the bill.”
NC: What’s the trick to the band’s longevity as the same original lineup?
Tim: “Our personalities. We’re not quitters in any way, we love playing live, and we’re always working on new music together. We weathered some big storms early on which made us quite resilient. We started really young too, so there was good energy to keep going over the years. We’ve also got a really strong fanbase who have stuck with us too. If we didn’t have that then maybe it would have become impossible at some point. So thanks to the fans!”
NC: And finally, back to Ad Astra. What’s the song you’re most proud of on the new album and that you’re looking forward to fans hearing?
Tim: “The title track, I’d say, the final track on the album. It was like an off cut of Fun People. I’d been trying to write an extra part for the song and had a chord sequence. When we were recording drums, we started playing around with it and Rick decided it didn’t really fit and should be its own song. Fast forward quite a few months, and what he said had planted a seed in my head. I listened to that little clip and all of a sudden this melody came into my head. I felt there was something missing from the album so I started building it up and made a song out of it. I thought I could get Graham on it and the lyrical ideas started flowing. We’d never played it in rehearsal, it wasn’t really anything, but it turned into a real gem.”
Ad Astra, the new album from Ash, is released on October 3rd. Head to Ash Official Store to pre-order.
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