Girl From Mars! Kung Fu! Oh Yeah! Shining Light! So many hit songs! Ash have got proper solid staying power, having been around for 23 years and weathered a fair few storms on the way. Tey’re back with a stonkingly epic new album that’ll have you rockin’ out. I spoke to lead singer and all round nice guy Tim Wheeler about Jackie Chan, comebacks and how to stay together as a band. Don’t you know I’m in heaven with you?
What was the music scene like when you were growing up in Northern Ireland..were there other bands around that inspired you? It was around the time when Nirvana really blew up so there were a lot of teenage bands. We were part of a scene although there weren’t many places to properly play; we’d do collective shows at a village hall. Nirvana inspired the DIY thing for us, and Terapy? from Northern Ireland had become really big as well so that encouraged us. What was it like when you moved to London and started gigging around the country? I guess we’d already started having a bit of success by the time we moved to London, a bit of radio play and press coverage, but it was a big shock to the system. It was quite exciting and the
16 / December 2015/
outlineonline.co.uk
“We stayed at Skywalker Ranch a couple times!”
music scene was really good in London at the time. You’ve had a great response over the years, like NASA using Girl From Mars as their hold tone and Jackie Chan using Kung Fu on one of his films. What other highlights have there been in your career thus far? We had a lot of pop culture references early on, like Jackie Chan, and space, and a lot of times we got quite close to things we were obsessed with. We played at the wrap party for Star Wars: Te Phantom Menace because we were such big Star Wars fans. We played with U2 to help promote the Good Friday Referendum, which was a really important show for us, and then getting on TOTP for the first time, having a number one album when we were 19 was crazy, touring round the world, playing Reading Festival…we
stayed at Skywalker Ranch a couple times! Wow! What’s Skywalker Ranch like? It’s north of San Francisco in beautiful countryside, and it seems like you’re really in nature but there’s this incredible complex there. It’s very very cool. When Charlotte in 2006 left how come you didn’t replace her? I think we thought it would be a lot of work to replace her, and we’d had success as a three piece before she was even with us. Also we were starting to experiment with different things in the studio, bringing keyboards in and stuff, so we thought we could replace her with some other elements instead and give ourselves a new direction. Ultimately she was a hard person to replace! Tings went a bit astray not long after that but after a short break you guys
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