Good Charlotte

Tim Wheeler’s right-hand woman Charlotte Hatherley has crafted a solo album from holiday romances gone bad and a mathematical approach to guitar-playing.

Six years after being plucked from the bosom of little-known London band Nightnurse to strum and dance barefoot with Ash, the one that the fans call Chaz has made an (as-yet-untitled) solo album of startlingly epic guitar-scrapes and the catchiest off-kilter harmony-pop since Kenickie exploded in a shower of glitter and gin.

“One of the songs, “Grey Will Fade” was a B-side for Ash”, explains Charlotte Hatherley. “I ended up in the studio recording that all on my own. Rick [McMurray of Ash] played the drums, but I did everything else. That just set the tone. I thought ‘Fuck it, I’m just gonna do it on my own, I’m not gonna wait around.’”

The album has been produced by Eric Drew Feldman, a one time member of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band who has worked with dEus and Frank Black and plays with PJ Harvey. “Rob [Ellis] did the drums in two days and I spent the rest of the two weeks doing everything. I fucking loved it. I’m a bit weird when it comes to collaborating with people. I find I can only really come up with good ideas when I’m working on my own. I feel free to do whatever I want where as, with Ash, Tim [Wheeler, Ash’s mainman] has always got these great ideas for guitar stuff because they’re his songs.”

“I’d just had my own songs for fucking ages and I thought ‘If I don’t put them out now I’m never gonna do it’. So I just got off my arse and made time and got it done. It takes me a long time to finish each song, though. Last year I had five that I’d already written years ago and I thought ‘This isn’t good, I need to write more’, and I wrote loads of new stuff. Then I realised it had taken me six years to write 15 songs, which isn’t good either. I needed to sit down and really go for it. I was worrying that I was turning 24.”

Ah, it’s a 24 thing.

“I wanted to get it out before I turned 24, and then when I didn’t I was like ‘Oh fuck!’. I wasn’t very happy about it. There’s so much I’d like to do musically, aside from being the guitarist in Ash. I was panicking.”

And the band is fine with it? “Cool, really cool. Tim and Rick have heard it. It’s not awkward or anything. It’ll be sweet.”

Ash fans can breathe easy. The 12 songs that make up Charlotte’s as yet unnamed album still inhabit a similar world to Wheeler’s, but draw from a larger musical palette. More complex at times, stranger yet poppier. Dare we even suggest… better? Charlotte squirms and ignores the compliment.

“My pointers for the album were XTC, The B-52’s and David Bowie. “Where I’m Calling From” is probably the first song I wrote. There are instrumental sections I wanted to be quite Eno-esque. It’s quite a Bowie/Eno kind of thing. “Stop” is a disjointed guitar thing, initially sounding like an instrumental from Low, but now it sounds like XTC. “Paragon” is really kind of crazy, B-52’s, stupid-pop. “Bastardo”, one of the newer songs, I was really proud of that. I’d been listening to a lot of Pretenders. That’s my first proper punky song. It’s got a novelty thing about it but…”

“Bastardo” tells the tale of our heroine’s holiday romance with a handsome Lothario in which she wakes up to discover he’s stolen her precious Gibson SG, Both that the self-explanatory Elastica-ness of “Summer” sound like potential radio roadshow hits, though this isn’t something Charlotte appears comfortable with.

“It’s definitely not my intention. It wasn’t what I was thinking when I wrote it. It would be weird actually. I don’t really have any desire to go on Top of the Pops and play “Bastardo”.”

So the perpetually sunny world of pop isn’t for her? “I’m not anti-pop. I watch CD:UK, still buy Smash Hits occasionally, dance to S Club down the disco…”

This is, most definitely, a guitar album, ranging from the one-string speed solos of her Ash work to symphonies of layered e-bow effects. There is a recognisable, distinctive Hatherley guitar style.

“That’s good! I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t really have any guitar heroes. A lot of it comes from David Bowie because he used so many amazing guitarists.’ Large pictures in Charlotte’s living room of Bowie in Labyrinth and Heathen haircuts jostle for mantelpiece space among the zombie memorabilia belonging to her film-director boyfriend Edgar Wright [of Spaced fame].

“Maybe it’s not really knowing what I’m doing. I started off practising my scales and I was really good at the maths behind guitar playing. It’s something that I don’t really understand. You get much more interesting stuff out of it. I don’t know where my thing comes from. Though it’s nice when other people point it out.”

Following in Ash’s footsteps may be a huge undertaking, but Charlotte’s not expecting to take over the world; she’s just happy to be making her own musical mark on it. “I’m very critical of everything I do so I find it hard to say ‘Oh yeah, it’s fucking great. Go and get it’. It would be really fucking cool if people love this record. But I haven’t quite got my head round the whole thing.”

“One of the best things about playing with Ash”, she continues, “is having girls coming up to me and saying ‘I play guitar because of you’. I get a lot more out of that than reading a good review.”

But in order for people to do that, it really is going to have to be a Charlotte Hatherley record. People are going to need to put a face and a name to these songs, aren’t they?

“I like the faceless aspect of recording”, Charlotte counters. “And initially, I was gonna put it out under a project name. I changed my mind about that because I play everything, bar the drums, and I’ve written everything. I think it would be selling it short if I put it behind another name. So I’m just gonna put it out there as me.”

“The whole Ash thing was just luck. I fell into that. But I’ve been doing music ever since and I love it. Without wanting to sound too cheesy, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else…”

By Timothy Chipping