BLOODY KIDS, eh? When, at the age of 16 months, Ash first set about kung-fu kicking pop’s teeth out, they were savage infants indeed: vigilantes of the post-grunge wilderness, integrity tattooed on their very souls, with fantasies involving the internal workings of a Marshall stack. These were the kind of rock outsiders who’d upchuck their rusks at the mere thought of writing a sweeping love song called “Oh Yeah”, let alone hiring a fucking string section to record it.
Times change. Records sell. Producers arrive boasting contacts with the Dudley Philharmonic. Albums rocket to Number One. Secret tracks and CD2s start plaguing your every waking moment… Maturity beckons. You’ve barely enough time to learn to play a bass with a full four strings before you’re strapped into a one-way limo to Sell Out City, stopping only at Drink Problem Junction and Nervous Breakdown Central.
Hence, for the past year Ash have found themselves being dragged through the pop mill backwards - forced to play in the big boys’ charts while, at heart, they still wanted to be shoving conkers up their noses and playing songs they haven’t written yet, on instruments they can’t play, to a youth club full of mates who’d pogo to a weasel farting, all in the name of rabid Punk Rock. We call it ’growing up in public’ and Ash, it seems, have been grudging guinea pigs. And now, at last, they’re demanding their innocence back. Live at the wireless is not just a ten-track radio session recorded in Australia last October, although Ash would probably dismiss it as such an aside. See, to the purist, it’s also the closest we’ll come to seeing their bare bones and raw flesh, un-glossed by studio polish, for quite some time.
The signs are writ large. It begins with the demonic speed-metal thrash of “Darkside Lightside”. It features the kind of grimy, photocopied sleeve photos that are usually only used by large-shorted Seattle bands called Scrumturd. Its sleevenotes consist of the drug stash list from the beginning of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in all its hedonistic glory. And, most deliciously of all, it finds Tim Wheeler sneering, “We’re fucking Ash,” before chewing up “Girl From Mars” and gobbing it at the mixing desk, rendering the poor thing useless for the rest of the album.
It isn’t missed. Indeed, it’s the glaring mistakes and studio tomfoolery that remind us why we found these vivacious young tykes so charming in the first place. When Tim collapses in a fit of giggles at the end of an abrupt rollock through Ween’s “What Deaner Was Talking About” asking, “Did I leave out a verse?” or when “Goldfinger” takes three kick-starts before it revs off down Chunder Road spouting black oil-smoke. Teenage Fanclub with cast-iron balls, basically.
A few more rampant shoulda-been-hits down the line (“Kung Fu” and “Petrol”), things reach an hilarious peak on closing track “A Clear Invitation to the Dance”, on which Tim adopts the sleazy squeal of a castrated Frank Black for the obligatory preview advert hell. “GET AWAY FROM THE DIAL!!! GODDAMN!! GET AWAY FROM THE DIAL!!!” he howls like Satan’s own Dr Fox and several thousand Australian pacemakers simultaneously give up the ghost. Sure, the Dudley Philharmonic will be back to claim their pound of cinematic orchestral flesh soon enough, and they will be marvellous. But for now, here’s the half-hour of explosions they edited out.
9/10