The kids are alright

Career retrospective for hyperactive Irish pop-rockers Ash makes you realise just how good they really are. As Holly Knill discovers, Intergalactic Sonic 7”s is a ‘best of‘ worth investing in.

Fortunately for pop rockers the world over, Tim Wheeler and Mark Hamilton were crap at football and decided to form a band to compensate. They quickly became the worst band in County Down under the name Vietnam, so split and recruited Rick McMurray as a drummer, not bothering with the rest of the dictionary they quickly settled on Ash as a name and caught the grunge wave out of Northern Ireland.

“Envy”, their latest single, is included on Intergalactic Sonic 7”s which otherwise is a singles collection (read: best of). I’ll use that as an excuse for taking a quick romp through the band’s history.

They followed the usual band beginning saga of performing to pub crowds of 20 or so people, despite the fact that none of them were legally old enough to order a pint. They got signed to various small labels, wrote their first ‘classic‘, “Girl From Mars” and even scored the opening spot of an Elastica tour in 1994 - they just had to get the trip excused by their headmaster.

It wasn’t until 1995 that the band really became known with the release of “Kung Fu” and “Girl From Mars” which hung out in the UK’s top 20 for a summer or so. This success sent the band on a world tour where they got to trash their first hotel rooms - in the name of rock n’ roll tradition of course.

The summer of 1996 was a biggie for the band that was made to perform in dresses by their talented yet drug fuelled Welsh (possible tautology there for anyone who knows anyone who is Welsh), producer Owen Morris. They were magazine cover hits and Britpop heroes with two top five songs “Goldfinger” and “Oh Yeah” and their album 1977 sold over a million copies.

What with the Spice Girls smearing girl power over all pop, the lads teamed up with guitarist Charlotte Hatherley whose public debut was in front of 40,000 people at the V97 festival. Their title song for the film “A Life Less Ordinary* was another top 10 hit and the beginning of the band’s new direction… sideways.

Nu-Clear Sounds was beset by inspirational and production problems, it yielded “Jesus Says” in terms of a hit, but caused the band to take a hiatus and a rethink back in Wheeler’s garage where it all began in 1992.

2001’s Free All Angels was unleashed upon a sceptical public and sucked up all the way to the number one spot. At just a thousand quid off bankruptcy, Ash pulled out the platinum card. All time favourites from the singles on the album include “Shining Light”, “Sometimes”, “Candy” and “Burn Baby Burn”.

And here we are 10 years on in 2002 with an awesome ‘best of‘ released that makes you realise that you’ve liked Ash all along but maybe hadn’t noticed. The album features an additional disc of B-sides and rarities (as voted for by fans), titled Cosmic Debris. But you’re only likely to give this a good going over once you’ve exhausted the first album, which has more than enough to keep the embers burning.

The Northern Irish can be a feisty lot and as far as this band goes, live is the way you’d want to remember them. After all, the band is only 10 years old; if they continue at this rate their best is surely yet to come.