The Wonder Years

Older? Yes. Wiser? Well… Ash have always been teenagers in spirit (gin, mostly) but after six years in the business, they’ve put all the vomiting studio sessions and obscene in-flight meal orders behind them…

The musty smell of rock history hangs heavily in the air. It was in this dark recording studio, tucked away in a leafy Highbury side road, that The Clash first chugged out the opening chords of “London Calling” 19 years ago. Mere inches away, in the corner of the live room, sits the time worn grand piano where the toothy young Freddie Mercury first sat and picked out the intro to “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

When the Sex Pistols waded in two years later to record Never Mind the Bollocks, Johnny Rotten threw up into the very same piano and his dried vomit had to be painstakingly scraped off each individual string by some luckless tea-boy.

None of this - perhaps surprisingly in the latter case - seems to impress the four members of Ash, who sit around in the half light of the control room in Wessex studios, flopped on the sofa or perched on wheelie chairs, passing round a spliff and listening back to a vintagely punky future B-side. It feels like four in the morning, until suddenly the band’s PR arrives with the breakfast rolls. It’s nearly midday and Ash have actually only just clocked on for work, the previous nights shift having finished at five in the morning.

The original trio - Tim Wheeler, Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray - reminisce about the ‘old days’ as if they were road-battered rock veterans of several decades, rather than three young men with an average age of 21.6 years who left school and lunged headlong into a two-year world tour, culminating in an extreme drink and drugs burn out.

Noises from their camp this summer suggest, however, that Ash have grown up. Not only have Wheeler and Hamilton both joined wise old Rick (now 23) in reaching their 20’s, but the early stages of recording Nu-Clear Sounds, their follow-up to 1977, were fraught with problems - writer’s block, a bust-up with producer Owen Morris and creative power struggles between Tim and Mark (more of which later).

You can hear a certain maturity about Nu-Clear Sounds, as much in the driving rock tracks (even heavier than before, with bits of scratching courtesy of unofficial fifth member DJ Dick Kurtaine) as the increasingly adult-orientated, if self-doubting, ballads.

Spend an hour with them, mind, and Ash’s primeval behavioural strategies don’t seem to have been modified any, certainly not since the arrival of the ever-sultry Charlotte Hatherley (at 18 years old - Ash’s last teen). She listens in silence, occasionally blowing her cover of cool by burping loudly (an early sign that she’s already been hanging out with donkey-brained blokes for too long) or emitting throaty, encouraging laughs, no matter how disgusting the details of the latest anecdote.

Most of these centre around geek-turned-rock-nutter McMurray and his reputation for bizarre in-flight requests from air stewardesses. For his part, the drummer now looks mortified when reminded of his bladdered actions. What’s the best way to deal with such behaviour and get inside the minds of these ex-juvenile delinquents? Separate them.

Tim Wheeler
He’s not had your ordinary life, Tim Wheeler. Two weeks after he finished his A-levels he was playing Glastonbury. The came the blur that was the 1977 world tour. When that finally ground to an exhausted, nerve-fried halt, he was forced to face settling down, living on his own and buying a flat in North london - with grim side-effects. When the time came for him to pick up his guitar and begin writing songs for the second full-length album, he couldn’t do it.

“I felt like I couldn’t write songs anymore,” he says, “Or I didn’t want to anymore, because it does my head in. But it was just me kind of stopping myself from doing it. I soon caught on that if I just relaxed and wrote whatever I wanted just for fun, it would kind of get there.”

Tim is probably the most inscrutable member of Ash, his friendly, good-vibey air at odds with the character Rick once described as an “arrogant wee bastard”. Beneath it all there’s little doubt that Wheeler is a driven man. Let’s not forget that, as 12-year-olds, he and Mark asked their parents for guitars as Christmas presents “with the express purpose of starting band and becoming famous” and then just went and did it. Coaxed he’ll admit that he “might’ve been” a bit of a cocky teenager.

“But now I think I’m more realistic and I dunno, less romantic in my ideas,” he decides. “A bit more down-to earth. I don’t think I’m arrogant at all now. I can’t really remember, but I probably used to be… in fact I’m sure I was.”

Happily describing himself as a “middle-class country boy”, Tim is currently going through a bit of a rock makeover that harks back to his metal-devouring teenage years as much as his current passion for Iggy and The Stooges. It’s also a reaction against the pop pin-up status afforded to him when “Girl From Mars” hit the charts in late ’95.

For their recent Reading performance, he turned up in a black capped-sleeve T-shirt, welding a Flying V guitar (the metal totem), as Kiss-style pyrotechnics exploded all around him. “the pyrotechnics were taking it a bit too far,” he now concedes, “but the Flying V… I dunno, I’d like to save it from heavy metal.”

Weirder still, last year he had a huge pointy bald stripe shaved into one side of his head only hours before Ash appeared at Shepherds Bush Empire for a gig being broadcast live on MTV. “I thought it was really cool, really angular,” he states, with a wide beamer. “But it felt like you’d had a lobotomy or something. Some people thought I was receeding and other people thought I was trying to look like Hitler and shit, so I thought, ‘Fuck this’.”

Ask him how he sees relations within Ash at the moment and Tim is surprisingly honest: “Charlotte’s really cool. She’s got that arrogant self-confidence of a teenager, but she’s cool. Rick’s probably one of my best mates, we’re really close. Mark’s a bit weird. I dunno. I get on with him, but I don’t. We’re kind of going through a phase where we’re getting on each others nerves a bit, but I think that its just cos it’s been a bit of a struggle for the last 12 months.”

“The thing is, we both know we want to do the same thing, so there’s always a bond going. But we don’t talk that much. We get on totally sound, but, like, I don’t think he’s ever been in my house. We’ve been mates for nine years, though, so we’re pretty solid.”

“There were moments when I was on tour last time where I was sort of thinking it would be nice to go and work in a shop or something,” he admits. “Just those times when it got too much. Sometimes I wish I could stay at home and just write songs and work on music. But then we’re stupid: we want to go and play in Iceland and Japan and everywhere. I suppose I just love the chaos.”

Charlotte Hatherley
Charlotte was still at school in Chiswick when Ash first appeared on Top Of The Pops. She was aware of them, but didn’t especially like them.

“Well, I suppose I just didn’t really know them,” she now protests. “I used to walk to school listening to a compilation of the Evening Session and “Jack Names the Planets” and “Girl From Mars” were on it. But I never went out to buy anything. Now I think 1977 is a great album. Having said that there are definitely some weak spots on it.”

With her posh, drawling ways and chain-smoking, just-crawled-out-of-bed-with-her-make-up-still-on demeanour, Charlotte would fit right into Elastica. Instead, of course, she ended up in Ash after Tim moved into a room at her boyfriends flat for a few months.

There’s no arguing that her arrival in the band has brought a streak of glamour to their achingly blokey world - not least after Select’s widely appreciated sweat-enhanced shot of her onstage at Ash’s secret gig at Camden Falcon recently.

“After that,” she smiles, sparking up another fag, “we actually got rung up by some deodorant company saying, ’We saw this picture in Select. Do you want a sponsorship deal?’”

Coming from a creative background (her mother’s an actress who had bit-parts in some Carry On movies, her father’s a lecturer who’s “gone off to Australia to be a writer”) Charlotte’s parents drummed all kind of music into her, particularly classical, throughout her youth, resulting in her reaching Grade 7 on piano - an achievement which, of course, she’s at pains to play down.

Two years ago, when she’d joined her first band, Nightnurse, she bumped into another Chiswick girl at a party - the audience’s Sophie Ellis Bextor - and the pair of them boasted about their respective groups. “A bit weird when you think of it now, I suppose,” Charlotte muses.

Her first appearance onstage with Ash was a baptism of fire at V97, followed by stadium supports with U2 in Ireland and the recent sparkler fest at Reading. She coolly notes that “you do tend to get immune to the big gigs, even though you’re always shitting yourself until you hit that first chord.” Still, she was slightly daunted by the long-term prospect of being in Ash.

“They seemed a lot older and I wasn’t very confident,” she says. “I used to be very self-conscious about opening my mouth and coming out with something really stupid. I think the boys or me, if we’re really pissed off, we kind of just keep it in. I don’t really want to rock the boat. Well, I didn’t before, y’know.” she smiles. “But if something’s on my mind now I’ll say.”

How does she get on with them individually? “Well, Rick is probably the easiest to get on with,” she begins, carefully, “because he doesn’t get too riled by anything. Mark is… very hard. Sometimes he can be quite hard to communicate with. That’s just a case of getting to know him, I think. After a year [laughs nervously], it hasn’t really progressed a lot. Tim’s just so… You can’t find any fault with him really. But sometimes it’s hard to talk to him too cos he’s so immersed in all this stuff that’s going on and he’s got so much to deal with.”

Even though it’s a ridiculous question, it has to be asked: if she was absolutely forced - at gun-point, whatever - to have a sexual relationship with one of them, which would she choose?

“Oh God, I dunno,” she gasps in mock horror. “God. Well, I won’t say Mark cos I’ve had threatening letters about touching him. I won’t say Tim cos I’ll probably get threatening letters. Maybe poor old Rick. Yeah… [purring mock seductively] maybe Rick.”

Mark Hamilton
One insight into the complex mind of the handsome, gangly Ash bassist: he suffers from an almost pathological fear of fish and has done since childhood. “When I was really young, I remember eating fish fingers, cutting one of them open,” he says, wincing at the memory, “and seeing this sliver of silver skin. I picked up the plate and through it across the room. I’ve had dreams where there’s fish flying about in the air or where I’m thrown on top of a big mound of dead fish. it freaks me out. I reckon it must be from a previous life.”

Son of a dentist (he’s got an impressive gum-load of teeth, even though “I swear to God, I never ever went to the dentist”), Mark describes himself “as having been a stir-shit” as a youth. he is undoubtedly the rock ‘n’ roll life force of Ash, as well as their artwork designer, potential future video director and all purpose - as Tim puts it - “Mr Marketing”.

He’s also famous for having caned everything apart from (possibly) crack and suffered a weird breakdown when he was hospitalised for six months early in Ash’s history. He now remembers that phase as like “a really bad acid trip”. on tour, he was known to get through no fewer than two bottles of gin a day. now, he announces, he has cooled his boots, with the help - “even though it’s probably just a placebo” - of herbal Prozac-a-like St John’s Wort.

“I had to chill out” he almost snaps, in his breakneck Northern Irish burr. “The last few years I haven’t done any drugs. Because of what happened, I just can’t. I don’t want to go back their. The thing was, I couldn’t handle it. I always started off having a great time, but then at the end of the night, it all went fucking horribly wrong.”

He sighs deeply. “I don’t want to talk about all that shit because people always associate me with all the drugs. For the last few years I’ve been trying to…forget. I’m just trying to say it’s finished, it’s behind me. I’m sorted out and happy and shit. Miles better… But I can still go out and drink ten pints and I’m fine,” he adds with a mischievous grin. “I’m just not into that gin thing anymore.”

From where he was standing, the preliminary stages of making Nu-Clear Sounds were pretty hellish (“There was a lot off stress and worrying, it was like, ‘Shit, shit, shit’.”) until the group learnt to relax and the tunes began to flow. He’s less keen than Tim to flag up any real friction between the two of them: “It’s not really a power struggle, we’ve always argued and everything. At times we do get on each others nerves, I suppose. It’s only things like in the studio where we’re both passionate about something.”

One high-point of creative tension during Nu-Clear Sounds came with the relentless, near transcendental opening track, “Projects”, written by Mark. Tim first did the vocals while on mushrooms, bending the melody beyond recognition, convincing himself it was the most amazing thing he’d ever sung. The next day when Mark heard it and deemed it, no doubt accurately, to be “shit”, he forced Tim to re-sing it. The air didn’t clear for some days. “But in the end,” he nods, “even he agrees that I was right and it was better.”

If he’s being honest, has he ever maybe wished he was the singer in Ash?

“Oh I can’t sing,” he points out, flatly. “I’ve no problems - I play the bass and that’s it. But at the same time, whenever we’re writing songs and stuff, I have a strong vision of where it should go. Sometimes I’m wrong and sometimes I’m right. But if I do have an opinion about something [laughs heartily] they’ll fucking hear it.”

Rick McMurray
“Yeah, I suppose she’s right,” considers Rick, assured master of the dry quip, in response to Charlotte’s earlier frank admission. “If I was forced to have a sexual relationship with anyone in the band, it would be me.”

Up close as he nervously fiddles with his sideburns, Rick McMurray looks all of his 23 years. Take a dozen steps back and he could be ten years older. Having spent a year at university studying history and politics while he waited for Mark and Tim to finish school, he admits that he was equally comfortable with the academic life. “Writing the essays I found easy. Just bullshit, blah blah blah. It came to me naturally, funnily enough.”

Despite all his hedonistic ridiculousness Rick is probably the most sensible member of Ash. After just a couple of years in the role, he’s already tired of being the lone-brain-celled drunk.

“You’ve got to try it out the first time round, though,” he muses. “I was saying yes to everything, staying up all night drinking. I’m over that now, really; it gets boring after a while. The last thing I want to do now is go to a fucking club in London and have loud, banging music in my ears. It’s weird. It’s like, ‘Am I getting old?’”

While the others made the decision to stay in London, Rick bought a flat in Belfast. “I just don’t like London, the dirt… It’s too big for me. When I’m home I do my own thing and when I’m over here, it’s just get your head down. If you give everything to the band, you find yourself becoming a bit disillusioned. It’s like, ‘Is this as good as it gets?’ Being separate from it makes you appreciate it more.”

Perhaps tellingly, his perfect night when he’s back home involves him hooking up with his student mates. “We go down to the pub quiz. It’s a great laugh. Drink and win drink.”

Accordingly, for someone living a divided life, the most extreme parts of Ash’s tour film now frighten him.

“Especially Mark when he was drinking loads of gin and stuff,” he shudders. “We thought nothing of it at the time, it was like, ‘Oh that’s just Mark off his head, he does it all the time.’ It wasn’t a big deal, but you look back at it now and it’s scary.”

Did he ever find himself playing a protective role? “[Drily] No. I’m glad he’s off the gin, though. You can’t tell somebody not to do something, especially Mark. At Glasgow Barrowlands, he fell off the stage, then he came backstage and we said, ‘Mark, there’s no gin left’. he was saying, ‘Gimme a gin, gimme another gin,’ so we ended up giving him a cup of water and telling him it was gin.”

Later he found himself playing the diplomat during the teething stages of Nu-Clear Sounds: “Mark was saying to me, ‘You gotta go and tell Tim to write a song’, so I’d go over and tell Tim that Mark was getting a bit stressed out.”

Rick freely admits that his past tendencies to mild alcoholism and playful transvestitism were probably just by-products of him trying to bury the ‘real’ scholarly Rick. “They probably were, yeah. Y’know show everyone that I can drink and do whatever. But,” He adds, eyebrow raised, “I think I proved my point.”

All this is not to say that Ash have entirely lost their lust for brainless excess. There’s the small matter of producer Owen Morris willingly allowing drunken non-driver Mark to prang his Land Rover when the pair were recklessly circling the fields around Rockfield Studios in Wales in the dead of the night. Following that, the band’s manager systematically took out £300 worth of fence with the front bumper of his jeep as the bassist goaded him on, waving a sheet, playing the matador.

Not to mention Ash’s magic mushroom bonfire last Guy Fawkes’ at the farmhouse in Sussex where they were struggling to write Nu-Clear Sounds. A local forester who’’d been dealing them weed arrived with what Mark describes as “about five truckloads of big fuck-off logs”, and together they constructed a two-storey woodpile that they ignited with generous lashings of petrol.

“It just went up like a torch,” the bassist enthuses. “The biggest bonfire I’ve ever seen. I don’t do mushrooms, but the rest of them were off their heads. Once it had burned down to the point where it was jump-able I turned into the joker in the pack and started jumping over it. Then wee DJ Dickie decided he could do it as well. So he took a big run and landed right in the middle of this fire that had been burning for hours, it was so hot the embers were white. Our manager pulled him out and he was untouched! There wasn’t a singe on his coat. I swear! It was divine intervention.”

Let’s hope such forces stay with them for the next 18-month tour of duty…