Ash unearth long-lost track “Bittersweet Blue”
Ash have today released a music video and 7” single for the long lost song “Bittersweet Blue”.
The song has long been known to Ash fans as “Diamond Rick” and the only unreleased song from the 1977 album sessions. It is available to stream now and pre-order as 7” single.
It was originally written in late 1995, and was even performed by the band when they supported Therapy? at The Point in Dublin on December 28th 1995. However it was missing lyrics and saw Tim ad-libbing the lyrics on the night. It was finally committed to tape in early January 1996 during the Rockfield album recording session before being jettisoned in favour of other songs which would compromise the soon to be No.1 album.
The band had hoped to include the track on the 2008 deluxe edition of 1977 but it was discovered that the master tape had been lost. As the band recently prepared to put together the soon to be released 30th anniversary package, Tim Wheeler, resolved the ancient mystery, discovering it had been mislabelled way back when.
However, even though they had found the tapes what they found was a usable drum take, bass, some rhythm guitars, a scratch vocal and not much else. Not even lyrics.
As such Tim had the impossible task of getting in touch with his teenage self, writing lyrics and resurrecting this long lost treasure.
Keeping with the nostalgic theme, the band have also released a music video for the track directed by Anthony Neale, filmed in the same rehearsal space the band used in its formative years.
And if that’s not enough sonic time travelling we have visuals to match. It made perfect sense with all of the above going into this for us to shoot the video back in the rehearsal space in the bands formative years. It’s where we played the song for the first time all those years ago. And it means so much to have this space immortalised for all time.