Good morning,
It’s a brand new week in a brand new month with a brand new edition of The New Cue to reassure you that everything is going to be alright. Today we’ve got an interview with Ash’s Tim Wheeler and it’s free. See, we told you everything was going to be alright! It’s just south of here, go on, start scrolling, it’s waiting for you…
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Tim Wheeler
Next week, Ash release their eighth record Race The Night. With a 2020 best of compilation and a series of anniversary shows in 2022, it’s been a few years of looking back for the Northern Irish trio but the new album shows that Tim Wheeler, Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray are in no mood to let the dust settle. It’s a brilliant collection of songs pulling together the best bits of Ash from across their three decades, pinballing from panoramic power-pop, rampaging riffs, muscular grooves, melodic ease and frenetic rock wig-outs. Last week, Niall spoke to Tim about its creation, never splitting up and beating Billie Eilish to the record of youngest Glastonbury headliners…
Hello Tim. Where are you at the moment?
In London, at the Fierce Panda offices. I’ve just been signing copies of the album. It’s cool seeing the physical thing in the flesh.
How many have you got through so far today?
About 500 or something like that, or maybe it was more? [to drummer Rick McMurray]. 'Rick, how many did we do? Oh, probably about a thousand.
Where does that sit on the list of annoying things you have to do before a record comes out, is it above talking to journalists or below?
Yeah, it’s definitely below talking to journalists, I’d rather chat to journalists, for sure. It does turn to boredom a couple of hundred signatures in.
I bet. Congratulations on the new record, it’s a monster. Take me back to where it began.
Yeah, it started off before [2018 album] Islands even came out, we started recording maybe half of the songs back then. But then just a million things got in the way of it being finished - we had the best of album [2020’s Teenage Wildlife: 25 Years Of Ash] and all the Islands touring and then Covid and I had a baby and moved countries, it kind of took forever. A couple of years ago, we thought we’d finished the album but then we realised half of the album didn’t sit with the other half, there’s a very rock side and then there’s quite a synth-y side so we decided to put the synth-y stuff on the side and write more rock stuff, so it ended up taking it taken a while longer. It’s ended up feeling like a really cohesive, nicely put together thing but it took a while to get there.
What’s your favourite track on it?
That’s tough. It might be Like A God because that’s a real beast. I can’t wait to play live.
Yeah that song is huge. I like the way you bring it back at the end of the album for a reprise, like an end credit scene.
That was originally attached to the song, but then it was too intense. We wanted to have Like A God early in the album but it’s hard to digest a seven or eight minute version of the song at that point, so we stuck the big ending to close the album.
How much did looking back for the best of and the 30th anniversary shows influence your approach on it?
Not too much. Maybe. There was a lot of touring going on around all the reissues and the best of album, maybe it made me think of the songs that have stood the test of time, trying to trying to get stuff that measures up with those so we can possibly knock some things out of the set.
Was there anything in those anniversary shows and reissues revisiting stuff that surprised you?
Just what a mess our early archive is, that was quite a headache just trying to find the right versions of lots of songs because those sessions were always really drunken and Owen Morris our producer was quite a maniac.
Haha. You’re back on Fierce Panda after appearing on their 1994 compilation Crazed & Confused. Does it feel like things coming full circle?
Yeah, it’s really cool. But Fierce Panda has also evolved so much from what it was when we were on Crazed & Confused, it’s a really legit label now with good backing. It’s been really cool just remembering the first time meeting Simon Williams, it’s cool having a great character there and it’s cool knowing someone who’s a really good music journalist to run questions on the album by. I’d have a question about a song title or a lyric and I could ask him what he’d think about it I’d get a music journalist’s ear on that. He’s got great A&R skill.
Music journalists aren’t usually trusted with that sort of thing.
It’s good to know what a journalist perceives as cool! So it was good on the A&R front.
I’ve always wanted to start a sideline being a Setlist Consultant. Sometimes bands get to their third or fourth record and completely lose the ability to put together a good setlist.
Yeah, you could be a good consultant for management companies to stop their bands going off the rails in the setlist department. We’ve actually handed over our setlist curating to our sound engineer because he’s really good at it. We give him a list of songs we want to play and he really puts it in a really good order, he puts things into sections, things that go together. We would always just go for contrast so we’d always be jumping between vibes quite quickly. But he does it in a really good section way. It always starts with a good bang and always ends with a really good bang too, there’s a real skill to that.
OK, sounds like you’re already sorted setlist-wise. It’s been the summer of triumphant reunions for some of your 90s peers but you’ve stuck together the whole way…
Totally, yeah. I went to the Blur and Pulp shows and I was blown away, they were just brilliant. There is something to be said for taking a break and having this hunger in the audience when people really miss you, it’s quite cool. But we’ve just never quit, we’ve always loved keeping going. I’m proud that we’ve never stopped.
Do you feel like Ash get taken for granted though?
Oh, yeah, definitely. I do see some fans feel like we’re really underrated, some people will say that. I think that’s the one danger of never splitting up. I was chatting to the tour manager for The Stranglers and he said, ‘if you just stick it out long enough, the tide rises again, you just don’t know when it’s gonna be’. I’ve also heard someone say, ‘music is a perseverance game’. That’s the route we’re sticking to.
What’s been the toughest time in the band?
Nu-Clear Sounds, after that album didn’t connect the same way that was quite a challenging time, after the Britpop party fizzled out as well and hoping that we were going to be able to come back. We dug deep and came back with Free All Angels. Then I guess Napster and iTunes, the switch from CD sales created so much uncertainty for bands, would we be able to sustain ourselves financially. Then there was the massive curveball of Covid, that was fucking mental. There’s always some catastrophe around the corner and then some redemption around the corner too hopefully.
What’s your biggest regret in the band?
Maybe not kicking on with the right record after Free All Angels. That was the point where it would have been would have been great to go up one more step. To hit arena level would’ve been really nice and made things a lot easier. Once you hit a certain level, everything becomes a lot easier, but we still survived anyway so that’s kind of amazing in itself.
Eric Cantona sent you an angry fax message after you put him on the cover of the Kung-Fu single. Who owns it?
I think I’ve probably got it in a folder somewhere because I got forwarded it as well from the original fax, but the sad thing about fax paper is it would fade so quickly, so it’s probably just a blank page by now, a blank glossy page.
He’s launched a music career now, you should do a collaboration.
Oh yeah! Well at the time, he said, ‘I spit on your record’, so hopefully he’ll have chilled since then. Maybe he could come and spit on our record and we could sample it? Or spit in a rapping style? I’m in the Fierce Panda office and everyone is laughing at me - [to the office] I’m talking about Eric Cantona.
In 2009, Ash did an alphabetical tour of the UK. What was the hardest date to book?
I think Exmouth. Our booking agency said it was the hardest tour he’d ever put together because it was an absolute nightmare. The routing was just all over the shop to make it work. He couldn’t find an X so he came up with Exmouth. Hats off to him finding a Z - we did Zennor in Cornwall and that was such a brilliant gig, a tiny village hall that held about 70 people, we couldn’t even get our tour bus down the lane into the village. We had to offload all our gear into a smaller van and get the gear there. Everyone from the gig went to the pub right next door after and it continued way into the night. It was just brilliant. I’d actually like to go back and play Zennor again.
You’ve supported some stellar names over the years. Who’s treated you the best?
I guess Coldplay, they were the nicest. I remember we were coming to LA and they found out we were staying in some Super 8, one of those motels. They were all staying at the Chateau Marmont and they booked us all into the Sunset Marquis because they felt sorry for us. No band has topped that. They’re good dudes.
That is very sweet. Who’s treated you the worst?
Well, this is no reflection on The Darkness but we toured with them and I remember trying to watch them from the side of the stage and their production manager was screaming in my face, ‘get out of the way!’. I remember being on that tour feeling like, ‘what the fuck is this guy’s problem?’. The band were mortified after, they were good buddies so it wasn’t their fault.
What’s the Ash story you always pull out when you want to impress someone?
I guess the fact that we were the youngest headliners of Glastonbury is quite a good one, even if it was by accident. We headlined the second stage in 1997 and that was the Friday night and the weather got so bad over the weekend that by the time Sunday rolled around the headliners, Steve Winwood and Paul Weller, couldn’t get on site. We’d stayed around to party and hang out so we got a knock on our tour bus door and asked, ‘can you guys headline?’. We had to sober up really quickly and do that show. I think the point where they realised that Winwood and Weller weren’t going to be able to make it was late on the Saturday night and we’d just come back from watching Radiohead play the OK Computer set. We were absolutely wasted and it had been a brilliant gig and we were like, ‘oh crap, we have to get our stuff together’. With Billie Eilish, they had to say that she was the youngest ever solo female performer because myself and Mark [Hamilton, bass] were still younger than her when we headlined.
That’s excellent. That’s a good one to end on, thanks Tim.
Cheers Niall, good to hear you!
ND