INTERVIEW – TIM WHEELER, ASH, September 2024

INTERVIEW – TIM WHEELER, ASH, September 2024
By Shane Pinnegar

Irish favourites Ash are about to embark on their umpteenth tour of Australia, this time celebrating their many treasured singles. Their career began when the trio were still in high school, bursting out of nowhere (well, the small town of Downpatrick, Northern Ireland, about 34 km south of Belfast) with their 1994 EP and 1995 debut album 1977 and the hits Jack Names The Planets, Girl From Mars, Goldfinger, Kung Fu, Oh Yeah and more.

Wikipedia says they have released no less than SIXTY singles – a number undeniably boosted by their 2009 and 2010 year long A-Z Singles project which saw them releasing a new song every fortnight for twelve months.

Tell us more, I hear you squeal – and you’re in luck, because we Zoomed frontman, songwriter and living Flying V advertisement Tim Wheeler to find out more.

Hi, Tim. How you doing, man? Thanks for your time.

How you doing? Oh, thank you as well. Thank you.

Where are you right now?

I’m in London. Yeah, I’m actually at the little studio I’ve got in London.

Nice one. We’re looking forward to your Perth show [Sunday 6th October at The Rosemount Hotel].

That’s coming up very soon, yeah.

The weather’s lovely, man. It’s not too hot. It’s nice Spring weather so you should be up for a good one.

Perfect. It’s just turned shit here so that’s great news!

Ohh, that is good timing. Yeah, we’re just getting good. Yeah, I think we’ve got one or two rainy days scheduled before you guys arrive.

Yeah, that’s good. The flowers will be looking good.

Yes! So, this tour is celebrating your singles. According to Wikipedia, you’ve released SIXTY fucking singles!! That’s just crazy.

Isn’t it? Yeah.

Ignoring the eight albums, all cram packed with great tracks – even if you just look at those singles, how do you pick a setlist out of all of them?

Well, you know, we’ll lean heavily probably on the early years, the first ten years – because people love those singles so much. And then we’ll dip into… like, from the A to Z series we might only play one, for example. So that cuts it down a bit. And then there’s, you know, there’s recent ones as well, because we had had an album Race The Night out last year as well.

Yes, great album, love it.

Oh, thank you so much.

It’s thirty years since we put our first singles out, so it’ll be nice to play a bunch of those early ones. Yeah, we’ll play a lot of our early ones, I reckon, yeah. It’ll be a bit of a sandwich.

So, thirty years as you just said – you had Charlotte in the band for a bunch of years and everything, but the three of you to be in a band together for thirty years consistently without ever breaking up or one guy leaving or anything… it’s pretty amazing. Do you all get along that well still, for the most part?

We do get on really well. I guess one thing that helps is we probably used to do like two hundred gigs a year. Now we only do, like, sixty. So it’s like we’re not in each other’s pockets quite as much as we always were. And the pressure is very different now. But also we’ve really learned how to get on well and I think we’re very grateful that we get to do what we do and we’re all still alive. I was chatting to one of the guys from this band Alabama 3 and he was asking how many of my band had died!! Because I think several guys in his band over the years had died. I was like, yeah, we’re all still here, luckily. So yeah, that’s fantastic.

That is fantastic. I mean, especially when you think around the Nu-Clear Sounds time you guys were pushing the envelope a bit. I mean, things could have potentially gone awry at any moment.

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Mark was in so many death-defying incidents over the years, especially like, yeah… not going to point any fingers, but I’m pointing right there at Mark [laughs] and yeah we all did our fair share of stupid stuff. So yeah, it is really good. It’s amazing to be here now!

Whatever happened to the movie that you guys shot on the road in those crazy days – was that really shelved because it was just too incriminating?

A bit, yeah. You know, we were still quite young. When we finished, I think maybe 19 or 20 and yeah, we were like ohh God, if our parents saw what we really were up to, you know, they would like… they probably wouldn’t speak to us! That was one of the reasons and secondly, Charlotte had just joined the band, so we, you know, it kind of portrayed an era that we were sort of moving on from and I guess we were starting to think that we needed to mature a bit. But it’s kind of a shame, because then it really missed its moment for coming out properly. It’s really quite a cool film. Maybe it’ll come out in some form – we put out this greatest hits in 2010 or so [The Best of Ash, 2011], and we put it on there as an extra DVD with that, so it is available if anyone’s got a DVD player and can seek out that version. But yeah, we should get it on YouTube or something at least, someday.

I’ll have to see if I can find that.

Yeah, it’s cool, I think. I guess it’s quite a time capsule now, you know, like what it was like as a band touring in the ‘90s.

I’m very glad all my stupid shenanigans were before social media and camera phones… you did yours with a hired film crew!

I guess [we grew up] all in the magazines and everything on a weekly basis. Big time.

It’s a hell of a way to grow up. So, with the 30th anniversary and with Race The Night – there’s a few lyrics in there that are reflecting on getting older and whatnot – are you reflecting on your career and your life a little bit more nowadays?

Yeah, definitely – sort of. You can’t help it, you know. Still, I think maybe until my early and even till my mid 40’s, I was like, I kind of felt exactly the same in my head as when I was younger. But yeah, as you get older, you just get to this point, you just start to lose people, you know, along the way. And you are aware the world is so different to when I was like a young man – a young, young man starting this band. I just feel more and more grateful all the time for every chance I get to play. You just never know how long you will get to do it… because the world is changing so fast nowadays, like it just seems insane. So, I don’t know, I guess music’s a nice place where we still get to do the same stuff that we did – playing the shows is awesome! So I think I’m a bit more and more nostalgic for the old days, it’s probably just inevitable, I think, yeah.

Yeah. It happens, it’s very relatable! Since we’re talking about singles, that year when you did the A-Z thing, not just 26 songs, but 26 singles, I mean, there’s pressure with a single that it has to be really, really good, you know – it has to be better than just filler, or an album track. Was all the stress of that worthwhile? Did you at any moment think ‘shit, I wish I hadn’t signed up for this’?

In hindsight, it probably wasn’t worth the stress. Like, I’ve never worked so hard in my whole life. You know, we had our own studio, we had all this freedom and time and we could really just be in the studio non-stop and churn out loads of material and we had loads of loads of ideas to experiment with. It was very freeing, not trying to think that all these tracks have to fit together. But there was a lot of pressure, like [each single] has to really stand up on its own, and I think it was just a bit ahead of its time, you know. Nowadays – or maybe like five years ago – streaming had really caught on, and this was kind of just pre-streaming – we did it as a subscription service of our own. And yeah, it would have been quite good now to just be able to drop that. But, you know, I guess it sort of helped – it probably did help us get through one of those difficult transition times when CD’s were dying off, and streaming was kind of kicking off. It was a kind of weird in-between time. And doing it on our own record label as well was just so much work. It was, it was crazy. So it’s hard to know how much of that music – like, did it connect as much as our earlier stuff? Maybe not. But, I guess you know this, the fans who were with us at the time, I think enjoyed the process of it, but I’m not sure how many people are discovering it now. Maybe it will get rediscovered at some point? It was a very interesting project, I gotta say, but yeah – it almost killed me, yeah. [laughs]

Well, it’s the equivalent of 2 1/2 albums, isn’t it? That’s pretty heavy for one year’s work.

Yeah. And I think we sort of thought, to get the quality of [each one] being strong enough to be called a single, we recorded twice as much as we needed – so we had a two to one ratio to make sure they were good [enough]. So there was like just a tonne of bonus tracks that we stuck out as well. It was mental.

I think you’ve had seventeen UK Top 40 singles, which is amazing.

Yeah. Cheers.

But you somehow managed to always stay at a certain level and never really crossover to the mainstream and go like mega big and everything. Did the thought ever cross your mind to try to pander to getting a big commercial crossover radio song?

Yeah. I guess what we were trying to aim for that, you know, probably. Yeah, I kind of like Nirvana’s stuff, and they did the perfect thing of being commercial but trying not to be commercial. But then Britpop came in, and you know, we were sort of around that kind of scene. It kind of became okay for indie bands to aim high in the charts. So, I guess we were trying. Maybe. It’s probably like around the 2004 time, that’s when you saw a lot of bands, the ones who went really massive, that’s the kind of time that if you had a hit around that time it seems like you would be an arena or stadium band now, you know? I’m sort of thinking like Arctic Monkeys and The Killers and even Coldplay were making that kind of leap around that time. I think that’s kind of the point where we started to fall off a bit. So, I don’t know if we sort of – maybe like that fourth album point is where I wish we had got that right. And at the same time, I was kind of getting burned out. You know, we’d had ten years of pretty decent success at that point and I think I kind of needed a change of pace a bit as well. I think then maybe it would have killed us, if we made that jump like that.

Plus, I don’t know – if the Nu-Clear Sounds era was a reaction to the success of the first album’s success, then maybe going ballistic might not have been that healthy for you? You never know…

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s definitely, yeah, times the brakes came on and it probably did save us. So yeah, it’s tricky. It’s hard to know. But you know, because I sort of look at The Killers and like how the heck did they get there? I don’t know! There’s a few just humongous songs on their first album. I do look at other bands – how did they do it? But, you know, we’re in quite a nice little middle ground, we’ve got a good fan base and, you know, my head isn’t coping too badly with the pressure!

You had your first big hits when you were still in high school. I’m interested in when did you start writing songs and how did you go about that? Did you just like go bang – there’s a great song or did you really have to work at it for a while?

Well, we started this heavy metal band, me and Mark, when we were like 11 or 12 and we got guitars for Christmas. We’re like, ‘Okay, we’re going to start a band!’ We couldn’t even play – so we couldn’t do covers. So, we started writing songs straight away and they were like, definitely terrible, but we were kind of determined. We got laughed off stage quite a few times at our early gigs, but it just made us more determined then. But I think it was after grunge music kicking off – it’s all thanks to bands like Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth. I was like okay, songs don’t have to be really complicated, you know, and started writing a bit more simplistic stuff, a bit more punk and stuff. When it was like about 15, that was the first time I was like – actually Jack Names The Planets I think was the first song where was like, ‘oh, that’s a good song.’ And we start playing that at gigs and we got such a different reaction, and then Girl From Mars I wrote when I was 16. So yeah, there was just something clicked all of a sudden and here we are still playing these songs over 30 years later!

Amazing! You’ve written so many songs. I mean, what is it, eight albums plus the A-Z singles and plus all the bonus extras and all that sort of stuff – how do you ensure that, writing so many songs constantly, it’s not gonna be boring for you or repetitious for listeners?

Well, I always find something new, I’m always playing and trying to find something fresh when I’m writing – and I write a lot. So, there’s just tonnes and tonnes of discarded material, but no, there’s always something going on in my life and it comes out in the songs. The subconscious comes up and I’m like, ‘oh, what the hell? Where the hell did that come from?’ And it’s like, oh, that’s this feeling I’m trying to process or understand, you know. Not everything I write is good at all, but there’s always something fresh to be found, some new kind of approach or some fun idea, yeah.

Well, it’s still working for you, man, so, keep ‘em coming, you know? In terms of songwriting, where do you think the magic comes from?

Ohh thanks, cheers. I guess it comes from… If you do have a real true feeling and you know it, it comes out. It’s something that you need to kind of express. Often a song is, like, something in my subconscious that I’m trying to work out. For example, say, Girl From Mars. That song, I was trying to write about missing someone who’s, like, totally distant, from a different planet. And you know, it’s about the first breakup that I ever had and I was trying to express the feelings of, like, how gutted I was about this breakup, and it sort of emerged that way. So things like that, you know – sometimes you don’t know what you’re really trying to say, but yeah, it kind of comes out. I’m sure there’s just some deep subconscious thing going on when you’re making art.

I find the same thing writing. You look back on it and think, ‘wow, I didn’t know that!’

Yeah. It’s somehow a way of understanding yourself. I highly recommend it to anyone, painting or writing or anything, right? Even just writing down your thoughts, it just helps you.

Definitely. So look, we’re on strict orders to keep it a bit short. So I’ve got one more for you. I’m working on a pet project at the moment about rock’n’roll movies. Do you have any favourite rock’n’roll movies?

OK. Yeah. Yeah. Loads. Damn, what’s my favourite? Oh, I do love Don’t Look Back – the Bob Dylan one, because it’s so brilliant and so cool. I guess The Year Punk Broke is a really cool one for, you know, Nirvana, Sonic Youth – seeing them all in that early stage. And – I was just chatting about this one the other day – The Rutles!

Ohh love that one. Love them. Yes, very clever.

I saw The Rutles play once. We were playing in Glasgow and The Rutles were actually playing in a different venue in in the same building, so I got to sneak off and saw [them playing] Cheese & Onions. Yeah, it’s such a brilliant band, great parodies. And I’ve been enjoying the Get Back series as well recently. That’s fucking brilliant. Especially when you’re, like, recording a lot – seeing them – you know what they were going through. It’s like, all bands have this in common, you know, sort of the creative struggle is there, even the absolute greats, yeah.

Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time…

Ohh yeah, just tell me your favourite before you run off.

My favourite rock’n’roll movie – jeebuz, so fucking many great ones – it changes all the time. I tell you what, I know it’s a cliche, but This Is Spinal Tap… I watched it two nights ago, my daughter saw it for the very first time and it was just wonderful just to hear her laughing for the whole 90 minutes. A seventeen-year-old getting it, all these years later – that was so awesome.

OK. Yeah, that’s great. Brilliant!

 

 

Category: Interviews