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Biography - Seven years after Ash first blew the roof off Tim Wheeler’s dad’s garage with ‘Jack Names The Planets’, they're still one of the most effervescent punk-pop bands on the planet. They’ve had their drug hells, their (difficult) phases, their breakdowns and their line-up changes. They’ve lost direction, found it again, gone back to their roots and recorded their masterpiece of a fourth album while still only a couple of years older than Coldplay. We always knew Ash were special, but this….
The magic first sprouted in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland, in 1992 when fifteen-year-old schoolmates Tim Wheeler and Mark Hamilton asked the weirdie bloke with the cowboy boots and bug-eyed-stare in the year above them if he wanted to drum in their band. He was Rick McMurray, they became Ash (named after the first word they all liked in the dictionary) and they had songs about space – ‘Jack Names The Planets’, ‘The Troubles’, Jackie Chan movies – ‘Kung Fu’ and girls (everything else).
Within a year their debut mini-album ‘Trailer’ was making waves and within two years the band were appearing regularly on Radio One and the covers of magazines from Kerrang! To Smash Hits as the magnificent ‘Girl From Mars’ entered the charts at number 11.
The trio’s first album proper - ‘1977’
- was released in 1996 and an instant Number One, while ‘Goldfinger’
and ‘Oh Yeah’ crashed into the Top Ten.
Offstage, though, the band were having their problems. When Mark wasn’t leaping off venue balconies he was drinking and drugging himself towards a nervous breakdown at 17. When Rick wasn’t drumming like a demon he was blowing chunks in the name of alcohol poisoning. When the band weren’t tearing strips out of venues, they were tearing them out of hotel rooms and each other. Although musically thriving – (‘A Life Less Ordinary’, from the Danny Boyle film of the same name, notched them up a third Top Ten hit in 1997) Ash needed a woman’s guiding touch. Charlotte Hatherley, of indie noiseniks Nightnurse, joined the band and brought with her a new sound and a new image. 1998’s ‘Nu-Clear Sound’ – another Top Ten album – was the birth of a new Ash: harder, and heavier.
"I still think it’s a good record but we needed to get away from the pressure and do things naturally. There were definitely some really good songs on it, but on this album, every single track is better than ‘Nu-Clear Sounds’."
He speaks, quite perceptively, of Ash’s fourth album, entitled ‘Free All Angels’. Their most mature, eclectic, expansive, optimistic and downright brilliant album to date, and the kind of luscious pop extravaganza that ‘1977’ only hinted at, it was written in part on the road during ‘Nu-Clear Sounds’ world tour and part during an unprecedented creative burst in the 18 months Tim spent back at his parents’. "Every time I sat down I wrote a song," Tim remembers, "I finished about thirty. I was just spewing out songs really. It was very natural, whatever came out."
The first single from ‘Free All Angels’ - ‘Shining Light’ is released in 2001 and it marks Ash’s return to the Top Ten with a song which embraces their pop nature best since the release of ‘Girl From Mars’. The album itself secured instant success and a rebirth for Ash, beating Janet Jackson to the coveted Number One spot on its first week. The second release from the new album, ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’, reached number 13 in the chart, and was awarded Q Magazine’s ‘Single of the Year’ and NME’s ‘Best Single’.
Not content with their return to the top, whilst on tour in the states the band record the Motown punk track ‘Envy’ as a special release for their singles collection ‘Intergalactic Sonics 7"s’, which is another massive seller.
Title:- Trailer
Release Date:- October 1994
Tracklist:-
1 Season
2 Jack Names The Planets
3 Intense Thing
4 Uncle Pat
5 Get Out
6 Petrol
7 Obscure Thing
Title:- 1977
Release Date:- 6 May 1996
Tracklist:-
1 Lose Control
2 Goldfinger
3 Girl From Mars
4 I’d Give You Anything
5 Gone The Dream
6 Kung Fu
7 Oh Yeah
8 Let It Flow
9 Innocent Smile
10 Angel Interceptor
11 Lost In You
12 Darkside Lightside
Title:- Nu-Clear Sounds
Release Date:- 20 October 1998
Tracklist:-
1 Projects
2 Low Ebb
3 Jesus Says
4 Wild Surf
5 Death Trip 21
6 Folk Song
7 Numbskull
8 Burn Out
9 Aphrodite
10 Fortune Teller
11 I’m Gonna Fall
Title:- Free All Angels
Release Date:- 23 April 2001
Tracklist:-
1 Walking Barefoot
2 Shining Light
3 Burn Baby Burn
4 Candy
5 Cherry Bomb
6 Submission
7 Someday
8 Pacific Palisades
9 Shark
10 Sometimes
11 Nicole
12 There’s A Star
13 World Domination
Title:- Intergalactic Sonic 7”s
Release Date:- September 2002
Tracklist:-
1 Burn Baby Burn
2 Envy
3 Girl From Mars
4 Shining Light
5 A Life Less Ordinary
6 Goldfinger
7 Jesus Says
8 Oh Yeah
9 Jack Names The Planets
10 Sometimes
11 Kung Fu
12 Candy
13 Angel Interceptor
14 Uncle Pat
15 Wild Surf
16 Walking Barefoot
17 Petrol
18 There’s A Star
19 Numbskull
information on this page courtesy of www.ash-official.com