Tim Wheeler interview: ashes to Ash
Ash front man Tim Wheeler speaks to Ryan Jennings about paving the way for Northern Ireland music and the band’s musical journey into the digital age.
It’s 19 May 1998 and Downpatrick act Ash are appearing in the ‘vote yes’ concert at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall. In four short years, Tim Wheeler, Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray went from 17 year-old school boys leading a “weird double life” to sharing a stage with the great U2, pushing for peace in Northern Ireland.
It’s fair to say that Ash have blazed a trail for bands from the province. A general rule of thumb is that artists here have to be that bit better if they’re hoping to make it. Snow Patrol, for example, toiled around these isles for years without getting any real reward.
So Ash’s successes have surely been Northern Ireland’s gain. As front man Tim Wheeler says: “If there’s anything we can do to help other Northern Irish bands, we love to do it.”
He’s careful not to add fuel to the fire of Northern Ireland bands competing to be the ‘next Ash’, saying that he remembers what it was like to be a young band and just wanting to be yourselves. The latest in that line is Magherafelt-based band ‘General Fiasco’, but as far as the real Ash are concerned, the only similarities are that they too are a three-piece, but “that’s where it ends”.
As 17 year-olds the band were leading something of a double life. It’s not too often that the school Easter break is spent in Los Angeles being wined and dined by record companies vying for your signature. That whole experience, he says, was “a bit nuts”.
“While we were really breaking through in a major way”, he says, “People in school weren’t aware of what we were doing as a lot of our coverage was in places like the NME, which was off most people in school’s radar.”
The school principal allowed the three boys two weeks off to tour with Elastica, an up and coming brit-pop band at the time. The only condition was that they do their homework. Needless to say, the dog ate it.
By 1993, disillusioned by the almost non- existent music industry in Northern Ireland and not being able to turn to the now well established MySpace and Facebook, the band considered calling it a day. Indeed Ash might not exist as we know it had Tim not written evergreen classic ‘Girls from Mars’ in the summer of that year.
1996 saw the release of debut LP ‘1977’ – so called because it the year Star Wars was released – followed by numerous hit singles and the title track for the Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz move, A Life Less Ordinary.
Suffering in part from ‘second album syndrome’, ‘Nu-clear Sounds’ was released in 1998. Although it was well received by the critics, fans of the upbeat ‘1977’ seemed tentative to take to the darker side of Wheeler’s writing. By his own admission that album “totally failed”.
Not to be deterred, the platinum selling ‘Free All Angels’, complete with single ‘Shining Light’, arrived in 2001 – just in time to financially save Ash; the band was £1,000 away from bankruptcy.
“We spent a quarter of a million on a documentary narrated by Ewan [McGregor] that was never released at all, which probably didn’t help,” he explains. But it’s still in the locker and after a few tweaks it could yet make its way onto DVD.
Since then the Downpatrick act have been one of a select few, alongside Oasis, who have managed to escape the brit- pop guillotine. Elastica, for example, parted ways in 2001 and even Blur experienced a massive lost of interest in the early part of this decade.
The writer-in-chief naturally puts this down to the strength of the songs. But he might have a point. While the 1995 hit ‘Girl from Mars’ propelled the band into oblivion – it was also famously used as the on hold music at NASA – other singles such as ‘Oh Yeah’ and ‘Goldfinger’ have certainly stood the test of time.
The front man is now a naturalised New Yorker, having settled in the city on the back of the ‘Meltdown’ tour in 2005. If you are a successful recording artist it is only natural that you should feel drawn to the city that never sleeps but there were other factors too. He had broken ties with his partner in London and, to that end, felt he had nothing to lose.
By coincidence, bassist Mark Hamilton was in the same boat, but mohawked drummer Rick McMurray was never one for the big city. So while Tim and Mark wake up not far from each other in Manhattan, Rick regularly jaunts across the pond from Edinburgh to lay down his drum tracks. It’s fair to say the two places are worlds apart, but neither Tim nor Rick however are too far away from south Down town Downpatrick – or “home” as the singer still calls it.
A year later the two New Yorkers came across an unwanted studio, which they turned into one of the recording kind. That was the base for their last recorded album, ‘Twilight of the Innocents’.
Since then the band have gone entirely digital and are planning to release 26 singles in one year. For him it was simply a case of reacting to the format of the day. “When I first got an iPod it changed the way I listened to music – I started making playlists. Before I would only ever listen to albums but I find it exciting that people could get music on a regular basis,” he explains.
With an album, he says, the artist’s hard work comes out at the same time but releasing one song at a time makes it last that much longer. It’s helpful of course that they can record, produce and distribute their own music, having established their own label, Atomic Heart Records.
In spite of the digital move, touring remains an important part of any band’s schedule and coming into the summer festival season, expect to see them back on the road in both the UK and Ireland, perhaps with a few stopovers in County Down.
