Ash Are Set To Rock The Singles Tour 1994 – 2024 In Australia
Northern Ireland’s ASH bring their high-energy, punky pop genius back down under for The Singles Tour. This Tour will feature the best moments from the trio’s hit-laden career including Kung Fu, Girl from Mars, Oh Yeah, Goldfinger, A Life Less Ordinary, Shining Light, Burn Baby Burn, Walking Barefoot as well as their last two singles Usual Places and Race The Night and much, much more.
The band recently released their acclaimed eighth and UK Top 20 album Race The Night, it marks the band’s first album in five years and also, features new live favourite Like A God which they can’t wait to play live alongside all the anthems we know and love. Join ASH and their indie pop zest that we all know and love on The Singles Tour. Drummer Rick McMurray talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.
Another Australian tour, I think we might have to adopt you as one of our own?
I know, we were quite surprised when we got the offer to come back so soon. We were figuring it would be maybe 2025 or perhaps even 2026 because that would be the thirtieth anniversary of 1977 album. I think we did the twentieth anniversary in 2016, which was really great. So, we kind of figured it might be in a while, but when we got the offer, we were like, yeah, thank you very much. We’re delighted to come back.
It is crazy with all these milestones that are rolling round. I still go back to your first tour of Australia with Garbage and haven’t missed a tour since. In some ways I feel like I have grown up with the band.
Yeah, yeah, I was actually doing an interview for a festival we’re doing in the UK a couple of months, it’s actually Alex James from Blurs own festival, it’s called the Big Feastival. I think he’s trying to sell some cheese and get some bands playing. But yeah, that would be cool to do that, but was just talking about how we did the Latitude festival in the UK and saying how different festivals are from what they were when we started. It pretty much was all our contemporaries, I remember the first time doing Glastonbury was like Oasis and like Prodigy headlining. When we’re playing Latitude, on the same stage as us we had Big Special. I don’t know if they’ve made any waves in Australia, but they’ve blown up in the UK over the last year. I can’t get enough of them, they’re a great band and they actually supported us about a year ago, just before they blew up. It’s great to see them doing so well. They were on first. So, we have got these new bands coming up and then you get bands like us who’ve been around for thirty years. We saw our old mates from The Darkness. We’re watching this at this stage and then you had, like Duran Duran headlining as well. It was a real mix of eras and styles going on, whereas back in the day, it definitely felt like festivals were for were for contemporary bands and contemporary bands alone almost. So, it’s a real change. I guess if you if you asked us thirty years ago, would we still be doing festivals and coming to Australia it would be absolutely mind blowing for us.
The whole festival scene in Australia is precariously balanced with many not continuing. Is that like that in the UK?
There’s a lot of that in the UK which is down to the current economic climate. Hopefully things will stabilise. If it’s something else then it’s a bit worrying, but fingers crossed it will turn a corner.
Coming back and playing and playing the singles this time must be a sheer delight?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s something we’ve never shied away from playing the singles of the past. We do have a new album out as well. We’ve got plenty of singles that have come out off that as well. There will be a good mix of stuff, we’re just excited to go back and play. I was doing an interview earlier and someone was asking about particular songs, and I was like, well, I hadn’t considered playing that one. But, you know, social media does exist these days. So, if we get pestered enough and I’m saying that as I’m the guy in the band that would usually try and ignore that sort of thing. I’m just saying let’s just play what we want to play. Certain other people are like, oh, yeah, well, if there if there’s a bit of love for that let’s try and do it. So, yeah, I mean, if you want to pester us you can and see what happens.
With this tour being focused on singles are you looking at playing them in chronological order?
Yeah, I don’t think we’ve ever done like a chronological order set list before. It would be an interesting experiment, maybe it’s something we can talk about. For us it’s more the flow of songs. Where we have done the chronological order thing is for anniversary tours of an album, and you are restricted by the sequencing of the of the album. It definitely makes for an interesting gig because everyone knows what’s coming next. So I think we probably get a better flow with the set list when we are picking it for the show rather than when it was released or whatever. Maybe we’ll experiment with that, but I don’t know.
Even with the band’s ups and downs are you amazed that things are going stronger than even before?
Yeah, we’ve had our ups and downs. I think what happened with the first few albums with was that we had major success with the first record, the second record sort of in retrospect was seen as a sort of a dip, certainly commercially in terms of what it sold and that was that was a worrying time for us. We regrouped after that and we were aware that Free All Angels might be our final album at that point if it hadn’t sold. We were seeing a lot of our contemporaries being dropped at the time by their labels. If this is going to be us, we’re going to go out in a blaze of glory and make the best album we can. That energy we had resonated with everyone and that’s what I think has been the secret to, or kind of confidence, that we did survive that and we feel like we can survive anything these days. So, whatever happens commercially we’re always like, right, we can get over this and move forward no matter what.
On reflection are you really proud of your latest album Race The Night and how that ended up?
Absolutely! I think when it was released, a lot of the reviews were saying it’s our best album in twenty years pitching somewhere between Meltdown and Free All Angels, which I’m happy with that sort of analysis of it. That’s cool by me. The last the few years before that, we weren’t alone in this, but it was very much a limbo period for the band because of the whole COVID thing. Then trying to re-establish touring and it was quite unusual the way we put that that album together because we had a lot of stuff recorded like pre-COVID.
We would have had an album out if COVID hadn’t happened. A new album, which would have been fine, would been an eclectic bunch of stuff that that might have come out in 2021, but with COVID happening and Tim continued to write, I think it was me that said, well, hang on rather than doing an album that’s shooting off in ten different directions at once, why don’t we take stuff that we’ve written previously and put it with stuff that we’d written after COVID and corral the songs into more of a coherent direction.
There’s stuff from on Race The Night that’s from as far back as 2018 and then there’s stuff written from a few months before the album was released. I think that gave the album more of an identity. Within that identity it was very much like a guitar record. It’s still going from very punky stuff like Braindead to more melodic stuff like the title track Race The Night, and then there’s heavier stuff Like A God. It is moving about a bit, but it’s got more of a guitar thing going on than we’ve had in in a long time. I think that’s kind of one of the strengths of it and I guess moving forward, we’re going to the studio, and we still have got a bunch of stuff leftover from Race The Night. We’re in the same position, we’ve got seven to ten songs to add to that bunch, and then we got to figure out what direction we’re going to take with that first, because it could go very kind of experimental or it could go a little bit more guitary as well. It’s just whether we want to follow up Race The Night with some more sort of guitar driven stuff or whether we want to go with more sort of experimental stuff.
Beyond the tour is the focus very much on getting the next album finished?
I think at this stage it’s probably going to be two albums. It’s been a thing, ever since we did the A to Z series when we did a series of twenty six singles in one year back in 2009, 2010. Ever since then, we’ve gone back to albums we we’ve been like, right, what we want to do is we want to get an album out, we want to tour it and then we want to get an album as soon as possible after. Then we want to get on a roll and continue that roll. Ever since that idea has come it feels like something’s gotten in the way and frustrated our plans of doing that. The albums have been a bit more spaced out as they ever were in terms of release schedule. But, we’re feeling quietly confident, shall I say, of maybe getting two albums, if not next year, we’ll get one out early next year and then maybe either the end of next year or the very early the following year. That’s definitely the plan. We’ve got like tonnes of material which is a great problem to have, but we just want to get stuff out on a more regular basis because the stuff’s there and we have fan base there waiting for it. So, fingers crossed we can actually achieve that.
Interview By Rob Lyon
Catch Ash on the following dates, tickets from Metropolis Touring…
