Ash (Hastings)

Somewhere in the sleeve notes to their debut mini album 'Trailer', Ash give a shout out to a ‘dive’ they used to play in Belfast. There was always a sense that the band loved to thrash about in the small sweaty spaces that had provided their training ground as a trio, and since the departure of fourth member Charlotte Hatherly it looked as though the time was ripe for a return to small venues.

This was not the first time Ash have appeared in Hastings. Quite apart from early days of touring small venues, they dropped by on an experimental 2001 tour in which fans were asked to vote on where they wanted the group to play.

This tour is another experiment. Having decided that nobody listens to albums anymore, and perhaps hoping to reconnect with an earlier incarnation of themselves, Ash are releasing 26 singles in the space of a year (at the rate of two a week) one for each letter of the alphabet. Accompanying this interesting but arbitrary musical gesture is a tour of 26 towns in the UK, each one also corresponding to a letter.

Thus Tim Wheeler et al are back in The Crypt, a venue they last graced when they were teenagers. Now in their thirties the group haven’t really aged, but their demeanour is just fractionally more serene and grown up.

Nostalgia is in the air. Although the new single ('Joy Kicks Darkness', released on Monday and to correspond with B) gets an airing alongside 'True Love 1980' and material from 'Meltdown' and 'Twilight Of The Idols', the crowd really responds to opener 'Lose Control' which has people squeezed tight up against the barrier to get close to a group in full flow. 'Oh Yeah', 'Girl From Mars' and 'Goldfinger' cause incendiary levels of excitement. When Wheeler says “this is a song from 1977, the album not the year” does he think the crowd don’t remember his band’s first full length album? He need not have worried, their memory goes back further still, as demonstrated by the way a seething sweaty mass of people is on the move for 'Uncle Pat' and 'Petrol', both taken from 'Trailer'.

A trend emerges here; the audience is clearly more moved by the spectacle of their favourites being dusted off than by anything that has been recorded in the last seven years or so. There is a good reason for this: although Ash find their groove from time to time in tracks that capture something of their youthful essence (Ash are about youth more than almost any other British rock group), at its worst the new material is plodding and rather pedestrian.

The effect isn’t helped by a sound system that simply buckles under the weight of the music, with Mark Hamilton’s bass coming out way too loud and sounding like a lone soldier amidst the torn fragments of lead guitar. Luckily Ash’s exuberance has always made up for technical problems so this gripe is rendered less important. They have to be applauded for their intrepid search for the heart of their own work and constant consideration of how the music business promotes and packages what it deals in.



The Crypt, Hastings, 28th October 2009.

Written by Huw Green.