Legendary rockers ASH are back on the live circuit again with the announcements that they will be playing both Temple House Festival and Indiependence this summer as well as their own headline show in the intimate Whelans which is guaranteed to be an absolute sweatbox of a gig.
As popular as ever and still one of our favourite Irish acts of all time we were delighted to be able to grab Mark Hamilton for a quick chat.
He spoke with Deirdre Harrison a few days ago and here’s what they talked about.
You’ve been together since 1992, when you were starting out did you ever imagine 19 years later you’d still be together?
I don’t think we would have even would have really thought about what we would be doing in two years never mind almost 20, so yeah it’s pretty crazy. We’ve essentially become like a second family. It’s great like. It’s fantastic, it is almost 20 years. We’ve had a great run so far and we’re still hungry. We’re not going to be releasing any new music this year because we put out so much last year but we’re going to recharge our batteries and hopefully we’ll be looking to put out new stuff in 2012.
After so long together could you actually imagine doing any other job?
No that’s the problem; we’ve never had proper jobs! We came out of high school and went on tour and it’s kind of like we ran away and joined the circus. Whenever we were younger we had summer jobs like picking spuds in the fields and stuff; I think Rick waited tables at one point, but we’ve never had a real job. The whole idea of 9 to 5 is awful. Just horrible.
The music industry has obviously changed a lot since then; do you think it’s harder or easier now for young bands starting out to get their music out there?
It’s easier to get your music out there. It’s more competitive because anyone can get their music out there. There’s not as much money in the industry as there was back then so it’s not as lucrative as it once was. But if you’re a real artist you’re not doing it for the money anyway, you’re doing it for the love of it. So yeah the industry is completely different, it’s almost unrecognisable to what it was ten years ago. Like mid to late 90s, just the amount of excess in the music industry was insane. But now the amount of money involved is fractional. I guess it’s just because of the advent of downloads and stuff. Kids know where to go and get their music for free and that’s just the reality of it. But it’s down to the bands now to change I guess their business model; you gotta get out on the road, you gotta tour and make your money from merchandise. I guess there’s not the same stigma that there used to be with doing adverts or sponsors. There used to be, certainly in the 90s, if you did music for an advert for anything it was almost oh you’ve sold out. But now it’s almost you know, if people get something like that it’s almost like well done, congratulations. It’s a big break.
With the A-Z series was it hard to write 26 songs that all had to be single quality? Did you ever just wish you could stop half way through?
No, we ended up recording something like 56 songs total. We wanted to keep the quality high and not every song you write is going to be up to that standard so we just kept writing and kept writing until w e felt that we were content with what we’d got. We were lucky we could do that because we’ve got our own studio over in New York and we had the luxury of being able to stay in the studio for almost two years to write and record which not everyone has. That was I guess, the biggest artistic project we’ve undertaken in our whole career. Just the scale of it, we essentially recorded four albums.
Do you have a favourite song yourself from the A-Z Series?
One of my favourite songs is the first song on Vol 2, it’s called “Dare To Dream”. It’s very anthemic and the lyrics are quite down beat but then the music’s quite anthemic and uplifting, it’s kind of a weird, what’s the word I’m looking for, juxtaposition.
In hindsight, do you wish you had done anything differently with the series?
We spent quite a lot of our own money pressing vinyls, because we’re a real vinyl lover band. Every single we’ve released, we’ve always released it on 7’’ vinyl and we wanted to continue doing that. We released all the A-Z stuff on our own label and we just wanted to do that. The logistics of releasing 26 vinyls in one year was…a lot of effort went into that and planning, and headaches. If we didn’t have to worry about doing that the digital releases could have been a lot smoother. Purely on the logistical side, had we known then what we know now, we probably would have just said look it’s not worth it. It was almost like a vanity product for ourselves that we wanted to have those vinyls, the collectors market is so small, you’re talking maybe 500 people who will buy those vinyls and they love them. Those people love those vinyls, but you don’t make anything, in fact we probably only just broke even on them. But it was just a lot of effort.
Do you think that took away from the creative process because there was so much work involved?
No. We really didn’t, we had one person who was running the whole label side of things. She was cracking the whip at us, basically saying, “You gotta get this together, get this together.” To some extent we were making it up as we went along. Not everything was done in advance; we were still finishing off songs and getting them mixed as other ones were being released. There was a lot of chasing deadlines and things.
Do you think you’d ever go back to a major label again or is everything definitely just on Atomic Heart from now on?
You’re never going to say never to anything. But we don’t have any intentions to. That offer hasn’t even been presented to us. I know that Warner are talking to us about wanting to release something again, but it wouldn’t necessarily be new music it would be a compilation of old stuff. They own the rights to the catalogue so at the end of the day they’ll do what they want to do with that.
Would you be happy with that, to release another compilation?
If they do that it’s…yeah. It wouldn’t actually bother me you know?
For the “Binary” video you used some of the scenes from “Slashed”. Will you ever release the whole film or is that all fans will see?
No, I’m actually really lazy with that stuff. I’ve got a lot of footage from “Slashed” and I think it’s just trying to find the right optimum moment. I think that whenever Coldplay come back with a new album, which shouldn’t be too long, there’ll be a lot of hype and press around those guys. I think that might be a good time to drop the next instalment of that.
You’re playing The Temple House Festival this June and a few other smaller festivals over the summer; how does the atmosphere compare with larger festivals like Oxegen or Glastonbury?
Well you know, we have different touring cycles whenever we release stuff in that year. Last year we released A-Z and we went and did Oxegen. Any year that you’re trying to push a product our agents are actively trying to get us on the bigger bills and then, I guess you could call it an intermediate year or a down year, whenever we’re not really pushing it you will do secondary smaller festivals. That’s kind of where we’re at this year. It’s nice to play the different smaller ones; you get to go to a lot of different places like we wouldn’t have necessarily been to before.
Do you ever get to hang around for the weekend at these festivals or it a case of arriving, playing and leaving?
It really depends on what our schedule is like, if you’ve got across Europe to another festival the next day then there’s a lot play, pack and go. But if the next day is not too far away then everyone hangs out and usually you get to know a lot of the other bands. If there’s some other bands that you know you want to hang out and party with them. Festivals are usually just a good laugh.
Thanks for Mark for taking the time out to answer a few questions.
Ash play a number of dates across the summer including a sold out date at Whelans, Temple House Festival on June 10th and Indiependence Festival on July 30th. They also have dates in Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Switzerland and the UK.