Few debut albums capture a moment quite like '1977'. Three decades after its release, Ash are still celebrating the record that transformed three Northern Irish teenagers into one of the UK's most enduring rock bands. As the anniversary tour gathers pace, we caught up with bassist Mark Hamilton at Download Festival to reflect on the album's lasting legacy, the thrill of early support from heroes like Therapy?, unexpected Star Wars connections, the highs and lows that followed, and how '1977' continues to resonate with audiences old and new. A life less ordinary; Eamon O'Neill.
Photo; Louise Phillips
Hi Mark, how have you guys been doing?
Good. We're in festival mode all summer. It's usually July and August, but now it seems like all of June is festivals, so it's great. Regular touring kicks off again in September, but these three months are just festivals, every weekend.
The big thing that's happening at the minute is the celebration of '1977'; what's it like for you to be looking back on 30 years of that album?
I mean, it kind of launched our career, really, and then has allowed us to travel around the world for the last 30 years, and we're still on that roller coaster. It encompassed a time when we were still teenagers and a lot of our fans at the time were also teenagers, so we look back to that time as almost being really a pivotal moment. The 'Free All Angels' [2001] album might have been bigger worldwide commercially, but '1977' was really special at the time.
I first came across Ash when I saw a review of the 'Petrol' single in Kerrang!, and I remember Andy Cairns was bigging up Ash as well; how did that sort of support affect you?
It was great because we were still basically teenagers. We were kids, and then we were doing our first little shows around Belfast, in bars like the Penny Farthing, which was a tiny room which would hold fifty or sixty people. At one of those gigs Andy came down and was watching us, and we were like, "Oh my god, Andy from Therapy?'s here!", and over the years we've got to get to know them really well. They had us support them whenever they were doing their big shows at the Ulster Hall or the Point in Dublin. Recently, Andy joined us on stage and played with us at the Shine Festival, so it's cool how it plays out.
'1977' kicked into life when 'Goldfinger' was released as its first single, in 1996.
It's weird because 'Goldfinger' was number five in the charts and 'Girl from Mars' was number 11 in the charts, but 'Girl from Mars' seems to have more impact. Weekly charts can fluctuate, but it's the one that really seemed to have launched worldwide, globally.
'A Life Less Ordinary' featured on the soundtrack to the film of the same name. How was that experience?
That was Danny Boyle, and obviously, he had put together Trainspotting, and then that's in that soundtrack, and that was the next thing he had done after Trainspotting, and so that was a pretty big deal for us to get asked to do that. They sent us the film footage, and the song was written around the edits of the scenes, which was a different way of doing things, but it was kind of cool. And then through that we got to meet Ewan McGregor, and then because of him we got invited to go and play it to him on the set of 'The Phantom Menace', the Star Wars movie, and that opened up the doors to us doing music for computer games for them. So it was just one door to open another one, kind of thing.
Good. We're in festival mode all summer. It's usually July and August, but now it seems like all of June is festivals, so it's great. Regular touring kicks off again in September, but these three months are just festivals, every weekend.
The big thing that's happening at the minute is the celebration of '1977'; what's it like for you to be looking back on 30 years of that album?
I mean, it kind of launched our career, really, and then has allowed us to travel around the world for the last 30 years, and we're still on that roller coaster. It encompassed a time when we were still teenagers and a lot of our fans at the time were also teenagers, so we look back to that time as almost being really a pivotal moment. The 'Free All Angels' [2001] album might have been bigger worldwide commercially, but '1977' was really special at the time.
I first came across Ash when I saw a review of the 'Petrol' single in Kerrang!, and I remember Andy Cairns was bigging up Ash as well; how did that sort of support affect you?
It was great because we were still basically teenagers. We were kids, and then we were doing our first little shows around Belfast, in bars like the Penny Farthing, which was a tiny room which would hold fifty or sixty people. At one of those gigs Andy came down and was watching us, and we were like, "Oh my god, Andy from Therapy?'s here!", and over the years we've got to get to know them really well. They had us support them whenever they were doing their big shows at the Ulster Hall or the Point in Dublin. Recently, Andy joined us on stage and played with us at the Shine Festival, so it's cool how it plays out.
'1977' kicked into life when 'Goldfinger' was released as its first single, in 1996.
It's weird because 'Goldfinger' was number five in the charts and 'Girl from Mars' was number 11 in the charts, but 'Girl from Mars' seems to have more impact. Weekly charts can fluctuate, but it's the one that really seemed to have launched worldwide, globally.
'A Life Less Ordinary' featured on the soundtrack to the film of the same name. How was that experience?
That was Danny Boyle, and obviously, he had put together Trainspotting, and then that's in that soundtrack, and that was the next thing he had done after Trainspotting, and so that was a pretty big deal for us to get asked to do that. They sent us the film footage, and the song was written around the edits of the scenes, which was a different way of doing things, but it was kind of cool. And then through that we got to meet Ewan McGregor, and then because of him we got invited to go and play it to him on the set of 'The Phantom Menace', the Star Wars movie, and that opened up the doors to us doing music for computer games for them. So it was just one door to open another one, kind of thing.
That's another Star Wars reference, and for anyone that doesn't know, '1977' was named after the year of that film's release.
It was a combination of a bunch of things. We didn't have an album title, and the record company were asking for it. We were in the studio finishing the album and the record company were like; "we need a finished title by Monday or the album's getting pushed back. It's going to be delayed because we need to go and start doing all the setup work for it", and we had a cardboard box that had all these stupid names in it. One of the titles was 'Young Dumb and Full of Cum'. There was lots of really bad titles, but I think '1977' was almost like a safe default that we came back to because we just couldn't decide. I was like; "well, it's the year of our birth" - me and Tim [Wheeler, guitar, vocals] were both born in '77 - it was obviously when Star Wars was released, and that was pretty formative for us as we were kids. And then also, while we weren't around at the time, it was the year that punk broke. Without even knowing who they were, like, The Undertones, and The Buzzcocks, we were cited as being this new next generation of that kind of thing. We were getting all these references, and then we were looking back and going; "oh, these were the originals".
Ash were riding the crest of a wave at the time, of something the press were calling Britrock.
Yeah, it was weird because you had the whole Britpop scene, which was kind of more of an indie thing, which was the weekly news press - Melody Maker and NME. Then you also had monthly magazines like Select, and the music press was huge back then. They could break bands just from hyping them up, and they often would create scenes that didn't really even exist. They'd just create things. I mean, they would hype up bands who didn't even have a single released. Then, obviously radio was big too, but you had the indie music press, and then you had the pop music press, and a lot of the Britpop stuff like the Oasises and Blurs, they spilled over into the Smash Hits magazines as well, which is not where they would have usually been, and we kind of got a bit of that pie as well, being on Top of the Pops and things like that. And then you also had the rock stuff, so Kerrang! was championing us.
That's not a bad thing, having that sort of crossover appeal.
Yeah, we were doing a lot of press at the time, which was good.
You touched on 'Free all Angels', which was a huge smash; was it hard to follow '1977'?
By the time it came to do the second album, 'Nu-Clear Sounds' [1998] we had used up basically everything that we had previously, on the mini-album 'Trailer' [1994], and on '1977'. We'd cleaned ourselves out, and it was like basically starting from scratch, a clean slate, "you've got to write a new album", and there's a lot of pressure from the record company to basically come up with '1977' part two. They wanted more of the same, and if you tell belligerent teenagers what to do, they tend to do the opposite, and we were like; "no, we're going to take it completely left field". So half that album's kind of weird dark ballads, and then also heavier stuff. I think there's maybe only one or two songs which you would say were in the same vein as '77, comparatively. Compared to '77, it was a commercial disaster. I mean, it still went gold, but what it maybe did was it made the music press look at us differently, because we started getting tarred with the 'pop band' thing, the 'boy band' thing a little bit, and then 'Nu-Clear Sounds', in a weird way, got us taken a little bit more seriously by the rock critics, which, even though it was a dip in sales, it might have helped us over the long run.
So 'Nu-Clear Sounds' gave you credibility?
Yeah, definitely. It wasn't just a flash in the pan, or like or a one trick pony kind of thing. But then by the end of the 'Nu-Clear Sounds' tour we were pretty broke, and we had recorded demos for the next album, and the record company weren't really convinced by them, so we ended up just going and we talked to Owen [Morris] our producer, and we went in and started recording them. He sort of waived any kind of fee, initially. He had heard the songs and he believed in them, and he was like; "we're just going to go and record them anyway". so we went and recorded them, and then 'Shining Light' came out of that stuff. We recorded in Van Morrison's studio in Bath, I think, and then the record company heard it and were like; "okay, we were wrong"!
So you had that vindication.
Yeah, and then we went to Spain and had a fantastic time recording the rest of the album. I don't think any of us really expected it to go as big as it did, especially after everything; we were high [successfully], then a dip, and then back up again. It was crazy.
And you're here celebrating 30 years of the album that started it all; what else is happening?
We've got the Ulster Hall [Belfast] on sale and I know that there's less than 200 tickets left, and it's months away, it's at Christmas time, so that'll be gone, probably the next few weeks. And I don't know, depending on what happens, but I know they're adding more shows to the tour, so who knows.
It was a combination of a bunch of things. We didn't have an album title, and the record company were asking for it. We were in the studio finishing the album and the record company were like; "we need a finished title by Monday or the album's getting pushed back. It's going to be delayed because we need to go and start doing all the setup work for it", and we had a cardboard box that had all these stupid names in it. One of the titles was 'Young Dumb and Full of Cum'. There was lots of really bad titles, but I think '1977' was almost like a safe default that we came back to because we just couldn't decide. I was like; "well, it's the year of our birth" - me and Tim [Wheeler, guitar, vocals] were both born in '77 - it was obviously when Star Wars was released, and that was pretty formative for us as we were kids. And then also, while we weren't around at the time, it was the year that punk broke. Without even knowing who they were, like, The Undertones, and The Buzzcocks, we were cited as being this new next generation of that kind of thing. We were getting all these references, and then we were looking back and going; "oh, these were the originals".
Ash were riding the crest of a wave at the time, of something the press were calling Britrock.
Yeah, it was weird because you had the whole Britpop scene, which was kind of more of an indie thing, which was the weekly news press - Melody Maker and NME. Then you also had monthly magazines like Select, and the music press was huge back then. They could break bands just from hyping them up, and they often would create scenes that didn't really even exist. They'd just create things. I mean, they would hype up bands who didn't even have a single released. Then, obviously radio was big too, but you had the indie music press, and then you had the pop music press, and a lot of the Britpop stuff like the Oasises and Blurs, they spilled over into the Smash Hits magazines as well, which is not where they would have usually been, and we kind of got a bit of that pie as well, being on Top of the Pops and things like that. And then you also had the rock stuff, so Kerrang! was championing us.
That's not a bad thing, having that sort of crossover appeal.
Yeah, we were doing a lot of press at the time, which was good.
You touched on 'Free all Angels', which was a huge smash; was it hard to follow '1977'?
By the time it came to do the second album, 'Nu-Clear Sounds' [1998] we had used up basically everything that we had previously, on the mini-album 'Trailer' [1994], and on '1977'. We'd cleaned ourselves out, and it was like basically starting from scratch, a clean slate, "you've got to write a new album", and there's a lot of pressure from the record company to basically come up with '1977' part two. They wanted more of the same, and if you tell belligerent teenagers what to do, they tend to do the opposite, and we were like; "no, we're going to take it completely left field". So half that album's kind of weird dark ballads, and then also heavier stuff. I think there's maybe only one or two songs which you would say were in the same vein as '77, comparatively. Compared to '77, it was a commercial disaster. I mean, it still went gold, but what it maybe did was it made the music press look at us differently, because we started getting tarred with the 'pop band' thing, the 'boy band' thing a little bit, and then 'Nu-Clear Sounds', in a weird way, got us taken a little bit more seriously by the rock critics, which, even though it was a dip in sales, it might have helped us over the long run.
So 'Nu-Clear Sounds' gave you credibility?
Yeah, definitely. It wasn't just a flash in the pan, or like or a one trick pony kind of thing. But then by the end of the 'Nu-Clear Sounds' tour we were pretty broke, and we had recorded demos for the next album, and the record company weren't really convinced by them, so we ended up just going and we talked to Owen [Morris] our producer, and we went in and started recording them. He sort of waived any kind of fee, initially. He had heard the songs and he believed in them, and he was like; "we're just going to go and record them anyway". so we went and recorded them, and then 'Shining Light' came out of that stuff. We recorded in Van Morrison's studio in Bath, I think, and then the record company heard it and were like; "okay, we were wrong"!
So you had that vindication.
Yeah, and then we went to Spain and had a fantastic time recording the rest of the album. I don't think any of us really expected it to go as big as it did, especially after everything; we were high [successfully], then a dip, and then back up again. It was crazy.
And you're here celebrating 30 years of the album that started it all; what else is happening?
We've got the Ulster Hall [Belfast] on sale and I know that there's less than 200 tickets left, and it's months away, it's at Christmas time, so that'll be gone, probably the next few weeks. And I don't know, depending on what happens, but I know they're adding more shows to the tour, so who knows.
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