Come October, Ash are about to embark on an ambitious scheme. They’re ditching the tried and tested album format and are instead opting to release a single every two weeks for a year (A-Z Singles). It’s a bold plan; one which could either change the way music is distributed to fans, or be resigned to the pile of gimmicky marketing ploys. Only time will tell.
In the meantime, they’re setting off on a run of gigs (the A-Z Tour) to support the releases and this month in East, we caught up with Ash’s bassist, Mark Hamilton, for a chat about their upcoming gig at the Crypt in Hastings, releasing a single every two weeks for a year and filming Coldplay’s Chris Martin as he gets attacked by an axe wielding ghost. No, really.
As we begin the conversation, the transatlantic line leads to delays and while the ‘hellos’ and initial greetings are lost over one another and in the background crackle, the conversation starts with the lofty bassist waxing lyrical about Hastings’ Crypt.
MH: If I’m right, the Crypt was the first show we played on the UK mainland, back in either 94 or 95. We’re returning to the scene of the crime.
E: Do you like the Crypt as a venue?
MH: I remember it’s quite tiny. It’s almost like a wee cube; the ceilings quite low as well. I think I remember continually cracking my head, because I’m quite tall.
E: For your latest tour (the A-Z Tour) you’re performing at a lot of smaller venues, sometimes off the beaten track (the gig track that is): what was the reasoning behind this?
MH: Our plan is we’re going to be releasing a new song every week for a year, and we wanted to get a body of work behind us before we went on tour. We still wanted to get out on tour as soon as the series started, so we thought we’d go out and play smaller towns and places that we haven’t played before. It should be a lot of fun.
We’ve done tours like this before, small venue tours. Small venues are always fun. It’s something that really set up Shining Light (Ash’s 2001 single, taken from the Free All Angels) well. I think we did about five weeks of secondary market gigs before that single dropped and it went into the charts at number five. So it’s going to be a four or five week tour of places we wouldn’t usually go to.
E: Was there a heated debate over which towns to play?
MH: We told our agent that we don’t want to go to the cities we would usually hit on a regular tour. Then he came back with a bunch of dates, but he had quite a lot of work to do on this. But that was good; it was good to make him actually work.
E: Did the band get the ultimate casting vote?
MH: Yeah. There were a number of venues we told him to change, saying, ‘We usually play there, so get us something different’.
E: It seems a daunting task, releasing a single every two weeks for year: how prepared are you right now?
MH: We’re pretty much set to go. The first six months are all lined up. The art work and songs are all being sent off to be mastered. The first few have been mastered already. We’ve got about 44 songs recorded that we can choose from and we’re going to go back in the studio to record a whole lot more. The good thing about this sort of process is that throughout the year, if we write new songs and we feel they’re better than some of the ones that are already lined up, then we’ll just slot them in and no one need ever know.
E: So nothing’s set in stone?
MH: The first six months are set in stone, but the second half is still flexible. It’s nice to have that kind of freedom.
E: Where did the idea for the A-Z Singles originate from?
MH: I guess we thought with the album format, there was a bit of frustration in that you record one, and for us it tends to get a three year cycle. You write it, record it, get it ready to be released then go on tour for a year. The whole thing takes close to three years, and it’s a long time for fans to wait for new music. We kept thinking that we had to keep on re-introducing ourselves. Then you go on tour and people seemed to think you’ve disappeared for awhile. It’s an ongoing cycle.
So we thought we’d come up with a different model where we never really had to be actually be away, that might work better. That was one of the reasons. We had the freedom when launching our own label as well, to try something different, so we’re going to give it a go. I think if it works, a lot of people might copy it.
E: Is there a certain amount of trepidation involved with this? No one’s really done anything like this before?
MH: There’s some trepidation but there’s also excitement as well. It’s the same as jumping out of a plane for the first time. You’re going to be nervous but you’re also excited at the same time. So that’s where we are, especially as it’s our own label.
E: There’s been a lot of talk recently about the decline of the album: do you think this adds fuel to the fire?
MH: Well, when our last album was released, we came out with a bit of an untimely statement. Tim (Wheeler) did*, the week before it was released, when he said this was the last album we were going to record. So, he should have really left that until six months after we recorded it or released it.
That made a lot of people think that we were splitting up, which is quite strange, but we never had any intention of doing that, we just wanted to change how we went about releasing the music.
I think it’s been a long road of decline for the album, especially with the rise of digital media where people can pick and choose songs they want to listen to and they don’t have to have an old CD in the machine. Maybe it’s a busier society and people have got shorter attention spans and want to listen to individual songs rather than a large chunk of music. Short blasts of music seem to be the way people listen, and especially how they pick and buy music. That and the fact a lot of kids can get their music for free and aren’t going to pay for it, so the industry’s been in decline anyway.
* Wheeler announced at the 2007 Isle of Wight Festival that Twilight of the Innocents would be the band’s last album.
E: Going back to what Tim said, is that something you’re going to stick with, or do you think you might go back to recording conventional albums?
MH: I just don’t know. At the moment we’re just gearing up for this whole new strategy which starts this month (on Oct 12), where we launch with the first single True Love 1980. Beyond this, we can’t really think beyond this. We might do something completely different.
From our website, people can sign up for a subscription and every two weeks a song will automatically be emailed out to them. It’s priced cheaper than a regular CD would be, and that’s for 26 songs. There might be bonus tracks too, as we’ve recorded a lot of music and we want to get that out there too. I think established bands that have got websites find it a lot easier to distribute their music direct to the fans without any middle men or record companies.
E: And just finally, I read you once made a horror movie called Slashed. Is this true?
MH: Yeah. In 2002 we were on tour with Coldplay in the States and we had a lot of downtime. I guess we were travelling around America for weeks and we just wanted to keep ourselves occupied and find fun things to do. So we had our own video cameras and decided to make a slasher movie. Chris and Jonny from Coldplay participated in it and both of them were FBI agents who got hacked to death by an axe wielding ghost, which was pretty fun. So we’ve got that video footage in the vault and it’s priceless.
E: No date for a release yet?
MH: The thing never felt finished. The whole movie was envisaged to be about an hour and a half and I think we’ve got about 45 minutes. But certainly enough good quality stuff to put on Youtube at some point.