Bought it online before I had a turntable (recipe for success, as we’ve seen). Got a limited edition signed silver pressing. Not unhappy to own it, but it’s not going to spend a whole lot of time off the shelf.
I’ve seen Ash four times in concert and loved each one. We went to see them play the entirety of 1977 in London one time (I think this is the show). Great show, but ahead of it, I ended up waiting with a friend in a tube station for our better halves.
At one point, we’re sitting there chatting and she says, “There’s Tim” – Tim Wheeler being the lead singer of Ash. I laughed and kept talking, but then she turned me around and sure enough, there’s the lead singer of a not unpopular British group just hanging out in the tube station. I think he and the bassist hopped on a train to grab something they left behind.
Fun little celeb sighting. I mean, you don’t know who Ash is, sure, but in the UK they’ve released four albums that cracked the top ten. Two of them hit number one.
When the show kicked off, they had stormtroopers walk out on stage followed by a dude dressed as Darth Vader, I think. Ash is really into Star Wars. At that show where I saw them chuck the PlayStation out into the crowd (something I’m referencing like you’ve read it, but that I actually write about below), the most popular song was the one they contributed to the Star Wars: Republic Commando game.
I’m now seeing that Islands made it to number 18 on the UK charts, which means I probably haven’t listened to it enough to appreciate it. Maybe. The British have hit and miss taste in music, which is a compliment. American musical tastes haven’t broadly aligned with mine for decades.
It’s not like a Tranquility Base Accordion + Pie Plate situation where I actively dislike it. It just never really wormed its way into my ear.
When I saw them in Rochester back in whenever it was, they threw a PlayStation into the audience. I think they’d gotten a new one. The weird part of that was how early into the set it happened. Some dude grabbed it and ended up holding a PlayStation for most of a concert. They were the opening act, too.
This was all back when Charlotte was still in the band. I think she added a lot to that line-up, but she had a thing she wanted to do apart from Ash. Her first album was really solid – Grey Will Fade. Now she’s doing more producing and writing, I believe.
Islands is the second album Ash released after they took a break from albums. They did this little dance from 2007 – 2015 where they released a bunch of singles online, but no albums. I think they took a pretty strong stance on the side of the traditional album being a thing of the past. That was not the case.
The results of that break have been compiled into the A-Z Series. It’s like Islands. It’s fine and there are some excellent tunes on there, but it’s not consistently great.
Ash will always be one of my favorite bands. I heard Kung Fu back in the Angus soundtrack days and immediately got 1977. That’s an album that distills being a teenage kid in the summer, for me. Hope I get to see them in concert again.