The entire top half of this list is dominated by unquestionably great Ash singles, so it’s becoming increasingly hard to choose between favourites. ‘Uncle Pat’, the third cut from the group’s debut mini-album Trailer, was arguably the most fully-formed song in their repertoire at this point, from an album that favoured velocity over finesse, and was later used in an advert for Heineken. Its distinctive, strong guitar melody confirmed showcased just how mature Wheeler was as a songwriter, even though he’d only just passed his GCSEs at this point.
Always, always overlooked in Ash’s catalogue of great singles, ‘Wildsurf’ suffered from being the second single from an album that critics had already unfairly dismissed out of hand. Coming across as a glorious mixture of Nirvana and The Beach Boys, it was a scuffed, rough diamond of a track whose melody and lustre can’t be denied by the somewhat murky production. However, it received virtually no airplay or promotion as a result of their record label’s decision to bury Nu-Clear Sounds, so it slunk to a lowly #31 before disappearing without a trace.
One of the stand-out tracks from Trailer, ‘Petrol’ was only their second ever single but was a brilliantly adept exercise in loud/quiet, stop/start dynamics that belied their tender years. Hamilton’s bass and Wheeler’s low-end guitar rumble and drone like a car engine, as a stellar high-end guitar line streaks across the sky above it. Fans of heavy guitar music who dismissed Ash as disposable, lightweight rock clearly reckoned without it.
Packed with drum fills, guitar breakdowns and soaring, breakneck choruses, Ash’s eventual comeback single from Meltdown might have seemed like a box-checking exercise if it wasn’t so brilliant. Taking their traditional power-pop template and holding nothing back, ‘Orpheus’ was one of the most ornate and intricate singles they ever released, with Charlotte Hatherley’s spectacular backing vocals providing the frosting on a delicious pop confection. It deserved rather better than a comparatively poor chart peak of #13, especially for a lead single from an album. Sadly, it would be their last classic single for some time.
Perfectly timed for a release at the height of the scorching summer of 1996 – with Britpop triumphalism in full bloom and a doomed English football campaign on home soil – ‘Oh Yeah’ is the best slow song Ash ever made. A swelling, lavishly orchestrated backing never pulls focus from Wheeler’s spectacular vocal performance remembering a bitter-sweet teenage love story which, although it indulges in more than a few well-worn power-ballad moves, is so charming you can’t help but get swept along with it. As a result, it’s always been one of the group’s best known songs.
A glinting, power-pop bullet that summed up the artistic rejuvenation Ash underwent with Free All Angels, ‘Burn Baby Burn’ had ‘single release’ stamped all over it when the album came out – lo and behold, it followed ‘Shining Light’ out of the traps in a lethal one-two that brought the group back in from the cold and to the top of the charts. That such an unquestionably ace song is only eighth in this list is testament to the meticulousness with which Ash approached the noble art of the single.
Ash’s first ever single has been through many different revisions and re-releases in its time, but ‘Jack Names The Planets’ is best understood as a precocious first step in a musical journey, an exercise in stripped-down economy and sweet melody. The slightly more finessed version that appears on Trailer is the best take, for our money, but the rough-and-ready charm of the original 7”-only release, recorded for only £300, is also winsome. It finally charted for the first time when released to promote Intergalactic Sonic 7”s in 2002, and was re-mixed once more for 2011’s The Best of Ash. A virtual ever-present in the band’s setlists for over two decades, it’s an irresistible favourite for the band’s fans.
6 . Goldfinger (UK #5, Apr 1996)
The highest chart position Ash ever accomplished, ‘Goldfinger’ (not a cover of the Bond theme…) was a Britpop anthem par excellence that firmly cemented the trio as one of the most exciting new guitar groups in the country, helping them breach the Top 10 for the first time. Although the stop-start powerhouse rhythm of McMurray’s colossal drumming is prominent, Wheeler’s naïve teenage charm is the main attraction, with descriptive lyrics about the tingling excitement of a first romance (“down in the basement / listening to the rain… she’ll be here soon”) firing the imagination. It’s a familiar conceit for an Ash single, and one they were to repeat successfully over and over again.
The final instalment in a run of genius singles that stretched back nearly three years, ‘A Life Less Ordinary’ is often scandalously over-looked in Ash’s canon. Commissioned for Danny Boyle’s movie of the same name starring Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz, it was the first track Charlotte Hatherley recorded with the band, and the extra depth is immediately noticeable. Heavier than anything they’d released before, with a more than a touch of Jesus & Mary Chain, leather jacket and sunglasses cool, it still contained Ash’s distinctive lightness, and those contrasting elements were tied together with that irresistible bridge to the chorus. A heady mixture of heartbreak, regret, road-trip-to-nowhere nihilism and us-against-the-world romance that positively drips with teenage hormones.
One of the greatest comeback singles of all time, up there with ‘A Design For Life’ and ‘BitterSweet Symphony’, ‘Shining Light’ was an intoxicating, perfectly formed miracle of a track, resurrecting Ash from what would have been their fate as just another band consigned to the post-Britpop landfill, and re-establishing their relevance in the noughties, becoming their biggest-selling single to date. Mixing summertime beach party vibes with Brian Wilson harmonies and brisk, power-ballad dynamics, it seemed to beam down to Earth directly from heaven to rescue British guitar music from the deadening clutches of Starsailor and Travis. Even Annie Lennox picked up on its spiritual, quasi-hymnal qualities to release a curiously awesome cover version in 2009.
The musical equivalent of an iron fist in a velvet glove, ‘Angel Interceptor’ was another early Ash single to reference childhood sci-fi culture, named after the fictional aircraft in 1960s series ‘Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons’. Seductive, cutesy and utterly transcendent while retaining the streamlined velocity and power of their early Trailer tracks, it sacrificed raucousness for subtlety and was the third of three brilliant singles the group released in 1995. An intricate solo leads into the stratospheric chorus, as Wheeler pushed himself to produce a somersaulting vocal line as the track was catapulted into the heavens. Apparently, it was this experience that persuaded the group of the need to hire a female guitarist to provide backing vocals, which they duly did 18 months later.
Ash’s signature song, released in the summer of 1995, was their first to chart inside the UK Top 40 and saw the group perform on ‘Top of the Pops’ only a week after they had finished their A-levels. Typical of an early Ash single, it’s brimming over with the vigour of youth, but the incredible false ending and the acoustic guitar-led introduction demonstrates that Wheeler was an unusually dynamic songwriter even at the age of 16, when he penned it. As well as being a stunning piece of buzz-pop perfection, ‘Girl From Mars’ was the song that constructed the thematic template that they would revisit frequently, dealing with fleeting, summer romance and a mystery girl who disappears from Wheeler’s life just as quickly as she materialised in it. It’s still a rock and indie radio favourite more than twenty years later, and will be the song remembered by most people when Ash finally call it a day.
Everything that’s brilliant about Ash condensed into 2 minutes and 17 seconds of magic, ‘Kung Fu’ is an absolutely flawless slice of fizzing, pop-punk moshpit energy, and the greatest single piece of music Ash ever committed to tape. Speeding its way through a fantasia of martial arts movie and comic book references that read like a paean to Wheeler, Hamilton and McMurray’s lost teenage years (“last night Jackie Chan came round / we played pool with him and we hung out”), from The Karate Kid’s Mr. Miyagi, Bruce Lee, Fu Manchu and the X-Men, it was reportedly written in five minutes at Belfast airport on Boxing Day, 1994. Reversing the old adage, sometimes the most effective works of genius in art are down to inspiration rather than perspiration…
Perhaps more importantly, it was set to the kind of dumb, thrilling three-chord riff that even the Ramones would have been proud to have called their own, it even name-checked Da Bruddas’ own ‘Teenage Lobotomy’ for good measure, as if to cheekily place themselves in that lineage. The mid-song breakdown, with Phil Spector-esque drum beats and handclaps that build up until the chaotic final verse and chorus, clinches the deal. With its contemporaneous artwork, featuring a picture of Manchester United’s volatile French footballer Eric Cantona kung-fu kicking a Crystal Palace fan, a headline-grabbing incident that had happened only two months before, it indicated that here was a band with an irrepressible sense of humour beneath the masterful understanding they had of their art.
Do you agree with our list? What is your favourite Ash single? Tell us what you think below!
Tags: Ash, Ash singles, Charlotte Hatherley, Ed Biggs, from worst to best, Mark Hamilton, Rick McMurray, singles, Tim Wheeler
Counting down The Student Playlist's top fifty albums released in…
A beginner's guide to the dramatic, gothic and romantic post-punk…
As they mark the 30th anniversary of the release of…
Your email address will not be published.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
