ASH: 1977

 

(#548: 18 May 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing:  Lose Control/Goldfinger/Girl From Mars/I'd Give You Anything/Gone The Dream/Kung Fu/Oh Yeah/Let It Flow/Innocent Smile/Angel Interceptor/Lost In You/Darkside Lightside (+ secret track Sick Party)

(N.B.: This review was written by Lena; I just edited and published it - M.C.)

FLOWERS, BUT NOT THAT WAY

 

I try to remember the time - the spring of 1996, the lilacs blooming everywhere, even in our backyard nearby the lily of the valley and the day lilies. I was reading, trying to memorize and then recite Hopkins' "The Wreck of the Deutschland" just as the symbolic good woman of The Girls of Slender Means does, and nearly succeeding. I am not interested in a lot of things, including having any sort of Other, which of course means in my social circle there are two guys interested in me. One was happily a very brief encounter (I said no, which he understood), but the other guy persists and does so many wrong things that I am baffled as to what he intends and even really wants.  

 

This goes on for some time, dear reader, and I'm not going into details, truly awkward as they are.

 

There is a song on the radio (our boombox is on top of the fridge) which I may or may not have taped; my full attention was not really on music at this time, as you might understand. Combine this with the distinct urgings from a friend (as well as my own self) to get out of this social circle and find others to hang out with is impossible at this point, but I do not see them as I often as I once did. From what I can tell, everyone is pursuing someone who doesn't want them (any more, in one case).

 

The song on the radio is by Ash and is wonderfully loud, slow and all-encompassing and if I had been actually listening more closely, I would have understood it to be how I wanted things to be. Where was the man sitting with his records and wine in a basement waiting for me? The closest thing to it was this guy with his lounge records (for various reasons I didn't have much interest in the lounge scene, full of Bert Kaempfert albums and bridge playing and swing dancers and so much enforced frivolity and so on) and gambling and yeah, that's enough.

 

However, this man was there in the song, and sometimes the song appears to let you know he is real.  

 

I was a bit too distracted to buy 1977 at the time, which is a pity as it is, you know, great. I was having 'fun' I guess, still paid enough attention to things to get the new Sloan album One Chord To Another (therapy) and I did tape "Cybele's Reverie" off the radio so my Stereolab phase was slowly (very slowly) coming into view. And (sigh) my pathetic attempts to find Lovelife by Lush on tape were a kind of pathetic fallacy I don't even want to think about. The whole of the 90s was me wanting a cosy little corner where I could just read and snack and write, with everything around me interrupting this on a near-constant basis. But how else could I get wisdom?

 

 

Okay, I will slightly relent. In March 1996, the same day the death of Kieslowski was announced, I had two wisdom teeth taken out; it was a cloudy day with some melting snow. I had to be knocked out for the procedure and woke up to find two yellow bruises on my cheeks and my mouth full of gauze. My mom collected my medicines and we took a cab home.  

 

 

Once we got back and I was still a bit woozy from the anaesthesia, I answered the door to find him with flowers for me - not some primroses or hyacinths, but a lily, a lily that unmistakably looked like...it was a purple lily, a suggestive flower, heavy and too much. I thanked him, not being able to speak that well what with the gauze in my mouth, and wondered how it was I deserved such a thing, unless he had ideas. Sigh...

 

 

1996:  THE ESCAPE FROM BRITPOP

 

Now I know that for some people 1996 was good; for others it was a witnessing of mass phenomena which may or may not have been welcome. Three years earlier there had been an issue of Select which bore the headline Yanks Go Home! It had the Union Jack flag as the backdrop for Brett Anderson – I bought this as I really liked Suede and was interested to read about Saint Etienne, Pulp, Denim and The Auteurs.  I didn’t really care about ‘the Battle for Britain’ mentioned on the cover, let alone the “Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Cobain?” headline inside. This rhetoric is just dumb, I decide, and keep on reading. 

 

What I didn’t really know was that this was actually, despite the jokiness, serious talk, a point of view that essentially just said out loud what an awful lot of the UK music press probably already thought (in case you were waiting for me to wind up and then throw the pitch…). Coughs, but that near-hysterical anti-US attitude was not shared by everyone, and if you were a young musician from Northern Ireland (14 years old, maybe 15) then hearing Nirvana, Pearl Jam and so on was an inspiration, a way out. 

 

 

 

HOW I WANTED IT TO BE

 

If I'd only listened to the lyrics of "Goldfinger" then I would have known, but I just heard the soaring voice of the singer, casual and yet sharp. Had I heard the opening lyrics "Moooove closer, set my mind on FIRE" then it would have been game over, that's it, that's how it's done. Follow it up with "TAAAAAAAAAKING OVERRRR, the world seemed so ALIVE AHHUHHUH" and I don’t know what I would have done with myself.  

 

 

Sometimes women (I am generalising here) only know exactly what they want after they have had successive experiences of what they find boring, exhausting, humiliating and so forth. Some women settle for what they can get, valuing safety and security above all (the Charlotte Lucas), others are happy to be with someone they like and who likes them and it's all a bit teas, dances and social/lounge situations (the Jane Bennet).

 

 

I learned through this whole period what I wanted by getting what I didn't, which was some sort of attraction and obstacle and maybe conflict and going around what I guess you could call normal channels of communication. It would have been much better had I stopped the whole thing out of sheer frustration, but I have never been nearly enough Elizabeth Bennet.*

 

 

Did I want to be the girl in the song, a song that flies and pauses dramatically and winds down, only to soar and climb again?  Of course.  

 

 

IN WHICH BECK SAYS WHAT I CANNOT SAY

 

 

So there I am in Toby’s after seeing Emma and I’m having my usual ginger ale/Caesar salad/macaroni and cheese** and start in on being approached by the man who never really should have approached me and I am getting a rather cold shoulder – he’s not interested, doesn’t want to know. There is nothing like running up against the solid wall of two guys who are best friends and knowing where my place is in all this – nowhere. Bit by bit I am being alienated by just about everyone. Suddenly I hear the song – someone has paid $2 to hear a whole album on the jukebox. It’s the supremely alienated and outsiderish “Devil’s Haircut” from Odelay, which borrows from Them’s song “I Can Only Give You Everything.”  Which brings me to….

 

 

IT'S WAITING FOR YOU

 

 

He has been waiting for me has he? Is he as strong and relentless as “I’d Give You Anything”, a song I wasn’t sure about until I understood it’s about flirting, bending crushing notes, danger, letting GO? It crashes and repeats and wails against the days being the same and ‘going south of Heaven’ (no idea), but the whole song is about very open flirtation, swoony guitars, “how can you lose when it’s WAITING FOR YOUUU” and I’ve got to stop here and say this song irritated me at first but now….this too is what I wanted, and it may have been what he was thinking, but he never had any nerve to say it. He was delighted with me, the way people are delighted in inanimate objects that shine and flash and do cute things. It did not feel very grown-up.

IN WHICH JANE AUSTEN WARNED ME BUT I ONLY LEARNED THE HARD WAY

 

"It does not appear to me that your hand is unworthy your acceptance, or that the establishment I could offer would be any other than highly desirable. My situation in life, my connections with the family of De Bourgh, and my relationship to your own, are circumstances highly in my favour; and you should take it into farther consideration that in spite of your manifold attractions, it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you. Your portion is unhappily so small that it will in all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications."

(Pride and Prejudice, pg. 106)

Not, dear reader, that this speech or something like it happened. But it hovered as a feeling that whole year, that I was supposed to appreciate all this waiting he had done and enjoy whatever it was that he was doing for me, haphazardly. I am recognising now that even recalling this period is causing me stress if not trauma, which is why I only remember it in moments and flashes, as opposed to something pleasant where the haziness is due to the whole thing being a wash of sunshine, smiles and yes, physical things.  

 

A good chunk of 1977 is about romance and remembering romance and ooooooooohhhhhhh-wwwwwwwaaaaaahhhs and completely enjoyable uncomplicated sensuality and pleasure.*** It is always summer with its warmth and freedom and sense that finally something might happen. It is almost just as well I didn't listen to this at this time, because my experience was so different. I just remember him being amused by me - again, as if I was a clever machine, not a person - and observing me instead of trying to understand me.  

A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE BAND ITSELF

Ash have nothing to do with Britpop, which should have been obvious at the time, but Britpop was such an all-consuming situation at the time that just about any group who made upbeat rock 'n' roll was given the label Britpop whether it actually fit or not. Britpop began as a term from Select in 1993 (before Ash had even released a single) and since then it grew to be used for more and more groups - famously Oasis**** and Elastica - while no one agreed to the term, it stuck around. 

 

Now, I don't know if this is a provable thing, but putting Ash under that Britpop umbrella is...um...also awkward as they are from Downpatrick, Northern Ireland. Is Northern Ireland part of the UK?  Technically, yes. But look at how little input there is in the normal UK music discourse when it comes to Northern Ireland. The history of N.I. music is interesting and valuable, but in the run of things, in my experience, music from outside the boundaries of "England and Wales" doesn't really get *that* much attention in the English media. Ash had to be more than just good to break through all this. By the time 1977 appeared, they had released demo tapes, singles (including "Girl From Mars") and had finally graduated from high school (Ash were too young to be Britpop, quite frankly). Owen Morris, who had produced Oasis' Definitely Maybe, also produced 1977, which is probably where any journalist would stop in considering where they fit into anything.  

 

Finally, it was American music - the kind so disdained by Select's own Stuart Maconie - that had the most meaning and impact on Ash. "I'd Give You Anything" is a relentless flirtation, as if someone was giving you some serious eye while the Stooges played in the background, for instance. This is an album of straight-up rock, wistful longing ballads and a sense that the band can do whatever it likes. After all, they are still teenagers, not really beholden to anyone and not burdened that much even by history - Ash are to this day the only major commercially-successful band from Downpatrick.  

 

I would say more about Ash being from Northern Ireland itself, but that situation doesn't really figure into the lyrics at any point. I can imagine the band's parents were all happy they decided as 12-year-olds to form a band as it would keep them off the streets and busy. Downpatrick was not immune to the Troubles, suffering a bombing in 1990, a year after Ash, who called themselves Vietnam at the time, had formed. I don't want to speculate on this too much, but Tim Wheeler definitely sings in his own accent as much as say, Grian Chatten does, and this counts. Singing in your own accent is always a political act.  

A squall of noise and energy ends it all, dark and light combined as one, after the longeurs and excesses (do I need to mention the opening song which speeds along as if to say, hello our name is Ash and we like to rock and have a good time?); the album is like a rollercoaster - you want to experience the highs and lows again, the sickness and romance and dum goofball fun of an album made by teenagers, teenagers who listened to the Ramones and Nirvana and Green Day and wanted that BIG sound, a sound stretching across the whole sky. They were ambitious because they had to be, and successful because they had played and played so many gigs. Playing the magnificent, sensuous "Goldfinger" on tv they looked a bit nervous at first, but grew in confidence as they played. Maybe if I'd had this album at the time, I would have had the courage to do what so needed to be done, and would have had a better time of things....

OKAY, SO WHAT DOES IT MEAN IF HE TELLS YOU IT'S A DATE ONLY AFTER THE MEAL IS OVER?

But in the meantime I was increasingly uneasy, the attention and intention never letting up, my joy in life becoming divided between the conditional and unconditional, the self I have to be with him and my actual self, which has to be stowed away. I felt like I had made a mistake and there was nothing, like a natural disaster, that I could do; but the real pathos was that no one had ever paid so much attention to me before, so I had no idea what was and wasn't acceptable. This against a background where everyone seemed to be pursuing someone else, where being in a couple was *the* thing (and now I remember why I joined - a friend had found her boyfriend there, and was sure I could find mine too). It will take me some time to see what needs to be done, and do it and it will come, dear reader, from art forms other than music. Ash have got their act together and I still have a lot to learn...

Next up:  The Getting of Wisdom, Part II.

 

 

*Like I'm going to write about this period and not mention Jane Austen. The man who was courting me was not interested in her or the movies of her novels that were out at this time; I am guessing he didn't think they were worth seeing. I may as well also add that he had known me as part of the circle for four years before deciding to court me, which made me feel terrible. He crowed about waiting for me because I was interested in someone else and then pounced when I wasn't interested in him anymore. Let me just say: at no point did a Captain Wentworth moment happen - there was never any declaration of love.

 

 **Finally get to express my opinion that it never did have enough cheese, really.

 

***The lyric "Oh yeah it was the start of the summer" will grow more ironic in 1997, but that is for the future.

 

****As I write this, a kind of hysteria is happening over the prospect of an Oasis reunion, if only in concert for a night or two. I get the strong feeling that some actually do want it to be 1996 forever, which as you can tell is more than a bit unnerving for me. The mass phenomena that David Stubbs writes about in his book 1996 & The End Of History shows the power of that time and how unquestioning it was, how hegemonic. In this regard Ash really was just another group that fit into the scene, even if they really had nothing to do with it.