GIG REVIEW: Ash + Indoor Pets + The Gulps,
O2 Academy, Newcastle, Sunday 19 September 2021
Irish rockers Ash were meant to celebrate 25 years of making punk-tinged power-pop on a triumphant UK tour last spring.
Then along came Covid, and like the rest of the music industry, they were forced off the road and into hibernation.
Now they’ve picked up their Teenage Wildlife tour where they left off, and the three-piece from Downpatrick, Northern Ireland, are having a blast.
Exuberance
They were teenagers when they burst onto the music scene with debut album 1977, and although they’re older and wiser, they’ve lost none of their exuberance.
Frontman Tim Wheeler still looks the coolest kid in class with his trademark Gibson Flying V, while bassist Mark Hamilton pulls improbable shapes in his distinctive low-slung style, and drummer Rick McMurray is a human metronome, scarcely missing a beat.
It was six years since they last played Newcastle, and they seemed anxious to make up for lost time with a heavy-sounding set which made a mockery of their tag as a power-pop band.
With a back catalogue of seven studio albums and 60 singles, it wasn’t so much a question of what they’d play, but what to leave out.
Past revisited
Regular opener Lose Control was one of the casualties, sacrificed to make way for another 1977 track, the single Goldfinger.
Wild Surf and Oh Yeah reminded everyone that these boys can rock, while A Life Less Ordinary, Walking Barefoot and Shining Light showed Ash’s poppier side.
Not a base was left untouched as they revisited their past: You Can’t Have It All from the Twilight Of The Innocents album, Orpheus from Meltdown, and Arcadia from the A-Z Singles series.
Most recent album Islands (2018) gave us Confessions In The Pool and a breezy Buzzkill, which paved the way for a lively closing run of singles: Kung Fu, Cocoon, Angel Interceptor and debut 7in Jack Names The Planets.
The show wasn’t over, of course, and the boys returned for a three-song encore: a cover of The Only Ones’ Another Girl Another Planet, plus their own stone-cold classics Girl From Mars and Burn Baby Burn.
The night ended in bizarre fashion with McMurray conduct the crowd in a huge singalong of Ash’s play-out music, Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’ (I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life.
Some of these fans weren’t even born when Ash started out, while others have followed since the beginning, but everyone agreed this was a night worth waiting for.
No review would be complete without a mention of the support acts. Tonight’s openers were The Gulps, a five-piece based in London whose members come from three different parts of Europe and the Middle East.
They have a couple of singles and an EP produced by Killing Joke’s Youth to their name, and theirs is a rocky take on the classic power-pop sound.
In frontman Harry All they have a performer you can’t take your eyes off, and if you like bands like The Clash and The Strokes you’ll enjoy them.
Main support were Kent’s purveyors of ‘dirty pop’ Indoor Pets, who I’d seen once before, supporting The Futureheads back in 2019 (reviewed here).
They’re a step higher up the rock ‘n’ roll ladder than The Gulps, with a fine debut album, Be Content, under their belt, and they put on a good show.
They remind me of Weezer, and not just for slightly nerdy frontman Jamie Glass. They can play joyful fuzzy pop, or hit the pedal marked ‘grunge’ and metamorphose into something entirely different.
