Bec chats to Ash front man Tim Wheeler!

That's amazing, because I think back to, I think when Ash came out, from what I remember, you were pretty much placed in sort of the Brit pop, I feel that was the genre that they put you into.

But I was like, you were three teenagers from Downpatrick.

And I think I thought you had more of a punkier, noisier sound than a lot of the Britpop bands at the time.

Did you feel part of Britpop at the time or did you just be like, oh, this is a label they've slapped on us.

We identified as something else.

I think the merge just like, I remember it really seemed to kick off right that summer when Girl From Mars came out.

And there was a kind of huge wave of this sound, I guess, was being played in all the radio and MTV and everything.

And the papers were all writing about it.

And I think we had enough in common.

I guess we were working with Owen.

He was the Oasis producer.

So sonically, there was something linked us to all these other bands.

And, but I feel like we all, we were a lot more American influenced than all these British bands who were like trying to say that they only listened to the Kinks and Beatles and stuff.

And we definitely loved our Grunge and Sonic Youth and Nirvana and Pixies and all that stuff had been a big influence.

And we also liked a lot of like seventies rock stuff like Din Lizzy and And then we looked, but we did love a lot of pop music like ABBA too.

So we had a lot of melodies, melodic stuff going on from pop music.

But yeah, I don't know.

I think we got caught up in the whole wave of it.

And it was a bit annoying.

We knew we were different from all the other bands, but at the same time, it was nice when we'd go to Germany or Japan or San Francisco and there was like a scene of kids who were like super into Britpop and we already had an audience just the second we got there.

So there was good perks to it.

But then I guess most scenes, bands say, oh, we're not really a part of that.

No

one likes to admit it.

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