Ash is back after eight years with sixth album KABLAMMO! (Edel/earMusic). The Northern Ireland trio—vocalist/guitarist Tim Wheeler, bassist Mark Hamilton and drummer Rick McMurray—will be on tour supporting the LP in the U.K. starting later this month. Ash will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.
McMurray: The greatest creation by the comic genius that is Steve Coogan. This has been a tour-bus favourite for years. It’s got to the point at time that conversation is based around Partridgisms for weeks on tour. It helps keep me sane in tour. He seems to be quite an insane individual. We went to the premiere of the movie 24 Hour Party People, which he was in. We were on tour in New York at the time and it just happened to line up, and we actually got to meet Steve Coogan. He had been my comedy hero for years at that point. You can tell when talking to him that the Alan Partridge character that he does is actually pretty close to his personality, just heightened to a big extent. It’s exciting to meet this guy and wonder, “Where does the character begin and where does the real Steve Coogan end?” And there seems to be a very blurry line, like before Alice Cooper became Alice Cooper. He sort of changed his entire personality, and I think the same kind of thing happened with Coogan. He’s just a very interesting man. He had a series called I Am Alan Partridge; it was his second series actually. It was presented like a documentary of his life. The guy loses his job because he shot somebody on his chat show live on TV, and then his wife leaves and he’s living in this shitty motel and trying to sort his life out. I think we were in the studio recording or demoing the Nu-Clear Sounds album, and from that point we were just absolutely obsessed. We would just watch it over and over on our tour bus and everybody knew pretty much every line from the series.
Video after the jump.
