Music

“‘Danny, we need a gimmick. Wear a gas mask.’”

Daniel Ash is recalling his first paid gig as a young musician with a band called MI5. It was at Glasgow Rangers Supporters Club in Corby, an industrial town in Northamptonshire, where Ash is from, nearly two hours from London. Aside from its (obvious) Scottish pride, Corby was, according to Ash, also known for its violence, most apparent when they take the small stage—and the audience starts throwing bottles at them. They ran off after only a few minutes, confronted by their promoter, who’d been “piss drunk” since about 3:00 that afternoon.

“He said, ‘What are you doing? Get back out there.’ We said, ‘They hate us, they’re throwing glasses!’ ‘No. When they throw glasses and bottles, that means they love you. When they don’t like you, they jump the stage and beat you up.’ Good thing he wasn’t wearing the gas mask, and instead opted for a “really white” boiler suit. The other guys, in case you were wondering, were “dressed in totally normal clothing, doing their soul thing.” They played together for about a year, Ash, by his own classification, the “weirdo” in the group. 

“I even had a funny haircut back then,” he adds. 

I don’t ask and I hadn’t planned to, but he immediately declares he doesn’t want to talk about Bauhaus origins and his well-documented child/teen-hood friends and band members Peter Murphy, David J, and Kevin Haskins. “I’m not going to tell that story again,” he says, launching, unprovoked, into the story. “I knew Peter from 10 years old and hadn’t seen him for five years,” he recalls, of the day he decided to reconnect with Murphy and, shortly thereafter, form a band, Ash as the guitarist. “Then just on the spur of the moment, I just thought, I’m going to drive to Wellingborough, which was 10 miles away. I’m going to drive there and just knock on his door. Neither of us had phones back then, I don’t think. Knocked on his door, and then—boom, boom, boom—and everything started off.” 

Bauhaus debut, 1980’s In the Flat Field, shot the band immediately into legend status, widely regarded as trailblazing the goth genre. This launched Ash into a nonstop creative cycle, with and without bassist David J and drummer Kevin Haskins: Tones on Tail, Love and Rockets, Poptone, a series of solo albums. Most recently, he’s formed Ashes and Diamonds with drummer Bruce Smith (Public Image Ltd.) and bassist Paul Spencer Denman (Sade, Sweetback). Their debut album Ashes and Diamonds Are Forever (releasing October 31) continues Ash’s ongoing legacy of creating sexy art-school soundtracks; its 12 songs—undeniably cinematic, provocative, and powerful—sculpt an unexpected story and create one of the best albums of the year. 

“On a Rocka,” the album’s lead single, features a video directed by Jake Scott (Ridley Scott’s son), compiled footage from a full day-to-evening shoot of Ash riding a motorcycle in and around Joshua Tree. “It was a really fun day because I’m on a bike. What’s better than that, in my element? If you told me when I was 16 years old that I’d be living in Southern California with a load of bikes and being able to ride every day, I would never have believed you. It’s a dream come true times 10. Yes, it’s great. Having a variety of bikes is fantastic.” He says he has 25 bikes on the road, one to commemorate every tour. “I take a different one out every day,” he says. “There was actually a quote from Steve McQueen. He said, ‘I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than any city on earth.’ I’m pretty much the same.” 

His love of riding started at 12, stealing his father’s Lambretta scooter. After getting his license at 16, he got his own bike, a 42 pound (as in English dollars) Triumph with no wheels. “I got it from a farmer,” he says. “Then I took it home and got some wheels and built it. The first bike I ever got was a little 250 BSA. Then I went from that real quick to a 500 Triumph Twin, and then never looked back. My brother, he was a mod in the ’60s, and he was like Sting in Quadrophenia. He was the king mod. I’ve said this story before, but it is true. Girls used to pay him to be on the back of his bike going through town center on a Friday and Saturday night. Just to be seen with him on the back of the bike. That’s how popular he was. He had the bike, just like in Quadrophenia. He had one of those bikes with all the mirrors on it, and the fur things on the back, and this and that, full on like a Christmas tree going down the street. His best friend was a rocker who had a BSA 650. He took me on the back of that. As soon as I got on the bike, no way was I going to be fucking around with scooters. It was all about motorcycles because the power of motorcycles is through the roof in comparison with any scooter. I leaned towards the motorcycle thing, not the scooter thing.”

“Actually, this is going to sound really goth…” he says. “I love visiting graveyards. Doesn’t get much more goth than that, does it, thinking about it? In the graveyard, I’d look at all the ages of what people died. I was fascinated by how long people lived. Back then, there was a lot of infant deaths, but there was also a lot of people that lived to ripe old ages. Going back to the 18th, 17th, and 16th centuries.

“There are some of these tombstones that go back to the 13th century in England. They’re all crooked. A lot of them, you can’t see any writing on them. They’re covered in moss. I still do that all the time because on a bike, you always find stuff that you would never usually find when you go for a wander. Yes, that was one of my favorite things to do… I must be a goth after all,” he says, with a laugh. 

“I’m joking. Of course I’m not a goth. I love sunshine and riding on bikes in the daylight. Goths don’t do that.” The airborne vibrations of this statement no doubt shattering thorny goth hearts throughout the globe.

If we look at Bauhaus as the start of Ash’s career (let’s leave MI5 out of this for now), we can easily trace Ash’s evolution from dark-aesthetic subculture pioneer, to new wave pop chart-topper (Love and Rockets), traveling through other uncompromising peaks and valleys to arrive here, at Ashes and Diamonds, a genre-defying blend of Ash’s entire career, mixed with modern, high-tech, heavy beats, fit for a club or an action thriller. (Don’t worry, he’s still taking us to dimly-lit places.) 

The Ashes and Diamonds trio officially came together seven years ago when East Coast-based Smith and Denman, who’s often in the U.K., were finally all in the studio together. Their careful collaboration slowed, like so many, when the pandemic hit in 2020. Even after the album was recorded, Ash says at the 11th hour they went into a Hollywood studio to rerecord everything in just 10 days. “It was a very expensive mistake to think we had the album finished, but it just wasn’t good enough,” Ash says. “Tweak it and tweak it and tweak it—because now it’s fully realized. There’s no filler tracks, there’s no cover versions of anything. The production is like we’re all 100% on it now. We had that breathing space to really get it right.”

Ash says he used “the cut-up idea,” popularized by William S. Burroughs, to write nearly all of the lyrics on Ashes and Diamonds Are Forever. “I remember when I was a kid, I saw it on the TV,” he recalls. “I use trashy magazines because they have the most juicy headlines, like the National Enquirer and stuff like that, and People magazine and all the gossip mags because you get terrific headlines.

“Then I just cut them all. I cut all these headlines up. Put them on the kitchen table. Listen to the backing track, bass drums, and then I start joining the sentences together. Then hopefully, if I’m lucky, by the end of the afternoon or evening, I’ve got a song out of it. All of these songs and all the titles came from cut-ups from trashy magazines.” 

This conversation started when I’d noted my affinity for the album’s ninth track, “Setting Yourself Up for Love,” a song I’d referred to as a vampire love song. “‘Setting Yourself Up for Love’ must have been something that I’d seen as a title, or it could have been two sentences, ‘setting yourself,’ and then the word ‘love,’ and I join them together. That’s the whole cut-up thing.

“What’s great about it is it sets you free because you don’t have to work and sit there and think, how do I feel about whatever? This thing takes over. Your subconscious takes over, and you’re just having fun putting words together. It’s such a great way to create lyrics. 98% of this album, most of the other stuff I’ve done as well in the past is like that. Again, I don’t know what I’m going to write about when I very first sit down and have the track in my head. I don’t know. I just look at words. Oh, I like that headline. I like this. I like that. Put them on the kitchen table, and then I start mixing them up. Then suddenly, it’ll start working. Then I’ll have a whole song.

“It wouldn’t have been about something that I would have even wanted to sing about initially, but it creates itself because of the cut-up idea. That would have been the case with that track.” The ambiguity, the individual interpretations, he loves it. “Go wherever you want to with it,” he says. 

It’s no surprise that Ash started out as a visual artist, doing an extra year at art school because he loved it so much. “They couldn’t get me out of there,” he says. “I loved the solitude of being on my own. When everybody had left at 5:00 or 6:00, I’d be there until 10:00 p.m. with my little record player, playing records and doing my own work there. They used to have to kick me out every night. I was totally at home at art school.” 

He majored in industrial design. “What that actually meant was you could do whatever the fuck you wanted all day long,” he says. “It was perfect. It was very loose back then. This is back in the ’70s. Industrial design basically meant you can work in plaster, oil colors, gouache, water colors, anything you wanted to. It was very, very free and easy. Yes, I absolutely loved it.” 

That’s where he met Kevin Haskins and David J; Tones on Tail bassist Glenn Campling also went to art school. 

“I went for a job at the Weetabix factory,” he says, recalling making the top 10 of applicants for a job to design Weetabix cereal cartons “for the rest of [his] life.” At the second interview, he was terrified he might actually be offered the position. Luckily, his fashion sense blew the opportunity for him. “The guys that were interviewing me knew my older brother because he went to art school as well. They said, ‘Your brother’s eccentric.’ He says, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘He came to the interview in a black velvet suit, and he had earrings on.’ That was outrageous to them. I wasn’t going to be fitting in doing the yogurt cartons. I remember after I went away, they said to me, ‘We’re so sorry, but you haven’t got the job.’ I said, ‘Oh, thank you so much.’ I drove out of there in my $50 car, my old Ford Cortina. I could see the Weetabix sign. I’ll always remember it getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, and me going, ‘Oh, that’s it. That’s it. I can tell Dad now, ‘well, I tried, didn’t get the job.’ That’s it.’ It’s funny because the next couple of years, I think I ended up pumping gas at a gas station until what happened, happened.”