Ash is back

Daniel Ash could have just played it safe.

The British singer-songwriter, who’s now on tour performing music from a new solo CD, could have found financial security riding the ‘80s nostalgia wave with his former band, Bauhaus. After all, the band had regrouped in 1998 after 15 years apart and embarked on a nearly sold-out world tour. Or, Ash could have remained with his post-Bauhaus outfit, Love and Rockets, which also had a loyal following.

But Ash wanted to break clean of his Bauhaus past, the musician said in a phone interview with the RN&R. In 1999, he ended his longtime collaboration with fellow Bauhaus and Love and Rockets band mates David J and Kevin Haskins.

“I didn’t want to be in a band any longer,” Ash explained. “It was time to move on and work with different people.”

So now, after more than 20 years playing off and on with these influential alternative bands, Ash wants to go it alone.

Listen to “Mastermind” off his new self-titled CD on Psychobaby Records, and you’ll hear the phrase, “To risk nothing is to risk everything.” Ash appears prepared to risk it all in order to achieve commercial success.

Love and Rockets experimented with electronica on past albums, but Ash charges into techno territory with his third and latest solo CD. His distinctive guitar work shaped the brooding music of Bauhaus and the psychedelic-pop melodies of Love and Rockets, but early in his career Ash was combining guitar with electronic soundscapes, such as in his brief-but-brilliant intermediate project Tones on Tail.

In comparing the American and British music scenes, Ash said that the U.S. has been slow in accepting techno music.

“England’s had it for 15, 20 years, if not longer, and here it’s just clicked on in the past five years—thank God!” he said. “I just really love what’s going on now.”

Ash spoke about a recent interview he did for a guitar magazine, during which the interviewer told him that a lot of guitarists fear or despise techno because they’re not sure how they fit into it. But Ash said musicians need to get over it.

“That’s really the wrong way to look at it,” he said. “It’s almost like when people were playing acoustic guitars and somebody invented the electric guitar, and purists freaked out and said it was a bad thing. Well, that’s pathetic. That’s hippie mentality, really.”

Not that Ash abandoned his guitar for a sampler. Longtime fans will recognize his distinctive, edgy guitar licks among the drum ‘n’ bass influences of the new CD.

The first single is a cover of Classics IV’s 1968 hit “Spooky,” which was also covered by the late Dusty Springfield. Ash said he made a lyric change to give it “a sort of sexual ambiguity.”

Other noteworthy tracks include “Kid 2000,” a 21st-century Pink Floydian blues number in which Ash’s young nephew, Allister, reads a serendipitously found text of a child’s vision of the future. The child imagines a world where kids don’t go to school but “watch telly [television] all day,” live in bubbles and fly around with “little rocket shooty things fitted on their ankles that shoot fire.”

Ash said he found this forecast of the future in an unlikely place.

“I found this flyer on the floor of a café in Bristol [England], when I was working with Adrian [Utley of Portishead], and I really loved it,” he said. “I traced it back to an art school and I made a few calls to the school, but they weren’t returned and I never found out who really wrote them.”

“Trouble” also stands out with its disturbing tone and doubled-tracked vocals of psychotic ramblings. Ash collaborated with Utley for a different version that appeared on the American Psycho movie soundtrack, but the CD version is the original one, the singer says.

One song on the new album even has a Nevada connection. Ash said the annual counter-culture festival that takes place in the Black Rock Desert inspired the title of the song “Burning Man.”

“I did actually go to the festival about two years ago,” he said. “A friend of mine and I took two motorcycles from L.A. and we lived in cheap $50 tents for seven days. It was a bit of a drag.”

The song, however, isn’t about the festival but about a friend’s suicide and about burning the candle at both ends. The title just seemed to fit the song, he says.

Ash said he’s not averse to having a commercial hit off this album and hopes to have one of his singles in the Top 10. When asked how longtime fans might accept the record, he seemed optimistic.

“It’s not that far from the latter Love and Rockets things,” he said. “Some of it reminds me of Tones on Tail. It’s got that sort of vibe to it. It’s exciting to see how it’s going to be perceived.”

Ash will be supporting the CD, which was released Feb. 5, with a spring tour. Although Reno isn’t on the schedule, fans can catch him at Slim’s in San Francisco March 6.