April 24, 1999

Ash : Numbskull

If this is a deliberate attempt to piss off the hordes of posh Home-Counties pony-tottie who attached themselves to Ash in the good old days then it'll probably succeed.

Have you ever wondered how we at Team NME actually review the singles? The truth is that the NME office has at its centre a large, muddy pool in which lurk the largest and finest collection of crocodilia in Christianity.

One of our eager young work experience slaves sticks on the Ash single and the appointed reviewer momentarily looks up from his Euripides and casts an expert eye over the response behaviour exhibited by our reptilian cousins.

Incredible beasts! Been around for 200 million years, seen off the dinosaurs, woolly mammoths and the first, second and third ska revivals and - amazingly enough - the latest research suggests that they are possessed of a DNA code which is 99.72 per cent similar to that possessed by 14-year-old girls who, as we all know, have absolutely impeccable taste in pop music and buy 87.98 per cent of the UK's singles.

The response this time? None whatsoever. The magnificent old beasts (they can live up to 120 years, you know) bask in the glistening mud, lapping up the artificial sun provided by the nine 20,000 watt halogen lamps and ignore Ash's tuneless, joyless and
lifeless
ultra-heavy metal porridge completely.

The hack yawns, turns to his typewriter and taps: "The French situationists coined the slogan - 'Under the pavement - the beach!' Young master Timothy Wheeler and chums, by delivering this sub-sub-sub-sub-Pavement palaver, have dug so deep into the rock strata that they've hit permafrost. If this is a deliberate attempt to piss off the hordes of posh Home-Counties pony-tottie
who
attached themselves to Ash in the good old days then it'll probably succeed. For this IS the sound of teeth-grinding, grey-misted pre-menstrual tension. And it sucks."

Stevie Chick