Charlotte Hatherley - London, UK, Summer 2004
By: Matt Tomiak
Playing guitar in one of rock's most endearing, reliably brilliant singles bands for the best part of a decade always sounded like a pretty decent day job.
Yet Charlotte Hatherley of Ash's ambitions to showcase a more personal voice have recently been brought to the fore. Entitled 'Grey Will Fade', Chaz's debut
solo album is a (mostly) melody-drenched, collection of giddily infectious pop gems; although, as we'll discuss later, these candy-coated nuggets sometimes bear a dark centre.
It's been an improbable seven years since Charlotte joined Ash and started what she describes herself humbly as one 'far-out trip'. Incredibly, she's only just turned 25; and first began setting the hearts of gauche indie boys across the land all a-flutter way back in 1997. Meeting in the leafy environs of a North London café garden, rockfeedback is suddenly and unexpectedly transported back to its gawky early teenage days, but attempts to remain as professional and non-salivating as possible.
So, having spent most of her life making music, what made her decide that now was the optimum time for that first solo record?
'Well,' she opens, 'I'd written a lot of songs before I'd joined Ash and then I didn't write for years... then I wrote some more songs, 'cos I got quite distracted, went on tour for years and got drunk, and stopped writing songs. I realised how ambitious I really felt about it when I finally got a little bit of time. I found a producer, went to LA and made the record. It's coming out at the same sort of time as Ash stuff (the band's fourth, full-length LP 'Meltdown', and top-five best-seller, was released in May) and that's three years of touring.'
Yet she was eager to avoid this with 'Grey Will Fade' - 'If I record it, I'm not gonna wait two or three years for it to come out... I want to get it out immediately.'
Simultaneous schedules are also likely to play havoc with any plans of Charlotte's to gig the circuit by herself: 'I don't have a band yet, but as soon as I get some time off, I'm gonna get some gigs done. Definitely.'
It's quite a tuneful record, and happy, too - ostensibly, at least. Was its relatively light-hearted tone a deliberate reaction to Ash re-discovering their heavier side on 'Meltdown'?
'Sure - the newer songs that I'd written, 'Summer', 'Bastardo' and 'Kim Wilde'; an implausibly bouncy, hook-laden future single, a hilarious, cautionary tale of a dodgy one-night stand, and her breathless, effervescent debut 45, respectively; were 'really f**king poppy. I don't know why, maybe it's a reaction.'
Whilst Charlotte doesn't hesitate to describe her album as 'indie-sounding', she maintains that she does 'still have it in me to rock.' A notion to which anyone familiar with blistering new Ash tracks like 'Orpheus' and 'Evil Eye' will surely attest.
And indeed, there's some fairly weighty, intense lyrical themes - 'bittersweet, melancholic' as Charlotte herself describes them on 'Grey Will Fade'. So writing a solo album must be a cathartic experience, yes?
'It's definitely a personal record and it's cathartic in that I've wanted to do it for so long. 'Down' and 'Paragon' are both about good friends of mine... There's a lot of me in it.'
Saliently, however, the album concludes with the title-track and the tellingly optimistic line 'Grey will fade/And everything will be OK.'
Charlotte: 'I think that's why I decided to call the album that, as most of the songs are dealing with - in the end - quite positive sentiments.'
It also takes a bit of experimentation; 'Stop' is reminiscent of the brash-core of Sonic Youth, and isn't a track you can imagine finding its way onto an Ash album any time soon. Is it liberating to 'do your own thing' then, outside the confines of a band about who everyone already has preconceptions?
'Exactly. 'Stop' is the kind of song that would have been an Ash b-side, but I didn't want to do that anymore, throw away songs, I wanted to keep it for myself. It's one of my favourites. It's nice to do something where there's no expectations - use arrangements that are kind of interesting and different. With Ash, it's about the way that Tim writes, which works perfectly, and I didn't want to interfere with that.'
Certainly, carrying on two separate career-paths concurrently doesn't bother her - 'It's not as hard as people seem to think it is...' - and there's no doubt
that since joining Ash in her late teens, Charlotte's had a lot of fun. Any favourite memories? Making her live debut at V97 - a 'momentous' occasion - and 'Free All Angels', Ash's career-saving, return-to-form, third album going to number one both figure highly, naturally.
But there isn't much time for contemplation. With Charlotte and the boys departing the day after this interview for a month of festivals across the globe - 'Spain, Belgium, all over the f**king place, with Reading at the end... It's gonna be pretty full-on...' - yep, that 'far-out trip' isn't abating any time soon.
Artists in this article: Charlotte Hatherley