On "So Alive," the hidden gems in the Love And Rockets and Bauhaus catalogs, and his signature guitar sound.

Greg Prato (Songfacts): There is a flurry of Love And Rockets vinyl reissues, a compilation, and US tour.

Daniel Ash: Before this Cruel World gig was offered to us - this happened about six or seven months ago from what I recall - they said, "Hey, we want to reissue all the albums." With record companies, when the time is right they reissue everything. That was the case here. It worked out as a great coincidence with the synchronicity going on because we were offered the Cruel World thing out of the blue.

They had all these outtakes – there were various tracks that didn't make it to the albums, so it was a case of us going through them. There were a couple where we were like, "Absolutely not is that going out, it's not good enough. This one's really embarrassing, that's not going out..." You can only get so much on an album anyway.

To me, these are more of interest to people who are fans of the band, because the absolute cream of what we thought at the time is what made it onto the album, given as much time as we had. I don't think any album should be longer than 40-50 minutes in essence.

So, this was a case of putting this stuff out there that didn't make it onto the records at the time but were valid tracks. It's not like there's anything there that is cringeworthy – it's all stuff that's valid. They're not B-sides, but there are some oddities there. They just didn't make it the first time around.

Songfacts: A remix of the song "My Dark Twin" was recently released.

Ash: That was something when I heard it, I didn't think it was fully realized production-wise. I thought there were some little tricks I could do to it to make it fully realized. There was some stuff missing.

So, I went to the studio and did some tricks with it, and that's the track you can hear as a digital single. It's different from what's on the album. I just thought it needed tweaking.

Songfacts: What can fans expect from the upcoming shows?

Ash: We've got what I would describe as a modern psychedelic light show. That's all I can say at the moment because I don't want to say exactly what's going to happen. The cat would be out of the band then, wouldn't it? But there is some stuff we're doing live that we've never done before, visually.

Songfacts: Your guitar-playing style has always been unique, particularly in the Bauhaus days. Who were your influences?

Ash: Right off the top of my head, the thing that made me want to play guitar was Jimi Hendrix and Mick Ronson. They were the inspiration, completely. One of my favorite guitar solos ever is on the studio version of "Moonage Daydream" by David Bowie. That still gets me. That lead guitar on the end of that song sends me to heaven and back. Love it. And all the Hendrix stuff goes without saying.

Songfacts: And you always incorporated noise and odd sounds into your playing.

Ash: I discovered something called an EBow, which sustains the note indefinitely. So it turns the guitar into a keyboard. And there is another one by Fernandes Guitars called the Sustainer, which does the same thing except it sustains all six strings and you get three different octaves of that. So, there's some stuff in Bauhaus that you might think are keyboards but it's actually sustained guitar with an EBow.

I didn't want to sound like Hendrix. Besides, I couldn't play like him anyway. But I treated the guitar as a piece of wood with six strings on it and would always try something different. So if I was doing something that sounded like somebody else, I'd stop and do something else, like using drumsticks as a bow on the strings, just to try to make it sound different than "rock guitar." I tried to make it sound otherworldly whenever possible.

Songfacts: How does the songwriting compare or differ between Love And Rockets and Bauhaus?

Ash: It doesn't. It's a continuation. I'm doing a band now, which I've been involved with for three years but got delayed with Covid, called Ashes And Diamonds, with Paul Denman from Sade on bass and Bruce Smith from PiL on drums. It's the same process. It can be just a riff, three or four notes, a lyric, or a title of a song, and that gets you going and gets the creative juices flowing. That's how I write.

So it's either a headline as in a lyric title, a line of a lyric, or a guitar riff. And then I get inspired by either of those things and build on that, and then hopefully within a few days or a few hours I can shape it into something.

Songfacts: Let's discuss the lyrical inspiration behind a few Love And Rockets tunes, starting with "So Alive."

Ash: We had the weekend off and I had gone to a party on a Saturday night. I saw this woman on the other side of the room at the party and I was completely transfixed. I never went up to her because it wasn't appropriate – I was married at the time. But she had long brown hair, and it was like I'd known her in a different lifetime or something. It was just this thing that hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn't stop thinking about her.

On Monday morning, we went into the studio and we were going to be recording one of Dave's songs, and I was like, "Nope. We're not doing that. We're doing this – I've got a song." They said, "Well... can we hear it?" And I said, "No. I haven't written it yet."

I had the first line, because I didn't know what color her eyes were - she was on the other side of a dark room – and the first two chords. There are only two chords in that song anyway. I just said, "Give me half an hour. I'm going into the basement of the studio."

We were in Blackwing Studios in London. I went down to the cellar where the pool tables were, took a bottle of whiskey with me, and about 45 minutes later I came up and had the song. It was a very magical day. I don't know where that came from. I wish that would happen more often. But I went up and played it, and just like "Bela Lugosi's Dead," Kevin started playing the beat and David followed along with the bassline he came up with. We recorded the whole thing that day, got the backing singers in the following day, and it was all done in 24 hours.

As it progressed, it started to sound like "Walk On The Wild Side." That became the inspiration. We recorded most of it and then thought, "We've got to get female backing singers on this, just like on 'Walk On The Wild Side.'" And 24 hours later, it was finished. One magic day.

Songfacts: "Mirror People."

Ash: Way back, my wife, when I was married, she was from Columbus, Ohio, and we used to go to a few nightclubs there. That's back in the '80s. And all the people in the clubs were very fashion conscious, very self-conscious as well. Very into what they looked like. There's nothing wrong with that at all, but I noticed in this particular club, all the walls were mirrors, and all these people were staring at themselves in the mirrors while they were dancing, and even when they weren't. They couldn't help checking themselves out. And that's where that lyric came from.

Songfacts: "Haunted When The Minutes Drag."

Ash: In Love And Rockets, it's either Dave or myself who write the songs. And with that one, that's two songs joined together.

The first half was David's, and I just found out – he just told me the other day – that it was all about a girl he had a crush on at art school. Way back when he would have been 18 years old. My part, where the track changes halfway through, is sort of a sympathy for a couple of people that I knew. I was sympathetic to their situation that they were going through at that particular time. They were both going through a very similar thing, and that was my comment on it.

Songfacts: "No Big Deal."

Ash: I'm not going to say who it's about, but it was about somebody I knew that ripped me off. A guy that we fell out, and I was just saying, "Hey, no big deal. I'm just moving on."

Songfacts: "All In My Mind."

Ash: I'm going through the song lyric right now in my head... you've got me stumped. To be honest, most of my songs are about women, so it would have been about a relationship.

There's many times in Love And Rockets where there would be David, Kevin, and myself, and we'd be driving down the road, and David and me would always start going on about the cosmos. And I remember Kevin rolling his eyes, going, "Here we go again." So we would be obsessed with, "What's it all about? What's life about? What are we here for?" We'd have endless conversations about that. And if it wasn't that subject matter, it was usually about women. They were the two main subjects.

I think that really shows if you think about Love And Rockets' catalog, that's pretty much the two subject matters most of the time. It's a rock n' roll cliché, but what can I tell you?

Songfacts: "She's In Parties" by Bauhaus.

Ash: I did write some of the lines. On "She's In Parties," David, Peter [Murphy, Bauhaus vocalist], and myself all pitched in on the lyric. We traveled down the road in a tour bus or a car – we were all in the same area – and Dave had a pen and paper, and said, "OK. Shoot out some words, shoot out some lines." That's what we did.

Songfacts: "Terror Couple Kill Colonel."

Ash: That was either Peter or David's lyric, and that was from a headline in a German newspaper. [The title was inspired by a headline concerning a 1972 bombing in Germany by the Red Army Faction, which killed US officer Paul Bloomquist.]

Songfacts: Which song is the underrated gem from Love And Rockets and Bauhaus?

Ash: Well, we're all in love with "Deep Deep Down" right now from Love And Rockets, which is a song that never really had any attention to speak of. We're going to be playing that one live. With Bauhaus, I really like "Slice Of Life," because I wrote that one.

Another one that's a real killer is "Double Dare," and there's a story behind that. We actually recorded that for a John Peel session with five other tracks, so you had to work really quickly. And as was often the case with the John Peel sessions, his sessions would sound better than the actual song that was released by the band on their own albums. And that was the case with "Double Dare."

We tried to re-record it to put it on the album and it never was as good as that John Peel session. So, we actually delayed the release of the album in order to get that version on the album – it was that good. Again, one of those magic moments.

May 8, 2023
For more Daniel, visit his official Facebook and Instagram.

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Photos: Jolene Siana (1,3), Kevin Westenberg (2)

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