Gig review: Ash, Glasgow ABC

ASH have tried several tricks in the book to keep the fans – and more pertinently, one suspects, themselves – interested in the band, including the decision to stop making albums and opting instead to release a new single once a fortnight throughout 2009.

Reports of the album’s death have, however, been exaggerated and Ash now find themselves falling back on the format by revisiting their best-selling album, Free All Angels, on this tour, for which they have been rejoined by guitarist Charlotte Hatherley.

Around the time of its release ten years ago, Ash were still looking like worthy successors to The Undertones, with a catalogue of teen indie anthems which oscillated between awkward lust and starry-eyed romanticism. These were duly served up with copious amounts of fuzz bass from Mark Hamilton, still cultivating the surly adolescent goth look.

Happily though the likes of Shining Light and Burn Baby Burn were received by an audience who were all teenagers once, but no band with oil left in their tank should be resorting so soon to nostalgia for their relatively recent past.

The second half of the set, a nippy rampage through pre- and post-Angels hits, did not particularly resolve this dilemma, with the later brawny indie rockers such as Orpheus not quite matching up to the doe-eyed charms of their adolescent fumblings where girls were alien creatures – literally, in the case of Girl From Mars – and love lasted for a whole summer.

Rating: ***