ASH - LONDON 1997

London, Astoria, march 2nd 1997, U.K.

attendance: 1100
time: 65 minutes
support act: Urutsei Yatsura
setlist: Star Wars Intro/ Lose Control/ Season/ Goldfinger/ Girl From Mars/ I'd give you anything/ Lost In You/ I Only Wanna Be With You/ Innocent Smile/ Oh Yeah/ T Rex/ Uncle Pat/ Petrol/ Let It Flow/ Jack Names The Planets/ Darkside Lightside/ Gone The Dream/ Does Your Mother Know/ Kung Fu

After finding out that ASH would be playing two exclusive gigs at the LONDON ASTORIA, we really wanted to go. We were told that these shows were the only ones they would do in 1997.... well that turned out not to be completely true, but we decided to go anyway. We ordered tickets through the Ashtoria Ticketline. We were only able to get tickets for the show on monday, but we decided to go to London a day earlier so that we could hang out the tourist and maybe get into the Sunday night's show as well. We arrived at the venue at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and already there was this long line of little girls anxious to see their heroes.
Then we spotted Mark coming out of the building. When he saw us he was a bit surprised. Mark promised us a spot on the guestlist and left to get some food. The funniest thing was that all the people waiting in line looked at him and started whisperig "oh my god, it's Mark!", but no one ran after him, no one asked for his autograph, pretty strange! In Holland there's no way an artist can show his face outside of a venue without being jumped on by fans... polite people those Brittish!

The show, unfortunately was not very good. The band played a regular set and they did not look very awake. During Oh Yeah Tim got a shoe thrown against his head, which was fun to see. When the concert was over I tried to find someone without a shoe, but no luck.
The biggest surprise of the evening was a rendition of I ONLY WANNA BE WITH YOU, the Dusty Springfield classic! This was fun to hear, also DOES YOUR MOTHER KNOW sounded really well. It seems that the best songs this evening were no ASH songs. Nevermind. The show was still very enjoyable. There was an amazingly lot of Japanese girls present and they were screaming their lungs out, singing along in a Japanese accent. KUNG FU closed the show. During the song balloons fell from the ceilig, which was in my opinion a cheap trick (something you would expect at a Bon Jovi show or something) , but ASH got away with it! They probably found it just as cheap as me, but the effect worked wonderfully.

After the show we wanted to talk to the band. We got some passes that said that we were allowed backstage after the show. What this really meant was that we would be allowed into an afterparty, but there was no party! So the security kicked us out! Definately not a nice ending of a somehow cool evening.

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