School’s out for the summer of 1993. And for 16-year-old Tim Wheeler, that means two months of sci-fi films, sexual frustration and underage drinking, set against the backdrop of a Northern Ireland torn apart by IRA violence. All are factors that will inform the best song he’s ever written, an impossibly catchy pop-punk sugar-rush about a whirlwind intergalactic romance.
“The girls in Northern Ireland weren’t happening for me,” says Ash frontman Tim Wheeler, “but you can really romanticise someone from outer space, put them on a pedestal. I was into shit like Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, and as a kid I’d dream that my parents were Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker. That’s why I loved David Bowie and the Pixies’ Trompe Le Monde album, because they had all these sci-fi references. Maybe it’s to do with growing up in such an isolated place. [Downpatrick] is 20 miles from Belfast and a bit of a rough town. The troubles were still going on in 1993 and it was still an edgy kind of place.”
