Ash, The Astoria, London

Ash managed to sell out the London Astoria for five days running, it was so impressive for a band that had been around for such a short period of time that they renamed it The Ashtoria for the duration. These were going to be great gigs so Lee and I grabbed our tickets early and ended up with the Sunday.

We got to the London early and did a quick spot of shopping then headed to the venue as we wanted front row. While we were waiting we met Mark and Rick who signed a stack of CDs and my T-shirt for me, we briefly saw Tim who ran into the venue not signing anything.

There were a few other fans there, one of which was a young girl who was off her face. She was lying in the gutter puking everywhere, I joke “they will need to pump her stomach”, it gets a few chuckles from the onlookers. About half a hour passes and she’s even worse than before, a river of puke is now running down Charring Cross Road, so much so an ambulance is called. They turn up and start to pump her stomach on the pavement! They clearly didn’t want to clean up the back of their ambulance.

Ash were fantastic that night. Easily one of the best gigs I saw in the 90’s, the energy they had that night was incredible.

With the gig being on a Sunday it caused a problem with getting home in the evening as the trains stop an hour earlier. It looked like it was still perfectly doable from Charing Cross to Staplehurst, so we booked everything we needed.

In the week leading up to the show it was announced that there would be planned maintenance on the line and no trains would be running. Looking into what could be done we found out we could get as far as Chatham from Charring Cross after the show, so arranged for a cab, luckily a friend of Lee’s family to pick us up there to drive us back to Cranbrook and Benenden, on the cheap.

After the show, we hot footed it back to Charing Cross, only to find out that the last train to Chatham had been cancelled for some unknown reason, there were no more trains leaving the station at all… FUCK!

Lee’s dad had already warned us that he won’t be picking us up from Chatham if the cab doesn’t show up. There was no way in hell he’d pick us up from London! We were in deep shit. Then all of a sudden this train guard comes over to us and asks where we need to get to. We say Chatham and he replies “I can’t get you there but I can get you to Ashford, that train is returning to the depot, if you want get on it”.

Something was shining down on us big time! We jumped on it and headed to Ashford, first class of course. Now this is a time before mobile phones, so we can’t contact the cab driver to get him diverted to Ashford. Once in Ashford we have to find a payphone and Lee makes the call to his dad, who is fuming! He’s furious about this but agrees to pick us up from Ashford which luckily is only 20 minutes away from Benenden. We also have to fully pay for the cab which he also can’t contact.

In 2016 Ash released Ash – Live On Mars which was recorded at one of the five shows.