Ash mark 30 years of 1977 with expanded reissue, livestream and new tour

Thirty years after it arrived like a compact, gleaming wrecking ball, Ash are reissuing their debut album 1977 with extras, a livestream from Belfast and a late-year tour that stitches Australia, Southeast Asia, Europe and the UK into a single anniversary arc.

The new package is deliberately physical: a 2LP in green and black vinyl, a 2CD digisleeve with booklet and a digital edition. Alongside the original 12 tracks that made the record both a chart-topper and a platinum seller in 1996, the reissue adds four bonuses — the long-lost ‘Bittersweet Blue’, a 2026 edition of ‘Oh Yeah’, a 2026 demo of ‘Girl From Mars’ and an acoustic 2026 mix of ‘Gone The Dream’. The second disc is a live set recorded at STABAL Studios in 2021, where the band played 1977 in full and sprinkled in era-specific favourites.

There is footage of the band performing ‘Oh Yeah’ from STABAL below.

On May 6 the band staged a streamed concert from Belfast’s Oh Yeah Centre to coincide with the album’s 30th anniversary. Tim Wheeler and company opted for an intimate acoustic format. The event was hosted by BBC Introducing’s Taylor Johnson, who threaded interview segments into the set to tease out the stories behind the songs — not a sanitized oral history, but conversational short takes about how ideas formed in parks, bedrooms and on early tours.

The reissue is as much about ritual as it is about content. Physical variants and demos speak to collectors and completists. The STABAL disc, recorded in 2021, points to a different impulse: a band willing to revisit its own architecture rather than simply slap a sticker on a remaster and call it done. Hearing those songs through older voices and looser arrangements exposes both the youthful immediacy that made 1977 land and the cracks that time has filled in.

Tours with anniversary bills are equally instructive. Ash’s 2026 run begins in Perth on September 4, threads through Australia and New Zealand, stops in Singapore and Hong Kong, then reappears in Europe in November with a Utrecht launch and German dates in Cologne and Berlin. UK dates start in Torquay on December 1 and culminate with a December 17 show at London’s Roundhouse. Tickets go on sale May 15, with presales from May 12. Before the headline dates the band are also lined up for festivals including Download and Isle of Wight.

Seen from the rearview, 1977 was a formative record for a band that could condense bratty hooks and guitar fuzz into radio-sized anthems — ‘Girl From Mars’, ‘Goldfinger’, ‘Oh Yeah’ and ‘Kung Fu’ are songs that turned adolescent energy into durable singalongs. That template has followed Ash. In recent seasons they have shown a taste for musical conversation: last year they issued a double A-side that included a contribution from Blur’s Graham Coxon, and Tim Wheeler guested on Coldplay’s ‘Clocks’ at Wembley. Their most recent studio work, 2025’s Ad Astra, arrived as the band’s ninth LP, following Race The Night in 2023.

What the 1977 reissue asks, bluntly, is what a youth document sounds like in middle age. The added demos and new mixes can read either as corrective archaeology or gentle embellishment. The live disc from STABAL and the acoustic Oh Yeah Centre set show a band that still wants to test the songs against different arrangements and audiences. These aren’t radical revisions so much as slow adjustments: minor edits that allow the old chest to keep operating.

For longtime fans the package will function as both memory and material. For newcomers, the vinyl and the live recordings offer multiple entry points into a catalogue that hasn’t been content to stay frozen. Ash are not rebranding; they’re reckoning. Whether that reckoning will redraw 1977’s place in the band’s story or merely annotate it will play out in clubs and theatres this autumn and winter.

Ash 1977 reissue. CREDIT: Press