Rock stars Ash look back: ‘Mark broke his feet jumping off a balcony – for the rest of the tour he self-medicated with gin and buckets of ice’

The Northern Irish band on jamming together at school, booze and breakdowns, and being a weirdly functional family Tim Wheeler, Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray are the founding members of Ash. School friends from Downpatrick, County Down, they started out as a covers band called Vietnam in 1989. As Ash, their debut full-length album, 1977, went to No 1 in 1996. Shining Light, from 2001’s Free All…