Tonight, Matthew, we're going to be R2D2, C3P0, the big tall 'walking carpet' and Princess Leia! Tralala... 'Girl From Maaaars'! "Blimey that was good, excuse us while we smoke 17 acres of your finest skunkweed and get hammered off our cakes on free booze with Ewan McGregor and dribble all over several Hollywood lovelettes and annoy the fuck out of George Lucas 'till he gives us a bit part oops sorry Mark just stood on your neck there and broke it hurhurhur by the way we're only six years old! Heeheehee!" (Hic, vomit, fade to oblivion...)

Mark Hamilton, lofty purveyor of bass guitar, he of the spontaneously combustible limbs, stares into the foliage in a beer garden in Central London and wonders... well, what the hell it's all about.

"If you told me this when I was eight," he's saying, puffing on a cigarette, "that 'Tonight, you're gonna be a hugely successful rock band and you're playing at Obi Wan Kenobi's party...'"

He stubs out the tab, the grin starting on his face and stretching to somewhere near the galactic source of The Force itself.

"Fuck me," he says, baldly, and then changes his mind,"I mean, fuck off! Y'know? I mean... you've got more chance of being a fucking astronaut."

You can call it fate. You can call it luck. You can call it serendipity and magic and you can call it 'Ash still Blathering on about Star Wars after all these years', but that's tough banana-hued laser sticks, chums, 'cos for Ash, It's the stuff that makes it all worth surviving all that other stuff that's trying to kill them (possibly themselves half the time, but that's another story).

Trainspotting director Danny Boyle is an Ash fan, so he asked them to pen the signature tune for his new film A Life Less Ordinary, starring Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz. This they did, and thus began a connection with Ewan McGregor who two weeks ago, completed the narrative for Ash's forthcoming 75-minute-on-ver-road film which currently favours the title No-One Said It Was Gonna Be Easy. Ewan McGregor has also just completed the fist film in the Star Wars prequel trilogy (due out in 1999) in which case he plays the young Obi wan Kenobi, played originally played by Sir Alec Guinness. !977, in case you suffer mad mud disease or anything and have forgotten, became the title of Ash's '96 Number One debut album, not only because that's the year two of them were born, but is the year of the Star Wars cinematic 'birth'.

On March 21 this year, the very day Mark Hamilton turned 20, the technologically-improved original Star Wars trilogy was re-released. And Mark Hamil was, of course, Luke Skywalker himself. And tonight, Jim, Ewan McGregor has fixed it for Ash to make a special guest appearance at the all-new Star Wars it's-a-'wrap' party. Seated round a table enjoying a posh luncheon in the autumn sunshine, Ash should, by all accounts, be the  humanised embodiment of the doo-roo-roo-roo Twilight Zone theme tune. In truth, however, they're more 'Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps Please'.

"I don't think it's that wierd," grins the ever grinning prodigal songsmith, Tiny Tim Wheeler, devastatingly

"I don't think it's wierd, either," nods Mark, crushingly. "I just think that it's cool. It just happens."

But but but but...

"Ewan is incredibly nice," grins Tim of The McGregor Phenomenon, "wicked, really down to Earth, cool as fuck, you'd never think he's such a big star."

"He gave us an Alec Guinness impersonation," pipes Mark, "like... (in no way reminiscent of Alec Guinness or Ewan McGregor and more, er, Mark from Ash) 'I don't ever recall meeting droids before.' Hehehe. And his uncle (Denis Lawson) was in all the Star Wars. Cool!"

Alas,synchronicity and universal mystery mean nothing to Ash. Drugs, however, do.

"There's gonna be a fridgefull of skunk tonight," snickers Mark and he is not talking about Pepe Le Pew's trotters on a cocktail stick either.

Here they come... kneeling down the street... back after a "necessary, boring break" after 24 months' worldwide touring which left them "spattling out" from the booze, the drugs, the four billion press, TV and radio "duties", the near-severed fingers and mangled limbs of Mark's I -can-fly balcony lift-off routines culminating in a near-split via "the only proper argument we'd had in years" when Tim ran away from rock responsibility to hide, naturally, in a laundrette.

Time off, then, to chill out, secure themselves homes (Mark and Tim in London bespectacled sticksmith Rick McMurray in Belfast "with the goats"), finally find themselves, after two years of talking about it, a "totally perfect" new full-time member in Charlotte Hatherly (recommended by a friend of Tim's) and complete their film before writing the follow-up to '1977' next month.

There follows in '98, an 18-month tour about which they know no Recurring Madness Terror because, says Mark, in a moment of Proustian clarity, "It's like life, once you truly accept it's hard, it ceases to become hard."

Charlotte: "Oh Christ, Oh well! Tokyo her I come!" (Splutters gin all over the table.)

Meanwhile, we have 'A Life Less Ordinary', a sumptuous spree of tune-twirled melodic loveliness, which, says Tim, is about, "Er, it's just more... lines, really, ra ra ra."

Cheers!!? Ash, see, to this day, post-heroic, pan-global achievements, remain shy Northern Irish 'bairns', free from Embrace-style self-aggrandising bluster, possess the collectable ego of an Oxfam fish-slice and hide their sizable light behind a profound inability o express themselves beyond giggles, mutters, shrugs and an opinion scale ranging from "shite" to "awesome" with an inbetween "cool". They're really very lovely.

This year you supported U2. Didn't' you used to prefer Michelle Gayle?

"We did it 'cos it was the Irish gigs," grins Tim. "The first gig that size ever to play in Belfast. Quite historic really."

Did you actually like their show?

"Yeah!" beams Tim,

"Beats a fucking telephone box every time," notes Rick, rumly.

"I actually respect them," says Tim.

Rick (to Tim): "But d'you like them?"

Tim: "Kind of."

Ash: "Hurhurhurhur!"

You're all lying. They've been shite for years and you know it.

Ash: "Hurhurhur!"

"We like Ween," decides Mark, of the 'ironic' US toughsters whose 'What Deaner was Talking About' they've covered, "they're our favourite band. And the most unheard band. 'Cos no-one wants to hear them."

Two nights ago Ash went to see The Verve and Oasis in The Earls Court Experience. Verve fans forever, Ash deem the Wigan soul savers "awesome, people should've been excited about them years ago". Oasis were "shite" - or at least that's what Mark said 20 minutes ago before the tape recorder was switched on and now they'll only mutter cop-out dithers about "treading water".

NME, being gutted, puts it to Ash that 'Be Here Now' is a boiled-dry burnt-out chip-pan of yesterday's news featuring the most cobblers words in the history of human communication. The soul's evaporated, it means nothing to no-one, when-the-stars-are-in-the-sky-it's-getting-better-man... fookin' cooooooom ooooon Noel, yer lazy bastard!! Etc.

Ash: "........."

It's no use. Ash are not gutted. Ash, doubtless feel sorry for your correspondent who care too much, as sad fans do, and is now shouting, "It was like going to see Bruce bloody Springsteen!"

Ash: "Mnnnmnn."

You'd be better off with the Eagles!!!

Ash: "Mnneheheh."

You don't give a toss, do you?

"No," smiles Rick, "we don't. I'd rather talk about the Irish element to EastEnders than Oasis."

Tim: "Yes! Ahihihih!"

Alright then.

Rick: "Don't really watch EastEnders, don't have a telly."

At which point, NME prangs Ash in the eye with a spoonful of spicey sesame dip (or, rather, has a word with them separately, which amounts to an ordeal only marginally less irksome, bless 'em).

THE KURT JESTER

Rick McMurray is "knackered", is suffering "crushed lungs" due to staying over at Mark's last night on the spare futon, is a master of the pithy, deadpan retort and is mildly chuffed he's finally flown the parental coop by buying a "little one-bedroom flat" in Belfast, a colossal hurl into the Proper Freedom, after 22 years on Earth.

"Not really," he smiles, sipping a coke, "It's only 15 minutes up the road."

He is so normal he must be profoundly bonkers. His closest brush with insanity during The Rock Wars That Nearly Done Them In happened on Later... With Jools Holland - and who can blame him? - when he forgot how to play 'Oh Yeah' and suffered a gigantic freak-out, being "stared out by Angelo Badlamenti who had massive fuckin' saucer eyes" so he ran off and bawled his eyes out. "Really crying," he hoots, amiably. "'Can't take it anymore! Lost my mind!' It's fuckin' stupid, really. We don't really wanna kill ourselves. We just pretend we do."

In April of this year, he fell in love, which has fundamentally altered his very existence.

"Nah, I've just got something else to do now."

Why, you silver-tongued Lothario...

"Have you heard about Elton's next tribute record," he says, out of nowhere.

Er, no.

"Mother Theresa."

Oh aye.

"Yeah!"

He is not. Is he?

"Yeah, it's for Mother Theresa. Called 'Sandals In The Bin'."

THE KEITH MOON ELEMENT

"I've no fear of dying anymore," says Mark Hamilton, seven months beyond teenagedom, "'cos I've got a crazy notion that there's some guardian angel looking after me."

Mark eats a satsuma, drinks lager, proclaims himself feeing "alright" and avoids eye-contact at all times, referring to stare at the ground, the sky, the ether and the inside of his glass. He is, of course, The One That Went Proper Mad three years before Ash really started, six months' hospitalisation with a serious mental breakdown in what felt like a "bad acid trip". He's been nicknamed, for much of his ash life, Gordon (after gin, "the crack of drink", © Shaun Ryder) and been on prescribed mediation, including Prozac, for th past two years.

He is so magnificently bonkers on the outside he must be acutely normal on the inside. Maybe. He's been troubled this summer, since he started renting his own place and sometimes thinks he'd rather be at University with "nothing to worry about". He even declares, ill-advisedly, "If you don't have any money there's not so much to worry about, before adding, "Forget I even said that, that's stupid." What he means is, he's used to being "pampered", knows all you have to do when you're in a band is turn up. And stay alive.

"That's it," he says, "and suddenly I'm doing everything myself. Like on tour, I even had to be put to bed. Quite a lot. I'd just drink until I passed out. And then wake up and do it again."

Do you ever ask yourself why?

"Why what?"

Why you drink that much?