Ash move from Teenage Wildlife to raucous midlife as they celebrate 25 years with tour that's coming to The Pyramids Centre, Southsea

Shining Light, Candy, A Life Less Ordinary, Oh Yeah, and many more – the band knows how to pen a song with hooks that dig deep.

The compilation, Teenage Wildlife, has been released to mark 25 years of the band, originally from County Down, Northern Ireland.

The Guide caught up with frontman Tim Wheeler while the three-piece were in Norway, working their way back home for a UK tour .

Tim reveals they were very hands on with putting the best of together.

‘It was all us, we sequenced it and chose all the tracks, but it was tough actually because we left out some big singles.

‘We really wanted to get a balance over all the years, and I think we struck a good balance in the end, but it took several versions until we were happy. It's a hard thing to do!’

They’ve also been looking into the recesses of their seven-album back catalogue, not to mention the A-Z project, where they put out a new single every two weeks for a year.

‘It's given us a chance to dig out a few old tracks we haven't played for a while as well. So there's this added bit of freshness, in a funny way, by digging out some stuff we haven't played for a while.

‘And there’s one new song on there, Darkest Hour Of The Night, so I'm enjoying that there is at least one fresh song.’

The triple-disc version also features 18 rarities: 'That was fun to put together as well. It’s a good spread of everything.’

Has hitting the landmark anniversary made them reflective at all?

‘Not too much. I'm always more forward thinking, really. There has been a bit of reflection going on because of the nature of the Best Of... and some of the interviews have been about historic stuff. It’s great, but for me, it's never enough. I just want to keep going and I'm always thinking about the next step.’

Unlike some of their peers who’ve split up and come back to big fanfares, Ash have plugged away throughout.

‘I think over the long run that by sticking it out, it will add up to more than the hype we'd get if we broke up and then came back.

‘You get that for a moment, people will be excited for a moment and then it would go back to the way it was.

‘I’m much more in it for the long run and I'm really proud of all the music that we've made over the last 10 years that wouldn't have existed if we broke up or something like that.

‘For us it's never been a question because we still love working on new music as much as we ever did, and that's the thing that keeps driving us.’

And the trio, completed by drummer Rick McMurray and bassist Mark Hamilton, have remained fast friends: ‘Yeah, we’re very tight, we’ve been through everything together – all the ups and downs.’

And there have been many highs – and a few lows. When second album Nu-Clear Sounds failed to reach the heights of their platinum debut, 1977, they were looking at bankruptcy.

‘In those days, if you had a dud album, you had a good chance of being dropped by your record label. And in those days that was the end of your career, really.

‘Luckily we managed to get back with another number one album after that,’ their second platinum-seller, Free All Angels, ‘setting things back on track, but that was definitely a tough moment. Leading up to that we were still very young, we were around 20 years old thinking maybe our career was over.’

With that forward-thinking attitude Tim referred to earlier, the band decided to take a big gamble in 2010. Declaring that they would no longer be releasing albums (they’ve obviously since changed their minds on that front), they embarked on the A-Z series - 26 singles released in a year.

The band could see that the traditional album/tour cycle was changing as downloading and streaming began to bite on traditional sales.

‘Navigating the whole change of the music industry when it was in such big decline, around 2007/2008, it was kind of a tricky time,’ recalls Tim.

'It was hard to see how bands were going to sustain themselves at that point.

‘I think it was important to make that step at the time. It was good creatively, a good change.

‘We self-released all the A-Z stuff, and that was definitely the hardest we've ever worked as a band as well.

‘We did a crazy tour to go with it - we did an alphabetical tour of UK that started in Aldershot, and finished in Zennor. We played places we didn't even know existed before that!’

Ash returned to long-players with 2015’s Kablammo!, their first and – to date – only studio album not released on Infectious Records.

They resigned to Infectious (now part of the BMG group) – with Korda Marshall, the A&R/record label boss who signed them first time around when they were still only 17, and put out 2018’s Islands, which saw them return to the top 20.

While there' have been many highlights from the band’s career - headlining Glastonbury in 1997 is up there - there’s one thing that sticks out from their early days.

’Being on Top of The Pops for the first time,’ with Girl From Mars. ‘That was crazy. It was ‘95, the height of Britpop kicking off and that was real validation to our parents that we were actually making it.’

ASHThe Pyramids Centre, SouthseaWednesday, March 25pyramids-live.co.uk