Brighton date for Daniel Ash AKA Teenage Waitress

The show stops at The Folklore Rooms, Brighton on Friday, April 25.

First, though, that Teenage Waitress name…

“There is another Daniel Ash out there who is another musician and I was getting mistaken for him. He is very good but in a very different style to me. He is big among the Goths and I didn't want them turning up disappointed to see me! So the idea really was to create a name that gave me as much distance as possible from the other Daniel Ash. And actually I'd been writing a lot of songs from the perspective of other people, other characters, and really the idea is that the songs were all stories told by other people but were being overheard by this teenage waitress. You don't really know much about her at all. It is almost like she is the listener.

“And that's how I started out. But I'm writing a bit more from an autobiographical angle now. The first album was all about writing from different perspectives. I still do a lot of fictional stuff but in my songs now there is sprinkling of my own life in there. I suppose it's just experimenting with songwriting. I did all these character pieces for the first two albums but basically it is all about keeping it fresh.”

And now comes the third album which, as Daniel says, is almost unperformable: “It's very electronic and it relies on a lot of samples and things like that, the kinds of things that I don't have the budget to take on the road. It's very produced and it's very much a studio album and I was thinking how do I do a show with this. But I was wanting to try to reinvent our show anyway and just to go in new directions. I was wondering about barbershop or a string quartet and then I just thought it would be good to talk about the songs. I love hearing the stories behind his songs, how real-life leaks into songwriting and where the songs come from. So for this show in addition to the third album that's what you will get.”

As he says: “It will be a rock 'n' roll powerpoint one-man show featuring stripped-down songs, stories and visuals covering all of my songwriting career. The show is all about my creative journey. I'll be performing my songs, explaining the inspiration behind them and discussing how they were written.”

And it fits in well: “In addition to the third album I am writing a book about songwriting. I lecture about songwriting and I spent a lot of last year writing the book. So really this is good timing. I've been thinking a lot about my songs and my journey and the different methods of songwriting that I use and just some of the funny stories that surround you as a musician when you're playing gigs and how the stories leak into the songs. And that made the show quite easy to put together because I had written lots of it for the book.

“I've done the first draft of the book and I'm currently working on the second draft but the album will come first. The unperformable album is finished and we're just waiting on when will be a good time to bring it out. I think it's going to be about six months but I think it is more of an autumn album anyway. Hopefully the book will be following that in the winter or early next year.”