Ash bring 1977 home to the Olympia and Ulster Hall

The BMG anniversary set lands on 16 October with four extra studio tracks and a full 2021 live disc — two months before the Downpatrick three-piece play the album in Dublin and Belfast.

Ash play Dublin's Olympia on 9 December and Belfast's Ulster Hall on 10 December, the Irish dates are now fixed on the 1977 anniversary run as the expanded edition of the album arrives on 16 October.

The Northern Irish three-piece take the 1996 debut through both rooms two months after the BMG reissue lands. Formats include a 2LP EcoRecord Green and Black 'InkPlosion' vinyl in a gatefold sleeve, a 2CD digisleeve with booklet, and digital. Four tracks join the original album on the expanded set: the previously unreleased Bittersweet Blue plus three 2026 additions — a version of Oh Yeah, a demo mix of Girl From Mars and an acoustic mix of Gone The Dream. A second disc carries a full live performance of 1977 recorded at STABAL Studios in 2021.

A debut that still anchors the set

Formed in Downpatrick, County Down, in 1992 by vocalist and guitarist Tim Wheeler, bassist Mark Hamilton and drummer Rick McMurray, Ash followed the mini-album Trailer with the full-length 1977 in 1996. That debut topped the UK and Irish charts and was certified platinum. It has long been ranked among the 500 greatest albums of all time, and its songs have remained at the centre of the band's live shows across three decades.

After the breakthrough, the line-up expanded with Charlotte Hatherley for Nu-Clear Sounds in 1998. Free All Angels followed in 2001 and delivered another string of successful singles. The band have kept the catalogue active into the present decade: Race the Night arrived in 2023, an expanded edition the following year, and Ad Astra in 2025, with further singles the same year. The 30th anniversary edition of 1977 sits inside that longer working life rather than outside it — with new 2026 mixes and an unreleased song placed alongside a complete live reading captured five years ago.

From street date into the halls

Details of the anniversary edition emerged through 2026; the full format list and the December Irish halls are now set. Bittersweet Blue had already been presented as the unearthed addition at the heart of the bonus material; the mid-October release locks the physical editions and the second live disc into place.

The wider 1977 tour has already covered European dates, with a sold-out Roundhouse finale still ahead on the itinerary. The Olympia and Ulster Hall shows bring the album home in December for audiences who have lived with these songs since the mid-1990s. Returning to the record with fresh mixes and a full live document shows how the material holds up under current hands, while the two Irish nights give the sequence in order in rooms built for that scale of gig.

For a band still recording and touring more than thirty years after forming in Downpatrick, the reissue is a fresh pass at the record that opened the path, not a farewell to it. The edition is a fortnight from the shops; the December dates close the year on home ground.