The orchestral introduction to There’s a Star is so soaring, pretentious and over-the-top it might have been stolen from TV’s Walking with Beasts. And, now that the BBC has gone as far as it can with prehistoric monsters, it might want to commission a project called Walking with Ash.

Over a background of aforesaid stirring music, Kenneth Branagh would begin: “This week on Walking with Ash we will show you how the once mighty band – who had conquered the world with songs like Goldfinger and Girl from Mars – was reduced to turning out sugary pap with pointless lyrics.

“Here we see There’s a Star lumbering uncomfortably through the motions. This song, a distant cousin of tracks like Gone the Dream, makes a pretty tune at first, but it soon becomes repetitive and nauseating, causing its victim to turn off the radio.”

That’s quite enough of that. There’s a Star sums up everything that is wrong with Ash at the moment. It sounds good at first, but the lyrics are a ham-fisted afterthought – a pretty good description of almost every track on Free All Angels. It’s not entirely the band’s fault. You could tell that the best songs on 1977 came from real experiences – the rain lashing down on a stormy night in Goldfinger, the girl's hair coming undone in Wheeler's hands in Oh Yeah.

But once they had to tour and think constantly about writing material for the next album, Ash ran out of time to run around after sixth-form girls or get wasted. They had to make up situations to sing about, and, unsurprisingly, the songs suffered. How else could you explain the dire Submission or Nu-Clear Sounds’ Wild Surf? Wheeler went from singing about tearing around gritty Northern Irish streets to eulogising California surfing, a subject about which I would guess he knows slightly more than bugger all.

Ash can still turn out a great tune, as Walking Barefoot showed, but they could do with going on a year’s sabbatical to get some real experiences to sing about. Spare us “the kind of star we have been dreaming of”.