by Andy Powell
Eyes Wide Open
True Tales Of A Wishbone Ash Warrior
Andy Powell with Colin Harper
To Richard, Aynsley, and Lawrence—Big Love.
A Jawbone ebook
First edition 2015
Jawbone Press
3.1D Union Court,
20–22 Union Road,
London SW4 6JP,
England
www.jawbonepress.com
Volume copyright © 2015 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Andy Powell and Colin Harper. Foreword text copyright © Ian Rankin. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.
Edited by Tom Seabrook
Cover design by Mark Case
CONTENTS
Foreword by Ian Rankin
Introduction
Chapter 1 Growing Up
Chapter 2 Outward Bound
Interlude 1 Pauline
Chapter 3 Argus
Interlude 2 Hotels
Chapter 4 New England And Back Again
Interlude 3 Fans
Chapter 5 People In Motion
Interlude 4 India
Chapter 6 Why Don’t We?
Interlude 5 Other People’s Music
Chapter 7 Hard Times
Interlude 6 Guitars
Chapter 8 Driving A Wedge
Chapter 9 Tangible Evidence
Interlude 7 Road Works
Chapter 10 Blue Horizon
Illustrations
Appendix 1 Wishbone Ash At The BBC by Colin Harper
Appendix 2 Selected Discography by Colin Harper
Appendix 3 Wishbone Ash Live Dates 1969–2015
Acknowledgements
Co-author’s Note
FOREWORD
BY IAN RANKIN
There was a little shack next to a railway bridge near my primary school, and that’s where I bought my weekly copy of Sounds. There were other music papers out there, but Sounds was the only one that included a free colour poster. I was twelve years old in 1972, and growing up in a small town on the east coast of Scotland made it tough to be a music fan. I relied on the radio, my regular fix of Sounds, and the record collection of a friend’s big brother. That record collection had introduced me to Frank Zappa, Jethro Tull, and Led Zeppelin, while Sounds filled my head with dreams of loon pants, peace badges, and denim waistcoats, along with bands I would probably never get to see, since the nearest venues were miles away. One day I pinned the latest poster to my bedroom wall. The guitarist was playing a Gibson Flying V. I’d never seen a guitar like that before. Its owner’s name was Andy Powell and he played in a band called Wishbone Ash. Almost a year later, I did a swap in the playground of my new high school—a Genesis album I’d grown tired of in exchange for a Wishbone Ash album with a magnificent gatefold sleeve, showing a sentinel and a UFO. What I found inside was even better: a band with chops, mixing the old and the new, capable of spine-tingling solos and soaring guitar interplay. That was Argus, and Wishbone Ash had a new fan. Who became, as it turns out, a lifelong fan.
So it’s a great pleasure to be able to say that the man behind the Flying V can write a bit, too. Here’s the story of the band in his distinctive voice. There are tales of tour antics with The Who, of sessions with Ringo Starr, of hair-raising trips to India and beyond. The highs and lows of band life are laid bare, and, yes, there’s even room for some courtroom drama, too. Above all, Andy never forgets that the music is what it’s all about—making great albums and then sharing those songs with fans worldwide. Wishbone Ash is still very much a band hard at work, and as Andy himself says the line-up you’ll see at a gig these days is as tight and scintillating as any in the history of the group.
From the austere landscape of 1950s Britain, through the swinging 60s and rocking 70s, right up to the very different world of the present day, this is a book written by someone who’s seen it all and lived to tell the tale. From early influences such as Django Reinhardt and Chuck Berry, to the small ad in Melody Maker that would change his life, and from there to the rollercoaster ride of five decades of Wishbone Ash, here is Andy Powell’s story, told for the first time.
Enjoy the ride …
Ian Rankin,
July 2015
INTRODUCTION
If there is one song in our large back catalogue that sums it all up for me then it has to be the one called ‘Warrior’, visualised on the sleeve of our best-known album, Argus. It’s a collectively written piece with lyrics by our original bassist, Martin Turner; it speaks about fighting for what you believe in and has a prophetic vision that belies our youth.
To me, the song is a metaphor for life itself—or, at the very least, life in a band on a musical quest. The lyrics could be applied to any worthwhile endeavour in any walk of life where you have to fight the good fight. I’ve had soldiers, actual warriors of our own time, come to me and tell me how that song gave them comfort in battle.
I am never happier than when I have a clear musical mission and, yes, a clear mission in life. I think it’s the same for most of us. We need to know where we stand; what our purpose is. We’ve all been there, one way or another. This book is the story of my struggles, my insecurities, challenges, successes, and achievements. It’s my life as I see it: an acknowledgement of who I am.
It took a long time for me to really grow into the role of a professional musician, to feel that I was not only comfortable in those shoes but running in them. It even took me some years as a professional musician before I’d state it under ‘occupation’ in my passport. It was always a work in progress. In the lyrics of this song one hears a wistfulness, but one also hears a strong resolve at the same time. I like that. There’s an understanding that at some point you’ll be needing to go down to that valley, to gather there, gird up your loins, and put your world to rights. And often it’ll be just when you are feeling the most content with your lot—you’ll have no option but to face change, don the armour, and wade into battle once more. There’s also that quest to be a slave of no man, throwing off the shackles or the ties that bind, while fighting the good fight once more.
I’ll have to be a warrior,
A slave I couldn’t be,
A soldier and a conqueror,
Fighting to be free.
The best songs—and this one is one of them—have a kind of yearning to them: a yearning for a better life, a quest for the truth and often, above all else, a quest for true love. It’s the same with the singer. An audience can tell in an instant if the song is coming from the heart, regardless of whether or not the singer was the writer.
Guitar playing is like this too. The best soloists have a yearning within their style. Certainly Jimi Hendrix had that—he was on a mission. Clapton at his best could move you like this; Peter Green, most definitely. And I’ve always known this in my own approach—known when I was transcending or was merely paying lip service to the song. That, for me, is music.
Victor Hugo said, ‘Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.’ And, of course, in addition to songs with words, Wishbone Ash are known for producing a large body of music propelled forward by those intertwining guitars. When these ingredients, the music and the words, are blended in the right way, when the harmony and synergy is present in the song, you have one hell of a great band.
That, to me, is Wishbone Ash. It’s a band for which I’m proud to have fought for in excess of four decades. I was proud to be in it in the 70s, and I’m just as proud to be in it today. I’ve b
een buffeted and bruised by the cold winds of ill fortune along the way, but one always gains from experience. I’m a better person today than I was yesterday, and I’ve got there by accentuating the positives in a business where, as others might say, if you’re not up, you’re down. I’ve found the middle way, and whatever may happen tomorrow, that sun keeps on shining. In the words of ‘Eyes Wide Open’, a Wishbone Ash song from the twenty-first century, I’ve made it thus far in a business that knows no mercy by ‘taking hold of my life’. This book is my story.
CHAPTER 1
GROWING UP
The 1950s in Britain are often described as bleak, stuffy, austere, and monochrome. And trust me, they were. The 60s, on the other hand, are always paraphrased as vibrant, loose, colourful, exciting, and optimistic. The tint becomes rosier as time goes on, but even at the time it felt as if something had changed for the better.
It was about time, too. In 1965 Roger Miller was able to tell people around the world that ‘England Swings (Like A Pendulum Do)’, and Roger’s take, rather more so than his grammar, felt pretty accurate to me. The 60s really were ‘Swinging’, or at least they were if you went out and looked. And I did. I was born in the East End of London in 1950 but grew up in Hemel Hempstead, just north of the city, exactly the right age to drink deep from this well of hope. I was outside London, the magic cauldron momentarily at the heart of global culture, but I was close enough to get there, to see and hear what was about to have a major impact on the world. It was a golden time and place for pop music—and it seems to have defined the era in a way that it never had before and never really would again.
There would be an awful lot of kids like me enthralled by music and swept along by the dream of being a part of what Andrew Loog Oldham, the game-changing manager of The Rolling Stones, called the ‘industry of human happiness’. You might think ‘beats working for a living’ would have been a thought at the centre of that equation but actually, no, it wasn’t. My generation, it seems to me, were grafters. You had to be—growing up, there just wasn’t a lot of money around. There was a desperation to build something new and exciting, something colourful and loud, and building required effort. We had the energy and the will to do that.
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told the nation in 1957 that we’d ‘never had it so good’. He was the very antithesis of the sort of person who would come to represent the good times coming: starchy, old-school, upper class and with a bumbling voice. But move that remark on a few years, and I’d have to agree: we never did have it so good. And, if I put on my best pair of rose-tinted spectacles, I’d probably have to say we never quite managed it again.
My band, Wishbone Ash, was a ‘70s band’. I can’t deny we did our best to give those halcyon 60s a run for their money, and if the past is another country, it’s always worth a visit.
My mother, though, might have thought differently. Ruby Alfreda Powell, born in 1921, had a past much tougher than mine. Her father died, aged twenty-one, on Christmas Day 1930, and she basically brought up her two younger stepbrothers herself. She always learned her lessons well. She did everything correctly because corrected she was, spending a good portion of her time in the workhouse, after her mother couldn’t manage. As a child she would have done quite menial work to earn her keep. No easy road, to coin a phrase.
My nan was quite a character. She would actually go out into the street and sing for their supper. Somewhere or other the 20s were supposed to be ‘Roaring’, but I imagine in Britain it was just like the 50s would be—the decade after a ruinously expensive war, another grinding procession of penury and gloom and wishing to be somewhere else (preferably America). When the Wall Street crash came along in 1929, even America was no good.
Nan was quite industrious, though. She was in service—a live-in servant to the relatively wealthy, just exactly the same as her mother, Great Grandma Pudney, had been. Various liaisons ensued and the family history becomes a little bit vague, I must admit. I daresay it would fuel a few plotlines in Downton Abbey, but then my nan’s experiences were hardly unusual. The tough times made life hard for young Ruby. The workhouse system of dealing with the poor in society was abolished in 1930, although many of the places were still functional up to 1948. It’s a sobering thought. Maybe Macmillan’s line wasn’t so ridiculous after all.
Amazingly, however awful it was, the whole experience didn’t give my mum a ball and chain of bitterness to haul around. What it did give her was a fantastic survival instinct and work ethic, which she passed on to us, me and my brother Len, who came along four years after me.
* * *
‘What did you do during the war, dad?’
I might have asked this at some point. To which my dad, also called Len, would surely have replied, ‘Run for cover.’ My mum and dad married in 1944 and lived at 43 High Street North, East Ham, in the East End of London, inconveniently central to the thinking of German Bomber Command. Dad was deemed to be more useful to the war effort working in the armaments industry than gallivanting off somewhere with a rifle and a tin hat. He was lucky in that respect. That was the sad lot of his older brother Eddie, the star of the family, who perished on Omaha Beach, Normandy, on D-Day. My mum packed parachutes. She was eventually evacuated off to Northampton, and my dad would cycle up there to visit—on his bike at first, and later on a motorcycle. After the war, he was an engineer for Vauxhall Motors in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, an English outpost of the General Motors empire. The company spent most of the war making Churchill Tanks and then moved on to the Bedford Van. Like most of the British rock fraternity, I’d spend a fair proportion of my music apprenticeship trundling uncomfortably along minor roads for interminable distances in Bedford vans. Funny, you often thought you’d made it when your band finally got a van.
My dad was the only one of his brothers who moved out of the East End. The youngest of four brothers and two sisters, he was the only one who took the plunge and probably went above his station in taking a gamble, getting a job in the provinces. People didn’t move much in those days. It was a big deal. Dad was a hard-working guy so we were one of the first in our street to get a television and a car. My mum was a housewife—in the rather patronising terminology of the time—but she actually did all sorts of things: she kept books for a local garage, she worked in the school canteen preparing school dinners, she did whatever she needed to do to supplement the income.
Hemel Hempstead was apparently founded in the eighth century, receiving an honourable mention in William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, and it was granted a town charter from Henry VIII a few centuries later. As far as everyone was concerned, however, the place was a ‘New Town’, designated as such by the government in 1946, along with various other places like Stevenage and Crawley, and open for business—or at least for an in-rush of immigrants from the Blitzed-out East End—in 1949.
We would often go back and visit my relatives in East Ham, and you’d see the war damage lingering on well into the 50s. But we were growing up in a squeaky clean, wonderful Utopia of new housing estates with new schools, playing fields and the countryside where we could climb trees, ride our bikes, and play hide-and-seek. Everything was fresh and brand new. It was, to use an Americanism, awesome. The kitchen cupboards were still pretty uninspiring places, though. Food rationing didn’t stop in Britain till 1954 but everything was homemade and made with love.
Growing up in the 50s had an effect, I think, on a whole generation of Britons. If you look at The Beatles, the Stones—any pop groups of the 50s and 60s who were British—everyone was tiny. We were no different. I can still remember going to the local health centre and getting our ration of orange juice and cod liver oil. Mum made life more pleasant by being able to stretch the food budget with wonderful wholesome meals like oxtail soup, lamb stew, and of course homemade cakes, which were a magnet for local kids.
Travelling was always a bit of an ordeal. There were no motorways, no service stations, and during the Suez crisis of 1956 there wasn’t much
petrol either. Nevertheless, my family liked to go to Polzeath, Cornwall, for holidays, and it would take us at least ten hours to drive there. You can do it in half that time now. It would seem like an unattainable quest to find this remote corner of Britain—windswept moors and winding roads, Arthurian castles and clotted cream scones. It all felt very exotic at the time. I remember my mum would pack sandwiches and a flask of tea for the trip, and then we’d get down there, bundle into a caravan or a guest house, and freeze for the two weeks!
All the photographs of me in the 50s are by the seaside—I’ve got swimming trunks on, but I’ve got a home-knitted sweater on as well. And it was the same for every kid in Britain. It was misery! Everybody in the family looks so undernourished. But we absolutely loved it.
Looking back on it, going to Cornwall for holidays was quite middle-class and probably a bit eccentric at the time. The era tends to be characterised by Butlin’s and Pontin’s holiday camps—these rather grim, whitewashed Gulags erected around the unforgiving British coastline and purportedly offering affordable holidays in week-long increments for inner-city families … as long as your idea of a good time was bingo, ballroom dancing, and a kind of militaristic approach to communal fun with people you didn’t know. It sounds pretty ghastly to me, and clearly my dad had a similar view. Holiday camps played a big role in the careers of The Beatles and others in the very early 60s—well-paid summer residencies for weeks on end in front of captive audiences, at a time when the infrastructure of rock music in Britain was yet to be created—but fortunately I escaped.
My dad, I suspect, thought he was above this sort of thing. He wanted something a bit more rugged, and pottering about old tin mines and smugglers’ coves in Cornwall was certainly that. He had a great romantic streak in his own way. He’d sing Italian opera round the house and, not speaking a word of Italian, he’d make up his own language. But he could sing it. He really could hold a tune. I suppose, in a way, he was rebelling against his lot. He was a virtuoso whistler. I used to listen to my dad working in the back garden from my bedroom. He’d be whistling away, and I really believe this had an impact on the way I would use vibrato and develop my melodic guitar style later on.