by Andy Powell
As a teenager, Pauline was definitely mod in her fashion sense, and we’d both push the boundaries within the restrictions of our school uniform. On weekends, Pauline and her buddies would gravitate to the same dance clubs that we boys would, all pale-pink lipstick, long leather coats and knee-length leather boots. Then, come Monday, it’d be back to the blazers and school ties, modest-length skirts and polka-dot summer frocks.
Pauline invariably dated Mini-Cooper-driving guys, older and cooler than I could possibly hope to be. The best travel option I could offer was a Honda 50 moped. But eventually my persistence won out and she got to witness the beginnings of that whole tedious hurry-up-and-wait thing that goes into producing a gig at some little youth club in a converted wartime Nissen hut. Being crammed into the back of a very shaky and unsafe van was hardly the most romantic of ways to conduct a relationship, especially when on at least two different occasions the van actually caught fire. The fact that I rescued my guitar before her is not one of my prouder moments, and I still wonder if she fully realised what she was taking on.
Early on in our marriage we moved out of London to a sixteenth-century cottage in the village of Edlesborough in Bedfordshire. This move wasn’t made without criticism from a certain member of the band who felt moving to the provinces did not gel with a rock’n’roll lifestyle. Nonetheless, Steve for one soon followed suit with his own country cottage. Pauline and I wanted to return to our roots and start a family, and for us, London was not the place to do this. Richard was born in August 1978, Aynsley followed in February 1982, and suddenly life took on a whole new meaning.
Around this time, Penny Gibbons, who had been running the Wishbone Ash fan club, decided to call it quits with that particular aspect of the workload, while getting busy with her own family life, and Pauline offered to take over those responsibilities. Our cottage was suddenly overrun with fan paraphernalia as well as all of the necessities two small children require. I had by this time added a studio to the back of the cottage, so there were days when chaos reigned as Pauline tried to get autographs signed for fans, write a newsletter, take care of the boys, and stay sane, whilst we were making music into all hours of the night.
When we discovered baby number three was on the way, some decisions had to be made. The fan club found a new secretary and the cottage went on the market. By the time Lawrence was born in May 1984, we had moved farther afield, to a farm in Great Brickhill, Buckinghamshire, and Pauline became focused on caring for our boys full time.
There was a point in the early 70s, before children and the need for security took over, when the band moved to America, and we were all thrown together much more than would be deemed healthy. Consequently, for a brief time, the rock wives—all quite different in personality—would be forced into social situations none of them would necessarily have chosen for themselves. While we slaved together in the band’s basement studio in Connecticut, wives and girlfriends were left to integrate themselves into the lifestyle we had essentially chosen for them. Pauline, for one, soon realised that shopping excursions to New York and hanging around a pool all day was not going to cut it. She became heavily involved with dance and exercise and then took a job as receptionist for a local hairdresser, Martin Pinto. It was Martin and his wife Jill who introduced us to the friends who we can thank for us living in the US today. We found like-minded souls in Robert and Elyse Shapiro, with whom we shared similar ideas on family life, and they were instrumental in later years in helping us make the transition to our new American home, becoming surrogate aunt and uncle to our lads as we fulfilled the same role for their daughter Anna. We would all join forces at tour manager Russell Sidelsky’s house, and were charmed to meet his new wife Woody and welcome into the ever-expanding clan their daughters Layla and Romy. Life was good.
Martin, however, yearned for a return to Blighty. America was not working for him. I think everyone else on the other hand was very happy drinking in everything America had to offer—not least of all the amazing weather offered by the New England seasons—making full use of it by enjoying bike-riding, trips into New York, learning to water ski, snow ski, and generally partying. It was, to use a variation on the Stevie Wonder line, ‘America—just like I pictured it’, and Pauline and I felt a real affinity for New England. We really did not want to return to England. We were building new relationships and living life to the fullest. We did, in fact, return to England for work, but the US had grabbed our hearts and continued to be a big draw for us. The Powell family kept its feet in both camps, and we have continued to live here for a number of years without one ounce of regret.
Citizenship eventually became something we needed to approach, and I have to say that the moment we took the plunge, everything really began to fall into place, and our commitment to the American way of life consolidated itself. It was a happy discovery that we would never be required to rescind our UK citizenship due to a reciprocal treaty between the two countries. In fact, our family members are all now dual citizens, and that status perfectly demonstrates our lives as we’ve lived them, with all of us having a very dual concept of our lives and roots.
Over the years people have tried to pry into my marriage to Pauline, some with malevolent intent. There have been petty jealousies, and Pauline has had to weather these more so than myself in a way. I remember her being harassed in Kensington Market for being with me at the time when my face was all over the music press, and there have been a few unpleasant phone calls to deal with. In the world of social media that we have now, cruel and idiotic statements get posted on Facebook that would, if they weren’t so ridiculous, test even the strongest of relationships. You have to wonder at the minds of some folk. In true fashion, given her sense of humour, Pauline finds much of the fan/musician thing quite amusing, and she keeps me absolutely grounded with her common sense.
At the time of writing, now that our kids are grown with families of their own, Pauline works with me on managing our complicated touring logistics, and we find ourselves together 24/7. It is a true test of our commitment to one other. It’s very timely because it frees us up to enjoy the journey together, spreading out the pressures and alleviating much of the stress involved in the constant travel. We have come full circle, and as with a lot of long-standing marriages, have found that true friendship and commitment arrive only through the tests of adversity that you go through as a couple. The band still charges forward and we both with it, just like always. It’s quite something.
CHAPTER 3
ARGUS
(1972–74)
A couple of things happened in 1972 that have defined the rest of my life. Firstly, Pauline and I were married on New Year’s Day, and secondly, Wishbone Ash recorded an extraordinary album. We called it Argus. In retrospect, nothing else we did would be quite so significant. And the funny thing is, we sort of knew it at the time. We were all in our early twenties, and none of us were Lennon or McCartney, but we had huge self-belief. With the spirit of the times—and all sorts of other factors—we crafted a forty-four-minute, seven-song body of work that immediately resonated widely with people and continues to do so all these years later.
Argus was recorded early in the year at De Lane Lea Studios in London, the same place as our previous two albums (though the premises had by then moved from from Holborn to Wembley), and with the same team: Derek Lawrence producing and Martin Birch engineering. We didn’t set out to create a ‘concept album’—the phrase itself a hot new concept at the time—but inadvertently I suppose that’s what we ended up doing. We had been gaining experience playing to much larger audiences and had come to the realisation that simpler yet more grandiose musical gestures in the construction of our songs were proving to be more impactful in stadiums and arenas. Martin wrote most of the words and all of us, to varying degrees, crafted the music. It turned out to be an album of powerful if loosely connected themes: time passing, aspiration, conflict, good and evil.
More than anything, the unifying theme of Argus was yea
rning, as I said in the introduction to this book—a spiritual yearning, a yearning for justice, a yearning for love, a yearning for nature and freedom. Backing up these universal emotions was a sense of backbone, grit, the determination not to be trodden on or swept aside without a fight; the realisation that everyone can to an extent, at least, make their own future through values, commitment, and resolve. The guitar lines throughout the album were very lyrical and melodic in themselves and meant to be heard in just the same way as the vocal lines.
We welded together the reflective, self-analysing world of the singer-songwriter with the muscular sweep of stadium rock. It was a particular kind of stadium rock: ‘English pastoral’ mixed with ‘West Coast cool’; sun-kissed Californian country-rock with vocal harmonies in damp British denim. Add a few of J.S. Bach’s simpler ideas on counterpoint fused with the sheer exuberance of youth and the listener is in the zone.
In these few songs we had defined ourselves both by the lyrics and the ensemble sound of a unique British band. We were able to capture something in the arrangements and input by the four band members that was greater than the sum of the parts and which clicked with a great number of people worldwide.
We were empowered and we were empowering. We weren’t jaded by the business at this point, and that, perhaps, was what made Argus such a once-in-a-lifetime work: that mixture of enthusiasm with experience before the inevitable tipping point was reached.
Pilgrimage, which we’d released prior to Argus, was pretty much our live set performed in the studio. You can hear that it’s an album more suited to being replicated live in the clubs, not in stadiums. Yet on the title track, ‘The Pilgrim’, and also on the song ‘Phoenix’ from the very first album, we were already experimenting with the musical processes that would be used to even greater effect on the Argus album, particularly on the core trilogy of songs: ‘The King Will Come’, ‘Warrior’, and ‘Throw Down The Sword’. After our experiences travelling around the world we now had a more global vision. It all came together on this album.
‘The King Will Come’—a song that has been in Wishbone Ash’s live set pretty much constantly since then, spoke of a second coming, with lyrics that had been lifted from the Bible by Martin and from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet by Steve Upton. No matter, the song was selling hope. It was a hopeful time. Hopefulness dates but hope itself never does. Nostalgia and hope make perhaps the most powerful combination in all of art. Argus was just an accident of human interactions, but it feels like it might have had intelligent design. Maybe the king did come, after all. It was certainly a blessing on the professional lives of those who were involved with it.
For such a windswept pinnacle of 70s rock, the songs that became Argus were mostly created in fairly prosaic circumstances. I remember how we worked the songs out on acoustic guitars at St Quintin Avenue just off Ladbroke Grove, which was where Martin, Steve, and Ted were living. I was living with Pauline on Wallingford Avenue, just ’round the corner. We were all feeling pretty excited about the material so we rewarded ourselves by going to Jubilee Studios, a basement rehearsal place in Covent Garden. I can vividly remember us working on ‘The King Will Come’ all night and emerging from that basement at four o’clock in the morning, just when all the barrow boys were loading up their barrows with fruit and vegetables. We were coming out into the sunlight and thinking, I think we’ve really just created something amazing. We got such a high from transitioning the songs from this acoustic songwriting process onto the electric instruments. It felt as if we were on the verge of something exciting.
Aside from ‘The King Will Come’, the most immediate song on Argus was ‘Blowin’ Free’. Quite why we did not release it as a single I really don’t know, because it had major elements of commerciality about it: the shuffle rhythm, the harmonised vocals, the upbeat guitar parts. Martin came up with the lyrics, which concerned a girl he’d been chasing in the Empty Vessels days, while the music was a happy accident inspired by the music of Steve Miller, among others. I’d been fooling around on guitar with a friend, Mick Groome, later of Ducks Deluxe, inverting some chord progressions from songs by The Beatles and The Who, and lo and behold this immortal riff in the key of D major emerged. It grew from there, and the finished article, especially the stacked guitar and bass parts at the song’s end, rather like a horn section, seem to have been an influence on a slew of other songs and other bands—parts of Steely Dan’s ‘Reelin’ In The Years’ (they even borrowed the apostrophe) and Thin Lizzy’s ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’ are the most obvious examples.
It has been said that ‘Blowin’ Free’ has a wonderful exuberance. This is true. It captured, for me, what was best about the 70s—it fits right into the zeitgeist. It encapsulated the feeling of the time. If you can imagine: you’re young, you’re a Brit travelling America for the first time, there’s nothing but the vast expanse of freeways and open road; the sun is shining and life is full of possibilities. If it sounds like a song to play at maximum volume in an open-topped convertible on a Midwest freeway, that’s exactly what it is. In fact, I can remember us putting it together during 1971, driving across the cornfields of Iowa. By the time we got to the West Coast it was done—we played it at a soundcheck at the Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles. And that was the first step toward Argus.
Just read here what blogger and LA music insider Bob Lefsetz said about the song in his Lefsetz Letter blog (dated April 5 2010) after he’d discovered a You Tube clip of it from the 70s:
Clive Davis would say Wishbone Ash can’t sing, that the song is too long. Jimmy Iovine would say they’re not good-looking enough, that there’s no way to tie in with the Fortune 500. And a band this good wouldn’t make a deal with a major label today anyway, they wouldn’t give up 360 degrees of revenue, wouldn’t sell their souls, they’d want to be free, on stage, where they belong!
I never even HEARD this song until today! Sitting at the light, waiting to turn from Sunset onto Barrington. When I heard the live rendition done at XM. Which is not the take I’m going to point you to here, that one had better vocals, but this ancient one just WAILS!
Wanna know what it was like in the seventies? WATCH THIS CLIP! Catch the audience clapping, grooving, moving to the music. Others standing in sheer admiration … how do they DO this?
We know how Britney did it. On sheer desire. Flashing her lashes for aged men. But that didn’t used to be the recipe we admired. We liked acts that truly cooked. Who assembled the ingredients and every night attempted to make that cake RISE!
Watch this clip. Doesn’t it make you want to raise your arms in exultation like the dude in the black shirt at the end? Doesn’t it make you want to grab your wallet, put on your jacket and go to the gig?
You can’t get this feeling anywhere else. Only music can light such a spark inside, transport you three fifths of a mile in ten seconds.
Hang in there, through the intro ad, through the first few notes, until the guitars lock in and start to WAIL!
In the old days, music was sealed up, you could visit it in the store, but it was hard to hear. But via the miracle of the Internet, you can hear Wishbone Ash’s ‘Blowin’ Free’ right now! TURN IT UP!
While ‘Blowin’ Free’ was the most obviously ‘American’-sounding piece on the album, the American touring experience was crucial to the whole album. The birth of FM radio in the States was certainly one of the factors leading into the Argus material, with all these young DJs given the license to play songs that were no longer restricted to being three minutes and available as a single. Then you had this wave of British bands going over to the States and showing the Americans how to really do stadium rock—how a band could make big musical and visual statements able to fill that environment.
We knew what we had to do. I don’t think we ever consciously said, ‘We’re going to write this thing and hopefully it’ll be big on FM radio,’ but we were on these long tours, we were listening to FM radio all day long, we were smoking weed, we were immersed in the stuff
of the times. The youth movement was burgeoning—we were golden. It was a moment in time where you’re so busy and so thrilled with what you’re doing and the opportunities presenting themselves to you that everything is living in the moment. It happens, I’ve no doubt, to most successful bands and to lucky young people at some point, however briefly. At that point in time we had money, we had travel, we had access to audiences, hungry audiences. We had pot and technology. And most of all, with our manager and record label behind us, we had massive self-belief.
To put it simply, we were doing the best we could—and, in hindsight, we were at our best at that precise point in time. There were simple elements in the songwriting but, as with all the best songwriting, everything culminated and came together to make something magical. When we put that music into a big auditorium it had heft.
* * *
Another aspect of the whole music world at that point of time that can’t be emphasised too forcefully is that this was the moment at which the ‘art of the rock album’ was at its absolute zenith. In those days, labels nurtured their artists, and there was the capacity both in time and finances to do so. The move from physical to download as a retail medium in recent times has various pros and cons but one result—whatever one’s opinion of it may be—is that the idea of an artist creating a body of work which represents a strong period of creativity has been diminished. We now live essentially in a world of tracks rather than albums and music seems to have a very short shelf life.
‘The album’ was the format we all worked toward in those days, and to a large extent Wishbone Ash fans still measure our progress in albums and expect to have a new one every year or two. I guess at the time I also thought it helped to have something to work toward in that sense. Some of the albums I most enjoyed and was most inspired by prior to 1972 included Hard Road by The Bluesbreakers, Disraeli Gears by Cream, Song To A Seagull by Joni Mitchell, and Harvest by Neil Young.