by Andy Powell
Argus was our grand artistic statement, a kind of concept album. Part of that analogy is borne out by the sleeve design. The Beatles had Peter Blake; we had Hipgnosis. Others of our era had Roger Dean, Rodney Matthews, and so forth—masters of the LP sleeve format in this fairly brief window of time. Everyone was creating epics in those days, and that’s something Argus has got going for it: it was our epic.
There was this wonderful cinematic imagery of ‘The Warrior’ on the cover, the artwork bringing a visual dimension to the music within. Steve Upton came up with the album’s title, Argus, taken from Greek mythology’s one-eyed watcher. It fitted neatly with this cover design of a solitary sentinel seen from the back, looking out over a mist-covered vale, clothed in the garb of the ancient world. I’ve got notebooks from when I was a nine-year-old at school, full of nothing but drawings of Greek warriors—I was obsessed with all of that.
The two Hipgnosis partners, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, convinced Miles to let them go on a junket to the south of France where the figure, one of their employees, was photographed using clothing from Ken Russell’s movie The Devils. Amusingly, while Argus went on to win ‘Best Album’ in the Melody Maker’s annual poll, it was Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick that won ‘Best Album Cover’ for its elaborately created spoof local newspaper, poking gentle fun at the mundane aspects of regional life in 70s Britain. Our epic mythologizing stood no chance, but in retrospect it has had far greater long-term impact. Some even say that the character and image of Darth Vader himself was inspired by our album cover.
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Argus was released at the end of April 1972, a few weeks after a headlining city-hall tour of Britain. We were lucky enough to get a lot of support at the BBC: we featured each of the album’s seven songs at least once across three Radio 1 sessions in the middle of the year (including the two that we would hardly play live at all again until the twenty-first century, ‘Sometime World’ and ‘Leaf And Stream’) and performed five at a Radio 1 In Concert in May.
But life is never entirely simple. Three weeks into a US tour in June, all our equipment was stolen after a show in St Louis. We had no choice but to fly home and assemble new gear—during which time Martin was hospitalised with appendicitis. Keen-eyed archaeologists examining old copies of Melody Maker will find that in July, while back in London, we were reported as planning to re-record ‘Blowin’ Free’ for single release as soon as Martin was back on his feet. Apparently we had planned to do this while in America before the gear went south. A month later, the same paper announced the single’s release—the A-side being a new song with a Rolling Stones vibe, ‘No Easy Road’.
‘Blowin’ Free’ has turned out to be perhaps our most popular song, certainly our most recognisable to the general public. Did we miss a trick by sticking it on the B-side? Possibly. As far as I recall, we were quite happy with the recording but erred toward a far more generic sounding song as the A-side. At my suggestion, we beefed it up later with horns but the whole single idea coincided with ditching our tried-and-tested production team and going into Olympic studios with engineer Keith Harwood. Perhaps this was the Rolling Stones influence taking precedence over our classic song ‘Blowin’ Free’. I think a genuine producer would have said, ‘Guys, WHAT do you think you are doing?’
For better or worse, Wishbone Ash were never much good at singles. We did keep trying over the years, right up to the end of the 80s, but we never quite cracked it. Still, we had one more go as recently as 2010—as much for the novelty as anything else—with ‘Reason To Believe’, written and recorded specifically for single release.
We went back to the States and fulfilled our remaining dates in July and August 1972. We even, at the suggestion of our promotions manager, Leon Tsilis, cut a live album in a studio in Memphis called Live In Memphis. The idea of this was to hand it out to the FM radio stations as a kind of insider glimpse of a hot new band from England. It was a brilliant idea and it really worked, giving the DJs the sense that they were personally discovering us. I remember the recording was very stressful, as these things often are, particularly in this case, because upon arrival at the airport in town, Ted’s vintage Stratocaster fell off the luggage cart when it was removed from the plane’s hold. We watched out of the plane’s window as it was literally run over by the same cart. Ted frantically tried—and actually succeeded—in rebuilding it prior to the recording, which took place in front of an invited studio audience.
Argus reached number 3 in the UK chart and hung around it for twenty weeks. It was ‘Album Of The Year’ in both Sounds and Melody Maker, at a time when these things really mattered, and we were invited to play at a Melody Maker poll-winners’ concert at the Oval cricket ground, London, in September in front of 18,000 paying customers. We shared the bill with Genesis, Focus, Argent, and ELP, which was great on paper but perhaps a bit of a mistake on the day due to the lateness of our arrival. This caused the headliners, ELP—the overall band of the moment—to go on earlier and for us to finish the show. They had a dynamic show planned with a giant smoking Tarkus model. I think we certainly did ourselves proud in terms of performance, but having not been there to receive our awards along with the other artists was seen as a direct snub.
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A few years ago, if I was asked by a fan or an interviewer what I thought our best album was, I’d probably have given a waffly answer involving whatever our recent releases were. But now, in the fullness of time, I agree with the critics—Argus really was our high point, the coming together of everything. And that was 1972! It’s the view of the public, too, and they are the most discerning of all.
One band member who seemed to know that an era was coming to an end was Ted Turner. He left the band after the subsequent recording for his own private and some would say self-interested reasons. In so doing, he also broke the spell, the internal dynamic intrinsic to the band’s ensemble sound. We all had to adapt to that. Steve Upton’s response was to pen the harsh lyric to the song ‘Don’t Come Back’, which appeared on There’s The Rub. My response had been to go out and find a replacement for Ted. The show had to go on.
This ushered in a twelve-year career with Ted’s replacement, Laurie Wisefield, who was relegated to forever chasing the ghost of Argus without really understanding what he was chasing. Sometimes providing technically far more complex guitar lines than anything we’d attempted with Ted in the band, Laurie’s ideas were always overshadowed by the sheer simplicity of the melodic lines we’d explored on this classic album. For example, the killer opening to the song ‘Don’t Come Back’ was in itself as dynamic an opening as anything we could come up with after Argus—but the song itself was just so-so. It was to be the case time and time again as both Martin and Laurie attempted their own versions of what they thought we were actually about, while we embellished these songs with tons of guitar ear candy, the likes of which no other band was doing at the time. Me, I was as confused as the next guy while Martin and Laurie explored their new love affair. To be fair, a new generation of younger fans came on board, receiving some good new music but having missed out on the great ‘flowering’.
Post-Argus, where were the signature double tracked harmony vocals between Martin and myself? Where were the simple, strong, double-tracked guitar lines? I’d pushed Derek Lawrence to do this on pretty much every song and it had worked. Certainly we came close once more to a concerted band feel on the New England album after decimating our audience with Wishbone Four and Locked In. But in reality it would take two decades to fully reconcile ourselves with Argus’s success, during which time everything had changed.
Speaking for myself, I had major input on the arrangements. The guitar lines I came up with on Argus demanded the listener’s attention. I provided the intros and endings to many of the songs, from ‘Throw Down The Sword’ to ‘Blowin’ Free’, as well as soloing on pretty much everything that required a solo on the album. It’s been said that some of my most inspired soloing was exemplified on songs li
ke ‘Sometime World’. I was working with Martin on bass lines and providing the best bass hook of the album all in the same song, just as he was working on guitar lines with Ted and me. The vocal line that flies through the piece, seemingly at odds with that bass line but complementing it immensely, was mine. Keeping score, though, is pointless. We really were a great team at that point. No amount of grandstanding over who wrote what means a damn forty years later. We simply had great synergy as a band, and importantly, Martin and I worked to bring out the best in each of us. It was never to be repeated.
My personal vision was for an album that would really feature English folk-rock with some bluesier American influences thrown in for good measure. Others were doing it with the emphasis more on folk, but we could take a harder-edged stance. An album starts with the drums and, in no small extent, we purloined the drumming style of Fairport Convention’s Dave Mattacks, which Steve Upton was to adopt. Just listen to the drum part on the aggressive opening I constructed for the song ‘Warrior’. There’s no question in my mind that had Martin simply tried to compose a song like ‘The King Will Come’ as a complete entity—the lyrics and simple chord structures without serious work on the arrangements, intros, outros, and chord embellishments—he would have fallen flat on his face, despite what he now says.
However, it can’t be denied that Martin was the instigator of much of the album’s material, and he was to feel that he needed more and more recognition in this regard. He took matters into his own hands as much as he could, also in terms of attempting to be the band’s producer on the subsequent album, Wishbone Four—a move that none of the rest of us was happy with. I’m convinced that this eventually led to his demise. I often wonder why his idea of his much-talked-about ‘creative force’ and abilities as a writer have not borne more fruit in the years since. There has been nothing but a dearth of creativity in that particular camp. It’s a shame; he promised so much.
Ted also rose to the occasion, here and there, with his rhythm and lead parts—the complete intro to the song ‘Time Was’, for example. Lap steel guitar was heard once more on this album, and Steve rose magnificently to the occasion with his song ‘Leaf And Stream’, inspired by a chord sequence and guitar arrangement I came up with, embellished by Ted’s chord voicings. We were all singing from the same hymn sheet, and it was, at times, as if the album was producing itself, demanding a direct and clear approach from all of us. All the producer and engineer had to do was to make things as sonically clear as possible, which of course they did, aided in no small part by the advent of the new sixteen-track recording format. This in itself was a major catalyst for what we were doing, and of course is now often overlooked. We could indulge in overdubbing.
I understand and accept that when people are buying any of the current music from Wishbone Ash, they’re looking for a thread of DNA back to Argus—and it does exist. And I think, being the last man standing in the Wishbone Ash story, a lot of that is invested in me. Writing this now, at sixty-five years of age, I feel really proud about it, and I feel really privileged that Argus made album of the year in the UK music papers. I still get the shivers, along with the audience, when I’m playing ‘Warrior’ or ‘Throw Down The Sword’ live. I never tire of those. To this day, once the wind gets under my sails, I’m there, and I can lift a band of musicians along with me—they all feel it, and I think the fans feel it. I wouldn’t be still doing this if there wasn’t something important that I was capable of delivering, which on the one hand means something to other people and, on the other, which gives me a shot of adrenalin, too. Obviously the guys that were with me at that time gave up on all that; they were defeated eventually by the enigma of it all. Martin self-consciously even derides and lampoons some of that Argus material now, with his new outfit, which is a travesty in my book—and in that of many of the fans, no doubt.
Wishbone Ash have been blessed with incredibly loyal fans, and they’re all hooked on that thread of emotion that goes back to Argus. They recognise that the band’s sound, at its best, is a transcendent experience, and Argus was the one studio album that itself transcended the live experience. I’ve often pondered the fact that we never took a deep breath after the huge achievement of that album. This perhaps is where Miles fell down as manager. Musicians are often the last people to have an objective viewpoint on such things as career strategy. That’s the job of management. That’s why you pay them. We should have waited and done some analysis of what we’d produced. We should have taken much more time before diving into the studio again and flogging ourselves senseless on the road. If it had been the Pink Floyd, for example, they would have left a five or eight year gap after the release of a milestone like Argus. Ted could have been brought back into the fold. Coulda, woulda, shoulda.
One thing’s for certain: with vinyl albums only containing forty-five minutes of music but CDs allowing for seventy-five minutes, it’s an interesting idea to imagine the songs from Argus being augmented by standout tracks that appeared sporadically through subsequent albums, but which most definitely had that DNA thread. I’m thinking of ‘Ballad Of The Beacon’, ‘Sorrel’, ‘Lady Jay’. Those examples of English pastoral would have sat right at home with the material featured on Argus. I’d take that any day over some of the pointless, derivative tributaries we meandered down during the end of the 70s and certainly into the wilderness years of the 80s. It’s only recently, in my humble opinion, that things have coalesced in a natural, non-forced manner. Of course, it’s a completely different set of players and the times are so different, but that strand of DNA is intact. I never gave up on it.
You can also hear early hints of the Argus style in my songs like ‘Errors Of My Way’ and ‘Valediction’, and of course the band’s epic, ‘Phoenix’. When a band is truly flying and connecting with its own true energy, the players and the audience can feel it and that was definitely the case on that particular song. It is, to this day, an extraordinary piece of music. I like to think that I’d be objective enough to know and to accept when the magic has gone. After all that I’ve gone through, I would knock this band lark all on the head immediately. But I feel really good about the material we’ve produced during the last twenty years or so, and I’m still chasing that Argus sound and feeling as much as I know the fans are. We’re still all on the same path.
INTERLUDE
HOTELS
I literally spend half my life in hotels. ‘What?’ you say. But no, I actually love hotel living, and I have this fantasy where I can, at some point, see myself living in a penthouse of some luxury hotel, simply calling down for room service or requesting a cab into town whenever my heart desired it. Think about it. Life is pretty easy in a hotel. Laundry, messaging, breakfast—all handled quietly and efficiently behind the scenes while you sip Martinis by the pool at the end of a long day.
It’s not all four- and five-star experiences, however. We’ve seen every kind of on-the-road hostelry, from the homely to the desperate English B&Bs just barely hanging on to existence, like some throwback to theatrical digs for travelling vaudeville stars from two centuries back. Some of the best times have been had in these. Others are swanky yuppie places—all steel and chrome Bauhaus edifices in, say, Berlin or Munich. My favourites, though, are grand old hotels like the Atlantic in Hamburg or the Waldorf Astoria in New York, where you get comfort and old-world charm coupled with real efficiency. These professionals really understand the life of being a traveller and do not discriminate in that regard.
You often meet some interesting folks in hotels. Not so long ago, in Edmonton, Canada, we went down to breakfast and who should be there with his wife and son but Mickey Rooney. This was not long before he passed away. He was definitely in his nineties and posed very kindly for the obligatory photo, turning on the charm just as he might have seventy-plus years ago. It was something to behold. They don’t make them like that anymore.
Another time, in Glasgow, Steve Upton and I stayed in the same hotel as Billy Connolly; we hung out w
ith him in the lobby, drinking whisky, naturally. He regaled us with stories all night long, until something like 5:00am the next morning. On another occasion, most of the cast of the hit British comedy drama series Auf Wiedersehen Pet were staying at the same hotel as us, and we got to hang out at the hotel they used while filming the series, where we could observe some of their world with them, joining in with their humour.
It does not always work, being stuck in one hotel in one place for a period of weeks. Despite my fantasy of living permanently in a grand hotel, I do prefer being on the move, because if one particular establishment is not working for you or found to be lacking, you know that it’ll all change the very next night. The next hotel might not use that horrid plastic incontinence sheet on the bed that you only discover in the morning after you’ve spent the night wretchedly tossing and turning in your own perspiration. In fact, the essence of change, including the linen, is a key draw to touring. Fresh sheets—don’t underestimate them, along with the little Do Not Disturb sign that you can affix to the door handle when you shut out the world. Once, at the Revere Hotel on Boston Common, Massachusetts, the hotel had a sign you could use that said Talent At Rest. I liked that.
One hotel where we had no choice but to spend an extended period was the Thunderbird Hotel, situated on Collins Avenue by the beach in Miami, Florida. This place was a decaying edifice from the glory days of the 60s, but they gave us a great financial deal for the duration of our stay while we worked on There’s The Rub. You could have made a movie about the antics of the quirky characters who either worked there or remained as semi-permanent residents. It was here that I discovered the music of Bob Marley & The Wailers for the first time, so that was my musical backdrop as I tried to make myself comfortable in my roach-infested room. The manager was always trying to think of new schemes to drum up business, and one day a truck literally dumped tons of earth in the centre of the lobby, right there on the carpet, and palm trees were planted—to improve the ambience, I guess.