by Andy Powell
However many bumps in the road there may have been, everything up to that point had seemed to be moving in a generally forward direction for our band. I suspect any band of certain longevity will deliver a dud piece of work at some point, and this was certainly ours. Even so, I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything. But you don’t do it twice. Lynyrd Skynyrd went through a similar experience with Tom and they actually shelved their third album produced by him, eventually getting it remixed with fresh overdubs in Muscle Shoals Studios. We should have done something similar. We had gone through that intense period of three or four years where we had incrementally and steadily built up our audience—we had this fabulously loyal audience in England who supported us in all the town halls and colleges. It was a market we understood and loved. And then we were breaking into Europe and doing the same.
Then we came to America. There we were, living in the middle of the countryside—in Steve and Laurie’s case literally in a log cabin, deep in the woods—and it was like, What the hell is going on? Suddenly we were thrust into New York City with a man who has had an almost unbelievably stellar career—he’d recorded Cream, for God’s sake—but our recording was a complete failure. It was the very opposite of ‘getting it together in the country’, that reliable old fallback position for all 70s acts worthy of the name. And thus, almost inevitably—as if guided by some subliminal adherence to that idea—that’s exactly, at my insistence, what we did next: we got it together in the country.
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After the disaster of being Locked In we built a studio in the basement of the big main house on Goodhill Road Extension in Weston, Connecticut, known as Laurel Edge. It stood on fourteen acres and was occupied by Martin and his wife Maurn, along with Russell Sidelsky. We had brought a couple of our loyal road crew over to the States with us. Mark Emery would be in charge of the live studio sound. We wanted to create a vibe—a sound we could actually play to.
Around this point we were offered a management deal with Lieber & Krebs, a management team who were involved with Aerosmith, a band we’d been playing quite a lot of shows with. Steve Upton, who had drawn the short straw and wound up in the position of being our de facto manager in Miles’s absence, was duly sent down to New York to meet with these guys. They sent a limo for him. When that happens you generally know that ultimately you’ll be paying for it—or, if no transactional mechanism is yet in place, somebody will be expecting to make a lot of money out of you. And thus it was. When we heard about the outrageous 50 percent commission they wanted in comparison to the 20 percent we had been paying Miles, we decided against their offer. In retrospect, it might actually have done something for us. You never know, but it just felt wrong. After all, we had only just extricated ourselves from the Atlantic hierarchy, and we weren’t about to jump from the frying pan into the fire, where we’d relinquished creative control and were now faced with relinquishing financial control.
With that offer behind us, it was time to get on with creating what became the album New England. It was a happy period. In a way, I think it was the last hurrah for the kind of communal spirit we had had in the beginning—four people, living more or less together, creating music together with a common purpose. The music business is exactly that: a business. But the trick is in trying to block that out and create music with a kind of purity of spirit, crafting it as best you can but not crushing it beneath the weight of commercial concerns. Unfortunately, we would blow with the wind a bit come the early 80s, but New England was really ‘us’. Long-term fans still have a good feeling about that album—and so do I.
The house Martin and Maurn occupied was the setting for the recording of this determinedly homespun affair. We hired in a mobile recording truck, operated by a couple of brothers called Howie and Ronnie Albert, who drove it all the way up from Florida. They parked it in the driveway while we set up a PA, put mattresses on the walls, and created a makeshift studio in the basement. Locked In was a claustrophobic failure; this would be a sure-fire cellar.
A dusty basement became a cauldron of sound. And, yes, it probably went to 11. You can almost hear it on the record. Ronnie and Howie had a great track record. Their trick was that, as brothers, they had identical ‘ears’—they heard and could respond to the music, recording instruments in exactly the same way as each other. In other words, they could record for twenty-four hours straight, being able to take over from each other seamlessly, after a twelve-hour shift. They’d put this to great use with bands like Crosby Stills Nash & Young—with Stills and Crosby’s coke habits they’d needed frequently to pull twenty-four-hour sessions.
Mark Emery ran the live, engineered sound in the room so that we could all play off it. This was in stark contrast to the previous experience of playing in a very confined way in an acoustically dead New York studio with tiny studio amps, Fender Champs. English bands didn’t do that: they brought their full stage rig into a studio and they played! So that’s what we did. We had delays, reverbs, echoes going on in the room through a PA system, which gave us the feeling of creating a big rock sound—the very thing which had been so sorely lacking on Locked In.
‘Getting it together in the country’, invented by Traffic down in Berkshire in the 60s, was generally understood to involve a more relaxed concept of recording. We managed to combine this with a strong work ethic and got the record done reasonably quickly. The truck and the engineers were on rent, and we were paying for it. We had half to two thirds of the material we wanted to record more or less ready beforehand, and then the rest we put together on the fly. I can certainly remember one song from that album, ‘When You Know Love’, which was entirely a studio creation: I had a little rhythm guitar pattern, Martin had some lyrics; a song was born.
Both Laurie and Martin were getting into a writing groove with ‘Runaway’ and ‘Mother Of Pearl’. The big rock sound was back and guitar solos were flying everywhere. One of my favourite tracks even to this day is Martin’s fully realised song ‘You Rescue Me’. It’s one of the album’s highlights. ‘Lorelei’ was largely my song, with some minor help from Pauline on the lyrics. To my mind, some of Laurie’s most sublime soloing, on his 1954 Fender Stratocaster, appeared on this piece. For some light relief, I put together ‘Candlelight’, which I’d originally worked on with Ted before Laurie joined the band. This instrumental saw Laurie now replacing Ted around the dining table at Laurel Edge, the intimate recording actually taking place by candlelight. The whole thing was a true group effort and was all the better for it. We were writing for each other again, instead of for some record label or producer’s agenda.
New England ended up as a powerful, positive statement. We’ve considered playing the album live onstage in recent years. It may yet happen. As it is, the current Wishbone Ash often plays snippets from the album. Songs like ‘Runaway’, ‘Mother Of Pearl’, and once in a while ‘Candlelight’. There’s no guitar player in recent years that can do justice to Laurie’s playing on ‘Lorelei’, so we just skip it.
There was a special atmosphere created during the recording of New England that completely brings the songs to life. In fact, the album as a whole captured a certain sense of place. It was the antithesis of its predecessor. An album is, after all, the record of a moment in time, and this was a good moment, what we chose to send out to the world that year. I think it was late August when we were recording, and there’s a point, just after ‘You Rescue Me’, where there is this long stretch of genuine New England ambience in the grooves. We actually went outside with the microphones and recorded this incredible sound that had been distracting us during the recording. Yes, we had chanced upon the right moment in the weird seventeen-year lifecycle of the cicada, and there were now millions of them in the trees around the house creating their own collective rhythm. You can hear dogs barking on the album as well. That was the mood: it was very humid, very hot; there was a very funky feeling in a basement with no air-conditioning. And that’s what you’re looking for in a rock band: a bit of sw
eat and toil, and a door that isn’t locked, metaphorically or otherwise.
Capturing the mood perfectly was the album sleeve design itself, once again supplied by Hipgnosis. It was an eerily lit black-and-white composition depicting vaguely institutionalized young men, sharpening sticks in readiness for action. The ever-provocative Storm Thorgerson had flown out to capture the mood visually and even had us wading up to our armpits in swamp water, which he captured in photographs for the inner sleeve.
As artists, what we wanted was to transcend the circumstances of the making of the album and reach as many people as possible, but at the same time to capture something of the time and place, something of where we were at, and invite people into that world—like a good film or a book. You had forty-odd minutes of audio to create, however impressionistically, a sense of landscape and ideas, questions and answers. New England was created there and then by the four of us playing as a group, combining all our individual idiosyncrasies and reflecting something of where we were as people and where we actually were, on the map. Elements of various songs may have been in place before Howie and Ronnie rolled up the driveway, but it took the four of us in that basement to make it come together sonically. We felt comfortable in our skin again.
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With this album we had the tremendous good fortune to be offered a new deal by MCA—the same people we had left behind for the green pastures of Atlantic barely a year earlier. It was fantastic of them to take us back. The deal was very largely down to John Sherry, our agent at that time in England, who slipped effortlessly thereafter into the role of being our manager—and all power to him for doing that. The new MCA deal, which lasted up to 1981, would provide us with shelter in an increasingly stormy environment. We were very much cosseted and protected from all the changes that were going on in the music business back in Britain. We hadn’t completely burned our bridges as potential British residents, though. Our New England experience was emigration with a safety net since we all retained properties in the UK while renting homes in America.
Not long after New England, the album, we started to gravitate back to Old England for recordings. Martin, in particular, really didn’t settle in America. I don’t think he ever felt comfortable there. New York might have suited him more than rural Connecticut. There were domestic tensions at home, too. I know that our good friend, tour manager Russell, couldn’t wait to get out of the house. Eventually he moved into a cool house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, just down the road. Laurie and Steve were very happy, it seemed, building new contacts, making friends and living lives as single guys, albeit with steady girlfriends.
Martin had very much pushed for John Sherry to be our manager, so there was an axis of Martin and John wanting us to record at Surrey Sound, in Leatherhead, near where they both had houses. I was easy-going about it. I had a house in Bedfordshire at the time—as well as what was essentially our new home in New England—so when it came to the recording period I found myself doing this huge commute down to Surrey. It was certainly doable; whether it was wise is a question I’d often ask myself when I’d find myself tooling along country roads in my trusty Morgan sports car, navigating through fog at 2:00am after long drug- and drink-fuelled recording sessions under the auspices of Dr Nigel Gray, our producer.
One evening, during an intense recording session, John took a phone call from a slightly hysterical Pauline, who said that she’d arrived home with our young son, Richard, to discover that we’d been robbed. I was overdubbing a guitar solo at the time and John initially refused to hand the phone over to me, thinking that Pauline was making an excuse to chat. The drive home from Surrey seemed longer than ever that night and I arrived at the cottage to find chaos, with detectives, in-laws, and a toddler putting fingerprints all over the crime scene. It turned out that the hours of our routines had been logged by a couple of builders we’d hired to install a front porch. Pauline thought she had seen movement in the back garden as she came down the driveway, and that was apparently the robbers making a hasty getaway through the back gate. My collection of rare and valuable instruments—including at least six extremely rare and valuable Gibson Flying Vs—was left intact as well as my studio recording gear. The thieves had been mostly focused on TVs, jewellery, and hi-fi gear. We lost some precious mementoes and keepsakes from our travels, and they had obviously trashed the place, too, but it could have been so much worse.
Just Testing, recorded over several months at the end of 1979, would be the second of our new phase of ‘British albums’ and the first of several we recorded at Surrey Sound. In the meantime, though, there would be one more ‘American album’, Front Page News, in 1977. That particular album saw us returning to Miami, with Ronnie and Howie at the helm once more. We lived communally again, this time in a Spanish-style house with a shaded courtyard, once owned by Howard Hughes and set up as a love nest for him and Ava Gardner. We were reunited with our Scottish cook and sailor, Bob Dunlap, who had previously captained a sailboat cruise that Pauline and I had taken with he and his family, island-hopping around the Virgin Islands.
Front Page News was released on October 7 1977, in the middle of our tour of Europe. There are some good songs on that album: ‘714’, ‘Come In From The Rain’, ‘Right Or Wrong’, ‘Diamond Jack’, and so on. A month later, on November 14, we were back in New York, taping The Mike Douglas Show. Also on this show were Georgia Brown, Gary Crosby (son of Bing), and Marvin Hamlisch, the distinguished songwriter known for songs from A Chorus Line, Butch Cassidy, The Sting, and so on. This was a huge show in America at the time. After we’d finished our musical slot, Mike came over and interviewed us. Marvin ran over to where we were standing and made a bit of a fool of himself by trying to mimic his idea of a peace-sign-waving rock audience member, while prostrating himself in front of us. He didn’t want to lose the limelight.
We were also very happy to be reunited with Derek Lawrence, the man who had produced Argus. Together we recorded the album No Smoke Without Fire back in the very same recording studio that had given birth to Argus. It would probably be a lie to deny that at the back of everyone’s mind was the hope that we might be able to recapture some of whatever it was that had made the music so great a mere six years earlier. Our record sales were dropping off alarmingly and our audience had in many respects lost faith in the band’s ability to be certain of our direction. The musical relationship that Martin and I had together around the Argus period was pretty much broken. John Sherry saw this and gave Laurie a lot of inspiration to try and come up with something approaching the musical feeling of Argus. Songs like ‘You See Red’ and ‘Ships In The Sky’ were the outcome of this inspiration, and pretty good they were too, as was ‘The Way Of The World’, but the grandeur was missing. I think that John also saw that Laurie and I were not in sync as writers at that time—or as people, for that matter—but we could still deliver the goods together in the guitar department and onstage.
* * *
Argus was always ‘there’. It was the elephant in the room when it came to recording any new Wishbone Ash album. Or so we thought. Martin saw himself very much as the spearhead of our sound. He was of the mindset that everything he wrote was great art and therefore ‘worthy’. His singular belief in his abilities—including his talents as a solo singer—was off the scale. He also thought he could produce the band. On No Smoke Without Fire, however, Derek Lawrence was not having any of it, and he and engineer Rafe McKenna got on with the work, paying Martin little heed.
No Smoke Without Fire would be one of those albums referred to in retrospect as ‘solid’. I doubt if Derek would have been leaping up and down at De Lane Lea thinking, Wow! I’ve just produced the most amazing record! It’s always a producer’s job to bring the thing in on budget and to get the best results out of the band in question at that time and place. On that score, he did a damn fine job. But whatever that extra magic rabbit had been in the early 70s, it wasn’t being pulled out of the hat again. It was a different moment in time.
It would be fair enough to ask what Derek thought about the eventual No Smoke Without Fire as compared to the first three albums we had made together. But, curiously, I don’t think any of us asked him. I believe the feeling was that we’d completed the job as required—that’s sometimes the way it is at the end of album sessions, and that was probably true of other bands at that time as well. In Britain there had been a loose brotherhood of British rock bands all playing the same venues, all getting record contracts around the same time, producing classic recordings, all touring America in a second ‘British Invasion’—shared bills and friendly rivalry. For Wishbone Ash to have had the great good fortune of working with Derek Lawrence, and Martin Birch, the engineer of those great Fleetwood Mac, Deep Purple, and Pretty Things records, there had definitely been something in the air.
By 1978, though, I don’t think the same feeling was present in the air—not for us and nor, I suspect, for any band of our era. I was happy to work with Derek because I liked him; he was a Londoner, and he knew instinctively that our real stock in trade was getting it down as live as possible, and that the guitars were always going to be the ace up our sleeve as far as the audiences were concerned. ‘It’s all about the guitars, innit?’ he’d often say. He’d worked with the best and knew what constituted a great rock record, in just the same way as Bill Szymczyk did years earlier, having also worked with so many great American artists.
Nevertheless, bullish and undeterred, we went the whole hog and got Hipgnosis—yes, the Argus people—to create the cover art. The attempt to bring the old team together would be hard to deny, wouldn’t it?
On November 5 1978—Guy Fawkes Night—John Sherry staged a party to celebrate the release of the album. He decided to operate the pyrotechnics himself, with the help of a few members of our road crew. These were serious fireworks: mortars and rockets all laid out as if in readiness for battle. I remember John running back and forth with lit taper in hand and all the glee of a schoolboy pyromaniac. It was a good time.