by Andy Powell
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Around this time, Pauline and I were preoccupied with starting a family. Richard was born in August of 1978. It was a life-changing event for both of us, naturally, and I felt the onset of fatherhood more keenly than I could have ever have imagined. When Richard came into the world he was three weeks overdue and born by caesarean section, and while a rather groggy Pauline was recovering, I actually got to hold him first. It was my immediate impression that this was an old soul that I held in my arms. It seemed almost as if he’d been on this earth before. When Pauline did eventually have him in her arms the maternal bond was immediate and strong. She was destined for motherhood, that’s for sure. Elation would be my state of mind for the next week at least while I ran around like a chicken with its head cut off, preparing the home for the arrival of mother and son.
In those days, giving birth was not the rushing in and out of hospital that it is today. Time was allowed for mother and baby to get used to new routines and get over the birth itself. We prepared this tiny closet of a room for Richard right next to our cosy bedroom in the eaves of our old cottage. Our first visitor was the midwife—a rather tall, matronly Irish lady—and I immediately warned her of the thousand-year-old petrified oak beams upstairs and explained that she would have to duck her head in order to avoiding hurting herself. The Grade II-listed property had been constructed of beams salvaged from the British Navy after the fleet had been broken up, having done its work defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588. Sure enough, when she reached the top of the stairs she omitted to duck and promptly banged her head on this giant blackened beam and was knocked out cold. So there I was with mother and baby and a rather large, befuddled Irish lady lying prostrate on the landing upstairs. I think I may have revived her with a tot of whisky, if I think about it. This was the same lady who recommended that Pauline drink a pint of Guinness a day for the iron content, which she promptly did, being very health-minded for her children. That wouldn’t happen these days.
On September 6 1978, just a couple of weeks after Richard was born, I somehow received an invitation to a special event in the rock fraternity. The Peppermint Park club in London played host to a party thrown by Paul McCartney to celebrate his acquisition of the entire Buddy Holly song-publishing catalogue. There were quite a few celebrities there, of course. Pauline had planned to accompany me but, with a new baby, she had other concerns.
I made the solitary trip to London and, once at the club, I found myself seated at a table with Keith Moon and his girlfriend, Annette Walter-Lax. He was rather subdued. I’d actually never seen him like that; he was saying how he’d really turned a corner with the whole crazy rock’n’roll lifestyle, especially with all the pills and booze. It’s hard to look back and think of him as only thirty-two years of age at that time because he’d already lived so much life, of course. Anyway, it was to be the last time any of us were to see him, because later that night he passed away while staying in Harry Nilsson’s flat, 12 Curzon Place. Ironically, he’d been prescribed some sort of drug to wean him off alcohol. I was so shocked to read the newspaper headlines the next day, since I’d been sitting right there across from him at that party. Another macabre irony was that four years earlier, Mama Cass from The Mamas & The Papas had died in that very same apartment of heart failure, also aged thirty-two.
I was having questions about the whole rock’n’roll lifestyle, and the grounding that parenthood was giving me meant that songwriting was taking a back seat. Having said that, there was one song of mine, ‘Master Of Disguise’, which was recorded for our next album Just Testing, and which we still play in concert. With America still on my mind, the song was my reaction to getting to grips with having been an alien in a foreign country. I was just beginning to learn about it and yet here we were, back spending all this time in the UK again. Musically speaking, I was conflicted and in a state of confusion, that’s for sure. I’d certainly lost my clear sense of our band identity. When it came to fatherhood, though, I was as sure as I had ever been about anything in my life. I was still enjoying the recording process and playing shows but something was missing about the band.
I was learning some important lessons about recording from Nigel Gray, a fantastic producer and engineer whose talents we were now employing. I didn’t realise how much of a ‘producer’—a producer of my fellow band members—I actually was too. We all ‘produced’ results out of each other, as I mentioned earlier, and it was a process that had served us well in the earlier days. When we were living closer to each other and were more involved socially and creatively, it was almost a natural process. As we became less involved with each other, that way of working and its benefits gradually slipped away. Laurie for one was also not so sure during this phase, and on one occasion where we were trying to complete one of Martin’s works of art, he simply said, ‘It’s shit,’ after being cajoled by Martin into coming up with a guitar solo. We weren’t a particularly happy band. Mutual respect was required.
Whatever the strength of the material, we could always fall back on the guitar playing, which even now I look back on and think was stellar. There were always some new tricks up our sleeves in that department, which was getting more and more competent and professional. Synth guitars came to the fore; slide guitar, voice boxes, effects processors—we used it all and really started to use the studio itself as a creative tool rather than a place you went to record just your songs.
By 1979, with Dr Gray at the helm of Just Testing at his studio, Surrey Sound, the location for all those wonderful recordings by The Police, our recorded sound—our productions—were without fault. Great grooves, great guitars, pretty good songs. But I don’t think we were ever able to do another epic production like Argus again—certainly not before the end of the decade. We had a lot of creative licence, and we used a lot of it to prevent each other interacting together as a true band. All bands of our vintage were doing the same, taking preposterously long periods of time to produce albums and competing for the latest and best snare drum or guitar sound. It was pretty indulgent. We even brought in the songwriter Claire Hamill, who was being represented by John at the time, and she was actually very inspirational, adding backing vocals as well as co-writing with Laurie one of our best songs of that era, ‘Living Proof’. That actually was a great move as it really shook things up and inspired us. The stage and touring were where we became more of a band—I guess in part because we were thrust together again for six weeks a time, and because, onstage, you have to play more as a band.
Onstage and in the studio, I could still pull wild solos out of thin air and hated to pre-think the art of soloing. Laurie (and later Roger Filgate) felt much more secure in this way of working, doing their homework the week before in order to know exactly how a solo would end up sounding. Me? I’d just say, ‘Roll it,’ and I’d go for it, sometimes falling flat on my face but often coming up with some really good ideas on the spur of the moment. Probably my favourite song of Martin’s from that period is ‘Surface To Air’ from Just Testing, but I defy anyone to have a clue what the lyrics were about. For me, the best Wishbone Ash music of that era was when a great song idea was brought to the table, even in a bare-bones sense, and the band then breathed life into it. That was certainly the case with that song, and the twin-lead break in the middle is still one of my favourites.
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By the end of the 70s we were all living quite separate lives. We’d come a long way from living in the same flats or the same street as before. You gain something and you lose something in that progression. But by and large we still conceived of ourselves as a band. It was the only reason we were together. Martin often balked at that, in particular with the songwriting aspect, but I truly believe that excellence in the guitar department made what were often mediocre works shine brightly. The inter-band dynamic had changed out of all recognition with the replacement of Ted by Laurie—and, what’s more, the sheer amount of work that we did, both in the studio and on the road, seemed to me in retrospe
ct to be a kind of atonement for the mistakes we had made immediately after Argus. In many respects we replaced amazing inspiration with sheer work ethic.
Around that time we released a non-album single, ‘Come On’. It was a cover of a Chuck Berry song, and to this day I think of it as a brilliant recording. If there was anything we did that should have been in the charts, that was it—a great recording, a fairly daring rearrangement, an inventive production. But, alas, the casual viewer will look in vain for any old Top Of The Pops clips showing Wishbone Ash storming the charts with it. Plenty of ‘classic rock’ bands did manage hit singles in Britain and/or America in the late 70s—Thin Lizzy, UFO, Boston, Journey, the list goes on—but for whatever reason, we weren’t one of them.
Toward the very end of the decade there was a lot of frustration about the lack of success in camp Wishbone. We were doing some sterling work in the recording studio but there was a worryingly apparent correlation between getting a lot better at our craft and the sales of our records declining massively.
There had been this return to British studios to record again, this attempt to recreate the old team—but none of it was working. We were still getting decent recording advances but we weren’t moving the product. So there was a great frustration from the business side of things from both label and management. We had gone back to MCA and there was very much a sense of, ‘We’ve got to pull something out of the bag here guys.’ There were lots of talks down at John Sherry’s place and a lot of pacing the cage about what we were going to do next.
Initially, John had thrown his lot in with Martin, politically speaking, and it had been John and Martin who initiated the return to British recording studios from those in America. Although recording in America hadn’t particularly brought up our record sales, we had redeemed ourselves in the fans’ eyes. New England and before it There’s The Rub were, in my opinion, minor triumphs in sonic and artistic terms. But when we started recording down at Surrey Sound in England, the sales still weren’t near where they needed to be. Frustration piled upon frustration.
The times were a-changing, and whatever it was that we needed to do to keep up, we clearly weren’t doing it. In America, we’d peaked, chart-wise, with Wishbone Four in 1973: a Billboard number 44. It was simply the album that had coincided with the peak of our reputation as a live act in America. A national TV broadcast on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert around the same time hadn’t done any harm—although Martin possibly wishes he hadn’t worn that bathrobe. Things had steadily slipped away after that: There’s The Rub, Locked In, New England, and Front Page News all charted lower and lower in the Top 200. No Smoke Without Fire, our grand return to making a ‘British album’, didn’t chart in America at all. We sneaked back in with Just Testing in 1980—at the dizzy heights of number 179—but, as it transpired, that would be it for our US chart career.
In Britain, our first eight studio albums, from Wishbone Ash in 1970 to Front Page News in 1977, all made the Top 30, with Argus a clear peak, having reached number 1 or number 2 of the Top 10, depending on which chart you were looking at. Our three albums released between 1978 and ’80—No Smoke Without Fire, Just Testing, and the concert recording Live Dates Volume 2—all hovered just within or without the Top 40. There were to be a couple more UK chart entries in the early 80s, including an Indian Summer or glorious swansong of sorts with Twin Barrels Burning in 1982—riding shamelessly on the back of the ‘New Wave of British Heavy Metal’—but there endeth our British chart career.
Still, however mediocre the sales, Surrey Sound worked out pretty well for us in terms of results. It was a lively sounding room situated above a dairy, and we were very lucky to be working with Nigel Gray. I loved working with Nigel—a great producer, very pro and very able. So there was no problem with any of that; it’s just that the business had changed, the times had changed, and I think our fans had changed. Once we had let down the fans with Locked In and, before that, to a degree at least, Wishbone Four, it was very hard to get some of those people back on board again.
We were all living life and we took our foot off the pedal. While we felt on a daily and weekly basis that we were making up for lost time as people, to the music-fan masses we just weren’t around as much. Britain had a strong weekly music press, with three big magazines—Sounds, Melody Maker, and NME—and if it was reported that you’d ‘left the country’ it was like, Whoa! They’ve deserted us!
It took us a long time to get over the charge of desertion. I can remember a front cover of Sounds near the end of 1976: a picture of me getting out of a limo, with what was perceived as a rather apologetic expression, and the headline, ‘Who’s back in Britain, then?’ I was simply a man in a rock band who had been living in Connecticut. Despite the rewarding immigrant experience, I’d personally never felt that I’d ‘left’ Britain entirely.
How times have changed. These days, if you’re a professional musician, nobody gives a second thought to where you live—in fact, they’re not even interested. If you’re at the level of U2, people might care where you pay tax (the Netherlands) vis-à-vis where you collect your post (Ireland) because it actually affects the gross domestic product of a nation, but for the rest of us it’s long since ceased to be an issue. But back in those days we were a kind of ‘band of the people’, and we lost some of that by going to America. That said, we’ve still got fans from the very early days who’ve stuck with us—they’re still down the front, loyal as ever, and a big part of the process.
INTERLUDE
FANS
A large part of the reason for the band’s longevity and success comes from the fact that Wishbone Ash always respected its fans and catered to their needs, realising that without them we would be nothing. So, right from the beginning, a culture was nurtured of always signing autographs and having time for our folks, often getting to know individuals—and, later, their families—by their faces in the audience, and at post-show record signing sessions. We’ve only expanded on all this in recent years. We always had fan clubs in the UK, the States, and Japan and would try to cater especially to these folks whenever and wherever possible.
The UK club was started at our request by a lady who worked in Miles’s office by the name of Doreen Boyd. She, and later her daughter Lindsay, handled mail-outs and membership cards, and as a side line Lindsay was instrumental in getting the College Event magazine going. This was a brilliant idea of Miles’s to educate university social secretaries about the acts they could book for their events (most of whom, naturally, were on his agency’s roster at the time). Although Doreen was to go on after that to become The Police’s fan club secretary, she cut her teeth with our fans, so to speak, and became a kind of auntie to them. Some years later, when we came under the management of John Sherry, his personal assistant, Penny Gibbons, took over the role of fan club secretary. Much later on, in the early 80s, Pauline did the same.
It was a point of pride for me to always answer fan mail and try to grant the small requests from fans whenever possible. I’d always take note of youngsters following the band and often fathers or mothers would be seen bringing their youngsters along after a show to introduce them proudly to us, thereby inducting them into the wider Wishbone Ash family.
It’s not hard to see how music can really help create lasting bonds and memories between parents and their children if you imagine a family enjoying music together on a road trip, or celebrating family birthdays with a band’s music as the backdrop to all that. Those songs will be forever their songs. Only recently, we played a private event where the managing director of a huge company, a lifelong Wishbone Ash fan, was thrown a surprise retirement party by his colleagues with us making his wish come true by inviting him to play onstage with us. His daughter came to me afterwards with commemorative photos for us to sign. She was ecstatic. It had meant so much to her to be involved in celebrating the memories that she and her father had shared through our music. You simply can’t quantify that.
Another lifelong fan, now
well on his way to becoming successful in the world of business, is one Simon Atkinson, who had discovered the band’s music as a very young lad from his dad’s record collection. He would turn up to shows with his mother, who would wait outside patiently for him in the car. Finally, on his eighteenth birthday, Simon’s greatest wish was granted when he went to Berlin to see the band perform there. In subsequent years, as we’ve got to know Simon, he’s handled all sorts of requests and tasks for us, not the least of which was compiling the most comprehensive list of Wishbone Ash tour dates (presented as an appendix herein). He has sold merchandise and helped with tour management and crewing, becoming very much part of the inner circle.
Nevertheless, while the vast majority respect your space, there are always fans who abuse one’s hospitality and good-natured openness. In some cases, you find out there is a kind of innate desire in others to consume you as the host and supersede you and unravel you—an attitude of, ‘I can see through the façade of fame and personality, and could probably be doing it myself.’
One such character was Gary Carter, to whom I’d been introduced as a rather gauche teen by his father, an avid fan of the band. One afternoon, during our soundcheck before some show in England, it was pouring with rain. Often fans would hang around outside the venue hoping to listen to a soundcheck and perhaps hear a new song or two. I’d spied young Gary, on his own this time, standing bedraggled outside this venue, literally soaked to the skin. I couldn’t see him suffer like this so I invited him inside. And so began a relationship that I could hardly have guessed would prove to be the absolute bane of my life.
Over time Gary, like Simon, became a great authority on the band’s history (mostly the second phase of it). He started a fanzine and also became involved in our merchandising. Some of the diehards and more senior fans had reservations about Gary right from the start—and, in the fullness of time, they were proved right. It gradually became clear that he couldn’t accept that Martin was no longer in the band and seemed to be looking for someone to blame, namely me.