by Andy Powell
CHAPTER 5
PEOPLE IN MOTION
(1980–86)
The first two months of this new decade saw us touring Britain and Ireland following the release of Just Testing on January 18. During this tour we recorded music for the Live Dates Volume 2 album at Newcastle City Hall and Colston Hall in Bristol and also had our Hammersmith Odeon show on February 2 recorded by the BBC.
The last show of the tour on February 22 was in Belfast, at Whitla Hall. It was during the time of the Troubles, and just getting into Belfast from the south was fraught with danger. The fully armed security forces would change the location of the border checkpoints regularly, and we were questioned at gunpoint, all the time feeling very exposed while the whole scenario was being covered from a ditch by yet more armed soldiers. To say that things were tense would be an understatement.
Our driver on this particular occasion didn’t really put our minds at rest either. He had apparently had his Mercedes people-carrier blown up on a previous occasion, although, thankfully, his passengers had all exited the vehicle prior to the explosion. Once we got to Belfast, he let it be known that where we were staying was known as the most bombed hotel in Europe—one had to enter it through security and then yet another checkpoint ringed with barbed wire. Finally we made it to that evening’s venue. Predictably, during the soundcheck an alarm sounded and word went out that there was a bomb in the building. We were all pretty quick to exit the building but none so fast as Laurie, who ran hell-for-leather from the venue, guitar in hand.
By the time the 80s arrived we’d had a number of years of relative stability but less and less success. Martin had been applying his ‘creative force’ a lot of late—he was on a roll, ploughing his personal experiences into songs—but looking back, as a recording entity, there was a lot about us trying to go in directions that were really quite directionless. We had briefly returned to an esprit de corps with the New England album, but then later on we’d lose our nerve and go off on these Bryan Ferry/David Bowie tangents—whatever was going on at the time. Martin had met Ziggy, even had him turn up at one of his parties in London with Iggy Pop in tow, and he was royally smitten. Martin’s vocals subsequently became even more mannered and theatrical, and I for one could not get behind this obviously repressed side of his vocal ambitions. All the while, sales of the albums were going down at an alarming rate.
The MCA contract gave us a lot of security, no doubt about it, and the album advances were decent, although we were spending a lot of the money on indulgent recording time. It was the modus operandi for bands of our era to spend a lot of time recording, even writing stuff in the studio as you went along. That is now a bygone era. These days, things are a lot more efficient. Spending weeks in Florida with Front Page News was a case in point. The problem was that Wishbone Ash no longer was front-page news, barring a magazine cover apiece for Laurie, Martin, and myself over the last couple of years of the decade, in the modestly circulated British muso monthlies Guitar and Beat Instrumental. The photo of me stepping out of that limo on the front page of Sounds in 1976 was a last hurrah for that sort of thing. The mainstream of the music world had moved on, and we were doing our best to keep up—even if that meant imitating Bryan Ferry.
We were fishing around for a hit single, which was always, to me, a bit of a red herring. The label, of course, would have loved it. This was the era when singles were what you could hang your hat on. Classic rock bands, as they were becoming known, did have hits occasionally—Boston, Journey, Thin Lizzy, UFO, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, even Black Sabbath, for goodness sake. Everyone except us, it seemed. I wasn’t exactly gnashing my teeth day in day out trying to write a hit, but I think Laurie more than any of us was doing his best to try and create something to fill that gap.
Strangely, though, the one song we recorded around this time that I thought should have been massive was a cover: ‘Come On’, written by Chuck Berry, the godfather of rock guitar. The song had been a breakthrough hit for The Rolling Stones back in 1963; our version was sufficiently different and had a certain spark about the performance, with a terrific production. It could have done something with half a chance and a fair wind behind it. The label released it in Britain as a non-album single in August 1979. By coincidence, the British charts were welcoming with open arms a smattering of similarly quirky revamps of early-60s singles around that time, among them Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’ (The Flying Lizards), Dusty Springfield’s ‘I Only Want To Be With You’ (The Tourists), The Zombies’ ‘She’s Not There’ (UK Subs), and The Beatles’ ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ (Dollar). This was all totally coincidental to our decision to record a Chuck Berry number that had been a hit for the Stones from that same era. It was also totally coincidental, I’m guessing, that the groove on the subsequent Dollar hit was remarkably similar to the one we used on ‘Come On’! Alas, even with the fair wind of a British pop trend, the casual viewer will look in vain for any Top Of The Pops clips showing Wishbone Ash storming the UK charts.
Rock DJs like Alan Freeman and Tommy Vance at BBC Radio 1, however, were always good to Wishbone Ash, and both had evening shows on air at the time. But if Wishbone Ash ever had a ship at daytime British radio, it had probably sailed by now. Our next single, released in Britain in January 1980, would be ‘Living Proof’, the lead track from Just Testing. It had been co-written by Laurie Wisefield and singer/songwriter Claire Hamill and was destined to become one of Wishbone Ash’s perennial stage favourites. But no, that didn’t do anything on the charts either.
* * *
Just Testing was released at the very start of a new decade. Having taken a break from the road for almost the entire year of 1979, we now toured Britain and Europe heavily from January through to April, with further British town hall concerts and European festivals up to September. There was a lot of phoning back and forth between John Sherry and some of us band members during this time: ‘Things aren’t working … I’m frustrated … what can we do?’ There was one band member who wasn’t having a lot of those conversations, however, and it was Martin. So we decided it was time to have that conversation round at his house, a kind of ‘come to Jesus’ meeting, so to speak.
Thus, in October, along with John Sherry—the person Martin had pushed to handle our affairs and bring us all into more of a British frame of mind again—we all went to Martin’s house. We said, ‘Look, we think this isn’t working. We think we need to have a change of direction, whether it’s bringing in a new singer or an outside songwriter. Whatever we need to do, we need to shake things up.’ We had dabbled a bit by having Claire Hamill sing backing vocals on Just Testing, and in fact she would later join us as a kind of fifth member on the road in 1981. I don’t think anyone felt that having Claire more involved was a total solution in itself, but it indicated that we were keen to try to refresh what we were doing. Save for Martin, everyone else was aware that we were losing direction, losing fans. We weren’t gaining any ground.
Having said all that, I don’t think anyone at the time had really thought through what it was we needed to do, but it certainly came out at that meeting that one thing we lacked was a truly major vocalist, with gravitas, in the way that, say, Boston or Journey or Free had. And maybe we should get one in. No one was suggesting a return to the harmonized vocal style that so marked the sound of Argus, which in retrospect strikes me now as strange. It had been such a strong trademark sound, along with the twin harmony guitars. We had already started working on a new album, so if we were going to do it at all, now was the time to grasp that vocalist nettle.
Another big factor that was brought out in the meeting was that decision-making was becoming difficult—if not impossible. The whole thing was becoming turgid, somehow—we were still moving along but without any decisive goals or strategy to achieve tangible results. John Sherry, our very frustrated manager, certainly had his ideas, but he was really nervous about laying down the law in the way that Miles would have done.
So what was the im
pediment to change? Well, it seemed that the one intransigent fellow in the band, on most things, because he was having it his way and was quite happy with the way things were going, was Martin. He was enjoying it. He quite liked the albums and the direction and didn’t seem that concerned with the slump in sales. It’s possible that he thought the MCA deal would just keep going indefinitely. He had a very comfortable middle-class lifestyle in East Sheen, a London suburb. He had a lovely home, he had a studio at home, and he had started a family. He was living a kind of bourgeois rock-star life.
I, on the other hand, certainly didn’t feel that I’d arrived in that way at all. I don’t think Laurie felt that way, and I think Steve was looking at the two of us thinking, ‘Well, I guess if they don’t feel that way I don’t feel that way either.’ As a manager, John needed some kudos among his peer group, too—some tangible achievements—and he was definitely encouraging us to do something. It was seemingly in everyone’s interests, bar one, to start making things happen in some way.
Once the meeting got underway, the red flag for Martin was when the dreaded phrase ‘lead singer’ came up. He kind of flipped out at that, blew a fuse, and immediately showed us to the door. ‘You can all fuck off!’ were the words he used. In that instant, in effect, he’d fired himself. I guess he thought that an hour or two later we’d call and say, ‘Hey, buddy …’ But we didn’t. His old mate Steve wasn’t coming to Laurie and me and saying, ‘I think we made a mistake here.’ It was just like: ‘Right then, what are we going to do now?’ It was very bizarre. In hindsight, there had been no useful discussion, no alternative suggestions except for the singer thing or indeed any acknowledgement that we were failing. With one leap, though, we were free. That was evident to one and all. It really did feel like that. Suddenly, a lot of pressure that had been coming from one camp was, with the slamming of a door, no longer there. It was simply a matter of getting another bass player who could do some vocals.
At that point John Sherry became very motivated and suggested we get together with a certain John Wetton. This all happened very quickly. John Sherry and his namesake came from the same town on England’s south coast, Bournemouth, and had known each other a long time. I’d seen John Wetton playing in bands in the 70s like Mogul Thrash but I didn’t know him personally and hadn’t followed his later career. Wasting no time, John Sherry brought him up to my house in Bedfordshire. I had a little studio there that I’d had designed by Eddie Veale of Veale Associates and built in a sixteenth century barn in my back garden that had previously almost burned to the ground. John Wetton came along and we jammed, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, this guy can really play.’ It seemed like a great fit.
What we didn’t realise was that John Sherry had already presented a scenario to John Wetton: a bill of goods whereby he would come into the band as lead singer, possibly also as a principal writer. Whatever had been said, it soon became clear that John Wetton and Wishbone Ash were in possession of different versions of a script, and there could only be one denouement.
By that time the rest of us had actually already written ninety percent of a new album, Number The Brave, and we were quite happy with the songs Laurie and I had arranged and tailored to our individual vocals. There would have been issues with keys but also with style if we’d gone back to square one, to say nothing of meeting our delivery schedule for the album, and bearing in mind the tour plans already under way.
I’d seen John with earlier bands but I hadn’t seen him in King Crimson or heard the Crimson records where he’s featured as a vocalist; I knew his bass playing style but was totally unaware of his vocal style and latter reputation. This might seem strange, especially nowadays, when music and the basics of music history are available at the click of a mouse, but back then if you were a band doing serious touring—as we had been during John’s time with Crimson from 1972 to ’74—it was inevitable that vast amounts of popular (let alone ‘underground’) culture could pass you by. As a side note, aside from the jam session we had, John didn’t particularly endear himself to me shortly after our first meeting with his dismissal of my country home, saying that he despised that kind of rock-star cliché. Aye, aye, we’ve got arrogant lead-singer syndrome in the making again here, I thought, and so it was to be proven the case once again that first impressions often don’t let you down.
Thus, in blissful ignorance of not being on the same page, we all got on the same plane and, at my suggestion, went again to Criteria Studios, Miami. A lot of great records had been made there—Layla, Hotel California—and we’d had some good recording experiences there ourselves previously, although it was a difficult studio in a way: very dry sounding, all orange shag-pile carpets with no hospitality areas. There’s a legend that Wishbone Ash spent so much money on recording time that they built Studio 4 on the basis of it. Whether it’s true I have no idea, but it certainly didn’t seem that we were skimping at recording.
In fact, we were living quite extravagantly, as we always did in Miami. We were living, commune style, on Palm Island, a fabulous place on the bay with its own swimming pool, later to be bought by the Maharishi Yogi. We’d stayed there previously with Martin and his wife Maurn during the recording of Front Page News. Our immediate neighbours were The Bee Gees, and we’d often see Barry whizzing past in his Bowrider speedboat, flashing those famous teeth. I loved this house and being in Miami. It was the feeling of freedom that totally fed my soul. We were able to de-stress between sessions. We were able to bring our families along, too, so our wives, girlfriends, and children were all part of the process. I’d be teaching my son Richard to swim in the mornings and then recording at the studio during the afternoon and evenings.
Back to the studio … John Wetton was playing up a storm. Like Martin, he had this very upfront, English style of bass playing, but with more drive. In between sessions, however, John would sit at the studio piano, singing these ballads—very pianistic pieces—and it later transpired that what he was trying to do was get us to lend an ear to songs he’d been writing, but without formally presenting them. Despite the lead voice thing being on our agenda, John Sherry had misrepresented the idea of him becoming the ‘front man’, and I think John was also in the studio wondering, ‘When am I going to get to sing a lead vocal?’ There was a personality issue—a classic English diffidence—where he wasn’t sufficiently upfront enough to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this song … this idea … this direction …’ And the direction in his head was what he later did with Asia. Well, that was never going to work with us: we were a guitar band, not a keyboard band; we were riff-orientated, not power-balladeers. The guitars were still very much the combined voice of Wishbone Ash and always had been.
The unfortunate thing was that if John Sherry had clearly presented it to us that John Wetton would like, say, three or four songs on the album and a share of the vocals, I’m pretty sure we could have found the common ground. We weren’t going to become a piano band, but there was no reason that we couldn’t have developed some of John’s ballads into Wishbone-friendly territory in the manner, of say, ‘You Rescue Me’ from New England, or ‘Leaf And Stream’ from Argus, if only we’d had more time.
As it was, I only came to know John’s vocal style from one song. At the end of this whole studio experience, he came up with ‘That’s That’, which was a pretty blatant yet typically sideways way of telling us, ‘Thanks guys, but I’m off.’ There could be no advantage in shuffling around awkwardly, speaking in code. I’d become used to the American way: nothing is done by innuendo in America. Subsequently I’ve read in interviews that John really had it in for me. I became this bête noir—the man who stopped him singing on the album—which is just not the case. It was simply ignorance on our part on the range and style of his vocal abilities, his reticence to be upfront with his songs, and John Sherry’s miscommunication to him about the nature of the gig. Maybe John Wetton simply thought we would all be aware of his recorded oeuvre, but we weren’t—we were in the bubble of Wishbone Ash. I hea
rd him sing in the studio, but although he would later have chart success with his song ‘Heat Of The Moment’ in Asia, his voice did not make me, for one, sit up and pay attention.
* * *
Number The Brave was released in April 1981, and we hoped it would make a difference. Despite the misunderstandings with John, for that brief moment in the studio we were a ‘band’ again, albeit a different kind of band than we had been before. There was certainly a lot of energy on the album. There were new guitar sounds, there was Laurie and me taking over the vocals—and doing so reasonably well, I think. Steve Upton collaborated with us on the ripping title track, inspired by the Stephen King novel The Stand. Sonically, the whole album was a great recording, as can be heard to great effect on, for example, my song ‘Underground’. A new band dynamic was in place, with Steve contributing a lot more to the material and to lyrical ideas on tracks such as ‘Where Is The Love’ and ‘Open Road’. I particularly loved the cover design by the visual artists Cream, which was taken from an old World War I poster featuring weapons (in this case bayonets) honed and ready for battle once more, in true warrior style. With Dr Nigel Gray in the chair, six weeks of studio time, rented houses, and a big drug bill, as far as I remember, it was also the last of what you might call our ‘big budget’ recordings, right at the point where the 70s wave crashed for the last time onto the shore of the 80s.
As that wave receded and the new era dawned, what should a minor-crisis-prone English classic-rock band do to try and keep up with the times? Yes, that’s right: bring in a man from Uriah Heep. I’m seeing the funny side of it on paper, but in truth Trevor Bolder—who had previously played bass in David Bowie’s Spiders From Mars and spent several years subsequent to that fighting demons and wizards with the Heep—was exactly the right man at the right time.