by Andy Powell
* * *
It’s very convenient to talk in decades, but for me, being born in 1950, my life has seemed to evolve in sync with the turn of each decade. One of my earliest memories of music on TV is Sunday Night At The London Palladium—I’d always sit and watch it with mum and dad. It was presented at first by Tommy Trinder, a cheeky chappie from the Music Hall era, and then later by Bruce Forsyth—a man who, however implausibly, was until recently still playing to millions on weekend light-entertainment vehicles in Britain. When people ask me, ‘Are Wishbone Ash still going, then?’ I really ought to point out the towering totem of Brucie.
The Palladium show was a kind of entertainment revolution in its day—a rambunctious hour of cheer from the still-new ITV. Not only a second television channel but one that seemed prepared to have some fun. You didn’t get much fun from the BBC in those days. Everything that wasn’t clipped or deemed culturally educational was designated ‘light entertainment’—Light Entertainment was just that: a sort of aural blancmange, prescribed and regimented to the general population like a laxative.
The only chink in the armour of this scrupulous regime, it seemed, was ‘Uncle Mac’ on the radio—on the BBC Light Programme, as it was. A man known to his adult friends as Derek McCulloch, Uncle Mac had been involved in broadcasting for children on the BBC since the 30s. His Children’s Favourites show ran from 1954 to ’64, and that was when it got really free—we’d hear stuff from America, we’d hear Burl Ives, folk songs, Pete Seeger, things like that. His stated aim was to fire children’s imaginations, broaden their horizons, and he met the brief. Some people say they heard Elvis Presley, old bluesmen, all sorts of oddities on his show. Certainly, it was about the only slot on BBC radio at that time that broke away from the constant diet of dance bands and The Billy Cotton Band Show.
Leaving aside Uncle Mac and Sunday Night At The London Palladium—which even had Bill Haley & His Comets on the bill on one occasion—there wasn’t much exposure to music at home. We never had a record player when I was growing up. My aunt Rene had a radiogram, though, and I would hear songs like ‘Mack The Knife’ and ‘Fever’ by Peggy Lee or the odd Sinatra song. Other delights on the radiogram included Acker Bilk, a strange man from the West Country with a clarinet and a bowler hat; Edmundo Ros, maestro of Latin-American supper club music; and The Mike Sammes Singers, a soothing harmony act that later managed several discreet appearances on Beatles records. But for me, the first thing that really captured my ear was Django Reinhardt and his Hot Club de Paris.
I had no idea what this was. I think my dad turned me on to it, but it really resonated with me. I would have been about nine or ten. I heard that music, and it was streets ahead of anything else—and yet this was a pre-war act. Django himself had died in 1953. But this sort of information wouldn’t have been particularly known and certainly not pertinent at the time. (The curious, accelerating obsession with ‘newness’ is perhaps one of pop music’s least loveable gifts to the world.)
For me, hearing it as a kid, Django’s music rocked—the rhythm guitars were just pumping away—and over the top of this rhythm, with these incredible, emotional outbursts of fire, was this man playing lead guitar with, apparently, only two fingers. As I said, in those days, certainly in my neighbourhood, lots of people whistled: the milkman, the rag-and-bone man, the postman; all these guys whistled. And some of them were really bloody good! When you heard Django play guitar it was just another version of that: trilling away there, his strings like a human voice; a lot of passion, a lot of emotion. You didn’t hear that normally in the 50s. There was no place for naked emotion in post-war Britain. But the French, or the gypsies, seemed to know something we didn’t, and it was intoxicating stuff.
Toward the end of the 50s we were moving from light music on the BBC to the first inklings of rock’n’roll. I was hearing stuff that was loosely rock’n’roll, like Tommy Steele—the first in a series of rather ersatz British rock’n’rollers, usually with descriptive surnames, like Vince Eager and Johnny Gentle, and usually managed by the same man, Larry Parnes. It was all a bit camp and peculiar, in retrospect, but it was relatively exciting at the time.
Lonnie Donegan was, in a way, a magical one-off, though he seemed to be the start of this loosening-up of popular music in Britain. Skiffle was a British phenomenon: folk song with a jazz beat, they called it; three chords, a tea-chest bass, a washboard, and some thimbles. Everyone could do it—and, for a couple of years, everyone did.
Lonnie had kicked it all off with ‘Rock Island Line’ in 1956. This was seriously fun music, a breath of fresh air. He was the father of ‘letting it all go’. I was quite young then but anyone of any age could relate to the excitement—the energy of Lonnie’s performances in the 50s still comes across from old clips on YouTube. His hits dried up at precisely the time The Beatles arrived, but he was still holding festival crowds in the palm of his hands right up to his death in 2002. There has to be a lesson there: you can work hard at musicianship but you can’t buy charisma.
At some point before the decade’s end I became aware of Chuck Berry, a man who had both musicianship and charisma, counterbalanced by the sort of personality flaws you only hear about later in life. I’d hear Chuck’s guitar playing and think, Wow! This was something incredible. It’s remarkable that what Chuck did in the 50s is still the bedrock, the basic template of rock’n’roll in almost all its forms to this day. That chugging rhythm, the lead guitar that sounds like car horns, the riffs, the poetry in the lyrics—it started for me a lifelong love of all things American.
This seemed to be typical in my peer group. We maybe didn’t quite rationalize it all as ‘America’ but everything we cared about was coming from there. My aunt Doris and my uncle Tosh had a newsagents and sweet shop in Dagenham, about an hour away from where we lived. That was the first place I drank a Coca-Cola, and it was the first place I ever read a Superman comic. Anything from America had a huge impact. Everything in post-war Britain was just grim and drab and grey, and so you craved the colour and the fun of America: Coca-Cola, comics, burgers, films. When we got the TV I remember a series called 77 Sunset Strip and I became a fan of Chevrolet Impala cars, these vehicles that seemed to glide in and out of parking lots on cushions of air. I was definitely a devotee of the lead character, Kookie, played by the ultra-cool Edd Byrnes, who presented my first glimpse of what was to become, in the UK, the sharp mod style. The mind boggled. We just loved it, we craved it.
Many years later, on one of the first Wishbone Ash tours, I can remember sitting on my own on Miami Beach thinking, My God, I’m in a Technicolor movie! I am actually living the dream, right here, right now! I was there on the beach thinking, This is actually Technicolor! When you’re nineteen or twenty, that sort of thing is very impactful. I guess I was, and still am, a sensualist. I crave sensual experiences, and of course music is one of the best.
* * *
Most people of my age who gravitated into making music for a living owe some kind of a debt to Cliff Richard & The Shadows. Some of them even admit to it! Brian May, Al Stewart, Peter Frampton, Jeff Beck, Ritchie Blackmore, Pete Townshend, Dave Gilmour, Tony Iommi; even Neil Young and Frank Zappa are among the great and the good who have happily acknowledged the primal influence of Hank Marvin, Shadow-in-chief, a cheery looking man with Buddy Holly spectacles and a red guitar in a monochrome age. Was I any different? No! Joining the boy scouts and hearing pop music—specifically the instrumental music of The Shadows—on a transistor radio was the sunlit path. The road to rock was signposted by Hank’s twang. Baden-Powell’s orienteering skills, cowboy hat, and old-school camaraderie would help you find the way.
By the end of the 50s, Cliff and the boys were all over the airwaves, all over the TV variety shows. But I wasn’t particularly interested in Cliff and the singers at the time—not in Tommy Steele or Billy Fury or any of those other Larry Parnes ‘stable’ guys, whose names all seemed to be abstract nouns. Truth be told, I didn’t really care much for Elvis
Presley either. I was never into the rebellious aspect of rock’n’roll; I just didn’t understand it. I wasn’t drawn to that side of rock until much later, when I became a mod and a fan of bands like The Action and The High Numbers. That’s when I felt rebellion—but that was a few years down the road. As a ten year old, sticking it to the man—even if I’d known how to do so or, for that matter, quite who ‘the man’ was—just didn’t grab me.
What did grab me, though, was the ear candy of The Shadows sound, and Hank Marvin in particular. I liked what was going on in the band—in the boiler room, so to speak. How did the actual players create the sound of the band? For a period of time, it seemed as if that was all that was played on British radio. You might occasionally hear The Ventures—instrumental West Coast Americans—but you mostly heard our British version of it, which was The Shadows. Hank just did it better than anyone else. It was totally cool, it was smooth; he had the finesse, the touch and the tone. It stands up even today.
At the time of writing, Hank has a new album out, his first in a while, and if it all sounds pretty similar to what he was doing fifty-five years ago, who could possibly knock him for it? He found something unbreakable very early on in his career and he hasn’t needed to fix it yet—and nobody has realistically wanted him to. Sometimes not changing what you do is exactly the right thing, though you always have to keep the longer term, bigger picture in mind. Having the confidence not to blow with the wind or attempt to move with the times can often be the path of wisdom, though it might seem costly in the short term. I’ll admit that Wishbone Ash came close a couple of times to getting mired in emulating others. These days we simply adhere to our ‘sound’ and play to our strengths. Very few fans would wish for us to return to 80s-type production values.
But getting back to Hank, what was it about him that was so compelling back in the day? Well, partly at least it was the instrument he played. It just looked so cool. Toward the end of 1959 he acquired a red Fender Stratocaster with gold-plated hardware and a tremolo arm. It’s probably impossible to fully appreciate the novelty of this today, but between 1951 and ’59 American instruments were banned from import into Britain. It was actually Cliff who acquired the instrument, through the back door, direct from Fender’s factory in America, for Hank to use. Apparently it’s now in Bruce Welch’s loft—Bruce being the Shadows’ rhythm guitarist—and Cliff has quipped that, after a lifetime on permanent loan, he’ll leave it to Hank in his will. I think that guitar has repaid Cliff’s investment a thousand fold by now.
The funny thing was, the decision to buy a Stratocaster was an accident: Hank was aspiring to the guitar sound he was hearing on Ricky Nelson’s records at the time, which was down to James Burton and a tremolo-free Telecaster. I suppose all those guys I mentioned above would now agree that this was a fortuitous mistake to make. It’s probably less well known that Hank was also directly responsible for Vox Amplifiers creating the A.C.30 amp, a bit of gear that really defined the live sound of virtually all British bands in the 60s, from The Beatles downward.
* * *
While all this was fuelling my musical fantasies, I still had to contend with the business of education. At five years of age I started at Hobbs Hill Primary School and then moved up to the Junior School. I enjoyed school but it was always the art classes that captured my interest. I even won an art contest once. However, like all youngsters, I had to participate in sports as well, and it was during an away game with the school cricket team that an event came to light that was to turn into a big scandal for the school and the whole town.
One of our team had been seriously distraught all afternoon and, after we questioned him, admitted that he had been assaulted in the school stock room by the headmaster. I went home and told my parents. My mother later went round to my friend’s house and told his father, but he was in total denial. Eventually the police were informed and the whole situation was taken very seriously.
As it turned out, Reginald Swell—yes that really was his name—had been abusing a lot of boys in the school, but luckily not me. He was a local councillor, too, which somehow made it a bigger deal. Other teachers were aware of it and were obviously fearful for their own jobs. We were taken out of school for weeks as the scandal exploded. For those who like to think the past was a kinder, simpler place, that might be the case in some respects. In other respects—like having layers of safeguards, accountability, and retribution against bastards like Reginald Swell—it would be chilling to regress from the modern era.
There were two options in those days in Britain when you reached the end of junior school: it was all down to an exam called the 11-plus. If you passed, you went to a grammar school; if you failed, you went to a secondary modern. To a great extent it impacted the rest of your life and the options and expectations you might have. In 1961 I ended up at Apsley Grammar School. Meanwhile, several of my friends—and in due course my brother—ended up at the local secondary modern.
I had a lot of friends from the same social background and suddenly there was this line in the sand between us. It was a terrible, divisive line. But I still kept in touch with friends from both sides of that line because music was the thing that cemented our friendships. Most of my friends in bands were from schools in different neighbourhoods. Friendships require effort from all involved, but I can’t think of an instance where that tiny bit of effort every so often—the time to make a phone call or send an email to catch up and keep a connection going—has not been worthwhile. Later, after I had joined Wishbone Ash and moved to London, I was to invite an old drummer friend of mine, Terry Finn, to help out with some of our crewing needs.
Back in the early 60s, the effort involved was less apparent: there were shared goals, shared interests, and the sun always seemed to be shining. If you were musically inclined you could exploit those musical talents in the summer. Summer holidays were long and we kids were bored, so we’d all hang out at community centres, youth clubs, and so on, and that’s when I started playing music.
It seemed that kids from my social strata were not encouraged to play music at school. If you didn’t have music lessons and you weren’t from a middle-class family—and I wasn’t—you weren’t deemed to be musical. Consequently I got little encouragement in music at school other than communal lessons on the recorder. So thank goodness for those summer holidays: that’s when the chance to participate in music really happened. The closest I came to learning any musical theory was when I bought a book by Bert Weedon called Play In A Day. As simple as that book was, along with the promise it made, I never learned more than three chord patterns in different keys. I simply trusted my ear more. Years later, it amazed me how much musical experience my own boys would be given in their new American schools. Everyone was encouraged to join the school band or orchestra, and lessons in multiple instruments were made available to all the students.
I can recall at some point in the early 60s, presumably after that import ban had been lifted, word spreading around my neighbourhood that a real live Stratocaster had been seen in our local music shop in town—a salmon-pink one, no less. Kids from my housing estate would make pilgrimages down there to gawp in the window.
Around the same time we’d also make similar pilgrimages to London on the train or even the bus, which was a two-hour journey, to visit the music stores around Charing Cross Road, like Macari’s and Selmer’s, just to simply see a Stratocaster. We were young and easily intimidated, so we wouldn’t even dare go in the store, we’d just stare in awe at these artefacts from another world, glowing in the window.
There were two or three of us involved in these field trips to the edge of the dream world. My friend Bob Moreton in particular led the way. We couldn’t even begin to aspire to own one of these instruments but what we could do was try to make our own approximations. We didn’t dare get close to them to make accurate measurements so we had to guess it all, do it from memory. The first guitar I ever made, with my dad, was a copy of a Stratocaster. He made some of the
metal hardware parts and one of the other fathers helped with the electronics. We didn’t have a hope in hell of buying an amplifier, so someone took the guts out of a TV and I used the speaker from that. I’ve got photographs of myself with that guitar, and actually it was rather good! I played it onstage—and finding those stages was the next step.
Everyone has to start somewhere, and in my case it was the Ovaltine factory in Kings Langley. (I note that a blue plaque from English Heritage marking this prestigious event has yet to be erected.) The occasion was one of their annual social events. There’s a photograph of myself there: I think I was thirteen, and actually it was my future father-in-law Jack Langston who had finagled it so we could play. This was huge for us, and it was enough to give us the impetus to carry on as a band.
The next stage was playing at a Saturday-morning cinema before a screening of a Disney movie at the local Luxor Movie House in Hemel Hempstead. Once again, this nerve-wracking experience of public performance in a proper theatre was invaluable to me.
At this point we would have played the odd song like ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ or ‘Rockin’ Robin’—a 1958 hit for one Bobby Day—but our repertoire was mostly instrumentals by The Shadows, plus a particular favourite, ‘Cruel Sea’ by The Dakotas. Everything was learned by ear. It was a typical four-piece Shadows line-up. I became known in later life as a lead guitar player, but for me rhythm guitar was a huge part of rock and would remain so. Bruce Welch was my first hero. He was such a smooth player. I never did the moves, though.
