Eyes Wide Open

by Andy Powell

  It all came to a head when he was selling merchandise in Dublin, Ireland, during the Illuminations tour. Gary had decided to feature stacks of Martin’s new offering, Walking The Reeperbahn, on the sales table, while displaying just one of our CDs. This was the last straw. There was a parting of the ways.

  I tried to keep civil later on, when Gary and a chap called Mark Chatterton got a project together to write the history of Wishbone Ash. I was in Germany mixing a thirtieth anniversary DVD recording of Wishbone Ash featuring guests and former band members—very intensive work—and was presented with a completed text which I was told was to be ready for the publishers in one week. Should I wish to contribute, I had better get my copy in fast. Like a fool I stayed up each night for a week, after ten-hour video mixing sessions, working with sheaves of paper and editing the blatantly biased text. I’ll add that I was working under a solitary bulb while living in a tiny caravan in a field, which was being guarded by a rather irate goose acting as a watchdog. At this point in time I really was a man out standing in his field. In hindsight, I should have had nothing to do with the book. But you live and learn.

  * * *

  Something I’m very proud of with regard to Wishbone Ash and the fan community concerns our 1995 album Illuminations. I talk about it in detail elsewhere, but the key point was that here, with the band needing to firmly stake its place in a new decade and with a new line-up, the album that would do that was made possible through the direct intervention of our fans. Long before PledgeMusic or Kickstarter, Wishbone Ash delivered a fan-funded album. It was, for that time, a very novel gesture toward the band from people who really cared about what we did and who could spare a few pounds each to share in the adventure. I remain deeply grateful to this day for that level of support and commitment.

  The profit motive was never the only criteria Wishbone Ash employed when considering tours. A big part is the legacy and keeping fans involved in the music, both current and back catalogue—which I in particular had gone to great lengths to keep available in the record racks. Certain tours, especially in the USA, were inevitably loss-makers due to the cost of travel and accommodation. No matter: the bigger picture was more important. People respected this and felt catered to, and as a result they would show their loyalty by turning up for dates year after year, often travelling great distances to do so, even traversing countries and continents.

  All this built up an incredible international community. Fans’ sons and daughters from different cultures have even married as a result of this community. Others regularly spend their vacations nurturing friendships in countries with their newfound friends, as a result of meeting at a show somewhere on the planet. It’s something the current band and I are immensely proud of.

  Three fans of Wishbone Ash of long-standing are especially worth mentioning in terms of having my back throughout all these years: Leon Tsilis, Guy Roberts, and Andy Yates. Leon is a former MCA employee and Special Promotions project manager. It was he who suggested that Wishbone Ash become one of the first bands anywhere to get its own website. He fully saw the future and the way the record labels would lose their grip. Leon’s a huge fan of guitar playing and guitar bands (Lynyrd Skynyrd credit him with breaking them nationally in the US) and has a deep love for our band and its music. He encouraged me to promote Wishbone Ash on the web and did an awful lot to help with keeping the band’s back catalogue intact—which, of course, has been a huge benefit to all former band members in terms of keeping royalties and residuals steadily flowing to them.

  In the UK, Guy Roberts served the band in a similar fashion, helping to expand our international merchandising operation, giving a real personal service to other fans, forever seeking rare recordings or a special T-shirt from some obscure tour. Guy, an incredible archivist, got involved along with another stalwart, Andy Yates, a former policeman who’d become a fan as a young man, prior to joining the force in the UK. These two guys—along with their team of Dave and Daniel Moore, Sue Roberts, Mike Day, Nick DeJong, Mike and Pauline Holt, and a host of others—have overseen many fan conventions in the UK together, with Guy even running one in the USA. Leon put together two on cruise ships, sourcing for us the contact for one at Club Med in Florida, as well as the aforementioned anniversary concerts. It’s been a shining example of how folks who started out as fans have really rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in to help out.

  These days, with the business as we’ve always known it imploding on itself, fans have often taken it upon themselves to promote their own shows. John Ford in Indiana, John Winder in Oregon, and Mark Merriman in Tennessee are three who have done so recently in the States. In fact, at the show in Indiana, Dave Cruickshank, a promoter of the band himself, and his son Ruaridh turned up all the way from Bonnie Scotland to support us. Back in the UK, Simon Mills promoted Wishbone Ash at a fabulous country-house event.

  Ironically, Andy Nye, originally a fan of Wishbone Ash from forty years ago, now our UK agent of many years standing, could never have foreseen owning a booking agency, let alone becoming our agent, when, all those years ago, I’d personally berated him with foul epithets for not clapping along with the rest of the crowd at our gig at the Dacorum College—finally being told by me to ‘fuck off’ when he did not comply. I’m very humbled and pleased that he did not do so since, together, we’ve weathered some pretty rocky storms in keeping the good ship Wishbone a viable performing entity.

  In America, Steve Koontz, a super fan from North Carolina, who regularly takes on 3,000-mile road trips to follow the band, has been an immensely proactive supporter, even if you just take into account the sheer exuberance and infectious enthusiasm he displays. Talking of which, I simply cannot ignore super-fan extraordinaire Derek Thomson, from Newcastle, England, who turns up all over Europe with the self-same fire in his eyes that he had when I first met him at those rollicking shows at Newcastle City Hall back in the day, when you wondered whether the balcony would support the crowds of kids leaping up and down on it. Ian Routledge, another fan from those times in the Newcastle/Durham area, even lobbied to have us appear on a favourite festival of his in Minnesota, USA, the Moondance Jam, which we duly did, appearing on a bill with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. Amazing personal efforts by what we would have called ‘amateurs’ in a previous era. At the time of writing, I’m less than two weeks away from a return trip to South Africa with the band by virtue of the professional efforts of super-fan David Salter. This is very real fan power.

  People in bands talk about their ‘street teams’: well, we have had all this going on for years. There’s not a town or city in a foreign country where, even to this day, I can’t find a fan on the phone or, more likely, through social media, and ask for some simple job to be done, whether it’s collecting posters from a printer or collecting a band member from an airport. Take Fred Renz, who as a young fan and guitar player himself had the good fortune to witness the recording of some of the New England album, forever aligning himself to our cause. Fred has become a firm friend, helping out with all sorts of technical issues and tasks when we’re on tour, in the course of which he’s become a huge expert on ‘real ales’ of Britain.

  I’m also thinking of Big Harry and Nick in Holland and Detlef Assenmacher in Germany who have helped us in so many ways. In California, Atsuko Wolcott was instrumental in helping me secure some recent dates in her native country, Japan. Other Japanese fans from back in the 70s, Yasuko Seto and tsunami survivor Tamiko Bandai in Japan, have not forgotten a birthday of mine in over forty years! To this day we have friends and fans in France that we go skiing with each year, led by self-appointed ‘fanager’ Christian Guyonnet. There is another gentleman in Germany, Dr Bodo Kirf, who has personally booked us into some great European corporate shows through his sheer love of the band’s music. It had formed the soundtrack to his university days in Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne. In fact, a lot of former students cite similar stories concerning the import of our music, as do war veterans. Only recently,
in Southern California, I met a former sailor who served off the coast of Vietnam and recalled how our music would be played over the ship’s sound system during maintenance duties all those years ago.

  Taking it a little to extremes, on one other occasion I had a request from the family of a lifelong fan in Lichtenstein, now unfortunately terminally ill, to play a show there. I did not bargain for him being wheeled into the venue on a hospital gurney, complete with drip feed, or for his nurse to place him directly below my microphone stand. No matter what I did, it was very hard to consider the rest of the audience. It seemed to me that I was I was playing an entire show for his eyes only.

  In the States, years ago, we met a person who for years we simply knew as Dr John. In starting the USA Hot Ash fan magazine he became a vital resource to fans all over the world who wanted more information about our activities. It was not until we finally visited his home in Boise, Idaho, that we got the full sense of what industry a fan could simply put into his vocation. John Brady, as we later found his name to be, had even built an extra wing on his suburban home to house his incredible collection of Wishbone Ash memorabilia collected and traded from all over the world. The good doctor had every release of ours, not just from the States but from places like Iran, India, the Soviet Union—anywhere that the long reach of MCA could get to. John has found the rarest of rare recordings of the band, like the original demo recording for the first album, a one-off acetate disc that he located in an auction not so long ago. He graciously passed this on for release so that the original band members, along with the fans, could benefit from this find, the result being the 2007 release First Light.

  * * *

  Over a thousand shows ago, I met three French fans of Wishbone Ash at a fan club convention that we held in Duisburg, Germany: Michel Sady from Normandy; Christian Guyonnet from Paris, soon to become our videographer, among other things; and one Daniel Vetter from Saint-Etienne. Daniel was destined to become one of my closest friends, as well as to join a long list of really great Wishbone Ash front-of-house sound engineers—a position that he still occupies to this day, years later. All three of these gentlemen promoted shows off their own back in France, proactively taking personal financial risks in order to publicise the band’s current musical output.

  Daniel unfortunately lost money on his one and only foray into promotion, Saint-Etienne not being a particular stronghold for Ash fans. At any rate, soon after, we had a full French tour scheduled, and I invited Daniel to work the sound for us. He had impeccable credentials, having worked in the music business on several different levels. He’d travelled the world as co-guitarist for Steve Waring, an ex-pat American who had introduced the claw-hammer picking style of acoustic guitar playing all through France and in far-flung French territories such as New Caledonia and La Rèunion, so he was no stranger to the road. He had also received training at Apogee Sound Systems in California, and most importantly he knew, like the back of his hand, every Wishbone Ash song, guitar lick, and arrangement, not to mention our individualistic approach to live sound and production.

  Fast forward to today, and Daniel has toured the world with us and even mixed live performances for CDs. You might say he’s our fifth band member—and my personal sommelier and gourmand. Through him, together with Christian and Michel, the band and I have developed a lifelong love of French culture, but more importantly we’ve gained true friendship—in Daniel’s case, he literally has my back in the fog-of-war, which every band knows can be how it is when you are on some festival stage with no possibility for a soundcheck and you and your front-of-house man need to conjure up a live mix by virtue of sheer intuitive musicality using those abilities that have taken decades to hone.

  Lastly, people like Daniel earn their spurs by knowing when to be prudent with strangers—or, conversely, when to tell them to back off, if they are over-stepping the mark. Erstwhile fans who enter the band’s inner circle can choose to abuse or nurture one’s trust. Happily, I can say that Daniel has not only nurtured our trust but also upgraded our live sound, furthering our music in ways that other fans continuously remind me of when they rave about the quality of our shows from the perspective of the sound.

  There’s only one other gentlemen who comes close to Daniel’s lengthy tenure with the band, and that is Holger Brandes, our German tour manager, who has been with us on tours too numerous to mention after previously working security at clubs on the Reperbahn in Hamburg. Like Kevin Harrington years before him, Holger is a gentle giant who could certainly use brawn instead of brains to calm down a negative promoter or neutralise a dodgy fan situation. Like all our crew guys, he always chooses the latter. I’m proud to have all these guys on our side.

  * * *

  People sometimes forget that the term ‘fan’ is an abbreviation of ‘fanatic’. We were to meet a few of these along the way. Somehow, I seemed to get more than my fair share of nutters on my back than the other band members. This was probably due to the fact that I’d stayed the course, never quitting the band. The Ghoul from Goole comes to mind—a person who’ll remain nameless, but who I allowed into our circle, and who has subsequently and massively abused the privilege over a period of many years.

  Certain fans are stuck with the idea that the line-up featuring the original four members was the only true line-up, and even if those other members did leave to pursue their own lives, these fans would simply not accept it. I myself know what it is like to revere an artist and even to idolise them. I’m a fan of music and of certain musicians, and I’m guilty of projecting all sorts of my own passions and unrealistic expectations on them. So I ‘get it’ … to a certain extent.

  The image of me with my Flying V was the one most used in the music press, so I became particularly closely identified with the band’s image. Even the guitar that I played, folks would say, was inspired by the very wishbone in the band’s name. They may have had a point. But some of this high profile did not wash with certain fans. That’s fair enough, but it wasn’t by my choosing or design that (a) certain band members quit or (b) certain magazines liked to push my image above that of another. With the media, for anyone in the public eye, we are all pawns in the game—you can only hope to influence it, never steer it or control it. As with pretty much all bands, certain fans favoured their own choice of member to fete. Jealousies among the fans themselves would ensue as to who did what and who was the most important.

  Only recently in Germany I met a fellow who told me we’d met in a former life and that, in all seriousness, I should be the president of the United States. Even more alarmingly, some years earlier, there was the ‘fan’ from England who told me, in a voluminous handwritten letter, sent to my home, that he had been personally trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service, and was going to ‘relieve me of my millions’. He was, he told me, heavily armed, and was going to come after me for my ill-gotten gains. This one I took rather more seriously and definitely had to report him to our local constabulary. Shortly thereafter, I had him checked out at this address in the UK where he lived in a little bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac in a quiet Surrey neighbourhood. It turned out that he’d spent some time in certain institutions. Nevertheless, with all the things being reported on the news around the time—the Unabomber and so on—one had to take his threats very seriously.

  * * *

  One of the most bizarre fan encounters I’ve ever had happened in the 90s at a show in America. I’d had warning that this person was coming to our show. The venue had been a school house a couple of hundred years ago, and the good folks that ran the place were a kind of music society—real music fans. After our little show, in front of this group of very enthusiastic fans, a man sidled up to me and in a low voice said, ‘We’ve met before.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I said, looking at him sideways, while signing my autograph on another fan’s CD.

  ‘I’ve been inside your house …’

  That caught my attention, and it immediately creeped me out. It transpired that
this was Martin Darvill, a man who had become involved in managing Martin Turner’s musical ‘comeback’. I’d already crossed swords with him on the phone concerning the nature of Martin’s return into the business. Now he’d come to this little show of ours to whisper this creepy reminder in my ear. It was a signal of a world of pain that I would endure for the next seven years or so, while, all that time, it seemed to me, he would be chipping away, as the manager of ‘Martin Turner’s Wishbone Ash’, at the long years of goodwill we had enjoyed among the fan community. Ultimately, this would impact my very ability to continue in the band of which I had long been left sole custodian. We’ll look at the gory details later, but my personal view remains that without this man in the picture, the issues between Martin Turner and I could have been resolved to everyone’s benefit long before it ended up, in 2013, in a court of law.

  * * *

  Any band of our longevity will inevitably attract, over the years, a handful of genuinely disturbed individuals or followers with odd agendas you could do without. Likewise, any commercially viable business, bands included, will inevitably attract business operators circling around it—from the occasional essentially criminal promoter who disappears with the takings (it’s happened many times, to Wishbone Ash as much as anyone) to legitimate businessmen pursuing marketplace activities at odds with one’s own.

  The reason Wishbone Ash remains something worth fighting for—even in a courtroom, as it would turn out—is not simply because it’s my livelihood or the livelihood of my fellow band members at a given time: it’s because it means something to tens of thousands of people around the world—to people who have no negative agendas around the band whatsoever, but who simply remain active participants in this fantastic community of people of which I, too, am privileged to be a part. For every good fan gone bad, there are a thousand and one good fans gone better—and that is, of course, all to the good!