by Andy Powell
Trevor had wanted a change from Uriah Heep and answered an ad we put in Melody Maker. Funnily enough, he had replaced John Wetton in Heep several years earlier and would repeat the trick with Wishbone Ash. He’d be with us for the next couple of years: 1981 into 1983. Trev was a very easy guy to get on with, down to earth, good sense of humour, a fantastic bass player who could really dig in rhythmically while propelling the band forward. I always enjoyed having him onstage—he was a really solid guy, whereas John Wetton, I came to see, was a bit precious. I couldn’t imagine hanging out with John the way we could with Trevor, who had a nice levelling effect on all of us. In a social context, just traveling around as a band, Trevor was always good company.
The first touring we did together was in the UK and Europe around the middle of 1981. The Number The Brave tour was a full production affair with a giant drum riser with stairs for Laurie and me to mount during solos. There was also a walkway that could be reached by two sets of stairs high above the stage at the rear, which we would nervously climb during key choreographed parts. This very expensive set, which was built out of square section steel, welded together during weeks of construction at John Henry’s rehearsal and storage studios in Camden Town, was to feature on only one tour. With its giant bayonets, carved in plywood silhouetted by the lighting rig supplied by Entec, it actually made a big impact in the venues we played, but eventually, and wastefully, it was abandoned in some anonymous warehouse in London. No one ever really knew where.
We later augmented the band with Claire Hamill on backing vocals and the odd shared lead vocal. Two or three years down the line, the British charts would see a number of women having chart success with classic rock—the likes of Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, and Grace Slick with Starship. Also, my own favourite band, Fleetwood Mac, had gone all West Coast with not one female band member but two in the shape of Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks. What we were doing with Claire for that moment in 1981 wasn’t a million miles away from that territory, but I don’t think we could ever have developed into a female-fronted band.
I don’t think Claire was ever enough of a ‘band person’—she looked like it, she sang like it, but I’m not sure Claire was a ‘road animal’. She could certainly hang with the guys and have fun, but to do it year after year? I don’t think so. After the European dates she did come over to the States with her future husband, Nick, who ran the record label Beggars Banquet and was managing her at that time. But she didn’t finish the tour. Her heart was truly linked to her folk-singing roots. If you wonder what the five-piece Wishbone Ash sounded like, we did a German TV show during that tour playing ‘Get Ready’, from Number The Brave, which can be found online. If you’re a Wishbone fan, it’s a bit like discovering a Dead Sea Scrolls variation of something from the Old Testament.
After Claire had taken the night flight home from New York, bound for London Heathrow, I found myself at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia the next night, centre stage, pretty much fronting the band before a packed house. I believe that really was one of those sink or swim moments for me—a portent of things to come.
Trevor’s membership of the good ship Wishbone saw us move from the sheltered harbour of MCA into a whole new independent era, out on the open sea. We took part in a filmed concert to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of London’s Marquee Club during this period, which was later released on video. The studio album we made at this point was Twin Barrels Burning. We used Jimmy Page’s studio down in Cookham for that one, with Ashley Howe engineering. Jimmy had bought the Sol Studio from Elton John’s producer, Gus Dudgeon, who had coincidentally engaged the services of the same respected studio-design firm I had, Veale Associates, in turning this fabulous old watermill into a full residential recording studio.
When it came time for Trevor to do his bass parts he just couldn’t get a bass sound he was happy with. I’d also had a hard time getting a guitar sound. Trevor figured out that there was something wrong with the studio monitors. He dug his heels in and was getting angrier by the day, but no results were forthcoming. Eventually, Jimmy himself came down, having received word of our dissatisfaction. He arrived with a silver-tipped walking cane, dressed in white flannels and blazer, looking for all the world like he was living the life of an eccentric country squire, or perhaps playing some role in a period drama. But he was very pleasant and wanted to make things right for us—after all, we were renting his studio. We explained the problem and he summoned Eddie down. They went through everything and found that, sure enough, the speakers were out of phase, which was duly put right. I don’t know how much recording Gus had done with the monitors set like this—or Jimmy himself, for that matter—but at least now we were cooking with gas and could objectively analyse what we were laying down on tape.
As a side note, it was fascinating to see Jimmy’s old Vox A.C.30 and Fender Telecaster lying casually in the studio—tools of the trade that had been used to record some of his iconic guitar solos. In addition, while mooching around the living room of the house one day, I remember opening a cupboard and seeing that the only items in there at the time were some professional-looking one-inch recording tapes. I looked on the spines and, sure enough, they seemed to be masters of some, if not all, of the key recordings in the Zeppelin catalogue. Amazing that they were just sitting there in a cupboard of one of Jimmy’s several houses, unguarded, and not in some vault somewhere, given the value of the Zeppelin recorded legacy.
We had only a passing acquaintance with Page—I’d jammed with him previously at a charity night in a little village hall in Surrey alongside Simon Kirk and others—but in Trevor we had a solid connection to another rock legend, David Bowie, and we had a lot of fun asking him questions about his time with Ziggy and The Spiders From Mars. We were all hugely interested in that period, and he was always happy enough to talk about it, though none of it was good. Hunky Dory, just one example of my favourite Bowie’s albums, has Trevor’s stamp all over it, so I was sad to hear this. There were lots of tales of not getting paid and he didn’t have too many good things to say about Bowie’s manager or others advising David. I think the Spiders were too busy being a band, delivering the goods in the engine room instead of taking care of business. It’s easily done. We’d been there.
Twin Barrels Burning, released on a small label in Britain in October 1982, actually reached number 22 in the British charts—our best chart placing in years. It would also be our last chart placing ever—at least, up to the time of writing. Never say never! But if we had somehow known then that, in purely commercial terms, we had scaled our last peak would we—would I—have had the will to carry on over the next thirty-plus years? Who can say? But I’m glad I did.
In any case, we toured on the back of this release, playing some interesting places along with the UK, like Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Pula, and Split in the former Yugoslavia. The port of Split was full of sailors from the British navy, and the gig saw us entertaining what seemed like some rather young, enlisted guys who all, not surprisingly, seemed very shell-shocked, having stopped there on their way home from service in the Falkland Islands, where they’d been under fire below decks and had seen their comrades torpedoed on HMS Sheffield and HMS Ardent, among others.
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After two years of stability and forward momentum, Trevor left us amicably in April 1983, returning to the fold with Uriah Heep, after some changes had been made to the situation there that had disillusioned him a couple of years before. He would remain with Heep until he passed away in 2013.
At this point you could be forgiven for having the impression that Wishbone Ash had become a revolving door situation—Andy Powell, Laurie Wisefield, Steve Upton, and whoever we bumped into on the way to a gig. True enough, years get compressed into sentences when you’re looking back, but if there was a bit of scramble for members it was still a couple of years off.
With Trevor gone we recruited Mervyn Spence on both bass and vocals. Mervyn, like Trevor, was with us for over two years
and one album. He had been in Trapeze after Glenn Hughes left and he came in very much as a lead singer—yes, at last we were addressing the question that had caused Martin Turner to slam the door. Mervyn—or Spam, to use his nickname—was also very involved in the writing. This was still the era of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal that had begun with the likes of Saxon, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and Def Leppard in the late 70s, and Mervyn was the right guy to front a band locking on to that particular passing ship like a grateful barnacle. The sole album we made with this quartet—Raw To The Bone, recorded at Surrey Sound again, with Nigel Gray at the desk—reflected that style. Merv brought youth, energy, and a screamingly impressive vocal instrument to the table. The rest of us turned up the volume … except for poor Steve.
Steve had succumbed to the newly fashionable technique of sampling drum sounds and the need, created by producers like Mutt Lange and others, for rock drum tracks to be in perfect time and tempo. Briefly, what this entailed was for all the drum patterns to be programmed by the producer, and for the rest of us to play to those sequenced and quantized tracks. There was a smattering of Steve’s persona in there, in as much as each of his drums was to be sampled individually. In this way, the producer and engineer were able to make a composite of his actual drum sounds and tunings, but that was as far as it went.
Drummers from the 60s—Steve’s era—never played in perfect time, and in Steve’s case, his approach was very idiosyncratic, he being a right-handed drummer who set his kit up as a lefty would, resulting in unusual tom rolls and rhythmic patterns. This had all contributed in the past to giving our band its unique sound. All that was now out of the window. It made for a contemporary production, but certainly if someone had been trying to do that with my guitar playing, I would have been off in a shot or at the very least protested to the max. Not so, Steve: he just accepted it all, taking on board that the drum tracks represented the very heart of any production.
At this moment in time we were again getting down to business as usual. A chap called David Potts and an associate whose name I can no longer recall took over briefly as managers. Steve was acting as road manager and accountant and I was enjoying things more on the creative side with Mervyn and Laurie. It was a real band again.
Was this the last roll of the dice? Well at the time, when you’re doing it, immersed in it, it doesn’t feel like that. In hindsight, other forces outside compound to make it seem like that. But we did some amazing work around that time. I remember some great shows in London, and we played the Loreley Festival in Germany in 1985, with Metallica and heavy bands of their ilk. In fact, there’s a clip of us at that show online doing ‘Streets Of Shame’, a song we’d written about our experiences in the Indian subcontinent. In that video I appear to be wearing leather pants and a leather German-style biker’s cap. What can I say? It was the 80s—although that doesn’t explain why Mervyn had no shoes on. Or why there’s a scale model of Stonehenge on the stage. OK, I made that last bit up. The truth is, we were often the oldest guys on a bill, but we still didn’t feel out of place.
The irony was that I was making this pretty heavy music with Wishbone Ash at the time but at home I’d be listening to Scritti Politti, The Fixx, Nik Kershaw. I wasn’t listening to the kind of music I was creating! I know a lot of people say the 80s was a dire period for music but I didn’t think so at all. I found it all interesting. Digital recording was coming to the fore; these new acts were exploiting it, and that’s the kind of stuff I was enjoying. I was not about to shoot myself in the foot and give up on playing the guitar, though, even though synthesizers were really beginning to take over. The guitar had been good to me, and the trusty Flying V had by now well and truly taken on the role as my talisman—despite the fact that a lot of rock music didn’t seem to need guitar solos anymore. That would change again, soon enough, when guitar became cool again and younger audiences had a need to seek out us early-70s purveyors. The popularity of the V was now on the rise, soon becoming the definitive guitar of choice of heavy metal acts everywhere around the world. Finally, the instrument originally designed when Gibson was run by Ted McCarty was selling like hot cakes, and other manufacturers were rushing to come up with their own clones of this iconic electric guitar design.
* * *
In May 1984, Pauline and I made plans to sell our beloved little cottage, Holmleigh, in Edlesborough, Bedfordshire, and move to a bigger place in a village a few miles north called Great Brickhill, in the neighbouring county of Buckinghamshire. The cottage had become too small for the four of us, with its single bathroom off the tiny kitchen, restricted bedroom space, and lack of privacy upstairs. Since we had another baby on the way, we went from the sublime to the ridiculous: Ivy Lane Farm, with its six bedrooms and two living rooms, plus dining room and large farmhouse kitchen.
Our move from the damp, foggy environs of Edlesborough to the healthier higher-ground location of the farmhouse in Brickhill, with its fabulous views across several counties, was also spurred on by some alarming events. A predatory stalker was on the loose and had been breaking into houses locally, terrorising our neighbours as well as us and garnering national attention in the media, which had christened this guy ‘The Fox’. Only six doors up from our former country idyll, he’d broken into a house that was being looked after by a teenage son and daughter while their parents were on holiday overseas. He’d committed rape and God knows what else, and it began to transpire that other people became the victims of his perversity when he observed them from carefully built hideouts he’d created in their back yards or adjoining property.
A police crime and crisis centre was set up on the village green and all kinds of investigations were ongoing while petrified locals were arming themselves to the teeth in case of any eventuality. This was all going on while our move to Great Brickhill was in progress. Once there, I started work on Raw To The Bone down in Surrey, which was a couple of hours drive away, so I was spending time away from home occasionally, rather than face the long daily commute. This was not the best time to be leaving my family, it’s true. News quickly reached me via a BBC report that The Fox had struck yet again, a stone’s throw from where we’d moved to, attacking an elderly couple while they lay in their beds, actually shooting the husband in the hand.
Lawrence, our third son, was born in May 1984, right when The Fox was on the rampage. It may seem inconceivable but this predator had seemingly moved with us and was now terrorising our new village. Our house was very exposed and open to fields on the hillside, and the family was trying to adjust to this new feeling of remoteness, exacerbated by the now familiar terror in our neighbourhood. Pauline was sleeping with all the boys in the same room, a hammer and a carving knife stashed under the bed. After calling the police and being told that people should take every precaution they could in their homes, she was doing what she could under the circumstances and her parents were making frequent visits. Police surveillance was ongoing, and we got used to seeing helicopters checking things out from the air before eventually, on September 11 1984, a man was arrested in London on charges of rape, indecent assault, aggravated burglary, and burglary. The Fox was given six life sentences on February 26 1985. It had all been a stressful beginning to a new home life with a new baby, as well as a new album to promote.
* * *
Raw To The Bone, garish cover art aside, was pretty solid. Despite the heavy metal clothing there was still plenty of identifiable Wishbone Ash melody and harmony. There are still songs I’m proud of on that album, like ‘Cell Of Fame’, for example, a Steve Upton lyric with a great chorus vocal and bass line provided by session player Brad Lang. Tommy Vance gave us a chance to feature four of the album tracks on his Friday Rock Show in Britain around its time of release in July 1985. Nevertheless, the majority of our work during the Mervyn Spence era was not in Britain, it was in mainland Europe and even India, of all places, where we were poised to make our third tour. The reality is, if you’re in a rock band, you’re juggling a slightly di
fferent set of careers in all these different places. When things were going downhill in Britain for us we were still touring places like Germany very solidly.
We have this repeating pattern in British cultural life: build ’em up, knock ’em down. It doesn’t happen anywhere else—or certainly not with as much gusto. Even today, when I travel around the world, it’s a wonderful, prideful, secure feeling to hear people in other countries talk about ‘British Rock’ and the second ‘British Invasion’. The respect that bands like Deep Purple, Cream, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Black Sabbath, Wishbone Ash, and so forth are held in is tremendous. And then you come back to Britain and, as far as the media goes, it’s the cold shoulder. As the saying goes, you can’t get arrested. In fact, I’d be far more likely to get British press coverage these days if I actually was arrested for something—‘70s Rock Star Drink Drive Drama: Wishbone Ash Man Blowin’ Free Into Breathalyser’ or the like—than if I did anything involving music.
You always need to keep such realities in your mind. It’s much easier to do that now than it was then, although it was during the mid 80s that my view on being a professional musician in a rock band started to change. It wasn’t all about the destination—I was finally coming to see that it was about the journey, the road travelled, and I was really getting a firmer perception of the way our generation’s music was being viewed not only by our peers but also from the younger crowd.
Fans would come up to me after a concert in the early-to-mid 80s, thumbs aloft, saying, ‘Keep it going!’ Bands would be crumbling around you. There was very much a feeling of survival, and it was then that I started to understand the concept that a big part of continuing with Wishbone Ash was just that: survival. I’d read interviews with other people, not always musicians, and would quote them to the band. In particular, I always remember reading a Michael Caine interview where he was asked, ‘How do you choose the movies that you do and the ones you don’t do?’ And he said, ‘It’s quite simple: I just take everything.’
