by Andy Powell
It was around this time that I had a supposedly brilliant idea. I still had my house in Buckinghamshire, Ivy Lane Farm. I was living in the States and already renting the farmhouse out to the PepsiCo corporation—so why not rent it to the band? We could produce some records there, using the modest advances we were getting from Miles’s label to create a studio. We had already got back together; why not get back to getting it together in the country? Martin had a studio-load of equipment at home, so we joined forces. The idea was that Martin and I, specifically, would be partners in this—which was fatal. We dived head first into the idea that we could run this as a commercial studio operation in the country—which is a bit like building a big pit and pouring money into it. Aside from the logistical question marks on the enterprise, we were probably the most ill-suited business partners you could ever find. But we gave it a good shot.
I look back on that period around 1990 as a bit of a blur. We were trying to pull together the touring side of things, to capitalise on the renewed flurry of interest around the reunion, and I was also doing about twelve other things, often at the same time. I was managing the fan club; I was running a house with a revolving bunch of musicians, cooking meals for anything from four to eight people a night; I was starting to handle the band’s bills; I was running a furniture business with a former publicist, Rod Lynton, who was also living at the house … I had fingers in so many pies but I was starting to ‘manage’ things, learning a myriad of new skills, becoming more responsible in general. I was working harder than I’d ever worked in my life, with a whole other actual family life going on in the States with my kids, bills, commitments. I certainly did not appreciate at the time just how much was Pauline’s commitment in aiding this whole experiment. She must have been amazingly strong to endure what I was throwing at her.
By the middle of the year we were working on what would be the third of our reunion albums, Strange Affair, and it would turn out to be an apposite title. Back home on the farm on Ivy Lane, Great Brickhill, Steve got to work in the vegetable garden which seemed to ground him and get him out of his manic state for a while. We were fending for ourselves. It was almost like a commune, except it was driven not by the idea of ‘dropping out’ but rather by maximising our resources, including this farmhouse and its land, to commercial and pragmatic ends. We’d jokingly refer to each other as we passed by in the way of monks in a monastery: ‘Good morning, Brother Martin,’ and so on. I had a lot of energy—though God knows how. I was living in America but commuting to the UK for long periods of time. I thought of it all as synergy rather than mission creep. Ivy Lane Farm was a big house and I needed to keep it going. I was just trying to do the most with the least, putting all my assets to work. Also, having spent a lot of time in America, with its ‘can-do’ culture, I was trying to bring some of that back to my bandmates. That was the way I saw it.
Steve was there full-time; Ted was coming and going a lot as he always did; Martin was happy in the engine room, the control room, crafting the sounds as they went down on the Otari 24-track machine. Curiously, he was not so driven creatively. Perhaps he’d worked out a lot of the demons that had driven his songwriting in the late 70s. He definitely seemed much more content in his new relationship, with kids coming along at fairly regular intervals. But I felt newly responsible because it was under my roof that we were doing all this. I think perhaps the other guys in the band at this time thought that I was taking over—which was exactly the criticism we’d levelled at Martin before he left, years earlier. I’m sure I was a bit evangelical about all the ‘can-do’ stuff, which might have become a bit wearying to others—particularly to Steve, who had his own troubles to deal with—but we were all, I believe, pushing at the same door. The thing is, as is always the case, somebody generally emerges as a leader, and on this occasion it was me. I saw what needed to be done and I’d do it: if supplies were needed, I’d fetch them. But generally speaking, we all pulled our weight, despite getting back to luxuriating somewhat in taking too much time over things.
The problem was, with everything else that was going on I don’t think there was a vast amount of music being written. We’d sit around the kitchen table at night, sometimes picking up a guitar if there was time. One of my songs for Strange Affair—‘Wings Of Desire’, about our experience being at the Berlin Wall during its demise—was written in this way with Rod Lynton, but I don’t think the music came fast and furious, as it had with Nouveau Calls. I was bringing in outside writers a little bit. Andy Pyle helped out in that regard. The lyrics to the song ‘Strange Affair’ were written mostly by him with a little help from me, and that became probably the ‘big song’ from that album, the one that has had the longest afterlife in our live shows. It’s a real example of how musicians ‘produce’ each other, and how a song can change radically. Andy had played me an old demo of the song, which without being too unkind was in the style of Roger Whitaker—that’s the only way I can describe it—but once I got hold of it and brought forth a new arrangement, turning the groove into a shuffle, adding a twin lead section, it became more of a rock/blues song. In retrospect, however, we should have ditched the sequencer I’d suggested and played it more the way we’d do it later in a live context.
The 80s production values were still being adhered to but we were now looking the 90s in the eye. That was all to change before too long, but not before we had some fun bringing in what later became Gary Moore’s Midnight Horn Section to add some sweetening on that track and another song of mine, ‘Dream Train’, with Robbie France drumming up a storm. Robbie is sadly no longer with us, but I credit him as being a real mentor and inspiration to my young son Aynsley, who was already a drummer of two years’ experience at the tender age of eight! He still plays the original hi-hats Robbie gave him around that time. Of course, he also cut his teeth on all the Steve Upton parts to our songs, playing along to our early records at home, but it was this direct interaction with Robbie that truly fired his imagination in a hands-on way.
In July 1990, Steve Upton left Wishbone Ash. He had been having a hard time during the recording of the album because the drum booth was in a barn, away from the main house. We ran recording lines out to it but he was isolated physically as well as psychologically, and I think he found that difficult in a way that he hadn’t at any other time except perhaps during the Raw To The Bone sessions. He swore that there was a time lag in the sound because there was so much cabling involved—which was simply not possible. He couldn’t fit in with the grooves we were laying down. Things at home in Surrey had finally come to a head. It was all going horribly wrong for him. Steve would bottle things up a lot and one day the cork just blew out.
I remember him walking into the kitchen saying, ‘I’m going.’ He had his big Jaguar V12 E-type parked out in the yard. As he walked determinedly through the farm kitchen toward the car, I said, ‘What’s going on?’ In what was clearly a very symbolic gesture he gave me the red ledger in which he always kept everything immaculately ordered, always using an italic pen. In fact he thrust it into my arms. That was it. He left, and I was not to see him again until only very recently—in court, sad to say. It was extraordinary—extraordinary from a man who had shown such a sense of responsibility in everything he did, from keeping the books to time-keeping to driving us for all those years to looking out for our general welfare and everything else. He never formally dissolved anything—he just left. Everyone was gobsmacked. This man who had been a few years older than me, and who had never known his own father, had actually been something of a role model and father figure to me especially, just as Miles Copeland had been to him. But now he simply upped and left. I called Steve several times after this and on one particular occasion attempted to meet with him but he simply closed the door on all of us.
This ‘father figure’ archetype was something I often pondered in the band. It had been a strong theme. Ted and I had been the babies in the band, while Martin and especially Steve had been our elders or seniors, set
ting examples, sometimes good and sometimes bad; Miles in turn had been the big daddy to all of us, even though he had his own issues and private relationships to work through. A three- or four-year age difference is a big deal when you yourself are only nineteen. Steve leaving was a line in the sand that broke the spell and allowed me in particular to cast off these constrictive and by now irrelevant bonds. I was to revisit the father theme a couple of years later in the lyric I wrote to the song ‘Mountainside’, which appeared on the album Illuminations, and again in the song ‘Tales Of The Wise’.
I should have seen the signs. Steve was deeply unhappy. He was smoking a lot of hash and drinking a lot of Cognac in his room on his own at night. In hindsight, it was all there to see. I knew he’d already had problems playing on albums before as a drummer because the whole role of drums in rock music changed massively in the 80s. Drummers now had to play in perfect time. Drum machines had made this huge leap forward—you never really knew if it was a real player or a machine on the recordings. And that wasn’t Steve’s style. His sense of time would move a lot—it had a freedom to it that we can now all recognise as being a great thing, a unique style and feel. But the whole record-making industry had become so rigid about drums. Steve must have felt as though every facet of his life was going wrong. Still to this day I don’t really know what the full story was. At best, my theories are just that: my theories.
Miles was consumed with other projects, but around the time of Steve’s exit he bought Chateau de Marouaette in the south of France. He needed someone to manage the extensive grounds and called me up, aware that my younger brother Len was a trained horticulturist who had studied alongside Britain’s most famous garden expert, Alan Titchmarsh.
‘Do you think Len would do it?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so. I don’t think this is for Len. But I know who could do it—Steve Upton.’
‘Yeah, I’ve thought about Steve. I’m worried about him. Would you recommend him?’
‘Well, he’s been at my house here for a while—we’ve got a couple of acres and he’s been doing estate management in a way, growing vegetables and so on. He’s a man of the earth. He likes growing things, and he’s managed the band’s day-to-day affairs meticulously for years.’
‘You think he could do it?’
‘Yes, I’d personally endorse him for that. It could be the saving of him.’
‘Yeah, I think I will call him.’
I didn’t know how long it was going to last, but it was a place for Steve to go. As far as I know he spent many I hope happy years at the chateau and may even still be there.
Nevertheless, as seismic and profound as Steve’s leaving was, and whatever we could or should have done to help him, we were committed to delivering a record. He’d actually reneged on his contractual commitment to do that, leaving us in the lurch. We ended up getting Ray Weston and Robbie France in to finish the album, and we soldiered on as we always did. Robbie joined us for a tour of Britain at the end of the year and then Ray joined permanently. They were two very different players, and that was actually only a good thing. It opened the music up and showed me that anything was possible. For a brief period we brought in this contact of Ted’s, Hana Cunningham, as a kind of manager. Not a good idea. Like in the movie Spinal Tap where the band leader’s girlfriend tries to get in on record production, uttering the famous phrase ‘More Dobly, please’, Hana was completely out of her depth, knowing nothing of the music business.
I didn’t want to take over the band’s management—I still just wanted to be a band member—but I was already in a way managing lots of things by default: the house, the budget, the album recording. I had the energy for all of this. I was already the manager and producer in all but name, although I was probably in denial about it.
Strange Affair, the third and last of the ‘reunion albums’, was released in April 1991 and really was a strange affair in every sense. For most of that year, which included our first trip to Japan since the 70s, Wishbone Ash comprised Ted, Martin, Ray Weston, and me. Ray was someone who’d originally played with Martin during his solo phase. I got on really well with him. He had a good feel for the band, knew the band’s music really well, so it was a natural fit. This was around the time Miles was stepping back. I don’t know when he sold IRS to EMI, but EMI started distributing the label in 1990. (I believe IRS folded as a distinct brand in 1996.)
It felt to me, after the third reunion album and Steve’s departure, that a phase was coming to an end. I think there was a similar feeling amongst all three of the original members. And at that point—in October 1991 to be precise—I had a second confrontation with Martin—not at anyone’s house but over the phone this time.
Ted and I had pretty much conspired together that we wanted the band to carry on but without Martin. So it fell to me, of course, to call him. I can’t remember if we felt he was losing interest or wondered if he was serious enough about touring. But that wasn’t at the heart of our decision. He just did not seem to have any fire left in his belly. On a personal level I never really got on with Martin. If things were not going according to his agenda he could be really patronising. We were never friends. Neither of us ever looked out for each other in the way that Steve and I had. Thinking back, I can barely count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he actually called me about anything in all the years we worked together. It was always me calling him.
Wishbone Ash, for me, was a long-term career, and if at all possible you want to be involved with people you can get along with. It was very much a grown-up decision: it’s got to be clean cut, it can’t be this wishy-washy thing; it can’t be, to use one of Martin’s favourite phrases, ‘Now you see me, now you don’t’; it can’t be game-playing. And if there was one person who was always playing games, it was Martin. So my feeling at this point was, if Wishbone Ash is going to carry on, and if I’m going to carry on with Wishbone Ash, it ain’t going to be with Martin.
I called him up, with Ted’s backing, and said something to the effect of, ‘We’re going to carry on … and you’re not.’ This time it really was actually quite brutal, but it happens that way sometimes. Martin seemed to take it on board without much protest. I remember thinking that in order to fire someone, that person has to buy into the fact that they are being fired. That, at the time, was exactly what he did. That’s the way I remember it. The really unfortunate thing was that all this actually took place on Martin’s birthday. Sadly, I never realised this at the time.
In many ways, Miles had formed the band. It wasn’t a bunch of existing friends. We did push forward this fake ‘band of brothers’ thing a bit, and certainly in America people seemed to think Martin and Ted were brothers because of the shared surname. Steve and I were the two blond guys; Martin and Ted were darker. There’s always some contrivance in marketing bands, and after a while you often grow into those roles—you become a band and work on a collective image. But for me the band’s name, the entity of the band, was always bigger than the sum of its collective parts. Some people are ‘band people’—team players, like the guys I’m with now. And I didn’t see that in Martin at the end of the 80s. I didn’t get that feeling. ‘Well, you know,’ he’d often say, ‘I’m really a producer.’ There seemed to be this need to put himself apart from or above the rest of us.
On one occasion, which must have been in the middle of 1991, he said to me, in his latter-day ‘mockney’ accent, having ditched the Devonshire burr a long time ago, ‘Look, you know Andy, me old mate, rock’s dead, innit? It’s gone.’ I thought this was a bit strange, not least because rocker Bryan Adams was at number 1 in the charts with ‘Everything I Do’ at that point. But in Martin’s head, rock was a thing of the past. For me, Wishbone Ash is bigger than any individual. I was taking a mature look at it all in deciding that we had to move on without Martin, and in time I believe I was proved right. Martin didn’t take it well but he didn’t put up any fight. He was ambivalent, it seemed.
There will
, I’m sure, be people reading this who’ll see me as the bad guy here, people who’ll think we didn’t have enough cause to cut Martin out of the band’s future. It’s unlikely I can say anything else that will convince them otherwise. I could draw attention to Martin’s walkout in 1980 and the fact that the reunion was only ever meant to be a short-term exercise—a self-contained project within what Steve and I were doing as the residual keepers of the flame. But ultimately it’s like this: if you’re in a workplace that has a lot of issues for you, people you struggle to get on with, game-playing from colleagues, a lack of certainty that’s constantly nagging away at you and likely to affect your company’s long-term prospects, would you not finally do something about it? Would you not leave and go somewhere else, where other peoples’ issues aren’t dragging you down—or, if you’re in a position to do so, would you not find a way of removing the individual who’s at the root of the issues, and then transfer them to another branch or choose not to renew their contract when it’s up?
People have a rose-tinted idea about bands but one thing they are, which one can never get away from, is a workplace with a small set of individuals within it. And, inevitably, the time will come when those individuals will have exhausted their capacity to work together in a positive, pleasurable, and productive way. That’s simply what happened between Martin and me, and at the time Ted agreed that we would be better off returning him to the world of producing.
* * *
The whole Wishbone Ash reunion, the No Speak label, the Night of the Guitar tours—they were all part of the swansong of Miles Copeland in the music business. He cashed out. We didn’t realise at the time that we were part of that process. But all power to him—it gave us a four-year boot up the backside and produced three more albums.
Andy Pyle came back in on bass and, with Ray Weston on drums, Ted and I soldiered on for another two years, up to December 1993. I’d already been co-writing with Andy so it was a natural thing. As a bass player he was nothing like Martin but I knew it could work, despite him having little respect for Ray, as it turned out. A veteran of so many bands like The Kinks and Rod Stewart and so on, Andy would often refer to Ray as ‘the boy.’ It was not the best relationship for a rhythm section but I was largely oblivious to these inter-band tensions. Andy prided himself on his punctuality and general professionalism. He’d always be there with his vintage Fender bass in hand, together with a small gig bag—a perfectly self-contained if somewhat aloof individual. One great story involving Andy was on the occasion of some tour dates in California. We were on our way to Carmel, an exquisite little enclave on the beach where the town’s mayor at that time was Clint Eastwood. He was also the owner of a well-known local tavern called the Hog’s Breath Inn. We were joking with each other on the way there about how amazing it would be to actually bump into Clint during our day off in Carmel and were determined to visit the Hog’s Breath, not really believing for a minute that it might come to pass.
