Eyes Wide Open

by Andy Powell

  I called Barry from America one day before my farm duties and we hit it off immediately. Barry went to great lengths to say that theirs was only a small label, but I liked the cut of his jib and I knew he had a basic idea of the rock world. He’d had some involvement with Uriah Heep, The Groundhogs, and people who used to be in Caravan, although he was more clearly in the folk world, really, working with the likes of the Albion Band, Fairport Convention, and various offshoots from that particularly luxuriant tree of British folk-rock.

  Wishbone Ash definitely had some folk leanings and folk roots, with Fairport Convention especially being an influence of mine during the Argus period. This feels nice, I thought. These fellows are not your typical rock’n’roll hustlers. They go down the pub, they drink beer, they sign and record music for Morris dancers. That kind of goes with the feeling I’ve got right now, living in Connecticut, visiting harvest festivals and pottering about in the country …

  The planets probably aligned the day Barry and Malcolm actually found a man called beer to sign—Phil Beer, a solo alumnus of the Albion Band (as most people in British folk tend to be). It all felt very benign to me and I got on very well with Barry. It was the same feeling when I met Malcolm. They have a certain image—dressing in leather jackets and cowboy hats and looking quite scary, like members of Lemmy’s band—but they’re the gentlest souls you could ever meet. I realised that I’d found a home, and so it proved to be. We went on to release many records with them, including studio albums, acoustic projects, and live compilations.

  Barry became something of a mentor for me and would always act as a sounding board. Even today, whenever I’m in England we make a point of going to dinner together and shooting the breeze. And even though he’s quite a bit younger than me I call him Uncle Barry.

  It was a great period, the 90s, having all these foils to bounce off. HTD became a safe home for Wishbone Ash, which was exactly what was needed. The fact that these were real people—people you could call up at any time day or night to run an idea by—was invaluable. I was part of a team again. It really reminded me of how Wishbone Ash had started out. Barry would never shy away from telling me if I was shinning up the wrong tree but he really did stick with Wishbone through thick and thin.

  The label subsequently morphed into Talking Elephant, after Barry and Malcolm sold some assets to Sanctuary Records and rebranded. In recent years we’ve moved on, working with labels in Germany, for example. With the German economy soaring above that of the UK, and with Barry’s blessing, I’ve gone where the best opportunities are, in terms of both money and marketing. Barry’s a physical-product man at heart: he’s in the business of CDs, with only minimal investment in downloading and that kind of thing. But never say never—the door to that garage in Bexleyheath is always open.

  * * *

  Illuminations was released on HTD in October 1996 to coincide with a two-month UK tour. Once again, Tony Kishman could only make a handful of the dates, so Martin gamely stood in again.

  Being an Anglophile, Roger got on well with Martin at first. Before the tour we went to visit him at his home and he invited us to the British Airways pantomime of all things, as he was mixing the live sound. It was somewhere near Wimbledon, and it was a scream. Literally. The campness was off the scale. Martin was absolutely loving this whole vibe. Once the after-show party had run its course, we went back to his house and played him the Illuminations album. He was a bit offhand about it—‘Oh, that sounds like a bit of a posh record’—but it was posh. It was a big Anglo-American production. We’d thrown the kitchen sink at it, all the bells and whistles. But he put it down nonetheless.

  Illuminations was as good a classic-rock album as we could make, a powerful record, and we were very proud of it. We toured on the back of it … and then nothing happened. Roger in particular really thought this was going to get some great reviews and, yes, we did get a few reviews, but it didn’t sell outside of our immediate fan base and didn’t ignite anything in the business. Nothing changed at all. I thought, particularly in Britain, that it would be an event. Certainly, our fans thought, Wow! This is more than we expected. And I’m sure our peers in other bands thought we’d done a good job, but nothing changed. It was another time when things were changing around us; dance music was coming to the fore, and as usual we were at odds with the moment. But then, unexpectedly, the ‘moment’ came looking for us.

  I don’t know quite how it happened, but the producer Mike Bennett got in touch with me and said, ‘Look, I’m doing these dance albums with The Fall, Kim Fowley, and others, and I’m working with a label that is doing these kind of things, if you fancy it as a bit of a side project.’ And he talked me into it.

  Fuck it, I thought, why not? My kids were playing dance music around the house all day long and it was driving me crazy, but I ‘got’ it. I’d loved Tamla Motown back in the day, I’d been to dance clubs in the 60s, and on Wishbone tours in Europe in the 70s and 80s we’d always go clubbing afterwards. So I got the whole dance thing. And I thought, Well, Illuminations has done nothing, why not do this: do a complete 180-degree turn?

  It was reactionary, sure, but it was also in the spirit of throwing everything against the wall. At the same time I made things as clear as possible to anyone who would listen that it was strictly a side project for the band. We weren’t abandoning our dyed-in-the-wool musical style on a permanent basis. So I went along and started mixing Ash samples into this album that would be credited to Wishbone Ash and called Trance Visionary. We had these amazing techno grooves but we needed something to anchor it in the bass area so we brought in Bob Skeat. Wishbone had played the Town & Country in London some time before that and the opening act, fronted by our old crew guy Ashley Griggs, brother of Phil the soundman, had Bob on bass. I’d watched him playing and really liked his tonal approach, the lines he was laying down, and most importantly, the man could groove with the best of ’em. I think he may, even then, have been wearing his now legendary cap. Coincidentally, Mike Bennett knew Bob, too—in fact, Bob had actually assisted in repairing some of Martin’s bass parts on the Live Timeline album that had been released prior to the the trance albums, and was probably the main catalyst in my involvement with Mike. It might have been a bit of karma—Bob would join Wishbone Ash as a permanent member not long after this and at the time of writing, seventeen years later, he’s still here. And so is his cap.

  Trance Visionary came out early in 1998, and a second dance album, Psychic Terrorism, followed a few months later. It was a liberating experience. In PR terms it might have been daring to use the name Wishbone Ash on these albums, but in real terms it wasn’t: there was no business; we were doing nothing in the marketplace. Zilch. What did we have to lose? The brand name needed to be in the public eye, one way or another, and we were getting traction in quite different outlets as a result—shaking things up, so to speak.

  I felt it was like sticking two fingers up at the music business—flicking them a Flying V, if you will. We’d just done an amazing record that took blood, sweat, tears, and two or three years of toil to produce. We’d done everything that we could possibly do with that album, and it had zero impact. So why not do a couple of dance albums?

  In the summer of ’98, in between the two releases, we tried to tour with the idea. We did one show in Camden Town and about five people came along! I got flak from the hardcore fans—‘What are you doing?’—but it was only ever a side project. It did get us into some dance charts and dance clubs, and it did provide some kind of lateral promotion of the band’s name. There was a new generation coming along: they didn’t give a crap about screaming guitars but they did like beats. And now, for the first time, my youngest son would actually talk to me about my band’s music! (Lawrence, an exceptional visual artist, gradually softened his approach to our music and later went on to design posters, DVD covers, and even the cover of the Bona Fide album, but that was still some years off.)

  Dance music was big in Europe at that point in time.
I took the flak for our foray into that idiom, but of course we were still touring as Wishbone Ash. We hadn’t become a dance act. We had, though, become an all-British band again.

  * * *

  Despite the impression I might have given above—that every time a tour came in, Tony Kishman couldn’t do it—Tony did actually do a fair amount of road work with Wishbone Ash during the two and a half years he was involved, spanning 1995–97. By the end of 1997, however, he was getting offers he couldn’t refuse related to the Beatle-themed shows to which he still owns the rights. And while he really loved the music of Wishbone Ash, he was a single parent and he had to work. So that was that. But we had had an amazing time on the road together.

  In fact, Tony was one of the funniest guys I’ve ever toured with. I loved his irreverence. We’d laugh our way through tours with a nonstop stream of abuse. We’d listen to comedy cassettes in the car and generally keep things light-hearted. It was the era of the Jerky Boys and being a boys club, as all bands inevitable are—even the girl bands—we thought this stuff was a hoot. It definitely got us through some pretty rough shows playing for Welsh rugby clubs, workingmen’s social clubs, and East German border towns. Our merchandising lady, Carol Farnworth, even got in on the act, calling everyone ‘Buttnut’, while Mike Sturgis became ‘Mike De Rookie’ and so on. When Tony came to London, on our first UK tour together, we stayed at a favourite old rock’n’roll hotel near Marble Arch called the Columbia. Tony would play the ‘American abroad’ everywhere he went: he used to be a chain smoker, he liked his burgers, and he’d drink Dr Pepper constantly—it had to be on the rider at all the gigs. He would fly from Tucson to London via Rome, because at that point Alitalia was the only airline that would still allow you to smoke on the plane.

  After waking up jetlagged from one such journey and arriving just in the nick of time for breakfast, he came face to face with the battle-axe of a woman running the dining room.

  ‘What do YOU want?’

  ‘Err … the full English … please.’

  The breakfast service had ended by the time she came back ten minutes later and slammed his food down at the table, took one look at Tony, and said, ‘There yer go—good enough fer the likes a’ you!’

  Poor old Tony. Welcome to Great Britain, indeed. Events like that would surround him wherever he went, and we laughed about that one for days. But he loved Britain and he loved British music, had a real feel for it. He’d get a total kick out of the quaint but funny names of places we’d pass through on tour, like Puddletown or Nether Wallop. I have very fond memories of working with him. Just as it was with Jamie all those years before, he helped me see touring in a fun and different way.

  Roger Filgate decided to move on shortly after. I don’t think he got over his disillusionment over Illuminations’ relative failure, and the touring could be tough. He’d not spent years doing this as a way of life, and he was also rearranging his life in Connecticut, working on his teaching career and production work in the studio he had at his mother’s large house. He did play guitar, I believe, in Tony’s band later on, which took him to far-flung countries like the Philippines. But Roger and I have remained friends, and in fact he continues to be a part of the Wishbone Ash family—he contributed a terrific song, ‘Strange How Things Come Back Around’, to our 2014 album Blue Horizon.

  After that, it was a no-brainer to ask Bob Skeat to join on bass, and Bob in turn recommended Mark Birch on guitar. Bob at that point was like any other pro musician in London, working with many different hats in many different outfits. He’d been Gilbert O’Sullivan’s bass player for some time, as well as working with the guys from FM and also Toyah Wilcox’s band, to name but three very different acts. Both his dad and his uncle were pro musicians, his dad being a sax player who had played loads of London sessions with 60s pop stars and had even been a member of the hugely popular Billy Cotton Band. He’d also made a solo album with the Bolshoi Symphony. So Bob was brought up in that world—and, coincidentally, on the same street in Ealing as Pete and Simon Townshend, whose dad was also a professional dance-band musician. Bob is one of the most professional gigging musicians I’ve ever met. He understands that you have to be ready at a moment’s notice to sling your bass over your back, jump in the car, and do a gig. And that was exactly what I needed.

  Mark was also a really musical guy, a fabulous find and a lovely person. He never had pretensions of being a virtuoso player in the way that perhaps Ted had seen himself, but he was so much more in so many ways—very musical, with a really beautiful voice. It was a pleasure to meet him. He and Bob had played in a 60s party band called Mike Fab Gear, doing a lot of university balls. They had this great freewheeling vibe where music could be fun while at the same time a privileged thing to be fortunate enough to do. So I felt that, yes, I could definitely play with Mark. Mark played a Fender Stratocaster, which I liked—it was a nice foil to my Gibson—plus he could sing like an angel. He would take lead vocals on a couple of things, ballads like ‘Persephone’ and ‘Everybody Needs A Friend’. He added a certain gravitas to the performance of those kinds of songs. In addition, I could hit him with anything on the guitar and he could handle it:

  ‘Right, you’re going to solo for twenty minutes on “Phoenix” …’

  ‘Oh? OK.’

  There was a transitional period of a few months but shortly after Tony and Roger had left, Mike Sturgis moved on, too. Married life, settling down, and the offer of a full-time teaching post at the Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford beckoned. Ray Weston, a Wishbone veteran from 1990–93, during the last days of the ‘reunion era’ of Wishbone Ash, came back in and reclaimed his place on the drum stool. Suddenly Wishbone Ash was a 100 percent British band again. It was another big change to get my head around.

  It’s a strange thing: I find it easy these days to be a dual citizen. It did take a lot of practise, mind you, but by then I could slip effortlessly between two cultures. I was living in America, deeply entrenched in American society—I understood the jokes, understood the politics, and in Blue Law I got to hang out with New Yorkers. I could discern between a Boston accent and someone from Portland, Maine. I’d been to more states than the average American but I could effortlessly flick the switch and be an Englishman once more. A lot of Americans are salesmen of themselves or, should I say, their talents, like mini business entities; British people are no less that way but they often hide it under cosiness, camaraderie, and self-deprecation, so you have to switch gears and switch hats to accommodate that. There was a little bit of mental readjustment in getting involved with Bob, Mark, and Ray, but it was refreshing—all adding to the rich tapestry of life.

  * * *

  Mark Birch never made what you might call an ‘album proper’ with Wishbone Ash, although he was with us for a good couple of years. He did some great work on various video and sound recordings, but this period did nonetheless see a number of other cultural artefacts, some very much of the moment, produced under the Wishbone banner.

  ‘Unplugged’ albums were a big thing in the late 90s and early 2000s. Did Wishbone Ash make one? Of course we did! Bare Bones, released through HTD in 1999, comprised mostly rearrangements of classic Ash material for the format, plus a couple of new songs. ‘You Won’t Take Me Down’ was one that hinted at what might have been, with Mark’s moody vocals to the fore. His voice was very well suited to ballads, and he turned in some lovely work on that album—the only one he would make with the band. One of those rearrangements, Mark’s take on the Wishbone Four song ‘Everybody Needs A Friend’, would be his song of choice when he reappeared with us ten years down the line for our 40th Anniversary Concert (which was filmed for DVD release).

  Early in 1999, during an American tour, we participated in two podcasts of live concerts—long before the word ‘podcast’ had been coined. One was from the Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles and the other from the House Of Blues in Chicago. A few months earlier, in 1998, The Pretty Things had garnered a lot of publicity
, and a career revival, with a daring attempt at a video stream of their performance of their 1968 rock opera S.F. Sorrow live from Abbey Road Studios, with Arthur Brown and Dave Gilmour guesting. Technical gremlins meant it never reached anyone but the in-studio audience at the time, though it’s since appeared on DVD. Similarly, The Who were talked into a supposed video podcast from a Las Vegas casino in October 1999, which either didn’t work or was a con from the start. Either way, it too subsequently appeared on DVD, as The Vegas Job. This was still very much the pioneer days of the internet, and while a few clued-in people—including old-stagers like ourselves, the Pretties, and The Who—could definitely see the huge potential of it in the music world, it took a while for the technology to catch up and the public to embrace it.

  The show at the Whisky was fun. I remember Mick Fleetwood being in the audience, and someone from The Beach Boys was there too. We met all kinds of interesting people. It was a week of anniversary celebrations for the venue, and it was somewhere we’d often played back in the early days. For old times’ sake, I reserved us rooms at that famous rock’n’roll hotel, the Hyatt House, or the Riot House as it used to be known, and I decided to rent a Chevrolet Camaro convertible to take the band on a tour of Sunset Strip and Beverly Hills. It was a classic California day when we pulled off the road into a gas station and I started to pump gas into the tank. We were all crushed into it, I paid the attendant, and we set off again—but stupidly with the gas pump still attached to the car. I’d forgotten to take the nozzle out of the thing. I felt something stretching and managed to stop before we trailed the pump along Sunset Strip with a frantic gas station owner running behind us. So much for my fast-car, rock-star cool.