Eyes Wide Open

by Andy Powell

  With all this in his modus operandi, a lot of things became very easy when Ben joined the band. His physical energy, his showmanship, his writing—they all raised everyone’s game. One other impact was that it pushed me even further into the vocal area, into unashamedly being the band’s main vocalist, because I felt I had material now that I could get to grips with. It was a new century and, with no disrespect to the members of the previous few years, it felt like a newly rebooted Wishbone Ash, ready and willing to take it on.

  * * *

  We recorded Bona Fide in a studio that Uncle Barry knew, near a farm down in Kent. We stayed in a little motel down there and somehow, despite the bucolic-sounding environment, we got a high-energy album out of the experience. Released in 2002, Bona Fide would be the only Wishbone Ash studio set between our 1999 acoustic album, Bare Bones, and 2006. You might alter that analysis to say it would be our only studio album proper in the ten years between Illuminations in 1996 and 2006. It was a time for Wishbone Ash to stake our claim anew as a vibrant and creative entity, and we wouldn’t be wasting the opportunity. Bona Fide would be an album to define an era for us, and we were giving everything we could to make it right.

  Players, studio, production techniques, what mood people are in, the weather—it all plays a part. But the foundation of any album is the material you choose to present. If the songs are no good, or if the spirit behind them is wrong or the writing half-baked, all you end up doing is creating a record—literally, a record—of your mediocrity or lack of focus at that particular moment in time. We’d already had Locked In; we weren’t going to do that again.

  The opening track, ‘Almighty Blues’, written by Ben, is an exquisitely controlled explosion of energy. It would be a big stage number for us for many years. I produced the track, adding the twin-guitar stamp and some high-energy soloing and so on. Ben had everything else nailed down. Some of the other songs were trickier, because we were recording in the year of 9/11. For any artist, the dilemma was to either choose to ignore this momentous event or to somehow address it. We chose the latter in songs like the successful ‘Ancient Remedy’ and the even more ambitious ‘Come Rain Come Shine’. I think we scored big on cuts like ‘Faith, Hope And Love’ and also ‘Changing Tracks’. There was soloing aplenty from both Ben and me, while Bob and Ray upped their energy levels considerably on the album. The fans lapped it up.

  Bona Fide would have seemed to long-term Ash listeners, like our recently revamped stage sound, both familiar and new. It is undeniably ‘Wishbone Ash’ yet it doesn’t quite sound like a typical British or American rock album. Partly that’s because, while all the recording was done in England, engineered by Rob Williams and assisted by Rob Spickett, it was mixed in Finland.

  Ben had been working with one Magnus Axberg, an engineer in Helsinki, and he said, ‘I really trust this guy’s work, especially with vocals and guitars. Would you mind if we took it up there and let him mix it?’

  By this time I had noticed the production quality and techniques from a lot of people coming out Scandinavia but I was really nervous about letting go of the reins. It would be a first for me to not be in the studio during the mixing sessions. There’s absolutely no reason new ideas in studio production can’t originate in what some might assume to be some kind of backwater in Scandinavia and travel from there around the world. Whatever one might think of ABBA, their production sound was, and remains, unique—and it translated very successfully to a large part of the wider world. Another more recent band from that part of the world of whom I’m a huge fan is The Cardigans, and I particularly like their production.

  So we gave Ben’s recommendation a go, and we got the benefit of that. I really enjoyed what they did with the vocals, particularly. I think we spent about £20,000 on the album, and a lot of that was on the production. Rob Williams was quite disappointed that he didn’t get a crack at the final mixes—it would have sounded very different, a lot more English, less processed. But I was happy. As far as I was concerned, Bona Fide was an album for the new millennium. We had somebody from another planet—Ben from the planet Finland—and it was a new era: ‘anything goes’.

  It was a fresh start in every sense of the word. Touring became a lot of fun. Ben was very garrulous, and the fans loved him. They still talk about him. They loved the energy that he brought. They could see I was getting a kick up the pants, guitar-wise. Fair enough, there was a lot of drinking going on—Ben was as serious about that as he was about his fitness—but we became an even more upbeat, positive rock’n’roll band. I really enjoyed having Ben shoulder some of the relentless positive energy that I’d always employed in the different incarnations of the band, because sometimes it can take its toll on you physically. Having Ben’s upbeat energy in the mix definitely gave me some respite from this constant aspect of keeping the good ship Wishbone Ash ploughing forward, ever onward.

  * * *

  Ben Granfelt, Bob Skeat, Ray Weston, and I made a good team at the time—one that lasted about four years. To the casual observer it may have seemed that Ben and Ray were the rakish personalities in that band, while I was out there at the front, captaining the ship. But, as is often the case, the quiet fellow in the background is the one with a firm grip on the rudder.

  Bob Skeat’s contribution to Wishbone Ash cannot be underestimated. At the time of writing, he’s been in the band for nearly eighteen years—almost as long as Steve Upton was a member, and longer than anyone else at any time, bar myself. You wouldn’t keep someone on side for that length of time unless he was delivering the goods musically and was easy to get along with, and Bob ticks both of those boxes. He’s always been the most musical guy in the band, and it really helps if your bass player is that way because they’re the person underpinning the music.

  Aside from his great musicality, Bob’s a great diffuser of tension. He’s so schooled in the life of a professional musician that he realises you can’t fight it—you’ve just got to go with the flow. He’s superbly well adapted to the demands of the lifestyle and is also very, very disciplined. Somehow, Bob’s always smiling. He seems to just float through. He never throws a wobbler, though he might come down to a hotel reception once in a while and express his views robustly if the internet’s not working in his room or the taps are dripping. It’ll be something small like that, but it isn’t often.

  On another level, though, Bob is very, very important to the band because he’s been someone the other members can all go to individually with various gripes and grumbles and he’ll dissipate all the angst. I joke with him that he’s our first lieutenant, but his ‘rank’ is really much higher. He’s got a great sense of humour, so whatever the problem is it always seems less so after a chat with Bob. In fact, you might say ‘Bob’s your uncle’—which will probably mean nothing to anyone unfamiliar with the rich lexicon of English clichés and euphemisms.

  There were points where Ray and Ben clashed and the dynamic there was a bit different to any minor clashes between Ray and me. I think it was a question of egos. Ray could see that Ben was somewhat of an ascending star, while Ray had been in the band quite a while and was going through his own problems, which were starting to come to the fore a bit. Ben was the opposite: very gung-ho, very positive. It was an alpha male thing. Ray was a ladies’ man, had a certain swagger in his step, and maybe Ben was taking some of that focus of attention now. There were times when it would flare up. To be honest, I was oblivious to it a lot of the time but Bob would often clue me in: ‘Oh, bit of tension there …’

  There was one time when I think Ray was challenging Ben physically, making fun of his martial arts. And of course, as with anyone who studies martial arts, they never unleash it on anyone else, even in jest. Funnily enough, years before, Miles Copeland was the same—he was a black belt in judo. The rest of us would always try and provoke him. There’d be three or four of us on his back, roughhousing in hotel rooms on the road, just to see if he’d ever use his judo, and he never did. That was the kind of situ
ation that was going on between Ben and Ray. One time I came out of a venue and saw the two of them literally rolling around in the dirt. I think Ray had taken it one step too far—a Wishbone clash—but even then, Ben still didn’t unleash his weaponry.

  So there was always this taunting going on, but that’s a part of the dynamic of any band. Perhaps in this case, though, it hinted at something of more consequence. Ray was basically a lovely guy and he and I had some really fun times on the road together—much of the time it was just a laugh. He’d leave the band in 2006, and in these later years, when he’d been in the band a long time, he’d be in the back of the van, just groaning, lying down. I could see he was starting to become lost at sea.

  One day we stopped at a layby for a bit of a breather on the road. I’d noticed that Ray was reading quite a lot of self-help books, often by Deepak Chopra—who could make a lot of sense.

  There was Ray, in this layby, standing by a bush. He wasn’t having a pee; he was just standing there.

  ‘Ray, what’s going on? Why are you standing by that bush?’

  ‘Oh, Deepak says I need to be in nature for at least twenty minutes a day.’

  So Ray’s standing by this bush, ‘in nature’. I don’t think this is what Deepak meant, exactly—I think he was talking about a walk in the country. But the best Ray could do, as an itinerant musician, was stop in a layby and look at some shrubbery.

  * * *

  In hindsight, Ray was coming to a kind of natural end for his time as a hard-touring musician. It was Ben, though, who would leave first, and for similar reasons. In the four years we were together we did a lot of live work around the world, probably close to 500 shows, all on the back of that one album, Bona Fide. It had legs. We were still of the mindset that an album like that could create some kind of waves in the rock world. While it did among the fan community and the venues we were playing in, it didn’t really change anything, career-wise, for any of us. It was difficult to see where we could take it on from there.

  There was a feeling with Ben that maybe he’d expected more out of his involvement with Wishbone Ash in commercial terms. There were also, as had been the case with Mark Birch, domestic issues that were occurring alongside the amount of touring we were doing, and which were really impacting him in a big way.

  I remember we played a show one night in Chester while he was going through a breakup. I’d seen this so many times with different members of the band. There’s so much travel involved in being in a band that relationships almost inevitably suffer. Even Pauline and I, married now for forty-three years, have had to surf those waves. But there we were in Chester, about to go onstage, and Ben was literally falling apart. It was heartbreaking.

  Ben did end up getting divorced and then not too long after that he found a young lady, Jona, and became engaged to her. He remarried and became a father. He was also heavily involved with the Engl amp company and started importing and retailing their products to build up a livelihood outside of the band. This was all within the tenure of his time in Wishbone Ash, and so all of that played into his eventual decision to quit the band. He simply needed to be with his new family in Helsinki.

  I was very sorry to see Ben leave because we worked well as a team. But it wouldn’t necessarily be true to say there was a great second album waiting to emerge that was suddenly dashed by his departure. The way I view it is that this incarnation of Wishbone Ash lasted pretty much the right amount of time.

  Ben gave an enormous amount to the band. He pushed me into being a vocalist, fair and square, and the energy he brought was tremendous. There was never any hanging around in the studio—he got on with the job. He remains one of the most efficient studio musicians I know. He’d come in with all the sounds, the effects, the pedals ready to go. He’d already ‘produced’ his sound before he walked into the room. A true pro. But the greatest gift Ben gave me was his replacement—and an individual of greater contrast it would be hard to imagine.

  Shortly after playing his valedictory gig as a member of Wishbone Ash, Ben rang me in Connecticut one day and asked, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to go down that road again, Ben: go to London and start auditioning guitar players.’

  ‘Well, look, by all means have the auditions. But I would like to put forward the guy I played with in Gringos Locos all those years ago. I know his style would fit perfectly for Wishbone. Why don’t you at least see him at the auditions?’

  And that was Muddy Manninen. If this were a fairy tale or a Hollywood movie, I’d be able to say that Muddy breezed into the auditions, our eyes met, bluebirds sang, and immediately I knew the whole thing was sorted out. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  We eventually got round to holding the auditions at Ritz Studios in Putney. It’s a well-known rehearsal studio, built underneath the railway arches in Putney High Street, and I’d always liked the sound of the rooms. Unusually, the studios are set up with a window looking through to a kitchen/waiting area—a detail that will become relevant in due course.

  All sorts of people came down there by word of mouth. Ray had a good address book—he’d played with many people in London—and had put the word out. It was a fairly formal process. Personally, I hate auditions. It’s the worst way you can meet someone. People were lined up in a waiting room, coming in cold and playing through some prearranged songs. It’s a far cry from hanging out with someone on the road, watching them from the side of the stage and getting to know their personality and their musicianship in a natural environment, as had been the case with Ben.

  I remember speaking to Phil Palmer one time after he’d auditioned for Eric Clapton’s band. You lined up, you walked in, and it generally turned out you weren’t even auditioning with the maestro himself—it’s his backing band, and in due course somebody does or doesn’t put you on a shortlist. In this case, however, Eric was actually there, and Phil told me, ‘I started to play and it suddenly hit me that all the licks I was playing were Eric’s!’ The guy’s been around so long you can’t help having some of his moves in your arsenal, but poor Phil had come face to face with the man and was coming over like a tribute act. He still got the gig, though.

  I’m not sure that I would be so forgiving, if that’s even the right word. The refreshing thing with Ben was that he had his own lexicon of riffs and licks, but at this audition for his replacement I’d have some of these guys coming in and playing my own licks back to me, and I’m thinking, Oh God, no, no, no… I’m sure it’s meant to be flattering, or at least ingratiating, but it’s just depressing. If I want to hear someone playing like that I can do so onstage every night, and he’s standing in my shoes.

  After a whole day of this sort of thing I was putting one guy through the mill and at the same time looking through the interior window at this other fellow, very gauche, very awkward, clinging to a Les Paul Junior and looking distinctly uncomfortable and distinctively, well, Finnish. Gosh, I thought, this must be Muddy …

  He came into the audition room, plugged in his guitar, and immediately it was a total fit, hand in glove. His vibrato synched up with mine, his guitar tone was in the same area as mine. We smiled at each other because we both knew it was working. Bob and Ray were there and they too could see it immediately.

  I think Muddy was the last to audition that day. I told him I’d let him know. His musicality was fantastic, but I remember having these serious reservations because of his reserved character. But ultimately I decided the musical ‘fit’ was too good to pass up. We’d had one Finn in the band before and it had worked, plus Ben had spoken highly of Muddy and had worked with him in a professional band before. We’d give it a go.

  Where Ben had been an extrovert onstage and loved the limelight, Muddy was the opposite. It became even more apparent, actually, after he joined the band. I had to change my game massively to compensate. He was a muso, pure and simple, and he still is—though, in a way, that somewhat aloof aspect he so effortlessly projects has
become a kind of personality in itself. Fans have grown to know and love him for it. It’s a win-win situation.

  While Muddy didn’t have any desire to become a limelight-hogger, what he did have was a vast musical knowledge. His mother was a keen record collector, and Muddy’s the same. I’ve always thought that if he hadn’t been in a rock band he could have been a musicologist, somebody teaching popular culture in a university—engaging with it quite happily from the comfort of a book-lined seminar room with a great valve hi-fi and turntable in the corner. His knowledge of music history is better than anyone I know. He listens to music all day long.

  ‘What are you listening to?’ I’ll ask.

  ‘Frank Sinatra.’

  What?!

  Periodically he’ll get into a whole trip on Cab Calloway or Juicy Luicy or Moby Grape or someone equally left-field. Typically, over breakfast on the road, he might momentarily remove his earphones and ask, ‘Did you ever play with Quintessence, back in the day?’

  ‘Err, yeah, I think we did …’

  As Muddy told me later, even though he could speak English well there were lots of things about the English culture and use of language in his early days with us that he would miss. It later became apparent to me that it was a nightmare for him to meet people, not least fans after a show. By this time we had become a very open and engaging band, always available to glad-hand fans and chat to people. With Ben in the band we had done our first fan-club cruises: package vacations in the Caribbean, where it’s all about giving the fans total access. Ben was a natural at that stuff but I don’t think we could have done that immediately with Muddy. He’s better now but at that time he would have found it very difficult to engage fully with all the schmoozing—with becoming a ‘personality’ in any obvious sense of the word. But it was no problem, really; it just meant a bit of a rebalancing of the band dynamic.