Eyes Wide Open

by Andy Powell

  Unfortunately, a bit more rebalancing was on the horizon. Not long after Muddy joined we recorded a new album, Clan Destiny—which I’ll talk more about in a couple of chapters’ time—which was to be Ray Weston’s last.

  For all the inspirational reading and nature-contemplating that Ray had been doing of late, he was obviously conflicted. Being in a band doing the level of touring that we were was clearly no longer good for his well-being. For a start, he was becoming obsessed with death. With his Scottish accent there was a certain morbid humour to it, like Private Frazer in Dad’s Army: ‘We’re doomed, DOOMED, ah tell ye!’

  Bob’s eyes would roll every time: Oh boy, we’re talking about death again … Eventually I had a one-to-one with Ray. Something had to give. He wasn’t living in London any more. London was burying him: he’d been a musician, playing in a large number of bands and in studios; he’d done the London thing and it was time for a change. He was giving California a try. I think in a way I pre-empted the inevitable and brought it to the surface. Sure enough, he did move on: he met a wonderful girl and moved permanently to California, started a new life out there, and, as far as I know, he’s extremely happy.

  * * *

  It was 2007. As I look back now, a whole new chapter—to my mind, the very best to date—was starting in the Wishbone Ash story with the arrival of Joe Crabtree as our new drummer. In hindsight, Joe completed the jigsaw. Wishbone Ash, in this form, became once again greater than the sum of its parts, as I believe had been the case with the very first line-up at its best.

  To date, we’ve delivered a series of albums that I regard as among our best—The Power Of Eternity (2008), Elegant Stealth (2011), and Blue Horizon (2014)—along with some fabulous concert performances, some of them filmed for DVD release. We have a small but perfectly formed support network of sound and road crew, website, PR, and merchandising associates around us, and some of the best and most loyal fans in the business. But that loyalty would be sorely tested during this whole period. Just as the good ship Wishbone was beginning at last to steer a steady course and find a fair wind to sail with, something was playing out that would have the effect of seriously endangering the buoyancy.

  In 2005, Martin Turner—‘founder member and original creative force’ behind the band, as his publicity material was declaring—started running an entity called Martin Turner’s Wishbone Ash. The market couldn’t stand it and, ultimately, neither could I. After seven years of attrition, of trying to be accommodating, trying to be pragmatic, trying to find some way in which we could all work around it—and finding that Martin and those advising him had no apparent interest in compromise—I was left with no option but to take him to court. Wishbone Ash added its tuppence worth (actually, a bloody sight more than that) to the ensuing trade mark dispute case in London, September 2013.

  The next chapter is my record of and reflection on that sorry episode. After that, we can all get back to a more positive subject: music.

  CHAPTER 9

  TANGIBLE EVIDENCE

  (2008–13)

  On October 29 2004, Martin Turner and his wife came along to a show we were doing in Surrey. Looking back, it’s possible that this was when Martin got the idea to create a version of the band himself. Sometime after that, he told me on the phone that he wanted to get back into playing music. He’d had this aborted solo career after he left Wishbone Ash in 1980, and by this point I think he realised that with Wishbone Ash he had been involved in something that was really quite special. Plenty of people were telling him as much. Enough years had gone by where he wanted to start playing that music again—which was great, and on a personal level I was delighted to hear it.

  Near the end of 2005, he suggested he use the name ‘Wishbone featuring Martin Turner’ or ‘Martin Turner’s Wishbone’, and I was cautiously relaxed about it. ‘Well, you’ve got to be careful,’ I said, ‘because, you know, we’ve never ceased to be a band since you’ve left and we’ve got various business contracts in place and a lot of tours booked and we don’t want anything to upset the apple cart.’

  I was quite clear about it, and on that basis we came to what you might call a ‘gentleman’s agreement’. But, for whatever reason, it didn’t take long to unravel. When it came to pass that his new vehicle was to go on the road as ‘Martin Turner’s Wishbone Ash’, that’s when people I was working with started saying, ‘Wow, you can’t have this, Andy—you can’t have two bands out there with the same name.’ And so, naturally, I made our objections felt.

  By this time Martin had been introduced to his new manager, Martin Darvill. As a man with many hats, managing myself and juggling all the many things that go into keeping a band on the road, at this stage I still hadn’t cottoned on that these people had a very specific agenda, which was building up to a coup d’état. I was a man running a modest corner shop, with a loyal and long-standing customer base, too busy just getting by to notice that all these people in supermarket trucks weren’t just circling around the area on a works outing. They wanted my business.

  Martin’s comeback trail had coalesced by 2007 into a real ‘them and us’ situation. They had started a website that was strikingly similar to our own. Our site had proved very, very successful—since we started it, in 1995, it had become a tremendous resource in connecting with fans and keeping people up to date with news and our current music and touring activity. We’d registered the domain name wishboneash.com in March 1998. As it later transpired in court, Martin had subsequently found wishboneash.co.uk to be unoccupied and registered it for himself three months later, though it would be a while before he used it. If Martin wanted to use it as a place for historical information on the band and his role in it, that was no problem at all—it was when it became a promotional tool for his current activities—given that the only proper noun in the URL was ‘Wishbone Ash’—that it crossed the line.

  Funnily enough, the fact that we were using a dot-com site in itself became a focus for disparagement among some on Martin’s forum—this bogus argument that we were a US band running a US website. It wasn’t a US website, it was a global website; and we weren’t a US band, we were the band, operating worldwide, with one person who happened to collect his mail in the US and three others in Europe. Spats about pointless minutiae like this would become wearying over the next few years.

  With a website in place, Martin started to rally people to his camp; our band became known as ‘the dark side’. There was a lot of extremely volatile to-ing and fro-ing between the two sites: fans turning on other fans and people nobly, if vainly, getting involved to defend my position—because by and large I wasn’t keen to go down that route. There’s just no point in slinging mud online and creating a quasi-permanent legacy of petulant commentary. There’s no dignity in it, and after a while nobody takes you seriously.

  As the decade rolled on, Martin’s band were beginning to have a material effect on Wishbone Ash’s ability to function. He was trying to get into the German market and had an aggressive agent who would simply study the dates that we were doing and then contact the same venues and promoters, offering to undercut us—and on many occasions he succeeded. Consequently, the first foray into a legal confrontation was in Germany at a venue called the Post Halle in Bavaria. We said to the venue, ‘Look, you’re booking a band and you are calling it “Wishbone Ash” and you’re sending out flyers all around Bavaria saying “Wishbone Ash is playing the Post Halle in Wurtsburg”—and you can’t do it.’ Given the modern German tradition of respect for the law, the venue backed down immediately, once it was explained to them that we had legal registration of the name Wishbone Ash. We had gone through a German lawyer and sent them what’s called a ‘cease and desist’ letter, after which they ceased and desisted. This was the same procedure that Steve Upton had employed years earlier, when Ted had tried to usurp our position with his bogus band, simply assuming he could purloin the name Wishbone Ash. It would have taken a lot of legwork to have had to do that with every booking, but
thankfully the word soon got around in Germany, and a lot of other clubs that were thinking of booking Martin’s Wishbone Ash backed off.

  So we had saved the German market, which was a start. Now came the UK.

  Back in Blighty, some of the weaker promoters, keen to make a quick buck, were booking Martin into venues for, in some cases, a third of our fees—places where we had worked long and hard over fifteen-to-twenty years to build an audience. I immediately ceased working with those promoters. What choice did I have? But that, of course, compromised the amount of work that we could do in the UK, along with the building of credible tours, which we had always managed to do. We weren’t weekend warriors, throwing a few amps in our cars and doing forays into the provinces. These tours took a lot of organisation, but now they were being seriously curtailed. We had become used to doing two UK tours a year—and, more importantly, the fans had come to expect it. Now, suddenly, we found that it was only possible to do one. Eventually, enough promoters—the good guys—were saying to me, ‘Andy, you’ve really got to sort this out because it’s not doing the name any good—the brand is being sold down the river.’

  However misty-eyed a band’s fans might be, those bands that provide the soundtrack to their lives are brands like any other—from football clubs to baked beans. And where there’s a brand it has to be protected. In this day and age, however brutal and myth-busting that may be to hear, and however contrary to the notion of rock’n’roll as a world of free spirits and outlaws it may be, it really is that simple. I’ll stick it to the man with as much gusto as the next person, but I still pay my taxes, drive within the speed limit, and help old ladies across roads if they require it. And I have a feeling most people are exactly the same.

  I had had the trade mark ‘Wishbone Ash’ registered in 1998—the impetus being the discovery that somebody in the UK was operating a clothing company called Wishbone Ash—and I’d been religiously paying trade mark dues, protecting the name from people with various products over the years. We had to come to arrangements with people from a company marketing a cartoon dog to another marketing a device designed to keep earphone cords in place. They all liked the ring of the words ‘Ash’ and ‘Wishbone’.

  All of that was really good for the band’s former members, because it kept the name Wishbone Ash intact and solid, with obvious consequences for the continuance of residual income streams. In addition, I’d waited eight years before registering the name, in which time there’d been no activity by any former members to protect and further the brand name. Not one of them had raised a hand objecting or called me to say, ‘Oi, we don’t like you carrying on the name of the band all these years and releasing albums and so on …’ None of them had pushed the idea that we’d disbanded because, in fact, we had not. They’d all left in a piecemeal fashion, one after another, during different years and phases. It was all agreed and well documented among the fans and in the press alike.

  There was a huge upsurge of tribute bands during the 90s—acts cheekily grabbing these bigger bands’ names and in some cases duping the public. It was a kind of Wild West period all over again, except the pioneers had done all the hard work finding the gold-bearing rock in the 60s and 70s, and now everyone and his dog was free to come along, put on a wig, come up with a wacky variation on a name, and start working the seam. Everyone thought it was a huge hoot—especially in Britain—but it was wreaking havoc with the business. As far as I know, there was never a Wishbone Cash-in or a Blowin’ Freeloaders, but there didn’t need to be: Martin had come along and, in respect of his fees, the pub-sized venues he was tending to play, and his easy accessibility to punters around Britain any other weekend, he had effectively cornered that market himself, even making cheesy jokes about the names he’d considered and publishing an article on his website titled ‘What’s in a name?’

  Joking aside, there was an interesting precedent during 1990–91, when Johnny Fean, former lead guitarist and co-vocalist with Celtic-rock band Horslips—who operated between 1972–80 and were a particularly popular live draw in Ireland—fronted an act called The Spirit Of Horslips. He was effectively an original member operating his own tribute band, and doing so with the relaxed approval of his former colleagues, who were all following paths outside of music at that time. Nobody was being conned. In fact, it’s a bonus for any fan going to see a tribute band and finding it’s fronted by one of the tributees. If he’d called the band ‘Horslips’, coming back after a ten-year gap with only himself and hired hands in the line-up, I’d imagine people would have felt cheated. As it transpired, the full Horslips reunited in a blaze of glory in the mid 2000s for occasional gigs and live albums on an ongoing basis, and now everyone’s a winner. The point being: if Martin had wanted to do something like that it would have been fine by me, but I completely understand that he would have felt uncomfortable embracing that ‘tribute band’ flag so obviously. What I don’t understand is why he seemingly had a problem with using a clear, descriptive name that would have celebrated the music but avoided all the confusion.

  Eventually, the gentlemanly exchanges in trying to resolve this thing went out the window. I’d started to receive phone calls not from Martin Turner but from Martin Darvill, and I found them intimidating. He had clearly been talking to all of the former Wishbone Ash members from the 70s and they had, apparently, all come to the conclusion that now was a good time for a reunion. The plan was a short UK tour and a concert at the Hammersmith Apollo. I was an inconvenient thorn in their side at that point because I’d never left the band—I’d just continued. The existing Wishbone Ash—the Wishbone Ash—had relationships with agents and record labels; we’d done tons of work all over the world, and the fans were behind us. It wasn’t a business in limbo, looking for a buyer. There may have been vacancies in the entertainment continuum labelled ‘The Beatles’ or ‘Pink Floyd’ or ‘The Dudley Moore Trio’, but the plot of ground marked ‘Wishbone Ash’ was already occupied; the deeds were in order and the mortgage payments were up to date. The occupants had no wish to move on.

  Nevertheless, with all his other ducks in a row, Darvill came calling with this plan for a reunion. While Darvill was someone I disliked and wished to avoid, I wasn’t actually against the idea of the four of us—Martin, Ted, Steve, and myself—playing together again. As the popular music business evolves and the textbook continues to be written as new circumstances arise, usually with the pen of pragmatism, there are always ways and means to square what might at first appear to be a circle. In 2008 and again in 2011, the five original members of Pentangle regrouped for limited concerts and TV appearances in the context of short sabbaticals for the other members of ‘Jacqui McShee’s Pentangle’. The latter group was a touring and recording entity the singer had been fronting since inheriting the name, with the blessing of all concerned, in the mid 90s—the other originals having dropped out one by one in the fifteen years following a 1982 reunion. It was all perfectly amicable. Perhaps even closer to the Ash model, the ‘classic’ 70s line-up of Status Quo regrouped for a couple of short tours in 2013–14—John Coghlan and Alan Lancaster momentarily burying whatever hatchets there were with Quo lifers Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt, all with the active endorsement of the current Status Quo rhythm section. Again, everyone seemed perfectly happy about the arrangement. There was no loser in either case, and the fans were the winners. Everyone had their cake and ate it.

  The key differences with the Wishbone Ash scenario, of course, was the presence of Martin Darvill as would-be impresario, and the dysfunction in communications between the supposed creative participants from the get-go. I found it weird that not one of these guys who had shared the band with me in the 70s had ever called me up about this reunion idea. Not one call. There was no human element to it.

  Throughout this whole sorry episode I was criticised for being some kind of business-oriented power freak by people in the Turner/Darvill camp. But my ethos for running a band is this: yes, it’s got to have elements of very tough bus
iness, so that we get the best deal possible to keep the ship afloat, but it’s also got to have this huge fun factor to it and a good lifestyle factor. And, not least, it mustn’t forget the fans. At the time of writing, we’ve run about twenty fan club conventions all around the world. The fan community to me was massively important—and this ‘Martin Turner’s Wishbone Ash’ situation and the idea of a reunion cash-in was just dumping all over it.

  We could certainly have done something similar to the Status Quo solution in a limited way, but you don’t initiate a wonderful, feel-good event like that unless there’s genuine positivity behind it. That being said, I’ve always been a very easygoing, inclusive person, and despite the fact that all of this came as a kind of ultimatum, I was still at that point fairly open to possibilities. The problem was that Darvill had inserted himself very firmly in the middle.

  There had been very little contact between the three other original members and myself in recent years—and probably also very little contact between themselves. There had been periods in the 90s, for example, where I’d been playing in France near where Steve Upton was living, running Miles Copeland’s chateau—I’d be only 10km away but when I’d call him up he’d tell me he had ‘another appointment’. I’d call him as well as Martin Turner periodically about royalty issues, though, which was fine. As for Ted, he was somewhere in Arizona. Ted was always an errant soul—no one could ever get in touch with him, or at least not easily. Laurie Wisefield and I were in communication at various points, and I’d seen him socially, if briefly, over the years at gigs he was doing with Tina Turner and suchlike. I suppose it’s not that different to a situation where school or college friends are part of an intensive social circle for a period but eventually grow up, change, move on, find new circles of friends, become different people. Where bands differ is that, having created ‘product’ that has a long commercial afterlife, there remains a residual business connection, which can endure and require periodic attention long after personal relations have cooled or are extinguished.