Eyes Wide Open

by Andy Powell

  Still, you might well wonder why Laurie was involved in all this. I wondered that too. He was apparently there as a potential rabbit in the conjurer’s hat. I was told in no uncertain terms that the ex-members would like me on board with this reunion but if I didn’t want to be on board, there was always another 70s guitarist from Wishbone Ash: they would have a four-piece band either way. And at that point, Darvill said that they were going to do this with or without me, and if I wanted to do it they would give me £30,000 in cash.

  That was the big carrot. ‘Well, I’ll consider it,’ I replied, ‘but at this stage of my life, I’m not doing everything just for cash. I don’t think this is necessarily a good deal for the promoters … and I’m a bit pissed off that you didn’t have the good manners to ask me rather than tell me. In fact, you have no legal right to negotiate for anything under the name Wishbone Ash.’

  At the very least it was disrespectful. I had kept the name going in the dark years, out there treading the boards in all sorts of places aside from regular tours of the UK, America, and Western Europe, and all the ex-members had continued to receive regular income as a result—mechanical and publishing royalties from a shared back catalogue that was being kept buoyant by current activity, PRS concert repertoire income from vintage songs continuing to be played live all over the world. But now, having been goaded by a third party, they had decided it was time to slaughter the fatted calf, throw a banquet in Hammersmith, pull some lapsed fans out of the woodwork, and gorge like there’s no tomorrow. And that’s exactly what would have happened: there would have been no tomorrow—it was a cash-in based purely on the lure of cash, a short-termist enterprise with two people in Steve and Ted who hadn’t played professionally in over twenty years, another in Martin Turner who couldn’t be bothered to talk to me on the phone, and a middleman waiting in the wings to push Laurie Wisefield onstage in the very likely event that such an ill-starred reheating of the soufflé might collapse in mistrust, acrimony, or a basic lack of any real ability to play to a professional standard. To my mind, it had all the ingredients of a sell-out (in both senses) and a fiasco.

  The whole thing had been presented to me by Darvill as a fait accompli, with the suggestion that, if I decided to pursue legal recourse, I’d not only lose the case but quite possibly lose my house. For me, really, that was the last straw. I saw red.

  We already had our own fortieth anniversary thing in mind, which was a concert at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, due to be filmed for DVD. I just went ahead and booked a date in June 2009. I put it out in the press that I would love to invite the original members to join us onstage.

  There was an element of taking the fight to the enemy in that press statement, but the truth is I wouldn’t have minded if we’d all got together—a good-spirited one-off jog down memory lane in a controlled environment where everyone could shine for a moment, share in the revenues, and give pleasure to a lot of people. It might have cleared the air—and, after all, in purely musical terms, Wishbone Ash is the shared heritage of everyone who’s ever been in it. Martin, however, saw that as me being disrespectful to him, as if I was saying, ‘Come along and be bit-part players in my band.’

  Prior to all this, Darvill had turned up in person in New Jersey, to a little place we were playing, where I’d met him for the first time—or so I thought. It was then that he told me, as I’ve mentioned earlier, that he’d come to my home as a kid and I’d signed a guitar for him. But the way he did it was so odd and intimidating, sidling up to me, whispering in my ear, before any other introductory chat.

  I’ve been in your house …

  What sort of person does that? What other instinct would any sane person have to that kind of thing other than one of defence? Nevertheless, he’s managed to build a kind of empire with a stable of bands from a certain era and I suspect he’s done so because musicians, especially guys from the 70s, are used to having big amounts of money dangled in front of them; they are used to somebody sorting their lives out and managing them, and when I say managing them, I’m talking about changing their nappies. That works for a lot of people. He must have thought I was one of them.

  * * *

  In 2008, Steve Upton, Martin Turner, and David (Ted) Turner applied to OHIM—The Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market, the people who look after Trade Marks in Europe—for the name ‘Wishbone Ash’. I heard about it in November of that year and registered my objection. In May 2010, OHIM ruled in my favour. But that was only the opening skirmish at law.

  I engaged the British law firm Walker Morris, and in due course I initiated a kind of summit, at their office in Leeds, with the two Martins. It seemed to me that the pair of them treated the whole thing as a bit of a joke. They were on their way to a football match in Leeds and this meeting seemed to be just something to do on the way. There was a moment of light relief in the meeting when Martin T. wanted to record the whole thing but couldn’t make his gadget work—a so-called producer who couldn’t find the ‘on’ button on a digital voice recorder!

  In general terms, as a punter, when you see something advertised as ‘Mike Pender’s Searchers’ or ‘Eric Burdon’s Animals’, you understand that it’s going to be that person plus some other guys. But it can also feel pretty tawdry. It is implicit, if a construction like that is being used, that somewhere out there, someone else is running a vestigial version of the same band. As a fan you can’t help feeling things must have got a bit desperate—that something you might once have loved has been carved up in acrimony and the carcass, or in some cases a distant echo of it, is subsequently being trawled around the country for a last-gasp effort to squeeze some cash out of the thing.

  Funnily enough, along these very lines, Martin Darvill held up as a beacon of positivity the recent saga of Barclay James Harvest, a soft-prog band of our era, as a win-win situation: a benchmark for the Cloud Cuckoo Land successes awaiting a ‘double Wishbone Ash’ scenario. Following a sabbatical or a falling out of some sort in 1998, one of the BJH guys, John Lees, released an album entitled Barclay James Harvest Through The Eyes Of John Lees. That then became, however implausibly, the name of his touring band. Worse, John then roped in another original Harvester, Woolly Wolstenholme, and fans would be confronted with publicity material encouraging them to attend something called Barclay James Harvest Through The Eyes Of John Lees Featuring Former Founder Member Woolly Wolstenholme. I mean, really—in the annals of rock, has there ever been a band name less compelling or more absurd? And in what way can someone be a ‘former founder member’? They either are or they aren’t. You can’t take a sabbatical from having been a founder member of something. At that point Les Holroyd, another Barclay-as-was former/founder alumnus, launched Barclay James Harvest Featuring Les Holroyd and, perhaps inevitably, rounded up the only other former/founder member, Mel Pritchard. While Les had the sense not to bill his act as Barclay James Harvest Featuring Les Holroyd And Also Featuring Mel Pritchard, he did go on the road as Barclay James Harvest Featuring Les Holroyd With The City Of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s almost as if the whole thing was a memory test for fans (‘former founder fans’ included) or an attempt to find the cumular limit of what is possible to fit on a T-shirt.

  Darvill said something to the effect that if Barclay James Harvest can do great business with Les Holroyd and John Lees operating their own versions, what was the problem? ‘But Martin,’ I replied, ‘do you not realise how tawdry that looks and sounds? If you think Wishbone Ash are going to go down that road you’re really mistaken. This is a forty-year-old band with a great cachet. Those guys you’re representing won’t know it now but it’s actually worth it to them in the long run to keep this thing intact.’ Aside from which, as far as I was aware, from what promoters were telling me, the two Barclay James Harvesters currently on the road were gathering in corn of appropriately reduced volume to what would have been the case were John and Les operating the same vehicle—combined Harvesters, if you will.

  At one point du
ring the meeting, when it was clear that nothing of any value was being agreed, my lawyers suggested we take some time out and think about the options, to see whether there was some kind of agreement we could come to. I was trying to be pragmatic; I wasn’t trying to restrain Martin from playing music. That he’d decided to pick up the bass again, and play the music of Wishbone Ash, wasn’t an issue. I thought it was a good thing. But to blatantly try and grab back the name, fifteen or more years after he’d left, was ridiculous.

  This ridiculousness seemed perfectly obvious to me, and I was hoping—if it came to it—that the law would agree. But I was also hoping, if at all possible, to avoid taking it to court. The huge expense and disruption that was sure to entail is not to be taken lightly. I can only assume that the two Martins thought I lacked the will or the resources to do so.

  In the meantime, our ‘thrash it out’ summit turned out to be just a fumbling, bumbling, inconsequential meeting that was extremely expensive to set up and, as it appeared to my lawyers and me, not taken remotely seriously by the other side. I realised then that they had no intention of changing the name of Martin Turner’s Wishbone Ash. You had a manager who was independently well set up and who was stroking the ego of somebody who simply didn’t realise what the business had become and now had nothing to lose. The two of them were like a double act. Without his namesake, I don’t believe that Martin would have had the balls. As it was, they were just ‘having a laugh’. It appeared to be all about needling me. And it was working.

  * * *

  Shortly after that meeting, in May 2012, we issued a communication saying we were going to try and get the case tried in court. We decided to use the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (formerly the Patents County Court) because this was basically an argument about a trade mark and the ownership thereof. It was time to lance the boil.

  Anyone who’s seen the Beatles-spoofing film The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (1978) will no doubt recall the terrific scene where Michael Palin, playing a business representative of The Rutles in their death throes, stands outside the offices of ‘Rutle Corps’, casually reeling off a list of people he’s going to sue that day—as a stream of furtive individuals can be seen in the background, walking out of the place with office supplies, items of furniture, and stuffed gorillas. It’s a great satire of the business end of music, because there’s enough of a ring of truth about it. In fact, anyone who has read Peter Doggett’s You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle For The Soul Of The Beatles (2010) will be stunned (shocked and stunned) to find out just how much truth there was to it. The Beatles’ cooling personal relations and complex business affairs at the end of the 60s generated such a colossal afterlife of litigations—at one point, as Peter discovers, they literally sued themselves, just as Palin’s character had supposedly spoofed—that one finds it incredible that any of them had the mental space to continue creating music and maintaining a positive outlook over the subsequent twenty-odd years.

  From my own limited experience, the only way to deal with this is to compartmentalise it: hire lawyers and put the necessary time into supplying them with whatever information is required (or, if you’re a Beatle, hire someone to do the information digging for you) but regard it all as a separate entity to the day-to-day running of your ongoing career.

  If I was going to prove that Wishbone Ash had, in the eyes of the law, devolved to my ownership, I needed to find documentation to support the claim. For the whole summer before the trial date, Pauline and I became Wishbone archaeologists. I have storage units in the UK and in the States wherein lurk the artefacts of our entire business, going back nearly forty-five years. Many times in the past, Pauline had told me, ‘Andy, get rid of this crap—do we really need it?’ Well, it turned out we did.

  Among all the detritus we found Ted Turner’s handwritten resignation letter from 1974, complete with spelling mistakes. The whole process was like breathing in the dust of the 70s, without the fun of having a trip in the TARDIS. It was utter drudgery, soul-destroying at times. Despite being in a band that’s forty-six years old, I live pretty much in the present: I like being in the present, and I like to think in the present. That being said, now and again we did find the odd interesting surprise and things that I had completely forgotten about—contracts from shows that would cause you to do a double-take: ‘Wow, you’re kidding me—we actually made ten grand back in 1972 for a show in Boise, Idaho? We certainly didn’t see ten grand!’

  Trawling through this stuff, I’d forgotten that the 80s was the era of faxes. So there’d be all of these faxes that had all but faded—built-in obsolescence. And then you’d go back to the 70s and find ledgers and other paperwork, all handwritten, largely by Steve Upton. In those days he was the road manager, so he notated stuff in painstaking form. It looks like something from the age of Dickens.

  We were particularly keen to find Steve Upton’s ‘cease and desist’ letter to Ted Turner, from the time in 1983 when Ted was briefly running a bogus ‘Wishbone Ash’ in Texas. I knew he’d used a law firm in New York City—Grubman, Indursky & Schindler, which subsequently became one of the biggest music-business law firms in the world—but at that time they were just our little lawyers. I rang them up.

  ‘Can you guys dig around and see if you can find this cease-and-desist letter?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ll get back to you in a couple of weeks,’ they replied. ‘We’ve got storage units ourselves …’

  Sure enough, they came back in a couple of weeks: they’d tried but they just couldn’t find it. Luckily, though, they had found a letter from Steve requesting it. Thus, after three months of crate-digging, when we walked into the court room that September morning, I was pretty confident that, for anything they could throw at us, I could say, ‘Ah, well, I’ll think you’ll find that this proves …’

  * * *

  I’m lucky to be a naturally positive person, but I can understand those who might find themselves consumed with the trauma of being involved in a legal action. These things don’t happen quickly. Between filing the ‘Infringement of Trade Mark’ claim in May 2012 and having our day in court (two days, as it transpired) in September 2013, there was over a year’s worth of preparation and anxiety, with about seven years of mounting attrition before that.

  Pauline, in particular, found the whole thing a horrendous experience. She went through a long period of hating the internet, having to keep up with what was going on at Martin Turner’s website. Being kept informed was a necessary evil, but there were some vicious people posting there.

  I kept a very low profile during all of this online warfare, and to an extent so did Martin, although he did keep posting a lot of what at the time were referred to as ‘clarification statements’. It became a running joke among a lot of fans on our website: Not another clarification statement—which often turned out to be a clarification of a clarification. Once you start doing that, you are totally damned if you do, damned if you don’t. So I was wise to keep quiet. The time would come.

  The stress continued, however. There were times when Pauline would wake at six in the morning and go and sit on the porch and write letters. None of them were ever going to be sent but it was a kind of coping mechanism: getting down on paper all the injustice and exasperation that was clogging the mind. All the while, this vision of losing our home was ever-present.

  Eventually we became stoic about it all. Years before, we had been burgled. When the police came they said, ‘You’ll go through a whole range of emotions: you will be scared, upset, and the very last emotion you will get to is anger.’ And that’s pretty similar to the rollercoaster of emotions when something like this happens: it feels like your whole life is being burgled on a daily basis with the possibility that one day they’ll stop chipping away and just come for your home. It was a violation.

  It was heartening during this period to find out who your friends are, and to be reassured that their number was great. My current band colleagues, Bob Skeat, Muddy Manninen, and Joe Cr
abtree were first among the faithful, sharing the load as much as they could. In purely legal terms they are all ‘subcontractors’ rather than part of an ‘equal partnership’—that’s been the case with every new member since Laurie Wisefield left in 1985—but that employment status hides a much bigger picture. All three have bought into being long-term members of this band. At the time of writing they’ve been members for eighteen, eleven, and eight years, respectively—and that eight-year period as a four-piece alone is longer than any other Wishbone Ash incarnation. They’ve put their heart and souls on the line in creating the music and spending time convening with the fans. They’re invested in it, not just monetarily, but on a personal and familial basis.

  Aside from those in my immediate circle, the majority of the fans that kept the faith with the band were completely in sync with what we’d been doing. Most people saw common sense. Aside from a hard core of very long-standing supporters, we have fans now around the world, particularly in Germany, who are in their thirties and forties—people who simply weren’t around when we were playing the town halls of Great Britain back in the early 70s. They had become fans of this band. Bob Skeat means more to them than Martin Turner; Martin is a distant memory.

  Of course, every band member in every band has their own coterie of fans, and there were lots of people who particularly loved Martin’s songwriting and his singing and his persona, and a Martin Turner comeback would have pulled those people out of the woodwork—people who wouldn’t necessarily have been interested in the band as it had developed in the years after his departure. These people saw it very much in black-and-white: Martin was the original bass player, therefore Martin should be allowed to share the name.