by Andy Powell
To you Colin, my co-writer, for your boundless enthusiasm and passion for all things cultural from the latter part of the twentieth century, and for the taciturn wit and responses from the inimitable Heather.
Colin thanks
Heather, for putting up with all the Rock, be it Classic, Progressive, or Pantomime. Thanks to all the chaps in Wishbone Ash (band, crew, and Pauline) for being so welcoming—even Muddy. Thanks to Bewley’s Airport Hotel, Dublin, for several splendid bar/restaurant experiences along the way and to the discreetly unnamed hotel near Milton Keynes for providing so much fun with the rhubarb crumbles. And thank you Andy for making the process of working on this book such an enjoyable experience.
Photo credits
Front cover image by Juergen Spachmann/bigface.de. Title page image by Michael Putland/Getty Images. All other interior photography from the author’s collection. If you feel there has been a mistaken attribution, please contact the publishers.
CO-AUTHOR’S NOTE
Wishbone Ash today, as Andy once said to me, is about total transparency: interacting with fans in person and online, listening to their suggestions and observations, making time for them—because it’s only through respect for the people who come to the shows that the good ship Wishbone continues. With that in mind, perhaps it would be of interest to explain the process of creating this book.
During 2012, in the early stages of working on a John McLaughlin book (Bathed In Lightning, published by Jawbone in 2014), Andy was kind enough to give me a phone interview toward it. I had the impression, from shooting the breeze after the interview, that Andy had thoughts around writing a book himself. When the McLaughlin project was completed I got in touch again and offered my services if Andy felt he could use some help with it. We convened at Bewley’s Airport Hotel, Dublin, in early April 2014—one hundred miles down the road from me, midway (ish) from Connecticut to Europe for Andy—to at least discuss how such a collaboration might work. We would stay over and Andy would fly on to his commitments in Europe early the next morning.
Andy has often said that, while taking his music and the business around keeping the show on the road very seriously, part of the package these days, for him, has to be fun. The ideal is a mix of creative energy, viable logistics, comfortable hotels, and a happy atmosphere. Count me in for all of the above. We got on very well at that first meeting on the book trail and certainly had a few laughs. After two or three hours of intensive discussion around the still-speculative project, we recorded an interview for another couple of hours—mostly around growing up in the 1950s. I went off and transcribed the interview, turned it into prose, with a small amount of ghostwriting around it (mostly contextual information on the period), and also entirely ghosted a few hundred words of Introduction to the book, capturing Andy’s vision for it based on the intensive discussion we had had.
The ghosted Intro and draft opening chapter was enough to give Andy a feel for what the book might be, to fire him up with the knowledge that (a) he really did have a story to tell, and (b) we could productively work together on it. Andy is a musician first and foremost: he has long experience of giving interviews, presenting his thoughts with clear diction and clear sentence structure, and also writing short-form essays for online blogs. Writing a book is a different challenge. What I brought to the table was experience and instinct in creating long-form narratives. I’m also a fan of Wishbone Ash but helpfully (we both thought), not a diehard fan. I knew the Wishbone story in broad form but not the details; I knew the bigger picture of rock history very well. I could, in effect, be the ‘everyman’ in terms of conducting the interviews with Andy—asking questions a casual reader might want to ask about this or that situation without assuming knowledge. My feeling was that this should be a book which anyone interested in music history, not only confirmed Wishbone Ash fans, could read with pleasure. Andy agreed.
The process continued with further periodic meetings in Dublin thereafter. Quality fare would be consumed, decent wine quaffed, and then intensive interviews conducted. These would then be written up as prose, with on average 80 percent in Andy’s words, 20 percent in mine, ghostwriting around Andy. There was also an interview session get-together for a couple of days around Wishbone Ash’s annual show at the Stables, Milton Keynes, in November 2014, which was a terrific insight into how the band operate on the road. Additional interviews were also conducted by phone in late 2014. In general we would focus each interview around a particular projected chapter. The main chapters would be essentially chronological, though both of us were keen to avoid a straight album/tour/album narrative within that. It was Andy’s memoir so that, in a way, meant that he had the freedom to major on the things he most remembered—the things which were most important to him at the time or subsequently. There was no obligation to write a thousand words on every album or even mention every tour. I had also given Andy a few themes to explore in ‘Interlude’ chapters—fun chapters which could range across the decades on subjects such as hotels, fans, guitars, Pauline, and so on.
December 2014, with Andy off the road for a few weeks, saw intensive work on the book on both sides of the Atlantic, and much communication across it. Throughout the previous few months, with time being snatched literally in the back of vans and in hotel rooms around Europe, Andy had been revising the various chapters I had been sending him. Using each chapter as a draft, having something solid to work with and to spark further memories, Andy would add information and observations, tweak the way he had expressed some things in the interviews and generally finesse each chapter until it ‘felt right’, in tone and content, as a representation of that time and place, from his experience. It was, as intended, a personal history in tandem with it being, inevitably, a band history. He had also by now written a new Introduction—my ghostwritten one, rightly, acting only as a template.
By this stage, we had secured the involvement of Jawbone Press. For the first few months we had been happy to work on the book speculatively. In tandem with Andy’s book, I was also working on a history of uilleann piping while Andy, of course, continued to put in serious work on the road. The process, for both of us, became challenging in the first quarter of 2015. Andy had a particularly arduous tour of Germany to contend with, with much driving and adverse weather, and then a similarly gruelling tour across the Southern States of the US, while I was trying to complete a quarter of a million heavily footnoted words on 300 years of Irish piping by an immutable deadline. Coincidentally, the deadline for both books, for different reasons, was more or less the same: April/May 2015. Yikes.
Nevertheless, necessity is the mother of invention. I finished the piping book by the end of April and Andy continued to somehow find time to complete the Interlude chapters (all of which were originated by him, edited only very slightly by me) and to further enhance the already revised main chapters. Some chapters would go through four significant revisions, with much material from a personal and family perspective from Andy being woven into the tale, with the effect that any ghostwriting I might have done to fill the odd narrative gap or suchlike from the original interview material has been very largely replaced with the real thing. A final intensive period of writing and revising took place during the first three weeks of June 2015, with Andy having at last a productive period of connected time off the road.
The result is a book which readers can be confident represents Andy Powell 100 percent. My input was necessary to get the project off the starting blocks—to an extent, giving Andy confidence as a writer and storyteller in this format—and to give it shape throughout. But no one should be in any doubt that the finished product has the authorship of Andy Powell. To give a Powell-esque analogy, I ‘produced’ Andy Powell: it was akin to taking his song and arranging it in the studio, mixing the performance, and mastering it for the maestro’s approval. Andy liked the result but knew it could be better, so he remixed it a few times; I agreed with every remix (only suggesting we notch the bass down a little or brighten up the
mid-range here or there), and then we remastered it together. We’re both delighted with the end result. We hope you are too.
