Wishbourne Ash’s Andy Powell on ‘younger followers’ coming to band’s gigs | Music | Entertainment | EUROtoday

Andy Powell says Wishbone Ash are getting “lots of younger fans coming to the shows now.” Then he chuckles and admits that by youthful followers he means “people now in their fifties”.

Guitarist Powell, 74, co-founded the English rock band in 1969 and is the one unique member left. Their chart-topping 1972 masterpiece, Argus, turned them into stars.

“Wishbone Ash has become almost like a religion to me,” he says, talking from his dwelling in Redding, Connecticut, the place he has lived along with his British spouse Pauline since he grew to become a tax exile within the mid-70s.

It’s actually grow to be a family-run enterprise. Pauline accompanies the band on tour, overseeing the sale of merchandise, whereas son, Aynsley, 40, co-produced the band’s most up-to-date album, 2020’s Coat Of Arms.

Mum and son additionally co-wrote 9 of its eleven tracks.

“We still make albums but they don’t sell like they used to,” says Powell. “Not even the Rolling Stones sell records anymore. Touring is where all the action is.”

To that finish, Wishbone Ash embark on their newest UK tour this month: 5 weeks of reveals culminating on the Islington Assembly Hall in London on twenty fourth October.

“We tour the UK every autumn,” Andy explains. “We regularly do 30 shows in the UK in theatres and rock venues, and then go across the Atlantic and do 25-30 shows on the East Coast. Then take Christmas off. Then four or five weeks travelling Europe in the New Year.

“In the summer we’ll do a few festivals, thank you very much.”

Luxury tour buses are yesterday’s factor. “In the UK we all drive ourselves and the gear travels in a truck. In Germany, it’s more of a tour bus scenario. But we always stay in hotels. We’ve done the tour bus routine. It was fun in my 20s and 30s, but I can’t do that now.”

There are a number of issues the band did of their prime that they wouldn’t – couldn’t – do now.

“The first time we went to America the limo driver offered us a cigarette box full of joints. In those days that was normal. At the same time, we’d have a couple of cops on Harley Davidsons as outriders.”

He smiles ruefully as he remembers, “On those tours we’d just party all night. Grab a couple of hours rest then hurry to an airport – always running for planes, hungover. Then the first thing they would do on the plane was offer you a drink. ‘Thanks, I’ll have a Bloody Mary!’

“There would be a lot of ladies on the road too, and it was a nice feeling, a community that was our little society that would travel around together.”

Emerging from a smoke-filled basement in St John’s Wood, in 1969, Wishbone Ash shaped round Martin Turner, a 23-year-old bassist and singer from Torquay, who recruited the 2 guitarists – Powell and Ted Turner (no relation) – who created their basic twin-lead guitar sound that grew to become the band’s signature, later emulated and brought to even better success by Thin Lizzy and Iron Maiden.

The first 5 Wishbone Ash albums blended parts of exhausting and prog rock with folks influences and have been all charts successes right here. “The agents and management worked us like dogs,” he says. “It was virtual slave labour. When we started making a little money, we were still getting paid £5 a week, then a year later it went up to £10.

“I remember asking, ‘Hey, how come our records are in the Top Five and I’m still living in a £10-a-month flat in Notting Hill Gate?’ I’d just got married and needed to figure out how to get a house. I went down to the bank. They said, ‘Rock musician? No future in that. Get a real job’.”

Andy shakes his head. “I remember coming back to Britain a few years ago and seeing Johnny Rotten on telly selling butter. I thought, ‘How times have changed’. You couldn’t make it up.”

When, in 1974, they recorded their fifth album, There’s The Rub, in the identical Criteria studios in Miami the place the Bee Gees have been about to resurrect their profession with Jive Talkin’, the band determined to completely relocate to America.

“We had an American manager” – Miles Copeland, who later managed The Police – “and we were signed to an American label, MCA. A lot of people in America thought we were an American band.”

Living communally in Connecticut, they grew to become tax exiles.

“We were getting big record advances by then,” says Andy, “We had one main band house, which was this fabulous place on about 14 acres with a swimming pool. When it came time to write an album, we’d all just hang out, get the acoustic guitars out. There was a lot of smoking going on.”

Although they achieved fame in America, it wasn’t all plain crusing.

“We did a showcase for the MCA brass at the Whiskey A Go Go in Los Angeles, and they did not know what to do with us. They were largely Italian gentlemen of a certain persuasion that all wore very shiny suits, and they sat in the front row going, ‘What have we paid all this money for?’ A bunch of English oiks on the stage, one of whom was missing at that point in the desert, tripping on acid.”

He remembers “the exact moment in Hollywood when rock billboards took over from movie billboards, and we were one of those bands. We owned the strip.”

Andy and Pauline returned to the UK periodically. “We always had a place there, but then the kids came along and we had the opportunity to send them to a nice school in Connecticut. That’s when we decided to stay.”

Despite promoting tens of millions of albums, they by no means had successful single. They didn’t even launch the one tune everyone within the enterprise agreed was an enormous hit in ready, Blowin’ Free.

“It was the album era. Singles were considered a bit beneath bands like us. There was this mystery to the music. Taking references from literature, the bible, we didn’t necessarily know what we were doing. We just decided to throw it all in the pot.”

He cites the 10-minute Phoenix – the epic quantity that grew to become for Wishbone Ash what Stairway To Heaven grew to become for Led Zeppelin – because the prime instance.

It actually labored. “Touring America we were getting between £15,000-£20,000 a night.” Fees that in in the present day’s cash can be price round £150,000 an evening.

By the 80s, nonetheless, the line-up had shed each Turners – today Martin goes out as Martin Turner Ex Wishbone Ash – and commenced recruiting a seemingly limitless array of replacements.

They someway survived punk. “When the next generation came along, they called us old farts. I was insulated from it because I was already in America, where new wave was some quirky English anomaly. ‘These Brits are always doing weird stuff.’”

When punk was outdated within the 80s by heavy steel, Wishbone Ash launched the determinedly heavy Twin Barrels Burning, which took them again into the UK Top 20 for the primary time in six years.

“It was okay,” Andy says now, “but it wasn’t us.”

Nowadays, he says, “There’s no longer any pressure to fit in. Thank God we were a guitar band, because guitar-rock never goes away. It’s easy now because I don’t need to think about it when I’m writing a song. We know there’s going to be some twin lead guitars in there, we know there’s going to be some progressive changes and some thoughtful lyrics…

“We still pick up a guitar, plug it in, and make something happen.

“Live, we’ll make it happen in a small club, or at a big festival on a gigantic stage with all the accoutrements. It’s a piece of cake.”

And after all youthful crowds have a candy tooth.

*Wishbone Ash start a 31-date UK tour in Derby on September 20. For full particulars go to Wishboneashofficial.com