Andy Powell says Wishbone Ash are getting “lots of younger fans coming to the shows now.” Then he chuckles and admits that by younger fans he means “people now in their fifties”.
Guitarist Powell, 74, co-founded the English rock band in 1969 and is the only original member left. Their chart-topping 1972 masterpiece, Argus, turned them into stars.
“Wishbone Ash has become almost like a religion to me,” he says, speaking from his home in Redding, Connecticut, where he has lived with his British wife Pauline since he became a tax exile in the mid-70s.
It’s certainly become a family-run business. Pauline accompanies the band on tour, overseeing the sale of merchandise, while son, Aynsley, 40, co-produced the band’s most recent album, 2020’s Coat Of Arms.
Mum and son also co-wrote nine 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 end, Wishbone Ash embark on their latest UK tour this month: five weeks of shows culminating at the Islington Assembly Hall in London on 24th 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 thing. “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 lot of things the band did in 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 recalls, “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 formed around Martin Turner, a 23-year-old bassist and singer from Torquay, who recruited the two guitarists – Powell and Ted Turner (no relation) – who created their classic twin-lead guitar sound that became the band’s signature, later emulated and taken to even greater success by Thin Lizzy and Iron Maiden.
The first five Wishbone Ash albums mixed elements of hard and prog rock with folk influences and were all charts successes 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 same Criteria studios in Miami where the Bee Gees were about to resurrect their career with Jive Talkin’, the band decided to permanently 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 became 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 sailing.
“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 selling millions of albums, they never had a hit single. They didn’t even release the one song everybody in the business agreed was a giant hit in waiting, 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 number that became for Wishbone Ash what Stairway To Heaven became for Led Zeppelin – as the prime example.
It certainly worked. “Touring America we were getting between £15,000-£20,000 a night.” Fees that in today’s money would be worth around £150,000 a night.
By the 80s, however, the line-up had shed both Turners – these days Martin goes out as Martin Turner Ex Wishbone Ash – and began recruiting a seemingly endless array of replacements.
They somehow 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 superseded in the 80s by heavy metal, Wishbone Ash released the determinedly heavy Twin Barrels Burning, which took them back into the UK Top 20 for the first 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 of course younger crowds have a sweet tooth.
*Wishbone Ash begin a 31-date UK tour in Derby on September 20. For full details go to Wishboneashofficial.com