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“Progressive rock pioneers”

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I’ve been reading the Andy Powell / Colin H book lately – very interesting view of Wishbone Ash, if inevitably partisan. However, on the back cover, Wishbone Ash are described as progressive rock pioneers……

Progressive? As a Crimson/ Yes / VdGG follower, this seems rather odd….

Are ver Ash a progressive band?

Over to you…

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  3. I can say, though, that I didn’t write the back cover blurb – though Andy and I both approved it. As far as I recall, we both enjoyed the ‘progressive rock’ bit, though Andy would never call WA a progressive rock band himself – though he accepts that some tracks on the early albums are indeed somewhat proggy. But he really detests the idea of “prog rock” (as distinct from ‘progressive rock’ in his view) as exemplified by public school, airy-fairy, fey and whimsical types. We did an onstage interview at Ashcon last year and I put the Q to him: ‘So, are WA a progressive rock band?’ – for a laugh. And a laugh was had.

    More later.

  4. No, they’re not. Nor are Pink Floyd.

    P = m + s + w × se – G + © – H

    Where m = mellotron, s = songs about elves, w = widdly-fiddly time changes, se = sidelong epics, G = girls in the audience, © = band logo, H = hit singles .

    • I find it hard to disagree with Wiki in this case, which says this about Argus:

      “Argus is the third album by the rock band Wishbone Ash. It is the most popular Wishbone Ash album and widely considered their greatest by fans and reviewers. It was named “Album of the Year” in the 1972 year-end issue of Sounds magazine. The album features a blend of progressive rock, folk, and hard rock”

  5. My advice to Andy was to approach the book as a ‘memoir’ – it had to be principally based on what he *remembered*, hence the things that were/are important to him, looking back. That freed it up from being a ‘Wishbone Ash biography’, because there was absolutely no imperative to write equal amounts on every album, for example.

    The linear narrative would be further broken up by thematic mini-chapters – I gave Andy a few topics, after discussion, and he worked on them solo; later, he came up with a couple of topics himself, such as his impressions of India (a particularly evocative piece of writing, and something clearly burned on his memory from three trips there with WA). Andy is, in my view, a really excellent ‘essay writer’, taking a subject and exploring it for a few thousand words.

    My role was in large part to give the book structure and draw out Andy’s recollections through interviews, asking questions that I felt an average reader (not a WA diehard) would be interested in knowing the answers to. As ‘homework’, I had given both Bill Bruford’s autobiography and Mark Ellen’s memoir for Andy to read – as examples of what could be done with such a project. He enjoyed both, and definitely took on board the kind of template that Bill’s book offered.

    It is only natural, I think, that a person who who lived through a fast-paced period of success in the early 70s has, 40+ years later, boiled those experiences down to snapshots of moments and generalist recollections. Think about your own school days – you can probably remember a smattering of funny incidents, general impressions about particular teachers (usually the great ones and the bastards – who remembers the ones in between?), and the names of maybe 20 or 30 of your peers, if that. You certainly couldn’t give a biographer a month-by-month account.

    I can’t understand why some people (online reviewers for instance) can’t grasp this. Some people seem to expect vast tracts of text about albums and tours that happened 40+ years ago in the 1970s, out of all proportion to text recalling similar portions of time in, say the 60s or the 80s and beyond. I hope we provided quality, not quantity. Yes, the 70s was and remains the bedrock of WA’s career and between half and two-thirds of the current set-list will come from that period (although the particular content of that percentage, which songs, changes very regularly to keep it fresh), but in terms of memories for Andy, look at it this way: the mid 70s period of success was a rollercoaster of activity, all of it ‘easy’ in relative terms, because of the resources available. Things that stand out from that era are personal things, like moving his family to New England, not playing the Bristol Hippodrome an January 12 1976 (or whatever). To my mind, that kind of recollection is far more interesting than his views on this or that venue, this or that song (though we included a little of that).

    Where it becomes really alive, I think, is in the period before success and after success. I think the book’s chief USP is that it is a kind of everyman account of how to survive and even thrive *after* the goldrush. Keeping WA alive has been an immense task. By rights, it should have collapsed in the mid 80s, bankrupt and out of road. Andy has skirted bankruptcy more than once, and there have been times in recent years when his mettle has been hugely tested – taking gambles on certain tours because it feels like that region has to be serviced to keep the name alive there (with a view to future tours), even if it means running it at a loss this time, and suchlike.

    Wishbone Ash only exists because Andy wants it to – is prepared to undergo seriously gruelling tours, driving vans personally, with minimal crew, handling all the business and logistics personally, often for limited personal returns financially, (a cottage industry at best) but massive returns emotionally, through the family vibe of the WA community around the world.

    For me, it is thre chapters on the 80s-00s that are the most fascinating, as a reader. People perhaps don’t understand that the current Wishbone Ash has been together – the same 4 people, great ‘personality’ players, not anonymous hired-hands – for 10 years. Bob Skeat, on bass, has been there 18 years. In that time they have produced (from memory) three studio albums – one of which, ‘The Power of Eternity’, is in the top 2 WA albums in my view – a terrific box set of four live albums from 2010-14 (‘Roadworks’), the ‘Live At Metropolis Studios’ straight-to-vinyl live LP, and two or three DVDs including the splendid documentary ‘This Is Wishbone Ash’ and ‘Live In Paris’, from three specially staged small-theatre shows last May. I recommend ANY of these to anyone who thinks that Wishbone Ash only made worthwhile records in the 70s.

  7. “Progressive” does not translate to “Prog”.
    “Progressive” was a catch-all term used around the turn of the ’60s – ’70s to differentiate the kind of guitar/keyboard-based non-“mainstream pop” music that was beginning to be released (predominantly on albums rather than singles) around that time.
    The myriads of what we would now call “Blues-Rock” bands of that time were lumped into the “Progressive” descriptor as not being aimed at the pop-singles-buying public.

    “Prog” is a sometimes-pejorative term that was coined later to describe the more complex and more technically-proficient widdlesome branch of the form. As opposed to the more-straightforward “Rock”.

    • Yep, that’s the way Andy interprets it: ‘progressive music’ (lower case) as it was all termed at the time, becoming ‘prog rock’, ‘classic rock, ‘blues rock’, ‘folk rock’, etc when codified retrospectively.

    • Absolutely spot on mate. May I refer you to my comments in Afterword podcast #4: The Progcast, wherein I pointed out that at the time my mates and I used the term “progressive music” to differentiate the largely album-based music we preferred to the majority of the chart material at the time. We’d have considered Laura Nyro, The ISB and Al Stewart to have been “progressive”, just as much as Wishbone Ash, Yes, or even the Mahavishnus, while Middle Of The Road and The Archies were not.

    • Good point well made, Mike and Vulpes. “Progressive” just meant not staying still, trying new things. Could be anything that wasn’t the same old stuff. “Prog” became formulaic and quite content to stay within the definition.

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