A post in the Graun's Notes and Queries section the other day about a "forgotten prog rock masterpiece", Wishbone Ash's 1972 album Argus, brought in the predictable replies from nostalgic hippies and took me back to the days when I sat in my study at school, loon pants at the ready, nodding appreciatively at the opening chords of Throw Down the Sword.
I searched for Argus on Spotify and was indulging in some Proustian moments when my son came in. "God, Dad", he said, "is this the kind of crap you had to listen to in the prog era?"
For the uninitiated (and like most initiations, this is one you probably don't really want to have), Wishbone Ash were a guitar-based four-piece from Torquay, and Argus was a sort of concept-album (a term which should have the cautious heading for the hills at top speed), on whose cover a helmeted centurion type figure wearing a cape looks out over a misty landscape, probably somewhere near Basingstoke. I never owned a copy, but it was ubiquitous amongst the record collections of my friends, and I can still hum bits of it now. Wishbone Ash did quite good business in the mid-70s, but were fading already when 1976 came and punk swept prog rock away.
In considering the pitfalls of nostalgia, you have to remember not just how bad a lot of the music of your youth now seems, but how bad a lot of it seemed even at the time. Whilst liking Argus quite a bit, I also knew that it was pretty naff. For one thing, the idea of a collection of rock songs that might have been sung around the campfire by Dark Ages warriors (had they only been possessed of Marshall amplifiers, a Gibson Flying V guitar and an electricity supply) required some suspension of disbelief. For another, although Wishbone Ash wrote some reasonable tunes, the band's lyrics are up there with Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak - "Tonight there's going to be a jailbreak / Somewhere in this town" (perhaps at the jail, chaps?) - teetering atop the pinnacle of bad songwriting.
"I thought I had a girl", sang bassist Martin Turner on Blowin' Free, their heads-down rock-a-boogie crowd pleaser. "I know / because I seen her". Pretty conclusive evidence, you may think. And elsewhere, "There were times when I stood at death's own door / only hoping for an answer", a piece of existential reportage that stood in sharp contrast to my own moments of teenage-angst, times when I stood waiting in the rain for the bus into Pontefract on a Saturday afternoon. "And there's a time", burbled Turner on Time Was, "waking up / and feeling down / it's when you have to pick your feet / up from the ground". Well I guess the libretto of Der Ring des Nibelungen has some less than starry moments.
Was anything good about Wishbone Ash? If like me you think the sound of the electric guitar played pretty loud is one of humanity's more compelling musical creations, the band provided a fairly hefty dose. Andy Powell, of the Gibson Flying V, was a competent riff-meister of the thousand-notes-per-minute variety. Throw Down the Sword, for all its portentous folly, opened with an ominous minor key ostinato over a snare-drum roll, and morphed into a stirring threnody that exalted at the same time as making your own life seem utterly mundane by comparison (a bit like Mahler then). Leaf and Stream had a beautiful pastoral lilt, borne along by the glowing tone of Ted Turner's back-pickup Strat. Warrior was a defiant stomp, which you could just about imagine being shouted out by hairy-arsed Saxons, huddled in a muddy round house looking out at the rain. Listen to the opening of Sometime World - the similarity to Television's classic Marquee Moon, a record of stratospherically higher stature, is uncanny.
Wishbone Ash are still going; or rather, there appear, curiously, to be two versions of the band going - one led by Martin Turner and one by Andy Powell. And they have both been playing Argus live, in its entirety. It must be a funny life, a bit like being a musical Ancient Mariner, keeping on playing half a dozen songs that briefly made you famous nearly forty years ago.
My son has been born too late. Aged 16, he yearns to be growing up in 1977 during punk's brief hey-day: a couple of weeks ago he went with friends to see Stiff Little Fingers, a band I saw play in Nottingham over thirty years ago, but who are still apparently doing the rounds, paying the mortgage. He is dissatisfied with pop music now. "It almost seems", he said, "as if it's like it was before punk, and we're just waiting now for punk to come and sweep it all away".
There's a moral here, but I'm not sure what it is. Listening to something that was new thirty years ago is a funny way of coping with the staleness of now. And if something comes to sweep it all away, it won't be punk, because that's already happened.
And even if it is swept away, don't imagine that's the end - it might well come creeping back one day, a bit older and fatter, playing live somewhere at a medium-sized venue near you.
