Steve Ashley Passes the Test of Time - by Dave Thompson

PART ONE:

Amid the myriad names thrown up by the English Folk-Rock boom of the early 1970s, the era most succinctly summarised by the legendary Electric Muse 4-LP boxed set, few attract as much attention as Steve Ashley. The Electric Muse itself is essential listening for anybody requiring a grounding in the subject, a solid document of folk's transition from the earliest acoustic traditions to the full-blooded rock of the modern era, with contributions from every key performer you could imagine. But, in terms of sheer songsmithery, melding archetype with invention, Steve Ashley stood out amid them all ...

THE DOYEN of genre observers, journalist Karl Dallas, unequivocally ranked Ashley alongside Richard Thompson among the "new electric poets" whose absorption of traditional music was itself creating an entire new canon of standards, "ballads with the essence, rather than the surface appearance of the old tradition."  But, while Thompson moved on to a mega-stardom of sorts, Ashley remained in the shadows, stirring so infrequently that a decade might pass before he sees fit to release a new album.

Indeed, that is the case right now.  2001's superlative Everyday Lives album was Ashley's first new release since 1990's Mysterious Ways, although the silence was at least punctuated by reissues for his first two albums, plus a career spanning single-CD anthology, aptly titled The Test Of Time.  Therein lurk highlights of all seven of his albums-to-date, detailing his own journey from the folk clubs of the early-mid 60s, through to the first song recorded for Everyday Lives, "Over There In Paradise." 

It's a scant catalog, then, and a somewhat self-contradictory one.  Even within the rarefied circles of Folk-Rock, there are few major artists whose entire canon stretches to so few albums in so many years.  Ashley, however, has no regrets.  He told Goldmine, "the silences [between albums] have been there all along, and they've increased in length as I've grown older. But the albums I've made have been intensive productions that wipe me out when they are finished. 

"Plus it's good to return to 'real life' after recording an album.  After all, that's where songs come from, and that's been my inspiration all along. Everyday life - it's the place where songs grow - particularly folk songs. And although I've always loved American music - blues, folk and Jazz - I have concentrated my efforts on making English music.  When I first heard Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Little Richard, I loved the music because it sounded true.  They sounded like real people singing about their own real lives. So, when I started to make my own music, I was determined to write and sing about my experience of life, in my own accent."

As far as the public record goes, those beginnings take us back to 1967, when Ashley first emerged as part of the Tinderbox duo, alongside guitarist Dave Menday.  Prior to that, however, the West London native had been playing in sundry local R&B and beat bands, a fascination that he all-but abandoned after attending the Centre 42 festival in Southall, and witnessing a performance by the breathtaking Anne Briggs - one of the few musicians in this tale who could rival Ashley in the reclusive-genius stakes.

In 1964, Ashley moved to Maidstone, Kent, to study graphic design.  There he joined a student blues band, the Tea Set, running through the then-standard litany of Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed numbers, but interspersing them with "one or two songs I'd learned from Davy Graham's first album."  He also began performing at the Maidstone Folk Club at the Wig & Gown Hotel, a venue he helped to establishe with fellow art student Peter Bellamy (later of the Young Tradition).

Ashley linked up with Menday soon after, for regular gigs both in Maidstone and at the nearby Rochester Folk Club.  "Dave was - and still is - a very fine acoustic guitar player, and we started off performing traditional songs with me singing with Dave on guitar. In those days, I hardly played guitar, at least not on stage. I sang and played whistle and harmonica."

Around 1967, Ashley and Menday began replacing that early repertoire with their own compositions.  Ashley was now living in Rochester, literally in the shadow of the millennium-year-old castle that dominates the city - home was an old vicarage, a 200-year-old Georgian frontage on a 400-year-old Tudor house, with a vaulted crypt beneath the living room floor.   With the windows looking out upon some of the most picturesque history in the country, it was an ideal setting in which to write, and the spirit of old England would hang heavy over Ashley's words.  Visit Rochester itself, and it is easy to imagine the cheeky headscarf thief who haunts his "The Spirit Of Christmas" gambolling through the same arches and alleyways from which the city's most famous literary resident, Charles Dickens, himself drew so much inspiration.

Having graduated from college, Ashley returned to London in 1968 to work at The Observer newspaper.  There he found himself employed alongside Austin John Marshall, the husband of folk singer Shirley Collins, herself one of the most significant names on the entire English folk scene.  Marshall was also her producer and, upon hearing Ashley and Menday's work, he offered to take them under his wing.

Renaming the duo The Tinderbox, Marshall set Ashley and Menday to gigging around London and its environs.  The Les Cousins club in Soho, famed haunt of the Strawbs, Sandy Denny and so many others, was a regular haunt, while Ashley remembers one "particularly nice gig in Ipswich, where Anne Briggs and Johnny Moynihan were regulars." 

The Tinderbox also came to the attention of BBC DJ John Peel, joining Shirley Collins for a Night Ride session on January 28, 1969 (broadcast on March 5).  They performed eight songs, three with Collins herself ("Nelly The Milkmaid," "Ramble Away," and "Lowlands"), five in their own right - "Fire And Wine," "Oliver Woodworm," "Dreamsong," "The Finite Time" and what Ashley remembers as "a very special version of 'The Spirit Of Christmas'."

Despite such promising beginnings, however, The Tinderbox was not to continue sparking for long.  Having signed with Polydor, they promptly discovered the perils of recording a "topical" song - the news had just broken that, as Britain prepared for decimal coinage, the image of Britannia was to be removed from the coin of the realm.  A furious public outcry ensued, and the Tinderbox added their own voice to the controversy, "Farewell Britannia."  A week before the record's spring 1969 release, the Powers That Be caved in.  Britannia would be preserved on the 50 pence piece, and the Tinderbox single was scrapped on the spot.

Shortly after, Menday announced that he intended abandoning showbiz altogether to spend time with his young family. Ashley set about formulating a solo career.

Through Marshall's auspices, he guested on Shirley and sister Dolly Collins' seminal Anthems In Eden album, but most of his free time was spent writing.  By mid-1970, however, he was ready to begin moving again and, hooking up once more with Marshall, he recorded a 30-strong demo tape, documenting some three years' worth of compositions.

Although the tape was primarily recorded for the benefit of his publishers, Harbrook Music, copies moved swiftly into private circulation among the doyen of the folk world.  Anne Briggs herself recorded "Fire And Wine" for her 1971 The Time Has Come album, while Ashley himself appeared as a regular guest on the BBC show Start the Week.  By the end of the year, he and Marshall were busy with what they intended to be Ashley's debut album, Stroll On.

In the event, it would be four years before that album finally appeared, by which time much of the music therein had undergone radical revision, and Ashley himself had strayed from the solo path to become a founding member of ex-Fairport and Steeleye Span maven "Tyger" Hutchings' Albion Country Band.

The first overture came from Royston Wood, another member of the Young Tradition, one of the many players who guested on the early sessions for Stroll On.  Ashley recalled, "Royston told me that the new band he was forming with Hutchings would probably like to do a couple of my songs.  Then, a while later, Ashley called me and invited me to join them for a rehearsal/try out."

Completing the line-up with American violinist Sue Draheim and Fairport's own Simon Nicol and Dave Mattacks, the Albion Country Band adopted Nicol's home in rural Thrapston, Northamptonshire, as their base and, in early 1972, locked into rehearsals.  With Hutchings' avowed intent of taking his own electric folk visions further than either of his past bands had managed, the group threw themselves into the scenario with gusto - Ashley remembers a chunk of the band's Island Records advance was spent on the most esoteric instruments the musicians could find: Draheim picked up a bass viol, Nicol bought a hurdy-gurdy, Ashley himself became the proud owner of a crumhorn.

Rehearsals brought any number of songs into the group's repertoire, as Hutchings encouraged every member to present their own particular showcase.  Ashley recalled, "the Albions did a version of 'The Spirit of Christmas' for a while… a fairly heavy treatment and quite different from the recorded version."  His darkly haunting "Candlemas Carol" made it through a few rehearsals, with Nicol laying down some exquisite guitar, while "Fire And Wine" was destined to become an in-concert favorite.  He also handled a handful of traditional numbers - the epic "Lord Bateman" and, as a duet with Wood, "The Ramblin' Sailor."

Sadly, this particular line-up of the Albions was not to survive long; the group made its live debut at Sussex University on June 9, and broke up in October, shortly after headlining a folk festival in the grounds of Ashley's old muse, Rochester Castle.  However, they did gig heavily in the interim, while the popular belief that they passed away unrecorded is scuppered by the existence of a July 1972 John Peel session, eight songs long.  One song from that performance then made it onto Hutchings' own The Guv'nor box set, alongside a brace of live instrumentals. Steve Ashley, however, wanted more than that and, as his own solo sessions continued, he reconvened the full Albions line-up to cut a full-blooded version of "Lord Bateman."  That he was still to find a home for the album, though frustrating, was immaterial.  The Albions' status among the most exciting projects in the entire history of electric folk demanded documentation.  And his own project, of course, just kept on growing.  Next month, as we return to the Steve Ashley story, we'll find out if it ever did get completed.

PART TWO:

BY 1973, Steve Ashley had spent three years working on his first solo album, a span that saw him record alongside some of the heaviest-hitting names on the British folk circuit - Shirley and Dolly Collins, Anne Briggs, Ashley Hutchings and the Albion Country Band, great swathes of the Fairport Convention family tree and so on.

But, in an epoch when Glam Rock ruled the British chart roost, and metallic dinosaurs lurched through the underground undergrowth, only the continued success of Steeleye Span suggested that there was any commercial longevity in the electric folk rock movement, and Ashley's recordings were more and more taking on the appearance of a personal diary.  He had already reconvened the sundered Albion Country Band to record one song, "Lord Bateman," for the ongoing album; and when his latest project, Ragged Robin, seemed likewise doomed to die unrecorded, Ashley ensured that they, too, would have their day in the studio.

Ashley formed Ragged Robin in early 1973, with former Suffolk Punch singer Richard Byers, another of his Maidstone Folk Club allies.  With bassist Brian Diprose and drummer John Thompson, Ragged Robin rented a cottage in Suffolk for six months, and became a familiar sight on the folk club and festival circuit.  They made a memorable appearance at the 1973 Cambridge Folk Festival, supported Steeleye Span in concert, and enjoyed a six-month residency at the Howff club in London. 

But a lovely album recorded with Anne Briggs went unreleased for almost quarter of a century (Sing A Song For You finally appeared in 1997) and, again, it was left to the seemingly endless sessions for Stroll On to preserve the flavor of the group.  With Dave Mattacks replacing drummer Thompson, Ragged Robin cut their own version of a song that had already established itself among Ashley's best-known signatures, "Fire And Wine" - and from whose lyric, in fact, the band took its name.

Solo again, Ashley took another stroll down memory lane when he reunited with Tinderbox's Menday for a spine-tingling version of "The Spirit Of Christmas" - one of the all-time great festive songs, and still Ashley's best-loved song, as he explained. "'The Spirit Of Christmas' has been a rather special envoy over the years, particularly so with writers and presenters. But it almost failed to appear." 

After four years of trying, and some 30 rejections, Ashley and producer Austin John Marshall finally found a home for Stroll On, at Decca's Gull subsidiary - where their labelmates would include heavy metallurgists Judas Priest, and the resurgent God of Hellfire, Arthur Brown.  As all concerned trawled through the stockpile of material that had been gathered for the album, however, it quickly became apparent that there was way too much material for a single disc.  To Ashley's own amazement, "The Spirit Of Christmas" was one of the earliest casualties.

"I considered it to be one of the album's strongest songs, but the head of A&R at Gull couldn't see it, and I wasn't going to argue.  At that stage, getting the album out was the over-riding priority.  So, when I was asked for a track for The Electric Muse, it was the obvious choice. And, ironically, it reached a lot more ears than Stroll On! So there's a bit of Karma.

"Getting Stroll On released was an incredible relief for me," Ashley understated.  "It was hard living with the constant knock-backs, all the more [so] after we'd put so much work and care into it."  The critical response to the album, however, made all the waiting worthwhile.  It was elected Contemporary Album of The Year in Folk Review, Folk Album of the Year in the Daily Telegraph, and was there-or-thereabouts everywhere else it was heard.

Stunned by the reception, Ashley promptly returned to the studio to cut a single.  Gathering up the latest (Fairport 9-era) incarnation of Fairport Convention, he delivered the rollicking "Old Rock'n'Roll" and was rewarded, he remembered, with a Melody Maker review that called it "'the best record of the week,' and then pronounced it a miss!

Better was still to come.  "One evening, Gull called me over to tell me they'd done a deal for the States.  With Motown! I was completely amazed."  With Motown handling Stroll On's manufacture and distribution, spring 1975 saw Ashley undertake a two month solo tour of America, opening East Coast shows for the likes of Leon Redbone, Jonathan Edwards, Chris Hillman Band and Gene Clark.  Reviews were great, the album was picking up speed - Motown's first English folk singer looked like becoming one of their most successful imports ever.

But then disaster struck, as the tour moved down to Dallas, and Ashley contracted a virulent, and utterly incapacitating case of food poisoning.  The remainder of the tour, including shows with Dr Hook in Chicago, and Emmylou Harris in Los Angeles, was cancelled, and he returned home to recover.

Accompanied by Ragged Robin's Byers and Stroll On arranger Robert Kirby, Ashley cut his second album, the very aptly-titled Speedy Return, in just two weeks - "very different from the long drawn out, ever-changing process of Stroll On."  Though mere months divided the two albums' release, however, the momentum built up around Stroll On had faded, and Speedy Return barely caused a ripple.  Ashley himself all but forgot it; only as the Market Square label prepared for its reissue in 1999 did he return to the tapes, and he admitted, "listening to it again, I've been impressed with the freshness of it. The combination of traditional instruments, rock band and strings and brass works very well. It's good to see it back."

Even worse than the album's disappearance was the end of Gull Records, folding around the same time as Speedy Return speedily departed.  Once again, Ashley found the music industry had transformed itself into a brick wall.  "I tried various labels, but Punk Rock had taken hold of everyone's ideas about music, and my proposal for a third album, Rare Old Men, was impossible to turn into a finished product." 

Ashley himself left London, relocating to the country town of Cheltenham, and spent some time living ("at last!") outside of the music business.  By 1978, however, he'd hooked up with a few local musicians, members of the cult folk band Decameron, and the following year found Ashley reshaping Rare Old Men into The Family Album, at Dave Pegg's Woodworm Studios in Cropredy.  He also found time to contribute two album's worth of songs to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), as it rose from almost 20 years of hibernation to protest the US's recently-implemented policy of planting nuclear missile bases around the UK.

"I suddenly became aware that people with money were building bomb shelters in their gardens, all over Europe.  With a young family, I was horrified, so I wrote a whole clutch of songs in a matter of weeks, recorded them at Woodworm, then joined CND and offered the songs as a cassette only release."  Demo Tapes I was released in 1981; it was followed, two years later, by Demo Tapes 2 - "the first," he explained, "was full of agitation and the second was full of support for agitators" (long-deleted in their original form, tracks from both appear on The Test Of Time anthology).

In between times, The Family Album itself emerged on Pegg's own Woodworm label, while Ashley became a familiar sight on the benefit concert circuit; he even cut a new single, "Down The Pub," recorded in seven different languages and debuted, unaccompanied, in front of 250,000 people at a CND rally in Hyde Park.  A new band came together, and, for much of the remainder of the decade, the Steve Ashley Band gigged constantly, both at the clubs and on the established festival circuit - they appeared at Cropredy, Glastonbury and Cambridge.  The band also cut an album, 1990's excellent Mysterious Ways.

By 1992, however, Ashley had again turned his back on the music industry, returning to graphic design. He broke cover just once, writing and recording the instrumental soundtrack for Roger Deakins' acclaimed Stable Lads documentary in 1995. 1999, however, brought the news that Market Square were planning reissues for both Gull albums, together with the Test Of Time anthology; and invited him to partake in their forthcoming Bert Jansch tribute, People On The Highway.  Ashley turned in a dramatically fiddle- and echo-fired version of "It Don't Bother Me," then heralded this unexpected "comeback" with an appearance at the Cropredy Festival, performing "Fire And Wine" alongside the latest Fairport incarnation. 

Work on a new album inevitably followed.  2001's Everyday Lives, Ashley reflected, "is the acoustic album I'd always wanted to make.  It has hardly any drums, lots of my own acoustic guitar, bouzouki and mouth-organ, and very carefully recorded fiddles and mandolins."  Pegg, Nicol, Gerry Conway, Mick Dolan, Danny Thompson and the Incredible String Band's Robin Williamson joined the Steve Ashley Band's Chris Leslie and Dik Cadbury at the sessions, but it was only as Everyday Lives came together that Ashley realized how effortlessly the music scythed back to the very heart of the folk influences that had set him on his musical journey in the first place. 

With the mood enhanced by a couple more songs ("Down Among The Hop Poles" and "We'll Survive") that Ashley purposefully intended to tighten that connection, Everyday Lives then confirmed its air of authenticity by finding a home on Topic Records, the quintessential English folk label.

Today, Ashley finds himself in his strongest position since the Gull years.  Still writing and performing, he personally (inevitably!) has no immediate plans to make another album.  But Topic, who have an option on a second album, have already expressed interest in his recording plans, while the ever-enterprising Market Square remain committed to reissuing further gems from the Ashley back catalogue.  

Ashley himself will not be rushed, however.  "I think making albums of original songs is not dissimilar to say, making movies or writing novels.  There are plenty of filmmakers and writers who produce things with ten-year gaps in between. So I don't think my habits are that odd, really.  And, since the last album was released only two years ago, you could say these are early days!" 

As far as his overall career-so-far goes, he continued, "I can't pretend that I've been content to lurk in the shadows. I would have preferred more success!  The truth is, the shadows have become my habitat for a number of reasons and I have, by force of circumstance I suppose, discovered the secrets of lurking there.  Obscurity has its benefits as well as its limitations!"

Dave Thompson - Copyright Goldmine Magazine, 2003

Dave Thompson is author of over 70 rock music books, including Never Fade Away - The Kurt Cobain Story, Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Third Ear guides to Funk, Alternative Rock and Reggae & Caribbean Music. He has also written for Rolling Stone, Mojo,Q and other leading music magazines.