Eyes Wide Open by Andy Powell & Colin Harper

Author:Andy Powell & Colin Harper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Jawbone Press
Published: 2015-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

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Mark Birch never made what you might call an ‘album proper’ with Wishbone Ash, although he was with us for a good couple of years. He did some great work on various video and sound recordings, but this period did nonetheless see a number of other cultural artefacts, some very much of the moment, produced under the Wishbone banner.

‘Unplugged’ albums were a big thing in the late 90s and early 2000s. Did Wishbone Ash make one? Of course we did! Bare Bones, released through HTD in 1999, comprised mostly rearrangements of classic Ash material for the format, plus a couple of new songs. ‘You Won’t Take Me Down’ was one that hinted at what might have been, with Mark’s moody vocals to the fore. His voice was very well suited to ballads, and he turned in some lovely work on that album—the only one he would make with the band. One of those rearrangements, Mark’s take on the Wishbone Four song ‘Everybody Needs A Friend’, would be his song of choice when he reappeared with us ten years down the line for our 40th Anniversary Concert (which was filmed for DVD release).

Early in 1999, during an American tour, we participated in two podcasts of live concerts—long before the word ‘podcast’ had been coined. One was from the Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles and the other from the House Of Blues in Chicago. A few months earlier, in 1998, The Pretty Things had garnered a lot of publicity, and a career revival, with a daring attempt at a video stream of their performance of their 1968 rock opera S.F. Sorrow live from Abbey Road Studios, with Arthur Brown and Dave Gilmour guesting. Technical gremlins meant it never reached anyone but the in-studio audience at the time, though it’s since appeared on DVD. Similarly, The Who were talked into a supposed video podcast from a Las Vegas casino in October 1999, which either didn’t work or was a con from the start. Either way, it too subsequently appeared on DVD, as The Vegas Job. This was still very much the pioneer days of the internet, and while a few clued-in people—including old-stagers like ourselves, the Pretties, and The Who—could definitely see the huge potential of it in the music world, it took a while for the technology to catch up and the public to embrace it.

The show at the Whisky was fun. I remember Mick Fleetwood being in the audience, and someone from The Beach Boys was there too. We met all kinds of interesting people. It was a week of anniversary celebrations for the venue, and it was somewhere we’d often played back in the early days. For old times’ sake, I reserved us rooms at that famous rock’n’roll hotel, the Hyatt House, or the Riot House as it used to be known, and I decided to rent a Chevrolet Camaro convertible to take the band on a tour of Sunset Strip and Beverly Hills. It was

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