Classic rock’s golden age is now giving us half century celebrations of bands and landmark albums. One such – indeed my all time favourite album – is Wishbone Ash’s ‘Argus’, which was voted album of the year by Melody Maker readers in 1972 (ahead of ‘Machine Head’, ‘Thick As A Brick’, ‘Exile On Main Street’ and others) and is the jewel on the crown of their distinguished career.

It boasts some of their signature songs that have been live favourites ever since, and has been played in its entirety on a recurring basis by founder member Martin Turner and band in recent years. But the current Wishbone line up, led by evergreen guitarist Andy Powell, have only occasionally gone down that route, preferring to emphasise they are still active recording artists and covering all phases of their career in live sets. However this special milestone made it inevitable that their (extensive as usual) 2022 tour would have to mark their finest hour, and a very decent crowd was in place for the London date.

It is something of a Wishbone convention to open with an instrumental to demonstrate their guitar prowess, on this occasion ‘In The Skin’ which was the first time I can recall Mark Abrahams playing the lap steel, following in the footsteps of two of his distinguished predecessors in particular in Ted Turner and Muddy Manninen.

As Andy Powell self deprecatingly warned people at the start, the main course was preceded by a mini set of mainly newer songs. ‘We Stand As One’ I will admit is not a favourite but was appropriately dedicated to the people of Ukraine, while both the title track of most recent album ‘Coat Of Arms’ and ‘Invisible Thread’ started slowly but in a beguiling fashion showed it is still possible to put some fresh spins on those twin guitar melodies, even in the band’s sixth decade.

Then the dreamy ‘It’s Only You I See’, much improved on the studio version, was enlivened by a superb solo from Mark, who has really established himself as a worthy guitar partner, before he handled the closing solo and Andy the middle one on fan favourite ‘Standing In The Rain’. There was also a very solid, unflashy performance from new drummer Mike Truscott. .

The moment had now come to mark ‘Argus’ and the presentation was nicely packaged. Andy gave a little speech with some memories of the recording process and that side one was an attempt to learn some of the dynamic lessons of stadium rock from supporting The Who, while on the medieval themes of side two they had gone all ‘Game of Thrones’.

Talking was then put on hold as the album’s seven songs were played in order and pretty faithfully to the originals. We were taken on a magical journey through ‘Time Was’ progressing from gentle folky intro to full rock out, to ‘Sometime World’ with trusty Bob Skeat laying down some prominent bass lines and that wonderful closing solo from Andy where it seems impossible anyone can play notes with that speed and retain melody and fluency, to a concise ‘Blowin Free’.

Then, flipping the proverbial record over, ‘The King Will Come’ with Mark doing justice to the wah-wah solo, the pastoral ‘Leaf And Stream’ and the twin themes of ‘Warrior’, with a few people punching the air to the chorus and ‘Throw Down The Sword’ with another vintage Andy solo.

I did have a fear beforehand that the current line-up might struggle to do justice to the vocal harmonies that also characterised much of early Wishbone, but are less prominent in their sound now. However the biggest compliment I can pay is that Andy Powell sounded as good as I can remember singing, aided by Bob, that I did not even think about that till afterwards. Andy expressed how playing the album brought back cherished memories, and graciously thanked the other three original band members.

There would have been a temptation to leave it there, but there was time for a couple more choice oldies. After another anecdote about their days recording it in Miami and inspiring the Eagles and Joe Walsh, the lengthy ‘FUBB’ showed off the band’s instrumental prowess without ever dragging. Then a half hearted attempt to go off and back for an encore led into the fun and rather looser bluesy boogie of ‘Jailbait’.

At two hours, substantially longer than the slightly underwhelming gig here this time last year, there was full value for money. The entertainment either side showed there was, and still is, much more to the band’s catalogue than ‘Argus’. However this musical tribute certainly did justice to that wonderful piece of work that will always be seen as the crowning glory of their career.

Review and Photos by Andy Nathan

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Power Plays w/c 9 December 2024

In this sequence we play ‘The Best of 2024′ GRTR! reviewer selections

Featured Albums w/c 9 December 2024

09:00-12:00 The Best of 2024 (Melodic Rock)
12:00-13:00 The Best of 2003-2024 (Melodic Hard Rock)
14:00-16:00 The Best of 2024 (Singer Songwriter)