Steve O’Donoghue
Steve O’Donoghue (vocals, guitar)
Steve O’Donoghue arrived onstage unannounced at 8pm, a support artist at the Wishbone Ash gig, and proceeded to entertain us with his acoustic guitar for half an hour. A quirky singer-songwriter from Hyde, Manchester, O’Donoghue very quickly won over his audience, so much so that by the end we were calling for more.
Interspersing his songs with probably apocryphal stories, the time passed very quickly indeed. (“My father died a couple of weeks ago and we only discovered last night that he has cut me out of his will (and the grandchildren). He lives in a big f*ck-off house in the Cotswolds and runs a big f*ck-off Mercedes. We took the kids down there loads of times; they didn’t want to go, and they hated it – and now we’ve got nothing!”)
His seven songs were mostly bitter-sweet, always up-tempo, and O’Donoghue introduced each with a little story. The first two songs drew references to “working girls” which amused all, and then the tale behind ‘I’ve Been A Fool’, about a friend who promised to marry a girl if he ever met her again; well – spoiler alert! – he found her on the internet via social media, but she didn’t remember him. I particularly enjoyed the explanation of the title ‘You Ruined Everything’ which was dedicated to children everywhere!
As far as I can ascertain, O’Donoghue has only ever released one album, a 2003 CD called ‘Martha’, which I might just hunt out on Spotify.
Very much a Richard Digance-lite; very entertaining.
Setlist: The Town Bike; Working Mother; You Ruined Everything; Two People and One Million Butterflies; I’ve Been A Fool; The Hardest Man in Town; Holding On
Wishbone Ash
The ‘Argus 50 1972 – 2022’ tour
Andy Powell (guitar, vocals) / Mark Abrahams (guitars) / Bob Skeat (bass, vocals) / Mike Truscott (drums, percussion)
My final Holmfirth gig of the year took me to see the classic 1970s prog-rock band Wishbone Ash. ‘Argus‘ is one of my all-time favourite albums (you’ll find it amongst my montage of such albums elsewhere on this website) so I couldn’t pass-up the opportunity to see the band perform it live on a tour which was specially designed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the album.
You have to go all the way back to the Reading Festival of 1975 to find the last time that I had seen the band, and an awful lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. There have been some well-publicised acrimonious fall-outs between the several members of the band, resulting in there being two Wishbone Ash bands currently out on tour – this one and Martin Turner’s Wishbone Ash. I had been told that Turner’s was the better option, but I could only go to see what was available to me, so here we are.
The band took to the stage at 9pm, launching straight into ‘In the Skin’, a corker of an opener with its driving rhythm. I wasn’t familiar with any of the material in the first section of the performance because I had grown up fed on a diet of ‘Pilgrimage’ and ‘Argus’. I might have occasionally heard stuff off ‘Wishbone Ash’ and ‘There’s the Rub‘, but I certainly haven’t heard any of their more recent material. ‘We Stand as One’ was dedicated to the people of Ukraine in their ongoing struggle against Russia and was marked by Powell picking up his trademark ‘Flying V’ guitar.
A lot has been made of Wishbone’s approach to employing the dual guitar attack and it has certainly worked well down the years as well as influencing other bands to go down the same road. On this occasion, though, I have to admit that I was left wondering whether Powell and Abrahams were actually playing in the same key so dissonant was the sound that often occurred. As far as I could tell, it seemed that it was Abrahams who was at variance to Powell’s guitar line but, maybe I’m wrong? I was certainly close enough to the speakers to be able to hear what sounded like flat or harsh guitar runs!
Although there was no walk-off-stage break in the set, there was a natural break as the newer material came to an end. It was at this point that I was put in mind of something that I had read in Graham Armitage‘s book, ‘Penthouse Memories’ where I recalled Steve Toal saying that he had been to a gig somewhere which had reminded him of the Penthouse and its sticky carpets; well, I can tell you that on this very evening my shoes were well and truly glued to the dancefloor! Any more than 30 seconds of applying my body weight to either foot resulted in my having to quite literally tear my sole from the floor. With an ageing back proving increasingly reluctant to standing for long periods, I needed to keep shifting my weight and this sticky issue just became more and more evident as the evening wore on. Nightmare!
Anyway, back to the music, and we were soon into the album that we had all turned up to hear. Andy Powell introduced this section of the evening with a few stories about the creation of ‘Argus’, and then it was all systems go! ‘Time Was’, of course, begins with a slow acoustic theme before lifting off with the memorable riff and, by the time the gig had rolled around to my favourite song on the album, ‘Blowin’ Free’, everybody was deeply involved. The riff on that track is really memorable and with everyone joining in bouncing and clapping in time, it proved to be a fitting song with which to end ‘side one’ of the performance.
Powell went on to say that ‘side two’ was the more fantasy-inspired material, likening the overall feel to the recent cult TV blockbuster ‘Game of Thrones’. Even the album artwork, with its lone sentinel warrior, was designed with fantasy in mind, and he revealed that the designers were also film-makers.
And the quality music just kept rolling along with ‘The King Will Come’ kicking off the remainder of the album. But there is one slight problem with ‘Argus’ – whilst “Warrior” is a great track, “Throw Down the Sword”, the album closer, is actually quite slow, sombre and, if we’re brutally honest, hardly the most rocking song on the album. You can’t end a gig on a low, so we were treated to the very popular rocker, ‘F.U.B.B’, together with an interesting introductory tale…
Joe Walsh popped into the studio whilst the band was recording the album from which it comes, ‘There’s the Rub’. Whilst he was currently riding high on the back of his hit single ‘Rocky Mountain Way’, Walsh had recently disbanded Barnstorm, and was therefore without a band. Impressed by the twin guitar approach, Walsh asked whether Wishbone Ash were interested in going with a three-guitar attack but he was turned down. Then, on the day that the band were tidying up and leaving the studio, who should file in behind Don Henley and the rest of the Eagles but Walsh! He had the last laugh too, because his new band was in the studio to record ‘Hotel California’ and the rest, as they say, is history!
‘F.U.B.B.’ went down a storm with the punters, of course, and the almost two-hour set closed with the anticipated encore of ‘Jail Bait’ and ‘Phoenix’ moulded together, a combination which was a fitting end to the night. The near sell-out audience was very happy and had been well entertained. And I got some great photos too!
As an aside, what is it with people who feel the need to fart at rock gigs (and football matches)? And why do they always stand/sit near me? 🤷♂️🤬
Setlist: In the Skin; We Stand as One; Coat of Arms; Rock’n’Roll Widow; Standing in the Rain; Time Was; Sometime World; Blowin’ Free; The King Will Come; Leaf and Stream; Warrior; Throw Down the Sword; F.U.B.B.; Encore: Jail Bait/Phoenix (medley)
Gigs'n'Stuff 