Meeting Tony Ashton

In early 1970, when I was 11 years old, I heard the music of Tony Ashton for the first time. The album was Ashton Gardner & Dyke(1969 now available on CD REP-4565). I loved his unique vocal style and found the music to be something very new and different. That was a few months before I discovered Deep Purple(the album In Rock). From there on, I collected every record that was in anyway related to him. PAL's Malice In Wonderland(1977) was the last highly publicized record featuring Ashton.

In 1981 I was visiting London and went to a small bar called the Bull's Head to see The Terry Smith Blues Band. When I got there I was shocked to see Tony Ashton playing the piano! After the show, by which time he was completely smashed on booze, I walked up to him and said hello.
We exchanged about 20 words and I walked away feeling very disappointed.

After the passing of 14 years of not knowing what had become of him except what I read in the liner notes of the CD reissues, I wrote him a 3 page letter and sent it to an address in London that was given to me by Ingo. About one month later, in February 1996, I got a thank you note from Tony Ashton written on the back of a postcard print of one of his illustrations. He was thanking me for the letter and for putting him on the net to which he isn't connected. The note also included a phone number!
It took a couple of weeks before I built up the courage to call him. When I did, he was very kind and answered all the questions I bombarded him with!

To cut a long story short, after 3 telephone conversations in a 2 month period, we became friends. When he and his wife decided to take a short one week vacation, they inquired whether I recommended Cyprus (where I live) and of course I gave more praise to this island than it really deserves and recommended it. Tony said that this way he will also get to meet me. The next thing I know they find a great package deal to Cyprus that included a one week stay at one of the best hotels in Larnaca, a coastal city 30 minutes away from where I live!

On Sunday the 12th. of May, Tony Ashton and his wife Sandra arrived in Cyprus. We had arranged previously for me and my wife Stephanie to meet them in the hotel bar at 8:00 pm that same evening. The 30 minute drive to Larnaca was intense. There was the Paice Ashton Lord song Sneaky Private Lee blaring on the car stereo and in a matter of minutes I was about to meet the man whose music brought me so much joy over the last 25 years!

When we got there we asked reception where the bar was and started walking towards it at which point I look through the bar entrance and there he was, sitting at the bar sipping on his pint!! He looked different from the man I saw live on several occassions in the past - older, very short cropped hair and a bit thinner! Sandra, who is a 6 ft. 2" dark skinned lady immediately recognised me from a photo I had sent in my first letter that showed me pointing to a huge poster of Tony that hangs in our kitchen. Tony turns around and gives me a very emotional hug and starts expressing his disbelief that finally we meet! Of course I said I was the one who couldn't believe it. Sandra introduced me to the British born barmaid who they had befriended by now as the man who knows more about Tony's music than Tony himself knew!
They offered us drinks and we spent some time talking at the bar.

That night I took them to dinner and we spent the next 3 hours talking about every subject ranging from music to the internet which both Tony and Sandra are totally ignorant about. The evening ended with Tony playing piano in the hotel's cocktail lounge. He played some great blues inprovisations but did not sing much because the piano was very loud and there was no microphone. He did sing a great version of the slow blues standard Stormy Monday and as a special request for me, a rendition of his own song "Sweet Patti O'Hara Smith"(written in 1970 about Patti Harisson, wife of Beatle George who played on the same album and was credited as George O'Hara Smith due to contractual reasons). Three days later, we took them out to dinner again and lots of fun was had!

When I told Tony that for a long time during the 80's I thought that he was dead, his reply was: "I thought so too"! He filled me in on all sorts of details about his life that I didn't know. We discussed the missing PAL tapes, his days with Family, Deep Purple's current album and line up and some interesting stories about some of his old friends including the above mentioned Harisson, Eric Clapton, Jon Lord, David Coverdale, Roger Chapman and others. We spoke about his new career as an artist (incl. illustrations and oil/acrylic paintings) and that was very interesting. Stephanie and myself tried suggesting different ways to promote his new single. He was very interested but that's as far as it went. Tony told me that he does occassionally get fan mail but that my letter was very special and meant very much to him! He was very impressed by my knowledge of his music and the lengths to which I went in the past to find all the records he played on.

On the second night we met with them, I took with me a camera and a camcorder and got some great visual souvenirs of the experience. Tony signed several of my CDs. He also gave me a video of the PAL documentary PALPITATION. The greatest gift that I got from the Ashtons was a diskette with his unpublished autobiography on it. I have since read it and is one of the funniest books I ever read. It was co-authored by the late Mark Putterford, known for his work for Kerrang and other Rock stars' biographies that include Phil Lynott. It's such a great shame that Tony has not yet found a publisher for this classic biography!!

For me, this was an experience I will never forget!! Not only have I met one of my favourite musicians but I have now have a friendship with him that I will cherish forever! We still keep in touch by phone and fax. Since they left Cyprus, I have sent him some videos of himself that he has never seen before plus a copy of a cassette I had recorded of one of his performances at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club many years before! I apologise for the length of this article but I felt that the introduction and the background to the actual meetings was necessary to convey the thrill I felt meeting Tony Ashton.

Walid Itayim
stephan@zenon.logos.cy.net

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