Tony Ashton

Tony Ashton — keyboards, vocals, narrator and ringleader-laureate of British rock's late-1960s pub-circuit good-time school — joined Family in December 1972 as Poli Palmer's replacement and stayed for the final ten months of the band's life. He arrived already a decade into a career that had taken him through Remo Four (Liverpool's other 1960s beat band), George Harrison's Wonderwall album (1968), and the Top-3 UK hit Resurrection Shuffle with Ashton, Gardner & Dyke (1971). After Family broke up he returned to Jon Lord for the Paice Ashton Lord project, became a sought-after producer (Stackridge, Medicine Head), eventually moved to Germany to tour and paint, and died on 28 May 2001 at fifty-five.

Born Anthony John Ashton in Blackburn, Lancashire on 1 March 1946, he made his bones in Liverpool through the post-Beatles fallout era as keyboardist with Remo Four, the long-running Mersey instrumental group whose 1960s lineup included drummer Roy Dyke. The Remo Four connection put Ashton on a session that would mark him for life: George Harrison's Wonderwall Music (1968) — Harrison's solo soundtrack debut — for which Remo Four were drafted as the principal British musicians on the rock-leaning passages. The same circle (Ashton + Dyke + bassist Kim Gardner) regrouped as Ashton, Gardner & Dyke in 1969, signing to Polydor, releasing three studio albums between 1970 and 1972, and notching a UK chart hit with Resurrection Shuffle — UK #3 in early 1971, US #40 the same year, a chart entry sufficiently outsized for the rest of their work that Ashton would refer to himself ever after as "Resurrection Ashton."

He also began the long working friendship with Jon Lord (Deep Purple) that would frame his post-Family decade. The Lord/Ashton single Celebration was cut just before he joined Family — the kind of sideways collaboration that made Ashton one of the most thoroughly-networked people in British rock by the end of 1972, and one of the most determined to stop being on the road.

Joining Family (December 1972)

Ashton had told friends he was taking "at least a year off the road." He was producing Medicine Head when Roger Chapman phoned to ask him about Family. "I really didn't hesitate — despite six months previously saying I'd never go on the road for at least a year — I'd always dug those buggers. I can't think of another band I would have joined," he told Penny Valentine in Sounds in late 1972. He learned the back catalogue at a Harlesden rehearsal-room garage in November and December — "thrown in at the deep end a couple of days before the British tour started."

Valentine's December 1972 feature caught the new lineup in rehearsal: Ashton in "a tartan tammy precariously angled on his head, an old sweater scarcely disguising a neglected stomach," sipping from a bottle of Black Label between Townsend / Cregan / Whitney runs. Townsend characterised the move plainly: "He's brought in a really happy feeling… I'd only seen him play once. I was into the idea of him joining because I knew him as a guy. I knew nothing about his musical ability but Chapman is no slouch at picking musicians." Ashton on his own first gig: "I was frightened to death and yet I really enjoyed it — to say nothing of the two bottles of Black Label I consumed." The first time he was recognised in public, he told Valentine, was when three girls in Austria came up to him during a holiday: "We saw you at Birmingham Town Hall with Family. Bloody great." — "That's the first time I've ever been recognised in my life."

It's Only A Movie and the final tour (1972–1973)

Ashton played the entirety of It's Only A Movie, the band's last studio LP, recorded during the Knowle Hall / Stones-Mobile Cornwall sessions of spring 1973. The opening narration on the title track — "Cards on the table at midnite… We're shooting an old cowboy movie." — is Ashton, not Chapman, in the role of the cowboy-film director the song imagines. Whitney would later confirm the credit explicitly: "Tony Ashton narrates 'It's Only a Movie.'"

He took part in the band's final 13 October 1973 Leicester Polytechnic show through to the Holiday Inn pool-party riot afterwards — a story he would dine out on for the rest of his life. Ashton's account, as recorded later: "By the end, out of two or three hundred people, there were only three who didn't get pushed in, including the waiters and the manager who came up to complain." Of his Family year overall: it remained, per his own statement, the highpoint of his career.

Post-Family: Paice Ashton Lord, production, Germany (1974–2001)

The post-Family decade tracked back through the Lord connection. Paice Ashton Lord — Ashton with Deep Purple's Ian Paice and Jon Lord plus bassist Paul Martinez and guitarist Bernie Marsden — released Malice in Wonderland in 1977 and toured a Hammersmith Odeon string of dates that spring. The project ended after the rhythm section quit; Lord and Ashton continued as a duo on subsequent records.

Production work picked up in parallel. Ashton produced Stackridge's Extravaganza (1974) and Medicine Head's Thru a Five (1974) — the latter a project to which Rob Townsend also contributed, keeping the Family connection alive on the studio floor. Through the late 1970s and 1980s Ashton became a regular session and stage collaborator for Jon Lord and Ian Paice projects, and continued occasional work with the Family circle — Whitney once described him as "a great player" in a 1999 fanzine interview, and Palmer (who Ashton replaced in Family) said simply, "I've known Tony for ever."

By the late 1990s Ashton had relocated permanently to Germany, where he kept up a touring schedule through clubs and small venues — "where they're geared to remembering the old farts rather than condemning them," as he told John Bungey for the August 1996 MOJO feature on Family. Painting became a parallel career: he was a successful figurative artist with regular German exhibitions through the late 1990s.

Through the 1980s Ashton co-hosted the BBC TV music programme GasTank with Rick Wakeman — guests rotated through every week, from Phil Lynott to Deep Purple's Ian Paice, sitting in with the show's in-house band led by Ashton and Wakeman. The 1990s saw him return to large-festival appearances with Bernie Marsden before he became seriously ill in 1999. Earlier childhood detail had set the table for all of it: piano lessons from age five, The College Boys at thirteen at St. George's School, Blackpool, and his first jazz outfit — the Tony Ashton Trio — running Picador Club residencies in Blackpool through 1961 and 1962 before the Liverpool / Hamburg / Star-Club years with Remo Four.

Death and legacy

Tony Ashton died on 28 May 2001 in London, of cancer, age 55. Friends and former bandmates — Roger Chapman, Jon Lord, Bernie Marsden, Bobby Tench among them — paid tribute over the following months. The message Ashton sent shortly before his death — preserved on a number of fan sites — captures the man as well as anything: "Dear everyone, Thanks for all the messages and enquiries — recent tests show the cancer has spread and I've decided to refuse further treatment and come home. So — thanks to all, have a drink for me — cheers and bollox … — Tony Ashton." His Family year, despite being the shortest of any member's tenure (December 1972 – October 1973), is one of the most fondly remembered of the band's lineup history. He brought what Townsend called "a really happy feeling" to the closing record, contributed the title track's narration, and committed himself fully to a final tour he could easily have skipped.

Selected discography

With Family

• It's Only A Movie — Raft, 1973 (the only Family studio album with Ashton)

With Remo Four

• Smile! (Star-Club, 1967) and various 1965–1968 singles
• George Harrison's Wonderwall Music (Apple, 1968) — Remo Four as principal rock-side band

With Ashton, Gardner & Dyke

• Ashton, Gardner & Dyke (Polydor, January 1970)
• The Worst of Ashton, Gardner and Dyke (Capitol, February 1971) — contains Resurrection Shuffle (UK #3, January 1971)
• What a Bloody Long Day It's Been (Capitol, 1972)

With Paice Ashton Lord

• Malice in Wonderland (Polydor, 1977) — Hammersmith Odeon residency, spring 1977

Selected production

• Stackridge — Extravaganza (1974)
• Medicine Head — Thru a Five (1974, with Rob Townsend on drums)
• Lord & Ashton — various continuing projects, late 1970s–1990s

Pre-Family single with Jon Lord

• Celebration (the bridge from AG&D to Family, cut just before joining)

Born: Anthony John Ashton, 1 March 1946, Blackburn, Lancashire
Died: 28 May 2001, age 55, of cancer
Family tenure: December 1972 – October 1973

Sources: "Tony Ashton and Family" — Penny Valentine, Sounds, late 1972 (in the Press Archive); "Faulty Towers" — John Bungey, MOJO (August 1996), in the Press Archive; At The BBC sleeve notes — Dave Ling, Madfish SMAXBX1032 (2018); Whitney interview, The Weaver's Answer fanzine (1999); Discogs; Wikipedia.