Six years and five albums after Argus, they called Derek Lawrence. He had produced the first three records, including that one, and had not worked with them since. Wishbone Ash had come home from America, Front Page News had gone down badly with their own audience, and they needed someone to put the rock back. Lawrence did exactly that, and the result is the album a great many of this band’s followers name as their best since 1972 — and almost nobody outside that circle has ever heard.

The short version

No Smoke Without Fire is Wishbone Ash’s ninth studio album, released in November 1978 on MCA, produced by Derek Lawrence and engineered by Rafe McKenna. The band is Andy Powell and Laurie Wisefield on guitars, Martin Turner on bass and vocals, Steve Upton on drums. Eight tracks. This is Wisefield’s record: he wrote most of it, including You See Red, Ships in the Sky, Stand and Deliver and the two-part closer The Way of the World; Martin Turner contributed Baby the Angels Are Here and Like a Child; Anger in Harmony is a Powell, Wisefield and Turner co-write. You See Red was the single and did not chart. Colin Elgie did the sleeve. Turner later remixed the album himself for CD.

The producer comes back

Of the five albums between Argus and this one, two were good, two disappointed and one is the record their own fans call the nadir. Lawrence walked into that and did three things: he brought the rock back, he put the punch back into the guitar attack, and — by the account of people who were paying attention — he got four men who had started keeping separate songwriting accounts to work as a team again. The irony is that the result is still dominated by one of them. Wisefield had joined in 1974 as the replacement and by 1978 he was the principal writer, which is a remarkable thing for a band whose identity had been built on Martin Turner’s words and Andy Powell’s guitar. Two years later Turner was out. You can hear the balance tipping here, and it sounds like the band playing well rather than a band coming apart.

The sound

Punchier and heavier than anything since There’s the Rub, and the twin guitars are back where they belong — right at the front, jamming, multi-tracked, playing off each other exactly as they were built to. There are no epics on the scale of Phoenix, and the album is more consistent for it: eight songs, a wide spread of styles, and a coherence the previous three records could not manage. The lyrical mood is dark for most of its length before the closer finally lets some light in, but musically it is nothing of the kind — this is a rock album with strong melodies and superb playing. Some hear Fleetwood Mac in it, some hear Dire Straits, and the production is thin in places. None of it stops the guitars.

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The songs

You See Red opens on a riff that has outlived everything around it — the band still play it live nearly fifty years on — with the twin leads jamming up front, lovely vocal harmonies and a driving mid-pace. It was the single and it sank without trace, which tells you more about 1978 than about the song. Baby the Angels Are Here is Turner’s, a bluesy rocker with fine bass-and-guitar interplay that ends in a surprisingly fierce Powell solo. Ships in the Sky is short, almost drumless and folky, the closest thing here to Leaf and Stream, with the two guitars building a hypnotic rise and fall. Stand and Deliver is the hardest rocker on the album and carries a classic twin-lead instrumental section; a good many listeners call it the standout. Anger in Harmony is two songs in one, gentle until it shifts gear around the halfway mark into a boogie workout. Like a Child is Turner’s other. And The Way of the World closes across two parts — the multi-part jam form that made the early albums, back at last, and the only optimistic thing here.

Reception and legacy

Unjustly forgotten is the phrase that keeps coming up, and it fits. Among the faithful this is routinely called the best Wishbone Ash album since Argus and the finest of the Wisefield era — some go further and describe it as the belated follow-up Argus never had. It did not sell like one. Elgie’s sleeve is worth a look on its own terms: a black and white close-up of one man speaking into another man’s ear, both faces partly overlaid with drawings of what is going on beneath the skin; on the inner sleeve, without the drawings, he is shouting. They toured it through 1978, released Live in Tokyo the following year, and then made Just Testing, after which the classic Mark 2 line-up was finished.

The verdict

For people who already know this band, and the one to reach for if Argus left you wanting more of the same. Start with You See Red, which is as good an opening track as they ever recorded and has the riff to prove it. Then The Way of the World, both parts, for the return of the long form. Then Stand and Deliver for the guitars, and Ships in the Sky for the quiet. Argus is still where you begin and this is not its equal. But it is the closest they came, six years and a continent later, with the same man in the producer’s chair and only two of the original four still in the room.

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