Asher Quinn

Asher has sold over half a million albums since his debut recording Open Secret in 1987, and four of them - Open Secret, Mystic Heart, Wings of Fire and Concert of Angels - have topped new-age and ambient album charts right around the world. His early albums were released under the name of Denis Quinn, and the bulk of them under the name Asha.

Combining instrumental and piano-based compositions with… uniquely, at the time… a few spiritual love-songs, Asher quickly found a niche in the rapidly expanding new age market, and drew comparisons with Peter Gabriel, Phillip Glass and film score composers Ennio Morricone and Hans Zimmer.

Increasingly this decade Asher has moved more towards the troubadour tradition of gentle ballad singing, still with a strong spiritual feel, and his poetic, prophetic and shamanic lyrics have drawn favourable comparisons with those of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, whilst his voice remains uniquely pure, tender and intimate… defying any comparison at all!

Childhood: As a small boy, Asher says he used to listen to Radio Luxembourg under the bedclothes, and liked Buddy Holly, Rick Nelson and Elvis. He says: "I remember feeling quite concerned about Bobby Vee singing Take good care of my baby; I thought to myself 'Yeah, I hope they do… she's only small'. I was about 6 at the time."

School: Asher attended the Latymer School in London, which, with its sister school Godolphin, had a great theatrical tradition, and remembers Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman being in different years. Several friends and contemporaries went on to achieve success in the arts and the media like comedian Mel Smith, film director Paul Marcus, cellist Raphael Wallfisch and journalist Cassandra Jardine. Doing comic turns in revues gave him his first taste for writing and performing.

Asher says: "I used to play pounding Rolling Stones songs on the piano at teenage parties, and then ambient improvised stuff as the night wound down, but I was extremely shy and used to try and impress girls by playing the piano instead of chatting them up."

At around this time, Asher's cousin began going out with a Charterhouse schoolboy called Anthony Phillips, who was in a school band called Genesis… they were introduced and struck up a friendship around music, football, cricket and Monty Python. Anthony was to produce Asher's early albums, some 15 years later.

As a child, Asher says he loved Cliff and the Shadows, then the Beatles, but above all Bob Dylan. "Hearing Blowing in the wind aged about 9 made me want to write and play songs like that. For me it wasn't enough just to listen to great songs… I had to try and DO something about them."

Formative years, Asher writes: "As a student I had a German girlfriend, Ursula, who studied at the University of Gottingen. She had a little bedsit, and in the evenings we would listen to a crackly radio broadcasting from central Europe, and I grew to love the songs of people like Leonard Cohen, Fairport Convention, Van Morrison and French/Greek singer Georges Moustaki.

Ursula also introduced me to baroque and chamber music (especially the mournful Italians Vivaldi and Albinoni), art and films… Kandinsky, Chagall, Miro, Picasso and Matisse; their paintings were full of the kind of images I wanted to convey in my songs. Seeing Fellini's Roma made me realise you could combine the ordinary and the extraordinary in popular art, like Dylan did in song.

There was a 'beat' club called the Blue Note (they're always called the Blue Note), and we used to go down there to hear new acts. I dreamed of becoming a singer/songwriter, having my own songs on the radio and of performing at the Blue Note.

I remember also hearing, around that time, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells and I was amazed; one whole track lasting 20 minutes with different episodes, moments of great beauty and eccentric humour… a real kind of mythic quest in music. It completely revolutionised how I came to write songs and compose music."

At his own university, East Anglia, he was contemporary with comedian and grumpy old man Arthur Smith (who, he remembers, produced a bouquet of flowers out of thin air as a magic trick at the degree ceremony). The university had a great creative writing reputation, and Asher was taught by such luminaries as novelists Angus Wilson, Vic and Lorna Sage and Malcolm Bradbury, and it also spawned a generation of writers and poets, like Ian McEwan and Hugo Williams. Contemporary American literature featured strongly, and Asher was introduced to the writings of Leonard Cohen, and the beat poets like Jack Kerouac who helped fire his imagination.

Other musical influences: The majority of Asher's albums pre-2005 have been marketed as new age music, probably because he wrote many instrumental tracks, and because they tended to have a spiritual feel. The artist himself says: "I just write love-songs… they are often very personal, and mostly for my wife and children. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are my 2 great heroes, both nice Jewish boys, like me! I once waited outside a hotel in Kensington, all night, just to meet Dylan when he emerged. I was 41 at the time (not really).

With 'Len' I had a much more intimate acquaintance. As a fan backstage I shared a pizza with him after he performed in Oxford in 1976. My mates and I had the pizza and he eyed it… pizza is a great way to meet your heroes! I was driving a 3-wheeled Robin Reliant (my first car), and I was so dazzled by the meeting that I forgot where I left it. Hours later, still scouring the streets of Oxford, I met Cohen again. 'I've lost my car' I told him; 'Christ, I hope you find it' he replied. I was about to chat to him about cricket and the meaning of life, but when I looked up, he'd gone…"

Asher says other major musical influences have been Bruce Springsteen, Tim Hardin, Arlo Guthrie and Canadian Daniel Lanois, as well as the folk melodies of Celtic, Jewish, Middle-Eastern and South-American songs, in particular. He also had an enduring crush on the gamin French chanteuse Francoise Hardy, reputedly equally shy by all accounts, and still harbours an ambition to duet with her…

When asked about his favourite songs of all time, Asher says: "It's a toss-up between the Stranglers' Golden brown ('a Baroque sea shanty sung by dark, possessed men lured onto the rocks'), and Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah sung by Jeff Buckley. My favourite album is Acadie by Daniel Lanois.

From an interview: "I've never learned to read or write music, and still prefer to play by ear or to improvise. When I was about 14 my long-suffering but kindly and spinsterish piano teacher used to lament my inability to apply myself to reading, and wave her baton through the air, whilst telling me that Beethoven used to criticise Brahms for playing the piano by ear and for being lazy, and said that his piano teacher can't have spanked him enough. Er… yeah…right…

I eventually also taught myself rudimentary folk guitar and percussion. In my 20's I went on a long 'hero's' journey to the USA and Mexico, and ended up for a while in San Francisco. I briefly joined a band called the 'Wharf Rats'; band-mate Wade from Alaska played harmonica, and his accomplice Wolf had apparently been taught to play guitar by Charles Manson! Hmmm…nice! They were like the Blues Brothers meets the Young Ones. But Wolf got me to play on stage for the first time with his never-say-die enthusaism ('We've got a gig tomorrow night… so learn, you mother-*?!*?!').

During my time in the USA I tried to follow in the footsteps of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, writing about 'stuff' and just turning up to sing in bars, or cafes or on the street, as I travelled around. To this day I have only ever given a handful of professional concerts. I found a spiritual teacher in the Sufi tradition, and started reading Castaneda. It was then that I took the 'left hand path in life' - the dark, difficult, dangerous and exciting one (according to mythologist Joseph Campbell) - the mystical path. I finally began to have something to write and sing about…

Asher's name-changing business and other stuff… he says: "I've had a jumble of names because I was adopted; a Russian name when I was born (biological mother of Russian descent), followed by my adopted name at school (Denis Marks); my earlier recordings were either as Denis Quinn or 'Asha' (my inventions), but I've settled on Asher Quinn now… (or should that be Elvis… or Bob… or…)"

Asher is married with 2 young sons, lives in south west London, and also works as a Jungian psychotherapist. His son describes him as 'a bit of a mentalist'.