Wake report

Star-spangled mother of all wakes for joker and jazzman Tony
Bye to Hell Blues man
By Joel Taylor

There was plenty of booze and good conversation - and Tony Ashton would have loved every minute of it. Tony, the richly talented musician of soul, jazz and blues, the bon-viveur, the practical joker, the artist and the cricketer, this was the man hundreds gathered to remember in the mother of all wakes, filling the main hall in the Hampstead Town Hall on Tuesday evening.

The bottle party overflowed with friends, some of whom had travelled from Blackpool where Tony had grown up, others from abroad including Knut Morten Johannsen, organiser of the Hell Blues Festival of Norway. Tony, who had often played in the festival, had been made the festival's "Ambassador".

His friend, film actor Ewan McGregor, flew in from Morocco where he had been working on a film to attend the funeral.

Friends who had played in bands with him, friends who had sung deep into the night at boozy sessions at the Haverstock Arms, friends who couldn't help being charmed by him, they were all at the wake.
Tony was perhaps the last of the great characters drawn to the Haverstock Hill watering hole. In the 1940s and 1950s they included the poet Louis McNeice, later actors like Peter O'Toole, Ronnie Frazer and Ewan McGregor, and my old journo friend Tony Van Den Berg.

I met Carol McGiffin, Chris Ewan's first wife, who didn't seem pleased that Chris hadn't turned up. Chris and Tony had been close friends for many years. Tony had often appeared in Chris's TV show TFI Friday. Carol, a radio talk-show host, who lives in Belsize Park, said that though she had to leave London within a few hours for a Granada TV show in Manchester, she wouldn't have missed the wake for anything.
"He was such a wonderful friend," she said.

Film director Mike Figgis, who knew Tony for several years, told me that he had recently filmed Tony's last gig. He was also busy finishing his latest film Duchess of Malfi, based on a free adaptation by Heathcote Williams of Webster's 17th-century classic. It stars his wife Saffron Burrows, with Burt Reynolds playing a small part.

Friends lined up to offer condolences to Tony's wife Sandra (pictured above with Tony's last drawing).
She was pleased Radio 1 had re-scheduled their programmes on Tuesday to fit in a tribute to Tony, and that an album by Purple Records, released this week, included Tony's song I'm Dying For You.

Sandra Naidoo came to Camden as a child from South Africa via Hungary with her parents, who were fleeing from the apartheid regime. Her mother, a Lithuanian Jewess, her father, a militant Indian trade unionist. Sandra, one of the first black TV journalists in the 1970s and 1980s, occasionally read the ITN news with Andrew Gardner. Newscaster Trevor McDonald sent her a note:
"Welcome to the very small ranks..."

Thanks to Knut Morten Johansen