OK this turned out to be a goof by me. When solving some other asset problem a few weeks ago, I had fiddled around with (in config/application.rb)
config.assets.paths << "#{Rails.root}/app/assets"
and accidentally added (In some desperate move I guess)
config.assets.paths << "#{Rails.root}/app"
This of course included EVERYTHING under app as assets, which was horribly wrong.
This error did show up until I had to do a rake assets:precompile. Since I didnt really have a clue what that command did, I didn't see that it was trying to compile view ERB files as assets.
After finding this article: http://blog.55minutes.com/2012/02/untangling-the-rails-asset-pipeline-part-2-production/ I realised that it was erroneously including the view files and it had to be a path problem.
Small error but very difficult to fix. Sort of the Rails standard.