By Shawn Perry
When you think of Rick Wakeman, it conjures up images of a man in a cape surrounded by an array of keyboards. He’s at once a super hero, a wizard, a grand storyteller, a session guy in the early 70s who played piano for David Bowie, a multiple-time member of Yes, a prolific solo artist, a prog-rock knight in shining armor with a wry sense of humor. At 71, he’s still going strong — writing, recording, playing, releasing music and videos, promoting it, and taking care of his family.
These days, Wakeman is making his presence known with a solo album called The Red Planet. So far, the reviews have been off the rails and glowing with praise. It’s gotten major kudos for being an old-school, instrumental, full-bore prog-rock plunge into the lofty, space-age landscape of Mars. Perfect. With everything currently under siege, it’s a great escape to a place unknown. Backed by a solid framework of bass, guitar, and drums, Wakeman’s inimitable command of the electronic keyboard, in whatever form, is on full display. It’s impossible to turn away.
Much like the man himself. When finally, after 10 years, I got a chance to speak to Rick Wakeman about the album and a few other curiosities, there was simply no way I could resist reprinting virtually every word and utterance he had to offer. Word for word Q&A’s with talkative sorts are not always that easy to put together, especially when you want to get everything just right. We got into The Red Planet, ARW, Yes, the pandemic, and the last show he played. There just wasn’t enough fluff to cut out. After a friendly round of introductions, we got right into the current state of affairs and it evolved from there.
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How are you doing during this strange time in history?
Well, I hate it like everybody does, but you know, it is what it is. I don’t know what it’s like over there, but over here I shake my head. The beaches are just jam-packed with people, yet you can’t put a hundred people into a theater. My solution to it is let’s build stages on the beaches and we just go on and play because the audiences are already there.
I would be behind that a hundred percent.
It’s been very hard. I think it’s brought home to us how important concerts, shows, the essence of music — how important it is for all of us. Hopefully, when we get it all back, which hopefully will not be too far away, we’ll appreciate it maybe just a little bit more.
I think people are going to lose their minds when everything comes back. They’re going to want to go to every show they can.
I think you’re right. I’m the same. I’ve got a list of the things that I would have gone to this year. I hope they happen next year. I think you’re right. I think people are going to go crazy.
Well at least we have a new record from you called The Red Planet that we can listen to.
That’s true.
This is being called a return-to-form progressive rock record. Can you talk a little bit about how this record came to be?
I’ve been asked for many years by people. I love talking to people. I love meeting people at concerts. For the last five, maybe more years, concerts either with myself or ARW or whatever, people have said to me, “When are you going to do another prog-rock record, a keyboard prog record, an instrumental like Six Wives or Criminal Record?” And I’ve always given the same answer: “When I do a concept album, the concept has to come first because it’s a concept that inspires me to write the music.” So the answer simply is: “If the right concept comes along, that I get excited about, then I can do it. But until then, I can’t just write music and then stick names on it. It doesn’t work like that for me.”
What happened was I was introduced by my great friend Brian May to Professor Stephen Hawking and a lovely guy called Garick Israelian. Garrick is an Armenian man, lives on the island of Tenerife, near the Canary Islands. And he is one of the guys who proved and discovered black holes. I mean, ludicrously clever. Brian said, “There’s a festival held every two years called star Starburst. And Starburst is where they have all these lectures from astrophysicists, from astronauts, from all sorts of people. And at the end of the week, we have a music concert. I’ve done it. Why don’t you do it? Because you’ve done…like No Earthy Connection. I know you have an interest in space.” I said, “I’d love to.” So I did one of the festivals, which was down in Tenerife. I got to meet Stephen Hawking and Garrick. I actually went to a Professor Stephen Hawking lecture, which lasted just over an hour. And I sat there absolutely riveted, which was amazing really because I did not understand one word, nothing, not a thing. But it was great.
Garrick said, “In 2019, it’s the 50th anniversary of man walking on the moon. We’ve got big plans to hold it in Zurich” — which we did last year. That was with Hans Zimmer, Steve Vai, myself, Brian May, a big symphony orchestra and choir. Every surviving astronaut who’d walked on the moon was there. It was astonishing!
Just prior to that, Garick and I had a meeting in Tenerife. He said, “2021 is another big year. It’s the 50th anniversary of us getting up to Mars.” I said, “Really?” He said, “And Mars is just exciting. We’ve learnt so much. There’s another three missions going up in 2020 to arrive in 2021. They’re going to show us a lot. The new pictures that are back are phenomenal. We’ve discovered that the ‘red planet’ was at one time a ‘blue planet,’ that it had oceans and rivers and seas. It does seem very likely that your great friend David Bowie was right. There was life on Mars.”
And he said, “Look at some of these pictures. The photos are so crystal clear. It’s like, you’re there.” I just said, “Garick, you’ve just given me the concept I’ve been searching for for five years.” And I came back and I started working heavily on finding as much information about Mars as I could, as many photos and videos of Mars. I just got engrossed and wrote the music and spoke heavily with my engineer and co-producer Erik Jordan about how we’re going to do it. The plan always was to try and bring 1970s prog into the 21st century. Of course, there’s so much you can do recording-wise with technology that you couldn’t do back then.
Absolutely.
One of the other most important things was who I used. And again, I took the advice of my great friend, the late David Bowie. He said to me in 1971, “Rick, when do you come to do your own albums, always make sure that you choose musicians who understand what you’re trying to achieve. Because if you don’t — if you use the best musicians in the world, but if they don’t know what you’re trying to get — it just wouldn’t work.”
So I felt very confident and it didn’t take long. Lee Pomeroy is always my number one choice for bass player. I think he’s the finest bass player there is at the moment. Also, Dave Cole, who’s a great guitarist and has a talent that a lot of guitarists don’t have, which is knowing what not to play. He’s a brilliant player. Brian May absolutely loves him. Ash Soan, whom I worked with in Cuba, just has a unique way of playing and a unique way of thinking when it comes to the drums. I knew he would understand what I wanted. So to pick those three was really important. It just worked tremendously well.
I read in an interview you had done some time ago — and I’m paraphrasing here — that when you play and you close your eyes, you’re mentally painting images to go with the music.
That’s true.
So, when you play the music for The Red Planet, are you seeing these images of volcanoes and canyons and plains and the general Martian landscape?
When I was doing the recordings and actually playing the pieces? Yes, very much so. When I was writing it — and it was all written initially on the piano — I had a computer screen with loads of photos. So, I’d be looking at the photos and if an idea came to me, I would play it and make a note of what it was. I’d write it down on manuscript paper. And then I’d make some notes about what it was I was looking at. That’s how I tried to pick the eight pieces.
But you’re dead right. When I play — certainly in the studio when I was playing, my eyes closed most of the time — I do paint pictures. That was really how I was taught by my music teacher — the wonderful Mrs. Dorothy Symes, bless her. I first went to her in 1954. Right at the beginning, she said, “You’re a painter. That’s what music is. You’re painting pictures with music. So once you’ve learned the music, you’ve read the notes, you’ve learned how to play it…the quicker you’ve got it in your head and you can close your eyes and play it, then you can start painting your pictures.” And I’ve done it ever since.
Do you think that within the next 10 years, we’ll be able to transport humans to Mars?
It’s very likely and I really hope so. I mean, it’s a long journey, it’s seven months. That really is a long, long journey. It’s going to be a stopping off point as much as anything else. But I think there’s no doubt that Mars will be the next stop as far as the human race is concerned. I just hope it happens in my lifetime — I’m 71. It certainly will happen in my grandchildren’s lifetime. Rest assured, I will be talking a lot to them about Mars. Grandpa Grumpy is what they call me. “When Grandpa Grumpy’s not here anymore, you make sure that every time you read about Mars or hear about Mars or man lands on Mars or whatever, you think of your Grandpa Grumpy.”
I read that some of the music you put on this record was intended for a record you were going to make with Jon Anderson and Trevor Rabin. Is that true?
No, but I can see how that happened. What it was, I’d already started writing The Red Planet and putting some pieces and tracks together. I’d got the bolero of “Valles Marineris” and I got the basic layer down that I liked. Jon, Trevor and I were talking about doing an album and we started sending bits of music to each other. And I said, “Look, I’m going to send you something.” And I sent them “Valles Marineris,” which they really liked. It was pretty basic back then.
There were a few things that happened, so the album recording never happened. I actually pulled it back because I said, “You know what? The track was cool — ‘Valles Marineris’ — as it is. It’s very important to me. And I know what I want to do with this.” Sometimes, you have music that you write and you think, “Oh, this would be good for the band. This’ll be good for something else.” There’s other times where it’s, “I don’t want to play with this tune. I know exactly what I want to do with it.” And that was very much what it was with this. So when I played it to Jon and Trev, it was not as a piece to be used, but more as an idea of how I was writing at that time.
Speaking of Jon Anderson and Trevor Rabin, do you foresee you going in and cutting tracks with them?
I’d love to. There’s been a lot of things that have been very difficult for us. The tour before last that we did, Jon’s lovely wife Jane was diagnosed with breast cancer and had an operation, and thankfully is now fully recovered. But that put a lot of things on hold. Then just as we were about to do the last tour, my wife was diagnosed and had over a year of treatment. She’s now fully cleared. Thank the Lord, but it’s been an awful time. She finally got the all-clear at Christmas. The thing about Jon, myself, and Trevor is that we’re three family men. Family comes first, everybody gets sorted out. And there was a lot of caring things. We didn’t make a big song-and-dance about it. We had to deal with it ourselves. So that’s why nothing has happened with ARW for some time.
We were looking at this year to maybe discuss what we could do. And then, of course, the pandemic hit. I think in a strange way that will make us even more determined because whoever — the nasty, unknown sources that’s trying to do everything in its power to stop us doing things — just makes me more determined. I would really like to think that we can put some tracks together and then do at least one more final tour. I hope that.
I saw ARW three times, including the show you did at the Whisky in Hollywood, which was just incredible.
That was just so funny. I mean, how the crew even got any of this stuff on the stage. It was an idea of our managers. He said, “You know, 1971 in November, you guys played it.” Jon and myself were the only two that played the Whisky. “How great to do it at the same price it was charged back then.” We just thought it was a great bit of fun.
One of my most favorite gigs, probably in the last dozen years or so.
That’s nice. Thanks.
Getting back to The Red Planet. We talked about how the pandemic has killed everything as far as being able to go on the road. Did you have plans to take this record out and play it live this year?
Yeah, I did. There were a lot of shows set for the UK, and in and around Europe. And my agent in America was looking at it. He wanted to wait, rightly so, to see how the album did and to see how it was received before he looked at putting some shows together, which he is doing now — he’s looking at it for the next year. Through absolutely everything, we put the release date back. We had a big launch at the Space Center in England — that’s been put back to March next year. It’s been an awful lot of things that have tried to, shall we say, throw a spanner in the works. But what’s been amazing is the response from people, the websites just get bombarded with people who wanted to know information about the album — how we were doing it, what we did. Which is why we started the Rick Wakeman YouTube channel — to sort of keep people informed about what was going on and what was happening. That’s been hugely popular. So out of bad things, good things happen.
It looks like the last show you played was in March. And it was with Cat Stevens.
Oh yeah, that was interesting. That was a charity event at the O2 with 20,000 seats or something. A very good friend of mine, Gary Brooker from Procol Harum, called me last year and said that he wanted to put together a big concert at the O2 to raise money for the Royal Marsden Hospital, which is a big cancer hospital in London. He said, “Would you come along and play?” And I said, “I would love to because the hospital is very close to my heart.” He said, “Why is that?” I said, “That’s where my wife is.” And he went, “Oh, wow.” So it was very important to me to do it.
Then he called me closer to the date and said, “Cat Stevens, Yusef Islam, is doing it.” I went, “That’s fantastic.” He said, “Yusef wondered if you’d fancy doing ‘Morning Has Broken’ with him.” And I said, “Well, the last time we played it was in 1971.” He said, “Well, it should be interesting then.” Yusef came along and said, “I’d love to do it. It will bring back great memories.”
There was no rehearsal. We went into my dressing room where there was a piano, a keyboard actually. And I said, “How do you play it these days?” He played it to me and it was completely different. All of the opening had all different chords. And he said, “I’ve been doing it like this recently.” I said, “Well, do you want to know what we did originally?” He said, “Yeah.”
So I played it to him and he went, “I’ll never learn that in time.” So I said, “Okay. I’ll tell you what: Let me learn what you do. I’ll play along with what you do, that’ll be fine.” So he played a lot of it. “Is it a different key?” He said, “Yeah. It’s lower than it used to be.” “Great. OK, thank you very much.” So, I ended up playing it a tone lower that it was in the first place without a rehearsal of the new arrangement (laughs). But it didn’t matter because it was wonderful. It was great to see him. It was great to see him looking so well and enjoying his music. There’s only ever going to be two performances of “Morning Has Broken” — obviously the first one was in 1971 and then the last one in 2020.
Did he finally pay you for the session?(laughs)
He did pay me for the session. Yeah, he did that. He actually paid me in 2002, which is another story I sometimes tell on the stage. Yeah, to be fair, it wasn’t him who was to pay me, it was the record company. But yeah, I did get paid at the end and I donated it to one of his schools.
Nice. I have one last question about Yes.
Yeah.
I read a recent interview with Jon Anderson where he said he would like to do a show with all the surviving members of Yes.
Yeah.
Is that something you would like to be a part of?
No, to be honest with you. I love Jon to bits, but it’s not something I would do. I mean, I have strong views. I loved Yes. It was a major part of my life and I love all the guys who I ever played with in the band. But I have a very strong personal view — and it’s only my personal view — that when Chris (Squire) passed away, that’s when the name should have been retired. Chris was the founder member, along with Jon, he was the only founder member all the way through. And he was such an integral important part of that band.
The name “Yes” should be retired and that’s no reason why Steve or myself or Jon or whoever has been in the band can’t play Yes music. That’s fantastic. That’s important. But the name “Yes” — to me, the name died when Chris died. And so what would a reunion type of thing be? It would be a band without Chris. Alan’s not in the greatest of health. He’s limited by what he could do. No, I would rather have the happy memories.
