------------------------------------------------------- JANUARY 4, 2003 ------------------------------------------------------- Source: Mixdown Monthly -- Issue #105 http://www.users.bigpond.com/apertout/Wakeman.htm Return to the Centre of the Earth – Part 1 By Adrian Pertout With the upcoming Australian ‘Yes’ tour, Adrian Pertout speaks with legendary keyboardist Rick Wakeman from the UK about his days at the Royal College of London, ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’, and his longtime association with ‘Yes’. After an early introduction to music via piano, clarinet and church organ lessons, as well as a healthy diet of classical, jazz and blues, Middlesex-born Rick Wakeman entered London’s highly esteemed Royal College of Music in 1968 to study piano, modern music, clarinet and orchestration. His brief encounter with academia was terminated that following year in dissatisfaction, yet Rick went on to forge a musical career that now spans over three decades, and initially begun by playing in bands such as the Spinning Wheel and the Strawbs, and working as a session player – up to eighteen a week at one time, and culminating in what is now over two thousand tracks for prominent music figures such as Black Sabbath, Cat Stevens, Mary Hopkins, Cilla Black, Clive Dunn, Elton John, Edison Lighthouse, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Dana, Des O'Connor, Magna Carta, Al Stewart, Ralph McTell, Butterscotch, Biddu and Harry Nilsson, among many. In 1971, Rick then joined Yes, recording classic albums ‘Fragile’ and ‘Close to the Edge’ and consequently establishing themselves as “one of the leaders in contemporary rock music.” At the same time releasing solo projects ‘The Six Wives of Henry VIII’ (1973) and the highly acclaimed ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ (1974) with the London Symphony Orchestra, which incidentally became a top ten hit worldwide, and perhaps the catalyst for his first departure from Yes in May of ‘74. Q: Tell me about the early music experience – the days of the Clementi sonatinas, and later, attending the Royal College of Music in London. How do you reflect today on your formal music education? RW: “Well, it was a great time. I think I’m very lucky learning music in the year that I did, because there certainly weren’t the distractions that there are today. When I was a kid in the fifties – I was born in ’49 – I decided to learn to play. There were only I think two houses in our entire road that had a television for example. So there certainly weren’t computers, and all that sort of stuff around. Basically, there were Saturday morning pictures which you had, and you went out to play football, or you played cricket in the summer. That was all you did. And the rest of the time I practiced the piano, because I loved doing it. But there weren’t any other distractions. I mean, the only other distractions that came along was when I was about thirteen and noticed that the three little girls that lived next door weren’t quite so little any more. And that’s been a distraction for the rest of my flaming life (chuckles). But I think that it’s much more difficult for kids today because there’s so much else. You know what I mean? So it was a great period of time. And my father was a great musician as well. He encouraged me to play all sorts of music but said, ‘Stick to the classical’ because he said that that would give me the technique that was needed to really play what I liked. And he was dead on right. I will never forget that from him. He was spot on. And it was great times. I went to the Royal College of Music. I spent a couple of years there.’ Q: What can you tell me about that experience? RW: “At the time it was a nightmare, if you want the honest truth. I got a scholarship there. And I had passed all my various exams, got all my grades, won loads of festivals and all that sort of lark, and went there thinking that I’d got all these pieces of a jig-saw – of my musical life, that I’d done for the previous fourteen years – and that at the college, they would put the pieces of the jig-saw together for me. And they didn’t. I mean, basically at that particular time, the college was very anti any sort of music unless it was strictly classical music based. You weren’t allowed to do sessions, and if you mentioned rock, pop, jazz or folk, or anything like that, you were almost hung, drawn and quartered. It was all very strict at the time as well. You know, short back and sides – rule of the day – shirt and tie. And I had this huge argument with my piano professor one day, ‘cause she complained that she thought my hair was too long, and it was only touching my collar. And I said, ‘This has got absolutely nothing to do with how I play! You know, I’m passing my exams, I’m practicing, I’m doing my thing. This is absolutely ridiculous.’ So I said, ‘That’s it! I’m not having a haircut anymore.’ So I didn’t. And I’ve got a great deal of thanks to give to that particular lady because I started growing my hair, and so when the opportunity came, when I was in rock bands, I was already three or four years ahead of everybody with hair length. So that’s one major thing I took out of the college. The interesting thing now is that the Royal College of Music has one of the biggest electronic music departments, and all sorts of things go on there now. It’s changed completely. I was just there four years too early.” Q: Your interest for the blues and other popular genres led to your eventually association with the band ‘Yes’. How did this come about? RW: “Well, I had done loads of sessions for loads of people, loads of bands, and that was quite good because I started putting myself, without realizing it, in a sort of a shop window. Because you know, you play on a few records that are successful and people get to know what you’re doing. And then I joined the band ‘Strawbs’, which was great fun, and they were sort of like a folk/rock band. And I had great times with those guys. We’re still great friends now. I did an album with Dave Cousins recently, who was the leader of the Strawbs. And like most folk bands at the time, they were heavy drinkers, and then when you stopped drinking, you’d play for a bit. And that suited me tremendously, with my life (laughs). And then Yes – who were a prog rock band – they’d read an article that I’d written. I was about to leave Strawbs because I just felt that keyboards needed to have a different role in a rock band that they were previously having. You had to play the piano, and play it like Jerry Lee Lewis, or you had a Hammond organ and just played the organ. And I just felt that keyboards needed to play a bigger part in band, and become more orchestral, in a rock sense. And I wrote this in an article, and the guys in Yes saw it. And they came back from an American tour and Chris Squire called me up and said, ‘Hey listen, we’ve read your article and that’s the sort of route that we want to go down. Do you fancy joining?’ And I said, ‘No.’ They said, ‘Why not?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m going to go back to sessions, because you can’t make much money on the road.’ They said, ‘Just come down and have a rehearsal anyway.’ So I went down and had a rehearsal and intended to stay for half an hour and go home, and got there at about ten o’clock in the morning and left after eight in the evening. And that’s it, I was there, happy as a sad boy.” Q: Albums such as ‘Close to the Edge’ solidified the band’s status within the progressive rock scene? What can you tell me about the studio sessions, the live performances, and the general approach to the music at the time? RW: “Well, funny enough that you mention ‘Close to the Edge’ ‘cause Jon (Anderson) and I – you know, we’ve been travelling a lot together – we were just talking about ‘Close to the Edge’, because we play ‘Close to the Edge’; we’ve put it back in for this tour. And we were saying how it’s now so much easier to play and perform than it was back then, and it’s really because back then musicians were ahead of technology. So everything that we had to do, we had to sit down and work out, ‘How the hell can we do this?’ Like the sparkle tape at the beginning of ‘Close to the Edge’, it took more than two weeks to produce. And I put it together for this tour and took me about an hour and a half. Also, the sounds that you want to create on stage now, are so much easier to do. You know, we are a band, we don’t cheat, there’re no tapes, there’re a no things that go on with us, everything you hear we play live, but the great thing is that the sounds are now all there for us to be able to do, which weren’t there back then. And so I think the difference is that back then we were ahead of technology; now technology is way ahead of everybody. But I think that we were brought up in a lucky era where we were used to making the technology work for us rather than having the technology rule what we do.” Q: In 1974 you released your spectacular musical portrayal of Jules Vernes’ ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ featuring the London Symphony Orchestra and a narration by actor David Hemmings… RW: “Yeah, that was good fun. I brought that out to Australia too. That was fantastic. In fact the only surviving film footage of the original ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ is in fact an Australian performance, which is out on DVD. We just found it, and it’s out. And when I look at the footage, when I look at the film, it’s so seventies, it’s wonderful. When I got hold of it we sat down and looked at it in the studios down at Shepperton and made this huge long list of things to what I called ‘bring it up to date’. And my partner in the whole thing said, ‘Do you know what I think you should do?’ And I said, What?’ He said, ‘Apart from digitally enhancing the quality,’ so that the quality becomes fantastic, he said, ‘Nothing! Because this is a record of what it was in 1975, and this is how it should stand.’ And we though, ‘Oh, oh, oh, OK, if that’s what you think.’ And he’s been absolutely right, because everybody that’s got it so far has said, ‘Thank you for not doing lots of digital flashy work with it, and leaving it as it is.’ So it’s a real record of the time.” Q: And your keyboard set up is still memorable in my mind. Can you describe it for me? RW: “Huge (laughs). Well, back then it was all things like Mellotrons, a couple of pianos, lots of electric pianos, a Hammond organ, a Fender Rhodes, all those. But they were a nightmare. The Mellotron, which would run on a series of tapes, and invariably spew the tapes out most nights. Instruments were a nightmare to keep in tune. In general, if I finished with fifty percent of the stuff working, it was a pretty good night. It was a bit like being a mechanic as you went around. But I look at some of the film footage, and look at some of the instruments, and I go, ‘How on earth did I do that? Why did I do that?’ And you realize of course that back then that was state-of-the-art. That was the state-of-the-art stuff, and that’s how it was. And I wouldn’t change it for the world. You would get used to making individual sounds out of keyboards. There were no such things as presets on keyboards, so you made your own sounds. I had dinner with my good friend Keith Emerson a little while back, and we were talking about it, and we said that what was great for us was that we had to produce sounds of our own. Now people buy instruments, press a preset and it’s there. And the silly thing is that we’re not realizing it but a lot of keyboard players are all sounding the same, because they’re all using the same presets. The first thing I do when I get a new keyboard is to wipe the presets, and put my own sounds in. And nowadays I’ve still got a big rig. The rig is in fact bigger than it was back then. I’ve got a huge keyboard rig, and it still produces a lot of the same wonderful old sounds.” Close Window YesInThePress.com For site comments, inquiries, corrections, or additions, contact yitp@yesservices.com