Welcome to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. Hello, how are you? Thanks so much for joining me. What sort of a week have you been having? I wish you could just call me up and have a chat and let me know.
But I guess what you could do is send me a message through the website abreathoffreshair.com.au or even through the Facebook page which is Sandy K Presents. I’d be so happy if you felt like connecting whether it was just to say hi or maybe ask me to find someone special that you’d like to hear from. Go on, want to know who’s on the show today? Well, I’m very excited to be bringing you my chat with famed English musician Rick Wakeman, who’s best known for both his solo albums, of which there are now more than 90, as well as being a keyboardist Is that Rick? It is.
I can’t believe it. How are you doing? I’m very well, thank you. Thank you.
It’s taken me, I don’t know, seven months maybe to get you. You may well laugh, it’s been the most frustrating seven months of my life, but I’m very persistent. Good for you.
Are you in Sydney? I’m in Melbourne. Oh, you’re in Melbourne. I love Melbourne.
I’ve been to a cricket match there and also went to the Aussie Rules football final there with the Swans, which was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. The game was about three seconds old before everybody was beating hell out of each other. It was brilliant.
I loved it. Well, you’ll have to come back. You know, I genuinely have a lot of time for Oz because apart from a lot of people, I’ve got relations down there, they’re all nearly all dead now, but also just great memories of so many times down there and hope that I can get down again before I depart this mortal coil because that would be great.
It’s just a great place to go to. It puts a smile on your face when you go down there. That’s lovely to hear.
I’ve got lots of memories, some of which are totally untellable. I’m sure. Yeah, no, it’s wonderful.
Can I take you back through your most incredible life? Go on. I have to admit, I didn’t know all that much about you to begin with when my chase to chat to you began. But what I’ve read about you is just staggering.
At age 25, you’d had a heart attack. Yeah, I’d had three of them. I’ve stopped having them now because they hurt.
And at 30, you were one of the biggest rock stars on the planet. And then sometime after that, you were homeless and on park benches. What happened? Yeah, that’s called divorce.
Is that what it is? Yeah, yeah. Divorce will do it for you. That’s what sort of happened there.
Yeah, I mean, I’ve been married four times. Very happy now. Rach and I have been together 19 years now.
So that’s quite an achievement for me. Well, actually, it’s more of an achievement for her, really, than me. But yeah, no, divorce is somewhat crippling.
And each one of them, you sort of go, I haven’t got anything anymore. And then you start again. Well, you’ve been incredible that you have been able to start again each time and build it up.
And with such big dreams, the whole King Arthur thing was really a dream that kept you going, wasn’t it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the whole King Arthur thing was just, well, when I get a sort of beer in my bonnet and I’ve got to do something, then, you know, then I just have to have to do it, which is sometimes a real pain for my management because they go, you can’t do this. And that is like a red rag to a bull.
It means, oh, yeah, I will. Yeah. You know, sometimes it works and sometimes it, well, it always works, but sometimes it doesn’t work quite according to plan.
But that’s half the fun. Yeah. King Arthur was very special to me in so many respects.
It means a lot, King Arthur. I loved all the music that I wrote. I mean, a lot of it I wrote in hospital.
So in a strange way, King Arthur is as much an autobiography as it is about King Arthur, if the truth be known. But, I mean, the last battle I wrote after the doctors and specialists had a meeting with me in there with my management to say that they felt, because they dealt with heart problems differently back then. I mean, back then I was in hospital for nine weeks.
Now they have you out in nine hours. You know, it’s so much different. And they basically said, well, we think you’ll have to retire.
No more touring and things. And I remember I went, sod that. I’d rather not be here.
And just decided to, which was probably in one respect, stupid just to defy the doctors in every way, manner, fashion and form. And in fact, I went on tour. You just went out on tour? Yeah.
Went out on tour, which was, well, now with what they know, I mean, obviously they work on the principle that the heart is a muscle and he’s exercising. Back in the early seventies, it was, oh, better rest it. And that’s, I couldn’t do that.
But one of the funniest things was I played for the showbiz 11 football team and I went back playing with them again. And it was pretty well known that I’d had these heart attacks and it was fantastic because I played up front and all of the defenders, they were terrified to tackle me in case I dropped down dead. So it was absolutely brilliant.
I remember. So you had an advantage. Oh, it was great.
I mean, what I did on a couple of occasions, if they came in really hard, I’d fall over and just lie still for about 20 seconds and they’d panic and I’d go, oh, something’s funny there. And then they’d leave me alone. It was great.
I scored more goals that season than all the others put together. Then they cottoned on. And you couldn’t get away with it anymore.
Is there an absolute favourite tune that you have that’s the one that is more dear to your heart than anything else? It’s probably the theme to King Arthur, if I’m honest. It’s been used for so many things that that theme, telly theme, loads of general elections over here. And it’s been used in South America for their news things.
I can remember writing that on that particular theme on a piano, which I no longer own. That disappeared in one of the divorces. And I can remember writing it.
I had it in my head and I wrote and played it. And I thought, you know what? That’s pretty good. And I can remember thinking at the time that it was, actually, that’s okay.
So it is probably the King Arthur theme. Whoso pulleth out this sword from this stone and anvil is the true-born king of all Britain. The Music Press reviewed King Arthur before it happened.
They just actually slated the idea, the whole thing. Luckily, we’d sold out three nights at Wembley. And about two, three days before the opening night, I&M, who was inundated from Music Press, well, we need five to ten, we haven’t received any tickets.
Luckily, the general public don’t agree with you, because they’ve sold out the three nights. I wanted to do it at Wembley. I wanted to do Wembley and that’s where I wanted to do it.
Yeah. And I went to my manager’s office at the time and I said, I want to do the King Arthur. And I said, I want to do it at Wembley.
And I’m not sure why, but I said, no, I would do it at the Albert Hall. I said, I don’t want to do it at the Albert Hall. That’s the wrong venue.
And I said, I want to do it in the round. I want to do it, you know, like, you know, yes, I’d already done shows in and around then. So I want to do it in the round, in the middle.
So it’s, you know, the orchestra and everything. Can’t do it. Yes, I can.
No, you can’t. I can remember Arthur going, no, no, no, no, you can’t. And he said, we’ll do it at the Albert Hall.
And I said, give me one good reason why I can’t do it. And they said, well, because the Ice Follies. And I said, what do you mean the Ice Follies? Well, the Ice Follies are coming in in August to do their summer show.
Actually, in July, it’ll be ice. So I came out and then I was really pissed off. I walked down to Notting Hill Gates railway station and I got on the train and I ended up at Fleet Street.
And I got off. This is obviously no mobile phones and things. And I went to a phone book and I phoned up Chris Welch at Melody Maker.
And I said, Chris, fancy a drink in the Red Line? He said, oh, yes, yes. And I said, I might have a story for you. He said, oh, great.
Yes, lovely. So we met in Red Line. And I can remember sitting.
I’m going to do three live shows of King Arthur. Great. So we had heard a rumor that that was that was going to happen.
I said, yep. He said, where are you going to do it? I said, Wembley. He said, oh, right.
I said, you’ve got some dates. I said, it’s going to be July. And I said, it’s going to be a little bit different, too.
He said, on ice. I said, I’m going to build a castle in the middle of the ice rink. I’m going to have skaters skating all around, depicting the various scenes.
Are you serious? And I said, yeah. The following week, an article appeared in the Melody Maker announcing the King Arthur concert to be staged at Wembley in the round on ice. I guess if you want something badly enough, you can actually make it happen, can’t you? And although that probably counts as one of Rick Wakeman’s greatest achievements, he says he never rests on his laurels.
I’m not one who looks back very much. I’m going to be very honest. I used to.
I used to look back a lot. But I suppose the things in your life, not just musical, but, you know, marriage wise, divorce wise, you think, oh, if I keep looking back, I’m not going to get anywhere. And my father used to say to me that it’s your past that shapes your present.
And it’s your present that shapes your future. So you can look back to your past and use the best bits for moving forward. And I suppose there are some things visually on TV programs, things I did over the years that are stepping stones into how I got to where I am today.
And in a strange way, stepping stones will continue to whatever I do in the future. Rick, your 122nd solo album, The Red Planet. Yeah, The Red Planet.
I did it just before the major, first major lockdown started. I managed to get it recorded and done and ready. And then we put it out.
I can’t thank all those who’ve supported me and wanted this album for a long time for giving me the encouragement, really, to do it. It’s done really well here, which, I mean, really well. So we’re very pleased with that.
Rick Wakeman’s The Red Planet was completed with his backing band, the English Rock Ensemble. It’s keyboard heavy in a similar vein to his 1973 debut, The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Stay tuned as Rick exposes his funny side.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. Thanks for hanging in.
I hope you’re enjoying my chat with English keyboardist Rick Wakeman. Rick and Jess were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017. Many say the accolade was long overdue.
But whether you agree or not, Rick’s acceptance speech was one of the funniest in the event’s history. You may remember it. Take a listen to this excerpt.
I’m very happy here for a couple of reasons to be in Brooklyn. One is the fact, obviously, of being part of YES and getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And the other is something I really probably shouldn’t tell you, is that less than half a mile away from this very building was where I had my very first meaningful sexual experience.
No, no, no, no, no, no. Please, no. No, it wasn’t very good.
It never is when you’re on your own. Anyway. As Steve said, a thank you to his wife.
I want to say thank you to mine. Unfortunately, she’s not here tonight. When I left her this morning, I think she was in a coma, actually.
Well, I think she was in a coma. The sex was still the same, but the washing was piling up. I would like to thank, apart from all the guys in YES that I’ve worked with, my father, who played a massive part in my musical career.
My family were all in the entertainment business. We genuinely were very, very poor. My father was an Elvis impersonator.
Well, there wasn’t much call for that in 1947. He taught me a lot. I remember he sat me down once and said, Don’t go to any of those really cheap, dirty, nasty, sleazy strip clubs, because if you do, you’ll see something you shouldn’t.
So, of course, I went, and I saw my dad. There you are. Basically, in the UK, I’m known for comedy as much as I am for music.
I hosted a big comedy show in the UK for eight years called Live at Jongles, and there was a huge programme called Grumpy Old Men in England, which ran for six years. Massively popular programme. Yeah.
But I have this thing about awards ceremonies, and it’s nothing to do with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It goes to the BAFTAs in England or the Golden Globes or the Oscars. It’s called acceptance speeches.
I mean, they’re just dreadful. I mean, how many times do you want to hear somebody thank their mother, the director, the producer, the woman who did the make-up, the aunt who bought the guitar and the first guitar strings? Nobody is remotely interested. And you can tell that because when people are talking, it’s not that people don’t care.
They’re just not listening. They’re talking around the tables. It happens all the time.
And I was literally just going to go up and just say, yes, thanks very much. Great, the yes are in. Sorry, Chris isn’t here.
And I was standing there, and Trevor and John, who both know about all the comedy that I do in the UK, Trevor just went, go for it. I said, I can’t. He said, go on, go on.
I said, look, nobody knows me over here for doing comedy. He said, good time to start, isn’t it? So I just started with a few one-liners that I use sometimes in one of the stand-up shows. So the hardest thing then was thinking on my feet.
Yeah, absolutely. I’m trying to pluck things out of the different things that I use just to throw in, to keep it going. It was great fun.
With his wicked sense of humour, Rick has always provided the comedic relief in the bands that he’s played with. First with The Straubs, and then with Yes. It started at school.
When I was in trouble, if I hadn’t done my homework, rather than get the cane, I discovered quite quickly if you could make the teacher laugh, that they couldn’t be angry. I learnt that quite early on, and that music and telling gags and having fun covered a multitude of problems that you could get yourself into. And as a session player, you’ve performed a whole bunch of classics from Cat Stevens’ Morning Is Broken to Elton John’s Mad Men Across The Water.
Is there one that stands out for you as the most fun? Yeah, it has to be doing Hunky Dory with David Bowie. I did a lot of stuff with David, but doing that album was incredibly special. The freedom that David gave you to play, I mean, tracks like Life On Mars, you know, he just said, play it as you want to play it.
And not everybody you did stuff for gave you the freedom to play exactly as you wanted to play, and David was brilliant at that. So, yeah, Hunky Dory, Life On Mars, probably, yeah. It’s a god-awful small affair To the girl with the mousy hair But her mummy is yelling no And her daddy has told her to go But her friend is nowhere to be seen Now she walks through her sunken dream To the seat with the clearest view And she’s hooked to the silver screen But the film is a sad and poor For she’s lived in ten times or more She could split in the eyes of fools When they ask her to go She’s on the same floor Spying in the dance hall Old man, look at your escape window It’s the 3D show Take a look at the Old man, feeding off the wrong guy Old man, wonder if you’ll ever know He’s in the best selling show It’s the Life On Mars What happened was, I was doing a session in 68 for a band called Junior’s Eyes.
Really good band. And Tony was going to produce them, and he booked me to go and do some organ with them. So I went down to the studio, and I put a lot of hammered organ on these tracks.
And in the corner was a Mellotron. They’d just got it in. And I said, oh, when did that come? They said, oh, we got it in a little while ago, but it won’t stay in tune, so we don’t use it.
I had a bit of a break while they were doing other stuff, and I said, can I have a go? And they said, yeah, of course you can. So I switched it on, and I’d never played one before. I was playing it, and basically, in simplistic terms, it’s a series of tapes of recorded notes, and when you press a note, it presses the tape against a playback head.
But obviously, because of the motor, the more notes you press down, the more strain it is on the motor, so it starts to go slower, so the tuning goes all over the place. So I played around for a little bit, and I found a way of doing certain fingering that if you did it carefully, you could avoid it going out of tune. Tony was going to K-Bow, he said, how do you do that? And I said, oh, there’s a crafted little way you can actually get away with it and make it.
It’s nice, interesting. And it was early 1969, I was working with a 17-piece soul band. We used to do all the Otis Redding stuff and Wilson Pickett and Sam and Dave.
We were having a rehearsal on Thursday afternoon, and there was a phone call. They said, look, we’re in Trident Studios. Can you come up quick? We’re recording a track with David.
He wants the Mellotron on it. We’ve got one here, but no one can keep it in tune. He said, and Tony was gone, he said, you were the only person he knew who could actually keep it in tune.
So I drove up to London, and David was there, and it was Space Oddity. This is ground control to Major Tom You’ve really made the grade And the papers want to know Whose shirt you wear Now it’s time to leave the capsule If you dare This is Major Tom to ground control I’m stepping through the door And I’m floating in a most peculiar way And the stars look very different today For here am I sitting in a tin can Far above the world is blue And there’s nothing I can do Afterwards, David said to me, I’ve heard some of your piano play. He said, would you like to do some piano stuff with me? And I said, I’d love to.
So he invited me back a few days later, and I did Wild Eyed Boy from Free Cloud and Memory of a Free Festival and a couple of other tracks. And then it was after that that he invited me round to his house and played on his acoustic guitar the songs that were going to be on Hunky Dory. I found him so good to work with because he was so generous to musicians, unbelievably generous.
I mean, with things like Life on Mars, where he said, OK, when he played to me on the acoustic guitar, I said, play it on the piano. And I said, how do you want it? And he said, you know how I want it. I said, well, no, you tell me how you want it played.
He said, play it. So I played it. He said, that’s how I want it.
He was a real craftsman at songwriting. And, of course, the great thing was his songs, the lyrics were always great. They always told stories because it came from the folk world.
He was a folk singer. Rick Wakeman continued to lurch from one success to another. In 1973, his second album, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, reached number seven in the UK and number 30 in the US.
He’s got quite a good story to it, really. I was signed to INM Records with Strawbs. Yeah.
And part of the contract with Strawbs was that each individual was also signed to INM as an option, that if you left and they wanted to take it up as an option, they would do. I joined Yes, and we were over in America, and Jerry Moss said, I want you to do an album. And I think it was because Yes were just starting to get some notice, big notice in America, and he thought, well, nothing to lose, really.
So I got the magnificent sum of about $12,000. I went away and I’m thinking, okay, I’ve got to do an album. Now, I don’t sing, although I have sung on records, but I don’t enjoy singing.
So it was going to be an instrumental, and I was trying to find a subject to do when I was on tour. And I was at a small airport on that tour, and there was a book in one of the racks at a convenience store at the airport, which was called Private Life of Henry VIII. And I like my history, so I bought the book, started reading.
There was a bit about Anne Boleyn, and whilst I’m reading about her, I had this theme that came into my head, and I thought, that’s interesting. And I used the napkin, and I drew some manuscript lines, and I wrote it down. I got to the hotel, and I started reading a bit more.
And the more I read, and I came to Catherine Howard. She was only about 19 when he chopped her head off. Really? And I thought, I’ve got this here.
I can do Henry and his six wives. And I went back to England, and over a period of nearly a year in between Yes tours, I recorded The Six Wives. In 2009, I got invited because it was the 500th anniversary of Henry’s accession to the throne.
And they said, would you like to perform The Six Wives of Henry VIII at Hampton Court? Never been allowed before. I had to get the Queen’s permission and everything. I said, absolutely.
I did it with a symphony orchestra, a choir, huge band. There was a lot of fun in doing it. I mean, because as I say, like Henry, I’ve been married four times.
I mentioned before what an influence in my life David Bowie has been. Yeah. In so many respects.
I learnt so much from him in the studio, performing and wives. And when he passed away, I was asked to do a eulogy on BBC Radio, which I did, taking lots of calls. And I played Life On Mars live.
And they webcammed it, and a couple of days later, the presenter called me up and said, we’ve had nearly three million hits on the webcam. He says, people are saying you should release it and put it out. I said, I’m not going to release it out for profit.
And a good friend of mine said, do it as a charity record. It would be good to do. And I spoke to my lovely wife, Rachel, and I said, what do you think? And she said, I think first of all, you should think to yourself, if David were alive, because you were great friends, what would he say? And I said, well, probably for a good cause like a cancer charity, he’d probably say, yeah, go for it.
She said, well, do it then. So I did it, and we did it for a cancer charity, all the profits to a cancer charity in England. It did very well.
The single was number one for about eight weeks. It did really, really well. I recorded piano portraits and put tracks on it, like Morning Is Broken, which I did the original of, and put Space Oddity on, and a few other tracks.
And to my stunned amazement, it sort of shot into the top five in England. Because one of the difficult things, of course, in the UK, on radio, they will not play instrumental tracks. So I couldn’t get any airplay.
And it stayed for about 11 weeks in the top 10. I did some tours to go with it, and they were really successful. And then I did an album called Piano Odyssey, which came in the middle again, which was a top 10 album.
And this time, I just added a string section and a bit of choir. And there was an interesting thing in there, because one of the tracks I wanted to do was Bohemian Rhapsody, because Brian May is one of my closest friends. I tried to do it for Piano Portraits, but I couldn’t get it to work.
And I went back to it and looked at it. I went, I know why it won’t work. It does need those little additives, like a little choir coming in here and there, and a little bit of strings coming in here and there.
So I did it, and we finished it in the studio, sent it to Brian. I did phone him up first. I said, Brian, I’m sending you something.
He said, oh, great, what’s that? And I said, I’m sending you a piano version of Bohemian Rhapsody. And he went very quiet. And he came back very quickly and said, right.
He said, I love it. Freddie would have adored this. Rick Wakeman’s homage to Queen and his friend Brian May.
The original six-minute-long Bohemian Rhapsody sold nearly three million copies and remains the third biggest-selling single of all time. It’s been streamed nearly 200 billion times. Don’t go anywhere.
We’ll be right back with more.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. Welcome back.
I’m chatting with English keyboardist Rick Wakeman. Let’s just head back now to 1975’s The Myths and Legends of King Arthur. Rick has already told us that this was the favourite project of his entire career.
The concept album, based on stories about merry old England, began in his hospital bed while he was recovering from a heart attack. It was a story, it was a fantasy story, of basically music being the missing sense that was in all of us. It’s the album that a lot of people really, really like.
And looked at lots of projects that had been done with orchestras and realised there was one glaring thing that was staring us in the face. Yeah. What happened for years with people who’d done projects with orchestras, there was the band music, and then there were orchestral arrangements done around the band music.
So the most logical thing was, don’t think of it as band and orchestra. Think of it as one. The band is part of the orchestra.
You’re writing for violin, strings, guitar, bass, drums, trumpets. You actually are making a giant orchestra. And that’s really, I suppose, the principle that we used.
I was also at that great advantage at that time because I was selling a lot of records, everything was doing good, so nobody would argue with you. When we toured it, it sold pretty well. It sold four million copies.
But I remember the record company calling an emergency meeting with my management because it had only sold four million copies and they were really concerned about sales. It was very bizarre. We went out and toured it, and it was an amazing tour.
I had a seven-piece or eight-piece band. I had a huge entourage at the time after King Arthur. I met a massive amount of people on the payroll.
I mean, it was ridiculous. I mean, if I said it was at least three figures on the payroll, it was a lot of money just disappearing, just vanishing really, really quickly. Even though there was money coming in from King Arthur, it was going out just as fast as it was coming in.
The King Arthur shows on ice were a huge hit, but they were also the last of the big spectaculars. They had run at a loss, and when the production budget was slashed, at the end of 1976, Rick rejoined his former band, Yes. It seems to me, Rick Wegman, that you simply don’t have an off switch.
Are you on all the time? Yeah. I’m up half past five, quarter to six in the morning. I have certain routines to set me up during the day.
I feed the cats. We’ve got three rescue cats, so I feed those. Then I go and we’ve got two rescue dogs from Bosnia with another one coming, so I sort them out.
They get very excited in the morning and let them out. Then my missus is usually up by then, comes down, and then what I do is I go into my office. I’m normally in there by seven.
It’s quarter past seven, and I’ll try and get as much done by nine o’clock before the phone starts ringing. I find it the best time to get stuff done, and then it’ll be in the studio or whatever it is I’m doing for the day. I try to log off, except obviously when I’m on tour or in the studio.
I try to log off by about five o’clock, so I’ll have done 11 hours odd. Then come into that. I like to separate home from work.
I really do. When people call me and it’s about work at eight or nine o’clock at night, which my manager often does, I just sort of say, can you wait till the morning? If you go, well, can I talk to you now? I go, listen, Brian, you’re at home. You’re bored.
You’re bored. You don’t have a home life. You’re bored.
I’m not bored. Call me in the morning. That happens every now and then.
I like my home life, walk the dogs and do other bits and pieces. I like that. Are you taking better care of yourself these days? No.
Well, I suppose I am really actually, yeah, because I’m up on the high level of diabetes too, and I was read the riot act by my doctor, and he said, well, unless you do something about it and lose some weight, he said there’s only one outcome. I said, what’s that? He said, you die. I went, well, I’m not ready for that yet.
He said, well, lose some weight. So actually this year I’ve lost in, what have I lost in kilos? I’ve probably lost about 15 or plus kilos. Wow.
So do you feel better for it? I hate to admit it, but I do. Really? I actually do. I no longer bend down to do my shoelaces up and wonder what else I can do while I’m down there.
Yeah, no, yeah, I do feel better. And my wife, Rach, she’s really encouraged. She keeps on at me to make sure of it.
So I’d like to lose another 10 by Christmas. Right. So what’s the trick, eating more healthy and doing more exercise? It’s to make sure no snacking.
I mean, so there’s no chocolates, no snacking, no that kind of thing, and really not eating a lot just because it’s a meal time. I mean, some days I’ll eat a lot because I’m hungry, and other days I won’t. And you’re right, it’s the exercise.
I mean, dog walking really helps. That’s great. ♪ I’ve been playing the piano a lot, trying to put projects and things together.
I’ve been spending a lot of time, apart from playing, we’re in the process of moving house, which should have taken a couple of months, but it’s taken nearly two years. You’re a bit of a hoarder. Well, I am, I must admit.
But also, we wanted to renovate the house, and getting materials during the pandemic has been just hilarious, just about nigh on impossible. So I’ve been doing that. You know, that’s not been easy because, obviously, since 2019 when it all kicked off, I’ve had seven tours cancelled.
That is not good because basically, like most musicians these days, your touring and your live performances is your income. But I guess that it’s also given you a chance to rest, although I’d imagine that you don’t rest very much. I don’t rest.
No. No, I’m not a rester. Where do you get all your energy from? Mainly from, you know, I don’t know.
From life in general, really. And I’ve got some good friends and people around me who we work together who mostly are considerably younger than me, so they’re very energetic. Also my kids.
I mean, I’ve got six kids, 12 grandchildren. So that keeps you. That’s lovely.
And are any as musical as you? Eldest boy Oliver’s made a few records. He played with Yes for a couple of years as well. He’s, what, 49 now? That’s terrifying, isn’t it? Adam is 47.
He’s been with Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath for 20 years. He’s a great player, Adam. He’s really good.
They all play a bit. All of them do a bit, which is good because I want them to all do well because they’re going to choose which care home I go into. So they need to do well.
No, they’re great. And the grandchildren are hilarious. So, you know, so I think if you surround yourself by people who are alive, then you’ve got no choice.
You feel more alive too. Yeah. You’ve got no choice.
Yeah. I mean, I’ve got friends who are my age and older and musician friends who are my age and older. But, you know, I don’t spend that much time with them because, you know, all you tend to do is talk about.
Aches and pains. Yeah. What visit, last visit to the doctors, what bit fell off last week and that kind of thing.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I certainly understand that.
You’re not surrounding yourself anymore these days with the fleet of Rolls Royces? No. Funny enough, you know, I’ve just had a big clear out of a lot of keyboards and stuff that I thought, I haven’t used some of this stuff for 30, 40 years. So what’s the point in hanging on to it? So my son Adam said to me, Dad, you sell it, there’ll be people who’d love to play this stuff rather than stuck in boxes in your warehouse.
And they’re right. So I’ve sold about 40 keyboards and other bits and pieces. Some have gone to private people, some have gone to a couple of museums, which is nice.
And as regards the cars, I do have one Rolls Royce, which is a rare silver Seraph, which I love. But, you know, it’s interesting what the pandemic does for you. It went down to the garage for, I don’t know what it was, and he said to me, George, it’s seven months since we had this car in.
And I said, yeah, why? He said, you’ve done 11 miles since then. Good job. I drive around in a 15-year-old Lexus SUV, which I love, which is great, throw everything in, the dogs, you know.
And I think, well, that’s what I do. I don’t need the Rolls anymore. So that’s going in an auction in July.
So you’re right, I am a hoarder, but I’m having somewhat of a clear out. Oh, that’s very cathartic. I read about you that you’re starting up Rick’s Place again.
We were avidly watching from this side of the world as you were doing all of those through the pandemic. You’re getting ready to launch that again? Yeah, I’m doing six music pieces with, I’m going to sing with Hayley, Hayley Sanderson. She’s fantastic.
She’s such great fun. By horse, by rail, by land, by sea, our journey starts Two men incensed by one man’s journey from the past In Iceland where the mountains stood with pride They set off with their guide to reach the mountainside Do you feel you’re getting better with age? You’re getting more creative as you’re getting older? You like to think so. I like to think you have creative moments.
I mean, I felt that the Red Planet when I did it was some of the most creative that I’ve done for many, many years. So that was pleasing. Oh, I mean, still got a bit of it there.
It’s very, very difficult to analyse creativity because when you’re young, everything is fresh. Everything is new and fresh. As you get older, you’re just, to a lot of extent, using the experiences that you’ve got.
So you have to be careful when you’re writing music that it’s not writing from experience as against writing from creativity. So you always try to… It’s ever so hard to know sometimes. I mean, I’m pretty honest.
I know when I’ve written something and it’s half decent and when you’ve written something, you go, you know what, that might be good for a TV scene but it’s not any good for anything else. Right. But you’re still as passionate about it as you were when you set out? Oh, yeah.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s just a dream, really. I mean, I feel… I mean, I’ve had lots of ups and lots of downs and, you know, the ups are much better.
Trust me, I much prefer the ups. But, you know, how wonderful… Funnily enough, I was saying to one of my daughters just a few days ago, you know, she said, what would you do if one day you can’t play anymore? And I said, well, it would be very hard. I’d always rather do something because you can write, you know, even if you can’t play as… with the dexterity you’re used to, you can always… I’d always better do something and I might write some more books because the two grumpy books I wrote did very well.
And I said, but… I said, at worst scenario, if I’m stuck in a rocking chair somewhere, I said, and I wake up in the morning, sit in the rocking, I will never run out of memories. That’s what music has given me. You just… I mean, you can’t ask for any more than that.
No, you’re absolutely blessed. Rick Wakeman, you were born the genius and you’ll take that all the way with you. Thank you so much for your time today.
Oh, I must owe you money for saying that. Well, it’s a well-known fact and millions of people right across the world would absolutely agree. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you and I’ve had to wait a long time for it.
Thanks, Sandy. And I’ll have to get back down to Oz because for that, I definitely owe you a coffee. Okay, you’re on.
Thanks ever so much and I’ll see you soon. Look out for Rick Wakeman’s latest concept album. It’s called A Gallery of the Imagination and it was inspired by his very first piano teacher who taught him to paint pictures with music.
And that’s where I’ll leave you today. Thanks so much for your company. Don’t forget to follow the podcast if you’d like to catch up with some of the back episodes of A Breath of Fresh Air.
Till we meet again same time next week, have fun, won’t you? Bye now.