Artist News
Rick Wakeman’s Endless Tour
The Synth and Software Interview by Mark Jenkins
Rick Wakeman must be one of the busiest men in rock music, seemingly always on tour playing different themes and anniversaries. As we speak he’s in the UK playing a series of Christmas trio concerts, but before long he’ll be in the USA, reviving his 9-piece band called the English Rock Ensemble.
His playing style remains uniquely distinctive. He got his start in session work, and it only became clear much later how many significant tracks he appeared on – David Bowie’s “Life On Mars” and “Space Oddity,” Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken,” and many, many more.
Rick went on to play in folk/rock lineup The Strawbs, quickly moving to early Yes, the band from which he dipped in and out until the present day. His new album “Yessonata” is an arrangement of many Yes pieces for solo piano, but it’s not the only one he has to promote.
I asked him about the difference between his stage rigs for the three-piece lineup with his son Adam and singer Mollie Marriott, and the full band setup.
“My keyboard rig with the band is a huge rig, it really is enormous. When I’m doing the one-man show or this Christmas show it’s just four keyboards, either Korg Kronos or Nautilus, because they’re the most adaptable on stage for what we want to do.”
Rick had played earlier at Cropredy, which is a folk/rock festival, and explained “I take a different rig out depending on what the show is. The big setup changes every now and then, depending on what the music is and the sounds I’m looking for, and that big rig contains a real mixture of keyboards.”
In the past Rick has multi-layered sounds on stage using a Syco Logic MIDI Matrix, a device also used by Geoff Downes with Yes and Asia. “I still have it, but I don’t use it so much any more, because I have so many patch changes in the shows now that I can’t physically do it, as much as I’ve checked my body out, I’ve only got the two hands. It’s tricky – so now my patch changes are done by Eric Jordan, my keyboard tech, remotely from the side of the stage.”
Rick has always made keyboard arrangements of what were often orchestral parts (most prominently on his epic progressive rock albums “King Arthur” and “Journey To The Centre Of The Earth”), but in the current performances seems to have achieved particularly stunning orchestral brass patches, and lacking a drummer in these shows, huge orchestral timpanis under the left hand.
“There’s no point in Adam and me playing the same parts, so we take very careful note of what we’re each doing. One of the reasons we use the Kronos and Nautilus is that they are very, very easy to program, so we can make up layers of sounds and we don’t need to have rackmounts or other keyboards layering around it. And sounds like the timpanis are very much controlled by key velocity switching. I use them in particular during the “King Arthur” sections. All we’ve gotta do is try to create a big sound, but make sure we’ve got definition, because sometimes a wrong volume on one sound against something else can make the whole thing sound rotten.”
Rick’s son Adam still looks like an enthusiastic teenager on stage, but is in fact 50. Having acted as musical director for many bands and completed 20 years with Black Sabbath, he plays some guitar as well as keyboards in these trio shows.
“I’ve never been tempted to play guitar myself,” Rick explains. “At a very young age I learned where all the chords were, how the frets work, so when I was asking a guitarist to do something or writing music for the guitar I was writing with a knowledge of what the instrument could actually do and how it could sound. But no, it’s never really appealed to me, but Adam’s a fine guitar player. And when he was with Black Sabbath he played a lot of guitar as well as the keyboards. He’s – you know – he’s annoyingly talented.”
Although Adam can fit in with Rick’s archetypal style, he has directions of his own too, playing solo jazz piano for his “Jazz Sabbath” arrangements.
“I never taught him,” Rick explains. “Would you teach your wife to drive? Not if you want your marriage to last. So he went to lessons, and then we’ve done lots of things together, but I said to him – and to Oliver, my oldest boy who also plays and did two years with Yes – don’t ask me how I do this or what I do there, unless you want to play like me, but if you want to play like you, discover things yourself. Adam has a great style of his own.”
I asked how much setup and rehearsal time was needed for each different performance.
“I spend a day or two days with (keyboard tech) Eric in my storage facility before any tour going through the sounds, and then tweak them a bit as we go along. Adam does it all for himself – he’s 50, but for me that’s considered very young, and he does a lot of the programming for his own parts. But I tend to use Eric, because truthfully, these days I just want to play.
“And then there’d also be situations where I go – I can’t do that, it’s not possible unless I play with my feet as well. So then I say, Ad, can you deal with that? Can you do this? Can you do that? So we did it like that between us because there’s no way you can do those shows with just one keyboard setup. In order to create the sounds we want to, you need the other player as well. But I would say we always had a minimum of a week setting up for the Christmas shows and other things. If it’s just my solo show and I’ve got two keyboards out, maybe three, then it doesn’t take as long as that.”
I asked whether Adam’s individual style incorporated a wider influence by jazz than Rick’s.
“That’s very true. I mean, the only sort of jazz I love is the old Dixieland jazz, the old New Orleans style. That’s great. But the jazz Ad plays, he’s very good at it and good for him, but I don’t get it at all. I’m old fashioned. I go, where’s the tune? Where’s the melody? I like melody and I always have done, but he really enjoys what he does with his Jazz Sabbath and he’s got a good following with it – it’s not a music that appeals to me, but I do understand why it appeals to a lot of people.”
For may listeners, what defines Rick’s playing style is the ornamentation, the use of little decorative figures within the melody lines, which might be assumed to be subject to a great deal of calculation and variation – or maybe not.
“I guess there is. I don’t really think about it. I suppose they’re just variations on a trill, really. I have never really thought about what I do with ornamentations when I’m playing. I’ll stick half a dozen in only if they feel natural, that’s my basic rule of thumb.”
One aspect of Rick’s music that has caused mild controversy among fans is the replacement of male vocal parts with female.
“I’ve always worked with female singers, I used Chrissie Hammond in the past. But then I started working with the wonderful Hayley Sanderson on ‘Return to the Centre of the Earth’ and performances of ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth.’ The thing is if you’re playing a variety of music the girls can sing the men’s parts, but the men can’t sing girls’ parts, it’s just a matter of range.”
When Hayley got tied up in the band for Strictly Come Dancing (“Dancing With The Stars” in the USA) she suggested Mollie Marriott (the daughter of Steve Narriott from Humble Pie and Small Faces) “and she was brilliant. She certainly inherited a lot of her dad’s voice, that’s for sure. And she’s very easy to work with, she rehearses like crazy. One of the things that I really like is when people rehearse before everybody turns up for rehearsals, because otherwise you’ll start and stop every five seconds, and I don’t like that. So she’s very adaptable, and such a nice person too.”
One of Rick’s recent releases is the Yes Sonata, a piano album based on the band’s music. “We’ve always had some Yes pieces that we can play in the band, which I think we do an excellent job of. But this is just one long piece which fits in so many of the little Yes motifs. It works very well when I’m doing the piano show, and especially in America, it goes down extraordinarily well.
“But it depends on the concert. I can’t see me doing any more Yes-type configurations of the music, I think I’ve exhausted what I feel comfortable with. We do our own version of Starship Trooper with the band, which I enjoy playing very much because I think we do a great version. And we did half an evening of Yes music at the Palladium Theatre (London) and I picked pieces that I knew we could more than do justice to. But there aren’t any more that I would truly consider doing. The only one, maybe, if I did it, and I might, I might throw in Siberian Khatru…and ‘Going For The One’…
“But that’s definitely it. I don’t want to be a Yes cover band, that’s the last thing I want to be. But I do the pieces because I enjoy some of them and it’s a great part of my life. I’ve been asked, would you go out and do a whole tour of an evening of Yes music, and the answer is no, of course. Always happy to include some if it feels right, but I don’t want to feed off the name, that’s not my style.”
And what do you have in mind next for the USA?
“Well, I have my very, very, very, very final one-man shows in the USA (March and April 2025),we did two tours in America last year and they were meant to be the last, but we had quite a few venues coming to our agency saying ‘you haven’t fitted us in and it’s not fair.’ So that’s the last of the one-man shows, which is just myself on piano. And I do use a couple of additional keyboards and it works well, but now I want to knock the one man show on the head.”
Speaking of which, 50 years of “King Arthur” arrives in 2025 (and of “Lisztomania”) – any plans for that?
“Yeah, already booking now at the end of 2025 for the UK for the 9-piece band, and we are looking at ‘King Arthur’ in America. How we can do that there? You know, you just forget 50 years have gone by, is it really that long? But I love playing ‘King Arthur,’ and the 9-piece band does a great job of it.”
So that’s something to look forward to. My last question to Rick was whether he ever took a holiday?
“You sound like my wife. But the last time my lovely wife Rachel and I had a holiday was 2000 or 2005 with her mom and dad. We got married in 2011 and we still haven’t had a honeymoon. One problem is we have rescue dogs, and we won’t leave them in kennels, they’re so attached to us. So to go away with my wife together and leave the dogs for two weeks is not easy.”
Rick’s now living near Ipswich in South East England, but until 2000 was on the Isle Of Man.
“When you travel so much it doesn’t matter what point you start out from. I’m traveling all the time, so where I set off from doesn’t worry me at all. And I’ll play anywhere. Yeah. Anywhere within reason.”
Rick Wakeman’s most recent albums are “Gallery of The Imagination” (Madfish), “Live At The London Palladium” (Cherry Red), and “Yessonata” (Cherry Red).
He’s performing solo in the USA in April 2025, in the Netherlands and Scandinavia in May and June, and around the UK with the 9-piece band in October 2025.