by Rick Wakeman
‘That’s about the size of it, Brian, yes.’
He called me a swear word.
With Brian’s parting shot of ‘It will all end in blood, never mind tears, Rick’ ringing in my ears, I started rehearsals. They went great and I thoroughly enjoyed them. We secured the wonderful David Hemmings to be the narrator and, with the music all rehearsed and sorted, we were all set.
The only real glitch was with complimentary tickets. For some reason, the Royal Festival Hall hadn’t held any back for me – for anyone, by all accounts. I had a lot of family, friends and business associates who I wanted to invite so I was most peeved. I tried everything I could to get some freebies but to absolutely no avail. The band and David Hemmings were also expecting their fair share of comps. Not even Deal-a-Day could get one and that really was saying something. So I had no alternative but to buy tickets from a tout.
For my own show.
I phoned up the late Stan Flashman, the legendary ticket tout and latter-day owner of Barnet FC, one of the all-time great larger-than-life characters. I remember the great goalkeeper Ray Clemence telling me about working with Stan at his football club and saying, ‘It’s always a bit strange when everyone gets paid out of a plastic bag.’
I rang Stan’s number.
‘Hello, Rick, what can I do for you? Bit early for Cup Final tickets, ain’t ya?’
‘Stan, you got any tickets for my show Journey? I can’t get one anywhere.’
‘Forty, Rick – how many do you want?’
‘Forty, Stan.’
‘Blimey, Rick, that’s gonna cost ya.’
I bought forty tickets at three times the face value.
For my own show.
‘I’m doing you a favour, Rick, I’m taking food off my own table here . . . but I tell you what I’ll do . . . I’ll throw in this year’s Cup Final ticket for nothing.’
Stan Flashman, sadly missed.
Come the night of the two back-to-back performances at the Royal Festival Hall, and Deal-a-Day was anxious. Quite rightly, he pointed out that for all my laid-back approach to the band, this was a big deal for the Valiant Trooper’s pub band and he suggested I make absolutely sure that they weren’t crippled with nerves backstage. It seemed an astute observation and I agreed to find them out, weaving my way through the labyrinthine passages to their dressing room. With some trepidation, I knocked on the door and went in . . .
. . . They were playing darts.
They’d brought their own dartboard and seemed to have some sort of round robin competition going on.
‘All right, guys, we’re on in an hour.’
Barely looking up from their pints and arrows, they said, ‘All right, Rick, great.’
Just as we were about to go on, David Hemmings came in and said to me, ‘Peter Sellers is here, but apparently he’s got someone else sitting between him and his missus, the Australian model Miranda Quarry.’
I reassured David that this was no problem, as clearly whoever was sitting alone in between one of the most famous movie stars on the planet and his glamorous partner would happily oblige and just switch seats.
Once I walked onstage, I was keen to survey the front rows to see who was there and spotted Ringo Starr straight away. Sure enough, there was Peter Sellers and, just as David Hemmings had said, two down from him was Miranda Quarry.
And who was sitting in between them . . . ?
My nan.
Bless her, she was well into her eighties and was sitting there in her smart hat and overcoat, while Peter Sellers and Miranda Quarry looked distinctly ruffled. Only years later did I find out what had actually happened.
Apparently, Peter introduced himself to my nan, who had absolutely no idea who he was. Then, very politely, he enquired if it would be possible to switch seats so that he might enjoy the performance sitting next to his wife.
She said, ‘Where did you get your tickets from, young man?’
‘Er, from the narrator of this evening’s performance, a gentleman by the name of David Hemmings.’
‘Do you know who gave me my ticket, F24?’ my nan asked, showing him the stub.
‘No,’ said Peter Sellers.
‘Rick gave it to me himself. He’s my grandson, you know.’
‘You must be very proud,’ said Sellers. ‘Now, would it be possible to switch seats please?’
‘I thought I’d explained,’ said my nan. ‘Rick gave me F24, so that’s where I’m sitting!’
And that’s where she sat.
Right, it’s time to tell you about the humping dinosaurs. Finally.
The Crystal Palace venue was chosen very carefully to suit the grandiose nature of the live show for Journey. This was not a gig you could easily perform at the Timber Carriage. Although the venue was superb in many ways, it did come with a few difficulties. For a start, the area around Crystal Palace itself was littered with transmitters that the BBC used for radio and television. We are talking about fairly primitive early days for electronic equipment onstage, so there were often little glitches that only presented themselves at the most inappropriate moment. In the case of my show at Crystal Palace in front of 20,000 people, the particular technical gremlin that reared its head was the fact that my keyboards could pick up RF, or so-called Radio Frequency. In layman’s terms, this meant that when you pressed the volume pedals, the keyboard picked up radio signals which were then channelled through the various link-ups and out through the stage PA.
In other words, my keyboards became the world’s biggest radio receiver. The only way to get rid of these rogue signals was to play the keyboards. Then, and only then, would the radio (or for that matter sometimes the TV and occasionally a taxi rank) cease to be heard over the volume of the keyboards. So the most important thing was to keep the pedals flat down when playing and up when not.
The show was about to begin and, out of force of habit, I pushed one of the pedals down and suddenly, blasting out of the PA, came the classified football results. It was 27 July and, although the season hadn’t started properly, all the friendlies were being played and how your team was shaping up for the new season was in every football fan’s mind. Remember, this was decades before Teletext or footy results being texted to your mobile phone; the radio and television ‘Final Scores’ programmes were the only way that people could learn the day’s results. Most papers printed the day’s fixtures with blank lines on one page so that people could write the scores down as they were read out.
So I stood on that enormous stage and, at 120 decibels, all 20,000 of us heard, ‘Arsenal 2, Bolton 0 . . . Leicester City 2, Aston Villa 2 . . .’ Now, you might think this was a disaster but virtually everyone in the crowd just pulled their Evening News out of their pockets and started writing the scores down. The only gasps came when it transpired that Everton had beaten Manchester United or some such unexpected drama. Myself and the band just waited five minutes until they’d read out all the scores and then carried on as if nothing untoward had happened.
Although the technology might not sound too sophisticated (it was for the day), I had a field day with stage props for Journey. In case you haven’t been to Crystal Palace, there’s a fairly sizeable lake in front of the stage. Bearing in mind the content of Journey, it seemed an ideal chance to indulge myself.
So I had this bloody great pair of inflatable dinosaurs specially made in Holland. One was an ichthyosaurus. The other was a plesiosaur. In their day, they both tipped the scales at several tons and towered well above the 30-foot mark. No point in doing things by halves, I always say.
I wish I didn’t always say that, because these dinosaurs cost me a bloody fortune.
Still, they looked brilliant: bear in mind this was the mid-1970s and stage props like this were relatively unknown and risky. By definition, as this was the first time inflatable dinosaurs had been hand-built for a rock gig, we found out the practical difficulties as we went along. For a start, the air pressure inside these beasts had to be kept at a constant level, othe
rwise they very quickly began to deflate, collapse and lose all their shape. It took absolutely ages to fully reinflate them, so maintaining the air pressure was crucial.
We placed the dinosaurs beneath the surface of the lake at the front of the stage and when we started to play the song ‘The Battle’ they inflated, emerging from out of the water, and by carefully controlling the air pumps we could make them move a little and appear to be having a sort of fight.
I was playing my keyboards and watching all this – it looked fantastic. It had all gone perfectly to plan until one of the dinosaurs got snagged on something and, unfortunately, sprung a leak.
It wasn’t a big leak, but it was a leak nonetheless. And it was right at the base of its tail, a veritable orifice, so it was very difficult for the crew to carry out any kind of swift emergency repair. This wasn’t the biggest problem, however. The worst part was that the hole from the snag was very small, but the air pressure inside this ginormous dinosaur balloon was extremely high, so basically this creature farted its way through the entire performance at a quite serious volume. As you know, I was about to suffer two heart attacks so I had other things on my mind, and besides, no one at the show seemed to really notice.
Just like the Chinese lantern tunnels we created for Yes, when we came to take the Journey show to America the crew pleaded with me not to use these inflatable farting dinosaurs. They pointed out the fragility and the difficulty of setting them up, the possibility of them getting destroyed in transit, and also made the perfectly valid point that a fart lost in the ether of an open-air show at Crystal Palace would most likely sound like a nuclear explosion in a smaller enclosed arena gig in the States.
I was having none of it.
We flight-cased the dinosaurs ready for America.
Sure enough, there were a few small tears when we got to America but, undeterred, I said, ‘What you need is a giant bicycle-repair kit, chaps.’ As predicted by the crew, however, the dinosaurs repeatedly ended up with loads of punctures and by halfway through the US dates – and after God knows how many giant bicycle repairs – you could tell that the roadies had had enough. Every night they would lug in the conventional gear and stage set, then you could see they were all avoiding being lumbered with the dinosaur duty. Cue more grumbling all round.
This routine repeated itself throughout the tour until one night at a show in the Deep South, right in the Bible Belt. I walked into the soundcheck and enquired after the health of the dinosaurs, fully expecting the usual chorus of complaints and moans.
‘Absolutely fine, Rick, no probs,’ came the surprising reply.
I should have known at that moment that something was going on.
‘You sure? No tears, no grumbles, nothing to worry about?’
‘Nothing, Rick. The stage is a little cramped on one side so both dinosaurs will be on stage left, but apart from that, all sorted.’ That had happened before so I thought nothing of it.
Fast-forward to halfway through the concert and it was all going swimmingly. The dinosaurs were working perfectly and the crowd were loving every minute of the dramatic performance.
Unfortunately, it was about to get a whole lot more dramatic.
Unbeknown to me, the crew had discovered that by carefully reducing the air pressure in the dinosaurs and then suddenly reinflating them at a rapid rate, they could make it look like the dinosaurs were shagging each other. That’s why you pay good money to get the best technical brains that the music business has to offer.
At first I didn’t notice. I could see the ichthyosaurus was leaning towards the plesiosaur but thought nothing of it and carried on playing. I was right in the middle of a particularly difficult and demanding piece of music when I looked up from my keyboards to see both dinosaurs rampantly humping each other at the front of the stage, up and down, up and down, while the bemused audience sat in shocked near-silence. The beasts’ humping got faster and faster and more animated until, just before the end of the battle sequence, the plesiosaur let out the most enormous fart and then deflated.
The reviews in the Bible-Bashing Belt media the next day were not the best I’ve ever had, let’s just put it like that.
THE HEALTHIEST MAN ON EARTH
I told you I’d come back to The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, so here goes.
No one can criticise me for keeping things simple.
Well, that’s not true actually – my management did.
By the 1970s I’d moved on from Mervyn Conn Artists and was now, as a member of Yes, ‘looked after’ by another legend in the business – Brian ‘Deal-a-Day’ Lane.
Before I go all medieval on you, let me tell you a small anecdote about Deal-a-Day.
Deal-a-Day was actually the epitome of the great rock ’n’ roll manager. On the very first tour I did with Yes, we arrived at a quite swanky hotel in America, checked in, unpacked and then met back at reception. It was a courtyard hotel where the chalet rooms were all the way around the perimeter and in the middle there was a beautiful swimming pool. Our bassist Chris Squire wanted to catch some sleep – he was well known then, and still is, for going to sleep. He sleeps non-stop, you can’t get him up until one or two in the afternoon, he just sleeps and sleeps. By contrast, if the sun was even remotely out in the sky, our singer Jon Anderson would be out sunbathing. So he led the way out to the pool. We were all congregating at reception and I said, ‘What’s everyone going to do before sound check, then?’
Chris replied, ‘I’m going to go to my room and lie on the bed.’
‘I’m going to lie by the pool,’ said Jon.
Then Deal-a-Day piped up: ‘. . . And I’m going to go and lie on the phone.’
Right, introduction over, back to the Middle Ages.
Well, 1975.
Picture the scene. I’m in a meeting with Harvey Goldsmith, the most famous promoter and agent in the history of rock ’n’ roll, and Deal-a-Day Lane in his Notting Hill Gate office. We are discussing the dozens of ideas I’ve had about how to perform King Arthur live.
‘OK, so I’m thinking a castle, horses, knights, Middle Ages costumes, at Wembley Empire Pool . . .’
‘It’s going to cost a fortune, Rick,’ winced Deal-a-Day. ‘We should at least do it at the Royal Albert Hall.’
‘I don’t want to do it at the Albert Hall, the acoustics are rubbish and, besides, I can’t build a castle in the Royal Albert Hall. I want to do it at Wembley.’
‘You can’t do it at Wembley, Rick,’ said Harvey.
‘Why not?’
I can vividly remember Brian’s smug face as Harvey replied, ‘Because the dates you want are right before Holiday on Ice and it takes three weeks for them to install and then freeze the ice rink, so there’s just no way we can do it.’
I was not to be deterred.
‘Well, I’ll do it on ice, then . . .’
‘Rick, don’t be bloody ridiculous, it ain’t gonna happen . . . now go and think about the Royal Albert Hall.’
I did think about it . . . and dismissed it. I came out of the office, jumped in my car and drove straight to Fleet Street, parked by Farringdon Road, walked round to Red Lion Square and into the Red Lion pub. Chris Welch, the editor of Melody Maker, was there.
As we lifted the first pint, I said, ‘Chris, I’ve got an exclusive for you. I’m doing King Arthur, full symphony orchestra, English Chamber Choir, a male-voice choir . . .’
‘Blimey, Rick, that’s pretty ambitious . . .’
‘. . . And a full band . . .’
‘Crikey . . .’
‘. . . In a castle . . .’
‘Right . . . anything else?
‘. . . On ice.’
I was making it up as I went along, to be brutally honest, sitting there telling Chris about all these grand designs for a full medieval pageant, horses, knights, the lot – it all sounded brilliant, not least because it was the first time I’d heard it too. He asked how we’d set up the PA if I was in the middle
and I said I would ship in a Clair Brothers PA from America, as they would be skilled in rigging for such a concert and nobody in the UK was capable of doing it at that time. The PA would be hung and suspended in the middle, in netting, for surround sound.
‘Rick, this is front page! Can I run it?’
‘You’re welcome to it – help yourself.’
Two days later, when Melody Maker hit the news-stands, Deal-a-Day Lane phoned me up and referred to me using a very brief and specific gynaecological word. Once I’d denied being that, he said, ‘What the hell have you done, Rick?’
‘Well, it’s more about what I’m going to do, Brian . . . King Arthur on ice.’
I was really pleased with myself. But then I went to a meeting at the management office and they told me what it was going to cost.
It was not going to be cheap.
In fact, it was disastrous and even with sell-out performances it was going to cost me a lot more money to put the show on than it was ever going to make. Remember, this was before the days of sponsorship, before TV bought pay-per-view concert rights in advance, before videos and DVDs of shows helped subsidise tours. It would all have to be funded through ticket sales. Deal-a-Day sat me down with the accountant, David Moss, a lovely man who said, ‘Rick, if you sell out three nights at Wembley Empire Pool you will lose this amount of money.’ And he pointed at what appeared to be someone’s phone number on a scrap of paper.
‘It’s not too late to call it off,’ Brian said hopefully.
‘No, no, no! We can’t call it off. By the way, I think it’s going to cost more than that. We haven’t budgeted correctly for the ice skaters.’
Believe it or not, I actually knew a little bit about ice skating and was therefore aware that most top skaters lived in Eastern Europe and Australia so we’d have to fly them in and put them up somewhere for the duration of the shows. So we did the figures again and all agreed on the amount I was set to lose. It was similar to the national debt of Paraguay.