Sid Smith - Prog

Tuesday, January 17, 2023 3:44 PM

Eye Of The Survivor

Jon Anderson

Prog #115 NOV 27, 2020

Words: Sid Smith

“I’ve had it with your sweettalking politicians, all you want to do is go and steal the world, try to tell us that you’re here for all the people, when inside you’re really out to screw us all,” says Jon Anderson with some gusto. He’s reciting the lyrics from Go Screw Yourself, a song that would be released online a few days after Prog’s interview. His anger at the current political situation is palpable. As he talks, his words are interspersed with rueful, heavy sighs at what he sees as the terminal stupidity and wilful deceit of a political class lining its own pockets at the expense of people and the planet. “They’re like children playing around: ‘It’s my ball. No, it’s my ball.’ That’s all it is. These politicians drive me crazy because they’ve no sense of compassion or what’s really going on. It’s about time we all woke up, seriously.”

The smoke-filled skies above his California home and elsewhere that have dominated his home state following this year’s spate of forest fires only adds fuel to Anderson’s ire and exasperation. “The most important thing at this time in our world is Mother Earth and saving it for our children’s children,” he says. “There’s a bigger world out there there’s got to be taken care of rather than greedy politicians playing ‘who’s got the ball.’”

Faced with the daily doom and gloom of newspaper headlines, Anderson nevertheless remains optimistic about the possibility of a substantial shift in public opinion. At his core, he believes that good will prevail, that despite the travails and challenges, what’s best of us will survive. Anderson is nothing if not a survivor. “I always have a very positive feeling about the development of a state of mind and the consciousness of the planet, by which I mean everybody is going to raise their consciousness after this terrible virus,” he says referencing the implacable rise of Covid-19, fully aware that as a chronic asthmatic, a condition that nearly killed him in 2008, he’s especially vulnerable. “They’re going wake up a bit and realise that looking after the planet, looking after this beautiful home of ours is what we should be doing.”

The notion that a song could help crystallise a thought into a popular cause or movement may seem fanciful to some but to Anderson, it’s a given. “One song will come along and people will hear it and say, ‘Shit! That’s correct, these people have got to wake up and dream rather than wake up and look for money.’ John Lennon said it: ‘Make love not war, give peace a chance.’”

This isn’t the first time Anderson has invoked Lennon’s anti-war/procompassion message either. In 1971, the rousing chorus of Give Peace A Chance was discretely co-opted into the backing of I’ve Seen All Good People from The Yes Album.

Although the views expressed in Go Screw Yourself are explicitly unambiguous, Anderson’s form in that department hasn’t always been so crystal clear. Over the decades the precise meaning of much of his work has been famously obscure and oblique, usually resisting the usual kinds of literary and literal analysis from sceptical critics and hardcore fans alike. Nevertheless, Anderson insists that the mundane, worldly realities of current affairs have always found their way into his music, a subtle influence that has on occasion directly inspired a lyrical approach. A case in point, he argues, would be elements of For You For Me from Song Of Seven, originally released in 1980 and, now in 2020 it’s the subject of a remastered and expanded reissue. “I was actually listening to it last week just to check on what I was thinking in those days, and it’s pretty political, it’s an interesting song,” he says enthusiastically.

It’s not possible to discuss the creation of his second solo album without understanding the events surrounding the making of Yes’ final studio album of the decade, Tormato. The tracks Some Are Born, Hear It, Days and Everybody Loves You, which all appear on Song Of Seven, were written and recorded during the Tormato sessions in Paris. They were also roundly rejected for inclusion on the final record, indicative of the widening rift between Steve Howe, Chris Squire and Alan White in one corner of the studio and Rick Wakeman and Anderson in the other. Looking back, Anderson sees a couple of conflicting factors at play during that time. “I think that one of the things about being in a band is that when you’re surrounded by people who just want to push you, push you, and push you to make money,” he pauses with a degree of resentment in his voice, gathering his thoughts. “I mean, that’s okay… but there are times when creativity is suppressed by the energy to make a hit record, and that was really what was going on around that time.”

“Me and Rick and Alan and Steve would be sitting around waiting for Chris Squire and this producer dude to come along. It was always like waiting for Christmas to come, you know?”

Yes’ Tormato, 1978.

There was a distinct pressure to come up with something as commercially successful as their 1977 single Wonderous Stories, which was a surprise hit for Yes. While Don’t Kill The Whale from Tormato fulfilled that role, gaining access to the UK Singles Chart where it reached No.36, both songs were, in some ways, hits by accident rather than design. “When I’m under that pressure I just back off, because honestly, I haven’t got the natural gift to write pop songs like Elton John and Bernie Taupin and people like that who just naturally do it as part of their life, you know? I’m a different sort of musician. So when all that was going on I wasn’t happy.”

Song Of Seven, 1980.

At their best he says that Yes were happiest when left to make music on their own terms: “But outside influences that have been brought in over the years haven’t helped most of the time.” He’s referring to the arrival of producer Roy Thomas Baker, ushered in by Yes’ management during the preparatory sessions for Tormato. “I just needed somebody who was committed to work well and get in the studio in the early morning. We started off working in Paris I think and he spent more time in the clubs with a couple of guys from the band. He liked clubbing it. So he was really one of the reasons why it all broke apart. Me and Rick and Alan and Steve would be sitting around waiting for Chris and this producer dude to come along. It was always like waiting for Christmas to come, you know?”
At the end of a lucrative tour, Anderson had had enough and quit Yes in February 1980.

As the 70s gave way to a new decade, and the politics of polarisation, personified by the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, wrought seismic changes in society, Anderson found himself in an unusual position. He was now being described as an ex-member of Yes, his musical home since the band’s formation in 1968. Included on the group’s 1969 Atlantic Records debut was one of his songs, Survival, and some of its lyrics now seemed especially apt in describing Anderson’s situation a little over 10 years later: ‘The beginning of a shape of things to come/That starts the run/Life has begun/Survival.’

As Anderson found out, surviving life as a solo artist in the 1980s brought both opportunities and challenges. “Before Song Of Seven I’d made an album for Virgin Records. I got on well with Richard Branson. He had a record store around the corner from the Marquee Club, so I’d pop in there every day, chatting and listening to records. He was always very sweet. After he’d started the Virgin label he talked about me working on some music and offered to give me the money to make the album. He said, ‘If we don’t like it, you have got to pay me back.’ I said, ‘Okay.’”

Anderson laughs out loud at the memory of the encounter, recalling that the finished music he presented involved one side of an album based on the life of Marc Chagall, the Russian-French artist lauded for the vivid luminosity of his painting and in particular his stained-glass windows that were installed in various European churches and cathedrals. The other side of the record was about the faerie kingdom. “I really got into the subject in the 70s, reading books about the inter-dimensional beings that surround us all,” he explains. Only Jon Anderson could mention an album themed around the existence of inter-dimensional beings in such a matter-of-fact tone and not seem, well, away with the fairies. He does laugh, however, when relating Virgin’s reaction to the offering.

“They’d sent a couple of young guys around, 20 years old each. They looked more like punks really.” Needless to say, they were less than impressed with what they heard. “One minute you think you’re doing really important music and then someone says, ‘You gotta give us the money back.’”

That kind of rejection might have been regarded as a humiliating setback for some musicians used to performing in front of hundreds of thousands of people. It’s impossible to say how much of an impact it had on Anderson’s psyche at the time considering it came quickly on the heels of his departure from the band he’d dedicated a significant portion of his adult life to. Now, so far away from the events themselves, Anderson is sanguine about it all. “Life does things like that. So I said, ‘Okay, let’s get on with life.’”

The vocalist is nothing if not resilient; the result was a working group he dubbed The New Life Band augmented by special guests. In some respects Virgin declining what would’ve been his first post-Yes project acted as a kind of artistic palate cleanser and he signed a deal with his old label, Atlantic Records, clearing the decks for an earthier R&B style approach. Perhaps mindful of budgetary implications, he recorded Song Of Seven at his home in London just as he had done with 1976’s Olias Of Sunhillow. However, the musical style and language couldn’t have been more different. Anderson indicates he went into the session with one aim: to have as much fun as possible.

“When I was making Song Of Seven, I was just having a lot of fun rather than feeling any pressure. I wasn’t thinking about whether or not this album was going to make me a superstar.”

“When I was making the album, I was just having fun rather than feeling any pressure. I wasn’t thinking about whether or not this album was going to make me a superstar. I just got people to come by and just have fun, people like keyboard player Ronnie Leahy and a couple of other great musicians.”

One of those “great musicians” was bassist Jack Bruce, best known for his work in Cream. “I had a friend who knew him; he came round to the house and recorded Heart Of The Matter. A jaunty, pop-orientated co-write with Leahy is far from the cosmic, ethereal writing with which he’s associated.

The sessions also knitted together two different timelines, with Anderson reminiscing about Yes’ appearance at the Royal Albert Hall as one of the support acts at Cream’s legendary farewell performance in 1968, a mere three months after Yes’ very first live show. “That was truly an amazing, amazing experience to watch Cream on the stage that night. It was unbelievable. These guys were the real stuff. We’d just started a band and we felt very small in comparison. We thought we’d just get onstage and sing a couple of songs. When we set up on the stage, it was so big, we set up our gear to the right and we were all like, ‘Let’s just get through the songs playing in front of 6,000 people.’ Laughs. I remember saying hi to Jack at the gig at the Albert Hall and I think I bumped into him a couple of times when I was working in the bar at La Chasse club above the Marquee. He was always very nice, very sweet, saying, ‘How you doing, Jon?’ I was like, ‘Wow, Jack Bruce, one of the great singers and bass players of all time, is speaking to me!’”

“After Richard Branson started the Virgin label he offered to give me the money to make the album. He said, ‘If we don’t like it, you’ve got to pay me back.’”

Saxophonist and bandleader Johnny Dankworth, a veteran of the UK jazz scene, also dropped by to help out. He contributes a fluid sax to the lilting Don’t Forget (Nostalgia). Says Anderson, “I got to meet Johnny through his wife, the singer Cleo Laine. I knew her from way, way back at some record company reception. I had to say hello. She was such a character, we got on very well.”

Anderson recalls being invited to a party at the Dankworths’, where he ended up dancing briefly with another guest, Princess Margaret. He guffaws at the memory. “Yes, but the funny thing is that the London scene was something that I never really connected to, you know the whole celebrity thing. I never got into that. Mostly it was just friends who knew other people and we’d get talking about music and I’d tell them that I was working on a project and invite them to come over and play.”

Unlike his previous experience with Yes, this time around there was nobody from Atlantic asking for a hit. “You know, it’s funny, you make records, and then the A&R guy will call you up and say, ‘Well, Jon, we just listened to the album and we don’t hear a single.’ And then that’s when I put the phone down. Actually they thought that Some Are Born was going to be a good one and there was another one that I felt was pretty good, For You, For Me. The opposite of that was Take Your Time which was a lovely, lovely sort of a sweet song.”

If much of the album grew in a poppier, feel-good direction, the title track, Song Of Seven sounds like it could have easily sat within the 70s Yes setlist. It picks through a discursive melody meandering in a largely pastoral setting in which Clem Clempson’s guitar breaks flourish and adds a dramatic grandeur. “Clem is such a great guy, a really special player,” says Anderson. “I worked with him again on Animation in 1982 and he was in the touring band then and later on when I did the demos for Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe.”

The 2020 reissue of Song Of Seven, expanded to include the US single edits of Some Are Born and Heart Of The Matter, both previously unreleased on CD, shows an album that stands up well. “Sometimes you come back to something you did in the past and say, ‘Hey, this is pretty good,” says Anderson with evident pride.

Originally released in November 1980, Song Of Seven entered the lower reaches of the Billboard charts in the US and the UK Album Chart. Although lacking the kind of momentum that a new Yes record would have garnered, it was a key step to Anderson’s development and survival as an artist. Part of that mission included the singer going out on the road with Dick Morrissey (sax and flute), Barry De Souza (drums), Morris Pert (drums and percussion), John Giblin (bass), Lee Davidson and Jo Partridge (guitars), and Ronnie Leahy and Chris Rainbow on keyboards under the collective title of The New Life Band. “It was really fantastic,” Anderson remembers. “I’ve found, over the years, that if you get the right bunch of people together in a band that’s in harmony with what you want to do, it’s like sailing in a boat; it’s so easy. I’ve only done it, maybe four or five times in my career where I get together five or six people and you can sense when they want to really engage.”

While Anderson is complimentary about the ability and skills of his colleagues there was a moment during the rehearsals for the tour that perfectly illustrates his role as a creative catalyst, taking one element, seemingly abstract and diverse, to energise or invigorate the other. As the band rehearsed for a section of the show that would essentially be a jam session without Anderson onstage, Anderson noted that although what they were playing was ostensibly good, it lacked shape. Sensing that it wasn’t really taking off, Anderson came up with a novel suggestion.

“I said to Ronnie Leahy that he could learn the three main melody lines from Petrushka by Stravinsky. He was like, ‘Okay, Jon’ and was really unsure but they did,” says Anderson with a laugh.

Whatever limitations he might have as an instrumentalist, there’s no denying Anderson’s remarkable ability as a conceptualist capable of seeing what needs to be done in order to take the music from the ordinary to the next level.

“The idea was, we got sings one of the three main themes from Petrushka into the bass solo. It helped them get from point A to point B: from the bass solo, then the guitar solo, then the sax solo. It worked and I remember when we did the show at the Royal Albert Hall in 1980, that was really fun. It was really good hearing a band doing Stravinsky that way.”

Whenever one speaks to Jon Anderson he’s always working on a range of new ideas and has lots of different projects on the go. Maybe he’s dusting off something he started working on a few years before or putting the finishing touches to something else that’s in the pipeline such as Go Screw Yourself, or maybe even a reggae-infused ukulele tune written while on holiday five years ago that he thinks might do nicely as a Christmas song this year. His enthusiasm is nothing new though as even when he was working on Song Of Seven he was also recording material for 1982’s Animation. “I was thinking about the next four or five years of my life, musically and it’s what I’m doing now. I’m working on about four albums now especially these last six months being at home. It’s good because you get on with your vision for the next five years or 10 years of your work.”

A glance at his solo discography shows him, then as much as now, keen to collaborate with a diverse range of players: Mike Oldfield, Béla Fleck, and Rick Wakeman all crop up. There was even an attempt to form a new band with Wakeman and Keith Emerson. Anderson recalls: “I was actually staying in Amsterdam at the time and I started thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be great: me and two keyboard players?’ You see different colours, different textures.” It didn’t happen, of course. Emerson was keen but he says Wakeman prevaricated. “The energy could have been amazing. Sometimes people just don’t see the potential.”

Seeing potential is something that Anderson has always been good at. In 1973, after hearing a copy of L’Apocalypse Des Animaux by Vangelis and connecting with the languid soundscapes of Creation Du Monde in particular, Anderson was convinced the ex-Aphrodite’s Child keyboard player would be perfect to replace a departing Rick Wakeman after the Tales From Topographic Oceans tour. “We brought him to London but he didn’t really work in the band. He’s a one-man vehicle, you know?” Although that encounter didn’t work out the pair became firm friends and began an extremely fruitful partnership.

Their first album together, Short Stories, was recorded in London in February 1979, before the split with Yes. Released at the beginning of 1980, it hit No.4 in the UK Album Chart while I Hear You Now found itself at No.8 in the Top 40, with Song Of Seven bringing his first year outside of Yes to a rather satisfying conclusion Anderson looked to be in good shape as a solo artist. The following year found Anderson in the company of Vangelis once again to record The Friends Of Mr Cairo, which spawned I’ll Find My Way Home as a single, resulting in a surprise hit requiring the duo to lip-sync in front of a studio audience, swaying from side to side. The video on YouTube shows Anderson grinning and being the effortless showman, clearly very comfortable. Vangelis, by comparison, looks rather awkward. Anderson laughs at the memory of it. “The funniest thing was Vangelis said he didn’t want to be a pop star. ‘I’m a real musician, Jon.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, Vangelis, it’ll sell more records.’” Joking aside, he says the partnership with Vangelis taught him so much about himself as an artist and how he worked. “I was learning how to be spontaneous lyrically. Watching him work taught me so much, musically speaking. I remember he was recording in Paris what was going to be The Friends Of Mr Cairo. He was actually playing a groove as I happened to walk in and I sang State Of Independence, the whole thing, spontaneously without thinking. The whole shape of the song in one long take.”

As someone who didn’t like being under pressure to write hits and wasn’t certain how things would work out beyond Yes, Anderson was doing okay. More than okay, in fact. When American producer Quincy Jones was given a copy of The Friends Of Mr Cairo he saw it as a perfect vehicle for Donna Summer. The hits, as they say, kept rolling in. From the outside, things looked good. Anderson was in control of his destiny. His third solo album Animation did well enough and with still more appearances on other artist’s albums and his ongoing partnership with Vangelis, it was something of a surprise to see him return to the Yes camp. “I was actually living in the south of France working on projects and very invested in creating music, but I missed the whole excitement of touring. I’d been on tour with Animation in America with some really good people but it just felt like hard work, the gigs not the band. It was not what I was interested in doing.”

Feeling like he was back in the 70s when Yes were slogging around the support slots, the experience gave him pause for thought. “I was thinking, ‘What am I doing this for?’”

When Chris Squire invited Anderson up to come and listen to the material he, Alan White, and Trevor Rabin had been working on, he was happy to do so. When, after a short time, Cinema reconvened as the new Yes, Anderson had no hesitation in signing up. “I realised I missed being in Yes when it was really looked after properly, when it was really taken care of and towards the end of the 70s, after Tormato, it wasn’t. It’s funny, of course, because back then, management wanted us to make more commercial music, and here we were with 90125, the single most commercial album we ever made.” The rest, as they say…

“I’m working on about four albums now, especially in these last six months being at home. It’s good because you get on with your vision for the next five years or 10 years of your work.”

With hindsight and a generous dollop of pragmatism on both sides of the fence, it was perhaps inevitable that Anderson would return to the Yes fold for 1983’s 90125, reconvening what was a difficult on-off relationship with the band. Prior to Tormato, he was very much a catalyst and agent provocateur. After 90125 the balance of power had subtly shifted and would continue to do so right up until 2009 following his hospitalisation after a severe asthma attack. “They decided to move on without me, which is their choice.” His survival instincts kicked in once again and after convalescing he’s returned just as busy as he was in the 80s, with a series of collaborations and releases, including the recent 1000 Hands, which he regards as essentially being Yes music in all but name.

Having always included material from Yes in his solo shows and more recently with Anderson, Rabin & Wakeman, he sees himself as the true custodian of the band’s progressive spirit. “For me, I am Yes. It’s never left me,” he says. Of the current incarnation of Yes, he admits to having difficulties with their new material. “I haven’t heard anything that hits me and says, ‘Oh boy, I’m so happy they’ve evolved.’ It’s really great to hear them do the classic songs and Jon Davison’s singing well and everything but it’s a far cry from what it would be if I was there creating Yes music.”

Being in Yes was always a difficult proposition: great when it works but when it doesn’t things can get really bad. Knowing all of this, would he return if the opportunity presented itself? “I’ve said before that I’d love to do it as a final hurrah for the fans and go on a very special tour. I had a dream a month or so ago that I was opening the show solo, playing my acoustic guitar, singing a couple of songs. Then, Steve brings on his band and they play a couple of songs. Then I come back and do a couple more acoustic songs solo. After that, Rick and Trevor and all the others come on and play. There’d be about 20 of us on the stage all playing Close To The Edge. I started to see and visualise the whole piece, both musically and visually, it was kind of amazing.”

Dreams and visualisation, and perhaps, hopes and wishes, aside, having just celebrated his 76th birthday readers might expect him to be taking things easy. Not a bit of it, he says. “I’ve been actually writing large-scale pieces of music this last three or four months, which is, in a way, the recurring theme in my life.”

And Prog can’t wait to hear them.

Rock Candy #23 - December 2020-January 2021

Monday, April 11, 2022 5:35 PM

In issue #23 of Rock Candy magazine, YES guitarist Trevor Rabin reveals the unbelievable story of how the band’s 1983 tour in support of phenomenally successful comeback album “90125” and No. 1 U.S. hit “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” was put in jeopardy after an unfortunate accident.

“We were in a hotel swimming pool in Miami sipping champagne to celebrate the global success of ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’,” Rabin told Rock Candy writer Malcolm Dome. “There was a water slide very close to me that I hadn’t really noticed. Suddenly a very large woman came hurtling down the slide and crashed straight into me. The collision was so bad that it ruptured my spleen and put me in hospital. I needed an operation and was out of action for a few weeks. It sounds so bizarre now — almost laughable — but at the time, it was pretty scary and worrying.”

In a massive 16-page cover story featuring two exclusive in-depth interviews with Rabin and YES vocalist Jon Anderson, Dome forensically unpicks YES‘s return to prominence in the ’80s

“When I was working in the studio on ‘90125’, I definitely knew that what we were doing was taking the band into a new era,” says Anderson. “This wasn’t the ’70s YES. It was a band that was built for the ’80s. When the album was released, it became apparent that we were suddenly appealing to the MTV generation. We’d managed to get away from the idea that we were a big name from the previous decade that was no longer relevant — and I loved that.

“The whole idea behind ‘90125’ was that no one would be able to say ‘heard it all before,‘ confirms Rabin. “If that had happened, then the entire exercise would have been a creative failure.”

Rock Candy is a 100-page, full-color bi-monthly rock magazine, created in the U.K. It covers the sights, sounds and smells from the greatest era in hard rock music, the ’70s and ’80s. Put together by respected U.K. rock journalists Derek Oliver, Howard Johnson and Malcolm Dome — all frontline writers for the legendary Kerrang! magazine in the golden era — Rock Candy is available in print format with a free digital download version for anyone who buys the mag online.

Prog Magazine #115

Friday, March 11, 2022 3:52 PM

Jon Anderson graces the cover of the December 2020 issue of Prog Magazine #115.

Prog #107

Friday, March 11, 2022 3:19 PM

Yes have got it covered on the March 2020 issue of Prog #107.

Prog #110

Friday, March 11, 2022 3:15 PM

It's Rick Wakeman on the front cover of the June 2020 issue of Prog #110.

Danny Turner - emusician

Thursday, September 29, 2022 2:59 PM

Trevor Horn: “I’m just an old muso who likes playing and programming”

By Danny Turner
published March 25, 2020
emusician

The former Buggles man and chart-topping producer talks synths, studios and re-imagining his ’80s hits

The 1980s was a golden age for music technology, popularising the evolution of analogue synthesis and giving rise to the birth of digital recording. At the heart of that groundbreaking revolution in sound was producer Trevor Horn.

In September 1979, Horn’s chart topping single ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, with fantasy band The Buggles, helped pave the way for his electronic pop successors. He then moved into the production hot seat, where he used the latest innovative technologies to evolve and, occasionally, break artists such as Dollar, ABC, Spandau Ballet, Grace Jones and Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

By 1983, Horn had set up the maverick Zang Tuum Tumb label, while his band The Art of Noise began to remap the synth pop landscape once more, this time using the latest digital sampling technology.

Horn established the state-of-the-art SARM West Studios in London and, moving into the ’90s, produced the likes of Pet Shop Boys, Tina Turner, Tori Amos, Cher and Seal. Last year, Horn spent time kitting out his home studio in order to go back to his roots by creating an album of orchestral re-workings of ’80s hits.

You woke your parents at 4am in the morning to tell them you want to pursue a career in music. What precipitated that momentary excitement?

“I had a job as a trainee cost accountant, but was playing in a band five nights a week. I was riding home on my scooter from seeing this girl, and suddenly thought the only thing I’m interested at working in is music. I said to my dad, ‘I think I’ll turn pro,’ and he said ‘You’re not good enough.’ One evening I just thought, fuck it, woke them up and said, ‘Sorry, I’ve made my mind up – I’m going to be a musician.’ I knew I’d be a failure at anything else.”

You worked as a session musician in the ’70s, but what sparked your interest in music production?

“I worked on LPs when they were made in one day – when studios still had a red light. I loved the sound of control rooms and tried being a songwriter, but gave up. When I was 25, I’d made quite a bit of money playing in Ray McVay’s Big Band, which was a nightmare gig but I got a load of recording equipment, went up to Leicester and bought a studio. Nobody came in, so we started organizing sessions. Leicester City FC’s ‘This is the Season for Leicester’ was the first record I officially made, then somebody told me I was a record producer and I thought, ‘Wow, I am, and it’s what I want to do.’”

And from there it grew organically?

“Nooooo! Back in the day, you couldn’t get into a recording studio for less than £30-40 an hour, and I was earning £55 a week. I only ran the studio for a year, and then I bailed out and came back to London. I was working in another band doing cover albums – Brian Ferry stuff or whatever was in the charts, then I started producing demos for a music publisher. I did that for five years, but somewhere along the way I heard Kraftwerk and that completely changed my view about production. ‘Man Machine’ was the one for me, and my other favorite was Grace Jones’ ‘Warm Leatherette’. I was also into JG Ballard and novels like Crash. The Buggles was meant to be a fantasy group invented on a computer – then real life came crashing in.”

Did you have any understanding of what gear Kraftwerk were using at that point?

“No, I didn’t have a clue. We thought it was a sequencer, but there were very few available at the time. I couldn’t afford to buy one and was still learning the studio. I started on an 8-track and moved to 16-track, where there’s this whole protocol you have to learn.”

How did you facilitate a modern sound on such a low budget?

“In 1978, the idea that you could manufacture drums seemed interesting to me, so I sort of made my own drum machine sounds using reels of tape. I could never afford string players, so we’d just use whatever keyboard did the best strings. Everyone takes it for granted, but when the Polymoog came out it was a huge revelation. We had one of the first that came into England; it was a bit unstable, but sounded terrific.”

Did you envisage the popularisation of electronic music?

“I imagined a future world where pop music was Kraftwerk, and thought it was an exciting prospect. By the time we got to The Buggles, we were getting really good. Geoff Downes was a brilliant keyboard player – you’re not in a band like Yes if you can’t play keys! Geoff and I put everything into that record.”

The Buggles album The Age of Plastic involved a lot of experimentation with studio equipment…

“We were always trying to get things to sound different – especially drums. Don’t forget the album was written in 1979 and the only drum machine available was the Korg MiniPops Junior, which did sound rhythms for hotels. The track ‘Living in the Plastic Age’ was the MiniPops Junior put through a flanger. Geoff and I were awarded ‘Shits of the Year’ at Trident Studios because we were moaning that the old Trident desk was too noisy and we couldn’t get that bright ’80s sound we were after. Sequencers didn’t come in until the following year, so we used to imitate them. We tried renting an Oberheim for a couple of days, but it cost £75 and we couldn’t get anything out of it. Moreover, we couldn’t sync it to anything.”

Did you eventually find producing for others more interesting than being at the front end of things?

“Yes, because after The Buggles I joined Yes for a year, made an album and toured America and England. That wasn’t for me, because I wasn’t really good enough and studios were just starting to get really exciting. I’d bought a TR-808 and a set of Simmons drum modules. Dave Simmons came over, modified the modules and put a set of triggers on the side of the 808 so I could use a cowbell to trigger the bass. I also had a very rudimentary sequencer made by Roland that was dead simple but really effective, and made it CV and gate into the Minimoog, which made a great sound. It was a terrible pain in the arse to program, but it was really tight. I made the Dollar records and ABC’s ‘Poison Arrow’ with it. Then I bought a Fairlight – £18,000’s worth.”

Why buy one rather than hire one?

“If you hire one you’re only going to get into the first level. I just knew there was something in it and always remember the day I signed the cheque because Brad Naples, the head of New England Digital, called me. They’d just made the Synclavier and he said I’d regret buying the Fairlight because it’s a gimmick and if I wanted a proper, scientific instrument I needed to get a Synclavier. I said, ‘Forgive me Brad, but all I’m doing is making pop records.’ I did buy a Synclavier a few years later, but the Fairlight was great.”

What excited you about the Fairlight?

“It developed. At one point, J. J. Jeczali from Art of Noise worked it and spent most days in the back room of SARM East Studios putting stuff into it. Working with Dollar was the first time I really got excited because we had all these background vocals to do on ‘Give Me Back My Heart’ and we put them into the Fairlight. I did 16 takes of Theresa Bazar singing ‘la,’ played them in and the Fairlight gave them a really weird sound. There’s lots of Fairlight on ABC’s Lexicon of Love too – sound effects like cash registers and weird noises. I tried to make it so there wasn’t a dull or a sloppy moment, but ABC’s lyrics also led you down certain soundscapes.”

Which brings us nicely to the mid-’80s and Art of Noise, which in many ways heralded the digital revolution?

“Art of Noise was just a studio team messing about. It started off with a couple of drum loops, then Paul Morley came up with the name and we suddenly had this band. We grabbed stuff from places and had loads of ideas from going around the world with Malcolm McLaren and working on Duck Rock. I remember making the first 12", ‘Into Battle with the Art of Noise’, which was 25 minutes long. I also have a plaque somewhere with a champagne bottle saying I made the first No. 1 using a Sony 24-track digital, which was Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’. ‘Relax’ was the last record I made that was analog, which would have been 1983.”

Of all the records you produced at the time, which are you most proud of or thought stood the test of time?

“I guess Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The first time you heard them you had to hear them again, because there was a whole bunch of shit in there that nobody had done before. ‘Relax’ was a really good record and ‘Two Tribes’ still sounds great. What always impressed me is Steve Lipson’s engineering because, sonically, the mixes were perfect. When we came to mix ‘Welcome to the Pleasuredome,’ Lippo mixed it in one afternoon, although I wanted to mix it for another week. He insisted and he was right.”

Last year you released your Reimagines the Eighties album. What was the story behind wanting to create that record?

“One of the things I’ve really started to enjoy is playing live, but you need a nine-piece band to play live pop music effectively, so I guess part of the motivation was to get my name out there and sell more tickets for live shows. The album wasn’t my idea, but when it was suggested to me I thought, how often do you get the chance to work with a huge orchestra on a bunch of really good songs with whoever I can coerce into singing? When Julian Hinton and I got talking, we got crazier and crazier [laughs]. It took a year in the end, but when the songs are that good there’s always a few different ways of doing them.”

Did using orchestral elements enable you to add a level of differentiation, or did you actively look for songs that you felt could be enhanced using an orchestra?

“From my point of view, the great thing about the orchestra was that it took the strain so we didn’t have to recreate guitar tracks and things like that. I love the sound of orchestras anyway, so it gave us a new angle. If there was no angle, it would have been a very different record. I had 25 tracks initially and we whittled it down.”

In terms of finding vocalists to work with, did you have a very specific idea who you wanted to use for each track?

“I did, but sometimes it was difficult to get them and sometimes they switched around. Originally, Steve Hogarth sang ‘Ashes to Ashes,’ but Seal really wanted to do it so I asked Steve if he minded moving to another track. Rumer did the vocal for ‘Slave to the Rhythm’ but had originally sung ‘Dancing in the Dark,’ which was quite beautiful. Matt Cardle sang ‘The Power of Love’ at a festival about two years ago and when I heard the front of house mix I thought it was so good that I told him we were going to lift his voice from it, crop everything and create something completely new.”

Was the orchestra recorded first?

“No, it was done in one day during a massive 12-hour session. I didn’t want the London Philharmonic; I just wanted all the A players. Every time you set up an orchestra it takes half an hour to get everything working and everyone happy, and if you’re using a big orchestra that isn’t full of session cats you’re going to have tuning and toning problems. I can fix timing, but I can’t fix internal tuning and an A player’s sight reading is better than anything you’ll get anywhere. The other thing is that the session players already knew all the songs, so they were really happy to play them.”

Did you have any technical issues throughout the recording process?

“It took us a while to get the real strings to sound as good as the fake ones, because fake strings are so good these days. We used a combination of the two because the libraries are so massive and use actual recordings of things that are not exactly like samples. There’s energy to a real orchestra, but they don’t necessarily have the consistency.”

Are you able to listen to music without analyzing it?

“It depends on what I’m listening to. I‘ve got a collection of Bing Crosby and Al Jolson tapes from the ’30s, when they only used one mic. I’m quite interested by that concept. I like music from all different eras because it’s fascinating to hear how it all changes, and I love all those terrible mixes from the ’60s where they used stereo but only had four tracks. I’d rather listen to that than normal stereo, which is dead boring.”

How’s your studio looking these days?

“I’ve just built a new room so a drummer can play here at four in the morning. It’s a room within a room. Vocal sessions are recorded here and everything goes through a Wunderbar mixing desk, which was made in Texas. It’s totally analogue and we mixed most of the album through the board because you need a really good desk to record a live band. I’ve also got a writing room – The Opium Den, I call it.”

What tools do you use to write songs with?

“I’ve got loads of keyboards in storage: a Roland Super Jupiter rackmount, JX-8P, Juno-106, Minimoog and all of that stuff. If I’m doing something that needs them, they’ll come out of the cupboard, but when I’m trying out bits and pieces I’ll use keyboards like the Korg Kronos, Korg Triton or the Novation MiniNova. I have a nucleus of guitars and I’m very fond of the Akai MPC Live because it’s really quick to use and idiots like me can operate it. Lots of people make records on Logic, but I’ve never been interested in that. I’m a producer, so I work with artists and don’t knock out certain types of records. I’m just an old muso who likes playing and programming.”

David Kushner - Vanity Fair

Wednesday, October 19, 2022 10:05 PM

The Stranger-Than-Fiction Secret History of Prog-Rock Icon Rick Wakeman

The Yes keyboardist defined Spinal Tap–esque excess, until he staked everything on his eccentric dream of an Arthurian rock opera on ice.

Now, the tale of his epic spiral and long, slow comeback can finally be told.

BY DAVID KUSHNER

JUNE 25, 2020

On a cold winter night in 1980, a London bobby was walking his beat in Kensington Gardens when he spotted a man sleeping on a park bench. The bobby recognized him immediately from his long, straight golden hair. “Mr. Wakeman,” the officer said, trying to rouse the man. “Rick—get home to your missus. You’re pissed.”

At age 30, Rick Wakeman was already one of rock’s greatest superstars. A classically trained keyboardist, he reached international stardom in the early 1970s with Yes, the influential and enduring band that pioneered progressive rock, and would go on to sell more than 50 million records as a solo artist. As a session player, he performed on an astonishing string of classics, from Cat Stevens’s “Morning Has Broken” to Elton John’s “Madman Across the Water.” At the height of his celebrity, Wakeman defined the age of rock excess: collecting a fleet of Rolls-Royces, building a pub in his country mansion, and, most infamously, performing in a long, flowing cape, encircled by electronic keyboards like a sorcerer of synths. “Rick’s mastery of electronic instruments,” Elton John once quipped, “was one of the reasons I stuck to the piano.”

Given Wakeman’s wealth and fame, it was understandable that the bobby assumed he was only suffering from a few too many pints. Shaken awake, Wakeman thanked the officer and ambled away, as if he were heading home. Then, after waiting for the coast to clear, he found another bench to sleep on. Wakeman wasn’t drunk. He was homeless.

At 71, Wakeman still wears his blond hair long, but his attire is more backyard barbecue than iconic rocker. Avuncular and self-effacing, he meets me wearing a short-sleeve plaid shirt and black pants. In the four decades since he hit bottom that night in Kensington Gardens, he has sold millions more records, been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and influenced generations of artists from the Flaming Lips to Radiohead. This month, he will release his 122nd (!) solo album, The Red Planet.

But his crazy ride, incredibly, was crazier even than legend has it. It’s one of the great untold sagas in the history of rock, the tale of a man who bet his fortune to realize his wildest dream: a fantasy so overblown and outrageous that it makes the real-world excesses of Wakeman’s prog-rock days seem tame by comparison. That night, homeless and alone, it was his dream—of knights on horseback, a sold-out ice rink, and a band of friends rising from a humble pub to conquer the world—that kept him going. “If you believe it’s not the end,” Wakeman recalls, “then it isn’t.”

From the beginning, Wakeman believed in music. Growing up a poor, only child in a working-class home, he entertained himself for hours a day at the family’s piano. In 1965, at age 16, he auditioned for a big band that played community centers across the English countryside. The band’s singer, Ashley Holt, marveled at the sight of the lanky kid in a school uniform two sizes too small. “I thought, Wow, this one’s geeky,” Holt recalls. “And then I heard him play.” As Wakeman’s hands danced across the Hammond organ, Holt turned to Ronnie Smith, the stodgy, middle-aged conductor of the band. “He’s got to be in!” he told Smith. “Do not let this guy go.”

Holt, a wannabe rocker only a few years older than Wakeman, became his surrogate big brother, introducing him to the burgeoning world of rock and helping him find his musical voice. “Ash gave me a lot of confidence,” says Wakeman—so much so that he ended up being fired by the band for being too rock and roll. After a short stint at the Royal College of Music, which bored him, Wakeman felt like he needed a break.

One afternoon he dropped by a local recording studio, where he spotted an odd little keyboard in the corner. The manager of the studio, Tony Visconti, told him it was a mellotron, the spooky-sounding, electro-mechanical instrument made famous by the Beatles on “Strawberry Fields.” But it was so difficult to play that nobody in the studio could figure out how to use it. “Mind if I have a go?” asked Wakeman. Visconti and his recording crew watched in awe as the gawky kid made the mellotron sing.

“How’d you do that?” an engineer asked.

“Don’t tell him,” Visconti told Wakeman. “It’ll make you a fortune!”

Visconti asked Wakeman if he could come back to play mellotron for one of his artist’s recording sessions. After getting dropped off at the studio by his mother, Wakeman was greeted at the studio by a precocious young rocker whose eyes appeared to be two different colors. His name was David Bowie, and he wanted Wakeman to play mellotron on “Space Oddity,” the title track of his second album. “This will be a piece of cake for you,” he reassured Wakeman.

“Oh, okay,” Wakeman stammered.

“I take it you have played a piece of cake before?” Bowie replied. Wakeman, confused and nervous, offered no reply.

“Well,” Bowie went on, “maybe not then.”

The song launched a lifelong friendship with Bowie, and Wakeman’s career. He became rock’s go-to keyboardist, playing in countless sessions. In 1970, Melody Maker, at the time England’s most influential music publication, featured Wakeman on a cover story that anointed him “Tomorrow’s Superstar.” Bowie offered him a few key pieces of advice: get your own band, play with musicians who understand you, and, when it comes time to perform, “do what you want onstage, especially if you’re using your own money. Don’t let a promoter, agent, or manager tell you otherwise—they don’t have the imagination.”

Wakeman put the advice to use in the brashest of ways: He turned down Bowie’s offer to play in his sideband, the Spiders From Mars, and instead became the keyboardist for Yes. With its mystical lyrics, orchestral productions, Tolkienseque album art, and long, multipart songs, Yes exemplified progressive rock in all its technical breadth and portentous glory. Wakeman, who surrounded himself with keyboards and wore a cape to hide his arms after a critic said he moved like “a demented spider,” became prog rock’s most iconic star. “Here comes Rick, the caped crusader!” the band’s lead singer, Jon Anderson, recalls with a laugh. “He had a great sort of stance onstage, and very powerful energy. It really put him apart from any other keyboard player.” Or, as Wakeman deadpans, “I was Spinal Tap for real.”

By 1974, though just 24, Wakeman was already burning out. The recording of his third album with Yes, Tales From Topographic Oceans, had been, in his words, “poisonous,” and the band was barely speaking. Their fantastical songs, he felt, had become overindulgent and plodding. The problem was, there were too many yes-men yessing Yes. “If you said, ‘I want to do an album about elephants,’ they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s fantastic!’” he recalls. “You become very well aware quite quickly of the bullshit in this business.” When he confided in his old friend Ashley Holt, still a struggling singer and self-described “hick from the sticks,” Holt echoed Bowie’s advice from years before. “You’ve got to be happy,” Holt told him. “You’ve got to do what you want.”

Wakeman agreed. One Sunday night, as Holt and his band were setting up for their weekly gig at the Valiant Trooper, a pub in a hamlet about an hour northeast of London, a silver Rolls-Royce pulled up outside. Wakeman, who’d just come off a sold-out world tour with Yes, strode into the pub with his keyboard under his arm.

“Rick,” Holt said with surprise. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I’ve come to join in,” Wakeman said.

“You know,” Holt told him, “this isn’t a very big venue.”

Wakeman nodded at a spot by the fireplace, near Holt’s microphone. “Should I just set up over there, Captain?”

As the sparse crowd of bored geezers nursed their pints and played darts, Holt and Wakeman tore joyously through their old covers from the big band days. It felt like old times, but better, with the two of them pushing each other to the top of their game, Holt shrieking like a heavy metal monster, and the caped crusader wizarding the keys. “Every now and then you have to take stock,” Wakeman says. “You have to remember where your roots are. That, for me, was bringing me down to earth.”

The following Sunday night, Wakeman showed again. But this time, word got out: Hundreds of rockers and hippies crowded their way into the 100-person pub. Week after week, Wakeman’s stripped-down gigs at the Valiant Trooper became the place to be; neighbors complained about all the teens standing on their rooftops and peeing in their letterboxes. Then one day, Wakeman casually made Holt an offer. “I’d like to see you do vocals on this project I’m doing,” he told Holt. “You think the boys are up for it?”

“You mean Yes?” Holt asked.

“No,” Wakeman replied. “The boys from the pub.”

Wakeman had written his most ambitious piece of music yet—a concept album based on Jules Verne’s science-fiction novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. But even though he was still a member of one of rock’s biggest bands, he was offering the gig to Holt and his pub mates. “If anybody ever deserved a break,” Wakeman says, “it was Ash.”

Holt agreed to sing on the record—but Wakeman, ever the prankster, had another surprise in store. The album, he told Holt, would be recorded live. At the Royal Festival Hall. With the London Symphony Orchestra. And the English Chamber Choir. In front of 2,700 people. Oh, and it was too late to back out. Wakeman showed Holt and his bandmates the new issue of Melody Maker, where the recording session had already been announced.

“We were just gobsmacked,” Holt recalls. Brian Lane, the manager of Yes, thought Wakeman was “out of his fucking mind” for gambling his fame and fortune on these unproven barflies. But Wakeman, still taking a page from Bowie’s playbook, told Lane that it was his money, and he could do as he liked. “In that period of Rick’s life, you had two choices,” Lane recalls. “You agree with Rick, or you’re wrong.”

Pacing backstage at the Festival Hall before the sold-out concert in January 1974, Lane urged Wakeman to check on the band. “They’ve been playing pubs to a few people who are drinking at the bar!” Lane barked. “They are going to be shitting themselves. Go on in there and say something, for God’s sake!” But when Wakeman checked up on his mates, he found them playing darts and drinking beers, as if it were just another night at the Valiant Trooper.

As the show began, smoky mist covered the stage. David Hemmings, who had starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, sat on a throne, bellowing the opening narration: “The story begins on the 24th of May 1863 in Hamburg, when Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel discover an old parchment in a 12th-century book called ‘Heimskringla.’”

Wakeman, surrounded by Holt and the pub band, presided over the proceedings from within his tower of keyboards, his long, straight blond hair spilling over his silver-and-white cape. To his right were the London Symphony Orchestra in their tuxedos; to his left, the English Chamber Choir. On the wall behind them flashed a psychedelic montage of fantastical landscapes, reminiscent of Wakeman’s album covers. Though billed as a rock show, Wakeman had fashioned what looked and sounded more like a musical, in all its operatically hammy ambition.

The show, and Wakeman’s gamble, was a triumph. When the curtain fell, it received a standing ovation. Melody Maker declared the Holt and his pub band “sensational,” reporting that they “overcame their awe at the proceedings, and performed their duties with power and sincerity.” In May, when the recording of the show was released, it went straight to number one on the British charts. “I guess we weren’t that bad,” Holt says with a laugh.

But Wakeman had another trick up his cape. When the group reunited at the Valiant Trooper to celebrate his 25th birthday, he told his friends that he had an announcement to make. “I’ve quit Yes,” he said.

Holt’s head spun. Why would anyone in their right mind leave one of the top acts in the world? The pub guys, Wakeman continued, were now his one and only band. He was betting everything he had on them. “It’s like blackjack,” he says. “I thought: I’ll just keep going until I lose.” They called themselves the English Rock Ensemble, and Wakeman immediately booked them for an outdoor performance of Journey to the Center of the Earth, at the renowned Crystal Palace Bowl.

In the mid-’70s, bands like Pink Floyd, Genesis, and Yes were all competing to outdo each other with the latest theatrics: lasers, dry ice, pyrotechnics. But while prog rock was taking itself more and more seriously, Wakeman, who’d grown up on vaudeville and relished the comedy of it all, didn’t care what people thought. “I'm permanently reading 9.8 on the I-don’t-give-a-fuck meter,” he says.

Now, as he stared at the small lake in front of the Crystal Palace stage, his imagination sprang to life. He’d have inflatable monsters. Like Godzilla. In the lake. They would rise up during the climax of the show, when the legions arrive at the center of the Earth and engage in a final battle with treacherous beasts. Lane, still Wakeman’s manager, once again tried to stop him, but Wakeman plotted every overblown detail of the sold-out show, from the design of the waterborne creatures to the score for the symphony and choir. Despite his levity, he could be an exacting leader, cutting a rehearsal short if a violinist in the 50-piece orchestra played a wrong note. “It was pretty zany,” recalls Guy Protheroe, the orchestra’s conductor at the time. “But it was great being involved in the rock stuff, which was far from how I was trained.”

But the stress was taking a toll on Wakeman. On the morning of the show, he was headed to his kitchen for a cup of tea when he felt his knees buckle and the world go dark. He woke on the floor, bruised and confused, but chalked it up to fatigue.

Throughout the concert that night, he felt woozy and strange. “I can remember feeling incredibly light,” he says, “as if I couldn’t feel my feet touching the ground.” The wild props only added to Wakeman’s disorientation. During the climactic song, when the monsters began to inflate from beneath the lake, the crowd roared in glee. Just as Wakeman had planned, a pulley underneath the water dragged the creatures toward each other, as if they were preparing to fight. But suddenly, like a scene from Spinal Tap, the monsters got stuck right in front of the band, blocking the musicians from the audience. As technicians scrambled to fix the problem, the band dutifully kept playing. But the inflatables only drooped over each other, as if making monster love. Audience members, many of them zonked out of their minds on psychedelics of one variety or another, dove into the lake.

The next morning, the band convened at Wakeman’s mansion to discuss their impending world tour. Brian Lane had arranged accommodations befitting rock royalty: private jets, five-star hotels, sold-out shows from Los Angeles to Madison Square Garden. Wakeman took a call in his kitchen: It was Melody Maker, eager to interview him about the tour. But as he was speaking to the reporter, Wakeman suddenly felt too sick to go on. “I put the phone down and crawled upstairs,” he recalls.

He was rushed to the hospital, where a doctor told him he’d had a heart attack. “This isn’t possible,” Wakeman said—he was only 25. In fact, the doctor suspected he had suffered as many as three heart attacks in recent days. Though he didn’t use drugs, —to this day, he says he has never even smoked a joint—his lifestyle was destroying him: the drinking, the touring, the smoking, the lack of sleep. He was lucky to be alive, the doctor said. Heart disease had decimated Wakeman’s family—his grandfather and both uncles died of heart attacks, and his father was at high risk. The doctor told Wakeman he’d be staying in the hospital for nine months. Then she turned to Lane and asked, “Does he have enough money to retire?”

Ever since Wakeman was a boy, he had dreamed of being King Arthur. He made annual trips to Tintagel Castle, where, according to legend, Arthur was conceived. Every time he walked the rocky ruins, watching the waves smash against the cliffs, he imagined setting off on adventures with his faithful knights, fighting battles, and winning hearts. As a creative kid with little money and few distractions, he poured himself into his fantasy world. “It was just total magic,” he recalls. “It wasn’t mythical for me—it was real.”

Now, as he lay alone in his hospital bed, he thought of Arthur again. There was no way Wakeman could end his journey now. “I can’t do it,” he thought. “Music has been my life. It’s what I do. It’s what I love.” Despite the pleas from his doctor, family, and friends, he refused to give up. “I gotta carry on,” he decided. And if what the doctor told him was true—that he’d be risking a fatal heart attack if he ever performed again—then so be it.

“You were willing to die for rock and roll?” I ask him.

“I suppose if you want to put it like that, yes,” he says.

Several weeks after Wakeman’s heart attack, Holt was at the Valiant Trooper when his friend lumbered through the front door. Holt had heard what the doctor said, and figured his days of partying and rocking with Wakeman were over. But the moment Wakeman ordered up shots of whisky for both of them, Holt could see that old twinkle in the caped crusader’s eyes. “I’ve written our next album,” Wakeman told him.

It was a prog-rock opera called The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Wakeman had composed it in his hospital bed, including parts for symphony and choir. Writing about the clashes and conquests of medieval England was his most personal project yet; he’d always wanted to be a hero like Arthur, saving the day with his fellowship. But now that he was confronting his own mortality, the sagas of old felt more like his than ever before. “It was as much about me as it was about King Arthur,” he says. “I was on a quest to save my musical kingdom.”

There was only one place to have the show, Wakeman insisted: the Empire Pool Wembley, which had hosted the biggest bands of the era, from the Beatles to the Stones. There was just one problem, as Brian Lane reported back to him: the Ice Follies was booked at the Empire Pool for the next several months. The entire venue was covered in ice, making it impossible to stage a rock concert.

“All right,” Wakeman said.

Lane was startled. At last, he thought, the rock star who never took no for an answer was finally prepared to see reason.

But Wakeman wasn’t finished. “Then we’ll do it on ice!” he told Lane.

“On ice?” the manager said, trying to steady himself.

Wakeman, oblivious, began riffing on his vision. They’d have a big inflatable castle in the middle of the stage, next to the band. Then there’d be the symphony, two choirs, and skaters—dressed as knights and maidens—swirling around them.

Lane begged Wakeman to reconsider. At best, he said, “You’re going to lose a fistful of money.” At worst, it would cost Wakeman his life.

Wakeman responded by leaking his plans to Melody Maker, which put the story on the cover. “Everyone knows about it,” Wakeman told Lane, “so now there’s no choice.”

Determined to shoot a promotional film for King Arthur on Ice, Wakeman piled Holt and the rest of the pub band into one of his Rolls and road-tripped up to the Tintagel Castle. “You shall be the Black Knight,” Wakeman told Holt, handing him a suit of armor. Wakeman donned a long black cloak and tall hat to become Merlin the Magician. “We were chasing each other with swords around a paddock,” Holt recalls. “He made it into a comedy show.”

To make matters worse, Wakeman defied his doctor’s orders by taking Journey to the Center of the Earth on a sold-out American tour. It was sex, booze, and inflatable dinosaurs from the Hollywood Bowl to Madison Square Garden. The band flew on private jets, partied in stretch limos, stayed in five-star hotels, and seduced the choir. “There was quite a lot of social interaction between the choir and the pub band,” recalls Ann Manly, the choir’s manager.

By the time the band returned to London, Wakeman’s legions of fans were eagerly anticipating the premiere of King Arthur. Rock’s most extravagant ringmaster was promising rock’s most ambitious musical yet: a 50-piece orchestra, 48 singers in two choirs, a 50-person crew, a seven-piece band featuring two drummers, and more than 60 skaters dressed as knights and maidens, including Australian champion Reg Park and two-time national champion Patricia Pauley. “If you’re going to do something,” Wakeman says, “do it as you dream it.”

But trouble began before Sir Galahad even donned his skates. In an interview with Melody Maker, Wakeman made an offhand comment that the knights would be riding horses on the ice. Outraged, animal rights activists demanded that the show be canceled. To quiet the storm, Wakeman held a press conference at the arena. “I will now give you a demonstration of the knights on horses,” he told the assembled reporters.

On cue, the lights dimmed. Dry ice flooded the arena. Out from the shadows, a skater, dressed as a knight, came gliding out on horseback. Between his legs was a wooden hobby horse, which wobbled suggestively between his knees.

“You weren’t thinking there would be real horses, were you?” Wakeman said, as the reporters roared with laughter.

On May 30, 1975, the lights lowered inside the Empire Pool for the first of three sold-out shows. Wakeman strode across a red carpet and on to the stage, which was bordered by an icy moat. He was a prog-rock apparition—long blond hair flowing over his floor-length, sky blue cape, sequined in silver lining. As dry ice flooded the stage, Hemmings appeared on a spot-lit throne, intoning lines from The Once and Future King: “Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil,” he bellowed, “is rightwise king born of all England.” A skater dressed in cardboard armor glided over to the sword. But when he attempted to pull it free, it took the anvil with it. “No one had thought to anchor the anvil,” Holt recalls.

That wasn’t the only mishap. As Guinevere skated out during her namesake song, she accidentally skated over her veil, ripping her hat from her wig. At another time, the chain mail under Wakeman’s cape caught as he was descending his perch, leaving him swaying awkwardly above the ice. The skating, and playing, only became more difficult as the dry ice filled the arena: No one in the crew had realized that using dry ice over real ice creates a mist that floats higher and higher. At one point the haze was so thick that the band members couldn’t even see each other. “It basically covered everybody,” recalls bassist Roger Newell, who could barely make out the frets of his three-neck bass, let alone his pedals.

As the show came to the final number, “The Last Battle,” pairs of skaters took to the ice, pretending to sword fight as the band thundered along. The plan had been that the knights would all kill each other, leaving no one spared. But, strangely, a single knight survived the battle, and was now skating cluelessly around the rink. Suddenly it hit Wakeman: Before the show, one of the skaters had called in sick, which left an odd number of knights in the final scene. There had been no one to kill the surviving knight. He just skated around and around until he decided there was only way to fulfill his destiny and end the show: by falling on his sword, and fading into the dry ice of legend.

In the wake of the shows, it seemed that Wakeman’s epic gamble had once again paid off. King Arthur spawned another hit record, and Holt was in high spirits as the band assembled once more at the Valiant Trooper. But the moment he saw Wakeman’s face, he knew something was wrong.

“I’m sorry guys,” Wakeman told them. “I’ve run out of money. It’s all gone on our adventures. They’ve all made money, but they’ve all cost more than the money they made.” He’d lost everything: his house, his cars, his savings. As much as he wanted to stay with the band, he couldn’t afford to anymore. “I’ve got to go back to Yes,” he told them. The kings of prog rock had been struggling ever since Wakeman left the band, and they were pleading with him to come back.

“I was a bit gutted,” Holt says. But as disappointed as he felt, he had nothing but love for his friend, who had taken him on such an incredible ride. “Well, it looks like it’s the end,” he told Wakeman. “Let’s not hope it’s forever.”

“No,” Wakeman promised, “it won’t be.” He pledged to his friend that, one day, they would once again perform King Arthur together.

As time went on, though, it didn’t seem like Wakeman would be able to deliver on that vow. Years of gambling his fortune on his musical fantasies, along with two costly divorces, had caught up with him. Yes, which was past its glory days, proved unable to provide him a financial lifeline. Six years after King Arthur first skated onto the ice at the Empire Pool, Wakeman’s millions were gone. His few remaining possessions, including his instruments, were put away in a storage locker he’d paid for in advance. Too proud to ask his friends or family for help, Wakeman lived in Kensington Park, sleeping on benches. One day, exhausted by the months of struggle, he finally confided in an old roadie friend, who let him sleep on his floor.

As low as he fell, though, Wakeman didn’t lose hope. “My father once said to me that I have the gypsy spirit in me that his mother had,” Wakeman recalls. “That whatever you do, wherever you put your case down, that’s where you are.” But if the real Rick Wakeman had anything in common with the Caped Crusader he played onstage, it was the silver lining he always saw. No matter what he lost, he always had his music. He wanted to play again—and he wanted to keep his promise to his boyhood friend, to revisit the world of knights and maidens they had created together. Little by little, the music brought him back. “You go where the music takes you,” he says.

It didn’t take Wakeman long to get back on his feet. A year after he was sleeping on park benches, he hit the Top 40 with a concept album he wrote and recorded based on George Orwell’s novel 1984. Tim Rice wrote the lyrics, and vocals were provided by Jon Anderson. Wakeman went on to tour the world, release more than 50 records, and inspire another generation of admirers. “I try and keep everything I own that could be considered musical in some way at arm’s reach, like a spaceship cockpit,” says Kevin Parker, the multi-instrumentalist behind the psychedelic music project Tame Impala. “It’s very Rick Wakeman.”

But Wakeman wasn’t satisfied with his return to musical prominence. Over the years, as he continued to tour and record, he felt like something was missing. He had a promise to keep to an old friend. On June 19, 2016, Wakeman took the stage at the O2 arena in London, where he was headlining a prog-music festival. At 66, his face was fleshier, his beard grayer. But his hair was still long and blond, and his cape, black and silver-lined, waved proudly from his shoulders. Suddenly, the crowd cheered as Ash Holt, the man who had given Wakeman his first job as a musician, walked onstage with the other members of the pub band. They were reuniting with Wakeman for the first time since 1975 to perform King Arthur again. There was no ice, but there were tears. Wakeman had promised them long ago that one day they’d perform their epic again, and here they were, back in their musical kingdom together. “It was lump-in-the-throat time to see it happen again,” Wakeman says.

But throughout all he’s experienced over the years—the wealth and fame, the world tours, the homelessness—Wakeman hasn’t given up on bringing back King Arthur as it was meant to be staged: with ice skates. “Before I depart this mortal coil, I must do King Arthur on Ice again,” he tells me. “Think about what you can do on ice now! The technology has advanced so much.” A faraway look comes into his eyes, and for a moment he’s no longer an aging rocker—he’s the boy who walked the ruins at Tintagel, dreaming of another boy who pulled a sword from a stone and became a king. “We can build shapes out of ice,” he says, the vision shimmering before his eyes, as real as the music he brought forth from nothing. “We can build a castle!”

Jeroen Verkroost - The Infected

Monday, October 24, 2022 7:52 PM

THE 80’S BEST KEPT SECRET – TREVOR HORN

WRITTEN BY JEROEN VERKROOST
AUG 25, 2020

You will have heard of Andy Warhol, and his New York studio The Factory. He and his entourage were hugely influential in Pop-Art, fashion and music, with bands like Velvet Underground and artists like Nico Lou Reed and J.J. Cale.

This is a story about a man who was at least as influential as Andy, but in the 80’s. A man who built a similar studio bustling with creativity. He and his entourage of people would change electronic music forever and several of his team members would become immensely successful, yet his name is hardly known with the general audience. Here is the story.

Trevor Horn was a 70’s studio musician, a bass player who really wanted to be a producer. He had produced some amateurish punk-bands during the seventies, but Trevor first touched the charts after he started dating singer Tina Charles. Trevor became her musical director as well as backup bass player while building his recording studio. Tina Charles soon topped the charts internationally with hit singles like “Love to Love” in the late seventies.

In London, Northern boy Trevor was making some money producing radio commercials in his studio. In his spare time, he had been working with Bruce Woolley to form his own act, “The Buggles”. Together, in one hour of an afternoon in 1978, they wrote the track “Video Killed the Radio Star”. There were three elements that inspired the song

Horn: “I’d read J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Sound-Sweep”, in which an opera singer is rendered obsolete in a world without sound, and I had this vision of the future where record companies would have computers in the basement and manufacture artists.
Secondly, I’d heard Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine. It was like you could see the future when you heard Kraftwerk, something new is coming, something different. Different rhythm section, different mentality.
And finally, video was becoming immensely important. You could feel things changing. So we had all of that, and we wrote this song.” Eventually, they recorded an early demo, featuring Horn’s girlfriend Tina Charles on vocals.

In her backing band, Trevor had met keyboard player Geoff Downes. They had begun working together, making jingles for commercials as well as experimenting with electronic music. Trevor invited Geoff to join Buggles a bit later. Together they worked on the demo version of “Video Killed the Radio Star”, which was recorded in Geoff’s flat.

Downes: “We were northern boys trying to break into the music scene, but were initially rejected by all the record companies.” But Downes’ girlfriend helped out. “By chance, my girlfriend worked for Island and got them to hear our demo, and suddenly they wanted to sign us as producers, artists, and writers. We went from nothing to this terrific deal.”

“Video Killed the Radio Star” is a complex, modern-sounding pop song. Downes: “We stayed up for nights experimenting with different sounds. We wanted to cram as many ideas as we could into a pop song. The Buggles were predicated on the idea that everything in life is artificial, including music. That’s why it is sung in a robotic voice and why the instruments are all processed for a computerized feel. It was a commentary on the intrusion of technology into every aspect of our lives.“.

Interestingly, this was a track recorded with traditional instruments that was made to SOUND like it had been done by computers. The track was recorded in 1979. Back then “Wireless” didn’t refer to Wifi but actually meant radio. It is the first hit song showcasing Trevor Horn’s unique ability to make a recording sound “timeless”.

“Video Killed the Radio Star” was also the first music video ever to be played on MTV. The video was shot in South London in a day, directed by Russell Mulcahy. It had more production value than most other videos MTV had to choose from. Mulcahy used a lot of theatrics in his work. He went on to make videos for Duran Duran – including “Wild Boys” and “Rio” before directing the 1986 film Highlander. Also performing in the video were Hans Zimmer on keyboards and Warren Cann (from Ultravox) on drums.

Helped by MTV “Video Killed the Radio Star” became a UK #1 hit single and then went to #1 in 15 more countries, including America.

After the success, Horn and Downe joined progressive rock band Yes in May 1980. Horn sang vocals but he had problems with his voice and his nerves on tour. His bad live performance was the main reason for him to quit Yes after only seven months. Horn: “Joining Yes was one of those stupid things that you do sometimes. It was one of the two or three times in my life that I’ve done something that I knew was wrong.” Afterward, Horn and Downes went back into the studio to record the second incarnation of the Buggles, but they ran into personal and artistic problems, leading up to a disappointing second album and the eventual split of The Buggles.

By the way, after Buggles, Geoff Downes went on to form symphonic rock act Asia, which made him a huge star after which he rejoined Yes, and sold millions of records

The third unofficial member in Buggles, also in the video for was Hans Zimmer. You can see a young Hans standing in front of the Modular in the clip:
After school Zimmer had left his native Germany for London and started out as a synth programmer, working on radio ads. Trevor Horn produced and engineered several of the 30-second commercial spots that Hans composed and arranged, so one day Trevor Horn told Zimmer about his Buggles project and invited Hans to help him out: “I would start working with Trevor at 6 in the evening, finish at 9 in the morning to get to my 10 o’clock morning session which was actually paying my rent, it was pretty harsh. Trevor was always brilliant and I really learned a lot from him, I learned how to listen.“

Another talent that Horne picked up was classical clarinet and piano player Anne Dudley. She was working nightshifts behind the keyboards in late ‘70s studio’s. There she met Trevor Horn, who offered her work as an arranger on his team.
Back at Horn’s studio she met Zimmer and was introduced to one of the first, wildly expensive, polyphonic synthesizers, the Prophet 5 (which Downes had used on “Video”). Anne Dudley describes the first polyphonic chord played he played on it as a jaw-dropping moment for her. Soon she was full-time on the studio team working with Trevor Horn, producing records like ABC’s Lexicon of Love and Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock.

During January 1983, Horn’s team was working on the Yes comeback album 90125 – Horn as a producer, and Anne Dudley providing arrangements and keyboard programming. Horn was among the first people to use samples. While others were using samples as a sort of special effect in a pop song, Horn and his team saw the potential to craft entire compositions with the sampler, disrupting the traditional rock way of writing and composing.

Dudley: “We started playing together in our own time. Trevor had got a new synthesizer from Australia, a Fairlight, which fascinated us. It made it relatively easy to put in a sample of, say, a dog barking, and then play it in different pitches.

During the Yes sessions, the team took an unused Yes drum riff and sampled it into the Fairlight using the device’s sequencer. This was the first time an entire drum pattern had been sampled into the machine. then they added non-musical sounds on top of it, before playing the track to Horn. This resulted in the Red & Blue Mix of Yes’ “Owner of a Lonely Heart” single, showcasing the prototype sound that would become The Art of Noise.

The concept for the Art Of Noise was based on “The Art of Noises”, a book by the Italian Futurist-movement from the beginning of the 20th century. Among other things, these futurists imagined creating a new kind of music by using daily noises instead of classical instruments. A vision that was finally made possible by the Fairlight. The members were arranger Anne Dudley, engineer Langan, programmer Jeczalik, producer Trevor Horn.

To complete the team, Trevor hired media concept man Paul Morley. He was an influential journalist for New Musical Express Magazine, and Horn hired him to “do Propaganda” for the teams productions. He also joined the Art of Noise, where Anne Dudley and the boys were having fun.

Anne: Using samples of “Leave It” and “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by YES, which Trevor Horn had produced, we wrote a piece of music with lots of different sections and samples. There was a neighbor’s VW Golf starting and stalling, and group members saying “urgh”, and “money”, which we played backward.

This was back in the day when editing meant you had to literally slice tape with a razor blade. We ended up with something quite quirky but we certainly didn’t think it had legs as a single. To our amazement, it got to No 8.”

Paul Morley, Mr. Media, had been hugely successful with his propaganda strategy, propelling Frankie Goes To Hollywood to the number one chart position with “Relax” by provoking the BBC so that they’s boycot the song. And when he ran into his soon to be wife, a German lady called Claudia Brucken, the team decided that she would need a band of her own. The name was obvious: Propaganda.

And so Propaganda was formed around Claudia. 80’s star David Sylvian (ex-Japan) was asked to produce Propaganda. He eventually decided against producing them, but while he was thinking about it, he came up with the ghostly top line and music of the song ‘P:Machinery’.

In the end, Stephen Lipson produced the Propaganda album, under the supervision of Horn. For recording it they again did something revolutionary in 1983. Horn: “We took a Linn, a Fairlight, a DMX, a DSX and a Roland M5, interconnected them and programmed the whole song in each machine. Then we synchronized the instruments with each other. So we programmed everything, with the idea in mind, that the girls could sing over it, while we would lean back and just press some buttons – without using any tape. …Of course on recording day the whole setup went berserk and we had to start all over again to record the whole thing on tape!“

Fun fact: Even though the fully programmed song technique failed the first time, Horn soon found out it could be used to copy multi-tracks, and copy and paste them over several measures. ‘Wow’, I thought, ‘that’s something we can use for ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’!’ This was supposed to be only a three-minute track, but which we were having so much fun copying and stretching it over and over that, in the end, we worked three months on that song, and it became 13 minutes long.

And so we see that Trevor Horn had assembled this hugely talented group of people, who were the real stars behind many great 80’s bands and acts, producing hits for Seal, Simple Minds, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, ABC, Robbie Williams, The Art Of Noise, Belle & Sebastian, Cher, Bryan Ferry, Godley & Creme, Grace Jones, Paul McCartney, Tom Jones, Malcolm McLaren, Mike Oldfield, Pet Shop Boys, Shane McGowan, Rod Stewart, Tina Turner, t.A.T.u and of course Propaganda. Just check out these album covers, just a small subset:

[Link]
Anne Dudley went on to become a producer for Tom Jones, Alison Moyet, and Debby Harry, the first composer for the BBC Concert Orchestra and an Oscar-Winning soundtrack writer for The Full Monty, as well as having written over 23 other movie scores like American History X, Les Misérables and Bright Young Things by Stephen Fry. Anne also is the favorite soundtrack writer of Paul Verhoeven, having done the scores for his movies Black Book, Elle and his soon to be released movie Benedettta.

Bu the way, Hans Zimmer has also been making movie and video game soundtracks since the late ’80s. He has a huge amount of Hollywood film scores to his name: True Romance, Backdraft, Rain Man, Green Card, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, four Batman movies, Pearl Harbor, Pirates of the Caribbean, Sherlock Holmes, Inception, The Lion King, for which he won an Oscar in 2011, Dunkirk and of course Blade Runner 2049. What do you think of that list?

Actually, in the previous episode of this podcast, the Happy Goth Accident, all backing tracks we used were taken from Hans Zimmer’s Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack.

Warpaint – Shadows

Warpaint, what a great band name. Warpaint is an all-female LA quartet that appears to have a direct line back to 1982 Britain. The song, Shadows, is from their debut album “The Fool” from 2010. Where shall I begin with my fan rant about this great song. It gives me goosebumps 10 years later.

If I had to describe this album. In simple terms I would say it sounds soothing and immersive. There are certain elements of Grunge, but also from the ethereal sounding Cocteau Twins. It’s more about ambiance than action. The drum sections have a post-punk feel and the basslines are great on this album and also on this song (shadows). They could be one of those bands like The Chromatics to close off a season 3 episode of Twin Peaks.

Most of all, I think this is REAL music. It has an authentic heart and soul. There are four women playing instruments in a room, that’s it. That’s all that is needed. If you are sick of modern and manufactured crap then you do yourself a favour and check out Warpaint. Especially if you are into post-punk and alternative music, you will definitely enjoy this one.

But apart from my fan-rant: This first album didn’t create a big impact or splash, it’s just not poppy enough, and also maybe not “ballsy” or dark enough 😊

If you see live footage on Youtube, each of them is in her own zone. Often with eyes shut and head loose. It’s almost like watching them make up songs in real-time at every show. The chemistry can’t be denied and is an absolute joy to see.

The Sound – Sense of purpose (From the Lion’s mouth 1981)

This has to be the most underrated band and underrated album that I know of in our beloved dark genre. Some bands racked up hit after hit and enjoyed fame and fortune. Others never reach the top but slowly build a following, substantial enough to sustain a decades-long career. Then there are bands who get glowing reviews that never translate into large-scale public recognition, and end up with that poisoned label, of being “The critics’ favourite”.

One can only guess as to why The Sound didn’t make it into the big league. It is true that a lot of their songs sound the same. And later albums are too much “hit and miss” with some great tracks, but also a lot of mediocre ones. They missed the coherence and mood that From The Lion’s Mouth does have. But still it only sold 100.000 copies. So The Sound was doomed to become a “cult band”.

And maybe there were just too many of these post-punk bands around at the time.. And they couldn’t cut through.

Frontman Adrian Borland missed the charisma of Ian Curtis or Robert Smith. Also, in an age of “Video killed the Radio star”: Adrian wasn’t the most handsome guy you would like to see in a music video. Also Adrian had severe pchycological problems (a schizophrenic disorder) and he was an alcoholic. He was not easy to work with.
An interesting fact, is that this London band was more popular in the Netherlands than in the UK. Apparently we Dutchies have better taste 😊 And Adrian has also lived in the Netherlands for several periods in his life. Frustrated by

Frustrated by the lack of succes and a breakthrough that didn’t come, The Sound disbanded in 1987. Borland could not cope with other bands making it, and not him.

After the end of The Sound, he started a solo career and kept writing songs and performing. It’s a crying shame that he took his own life in 1999 at the age of 41. He jumped in front of a train at the Wimbledon railway station.

There is a documentary about his life and the band: “Walking in the opposite direction”

It premiered at the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam in 2016. Here it is:

The Church – Under the Milkyway

The Church is an Australian Rock band, and this beautiful track is from their album Starfish from 1988. Before releasing this album they were making interesting music, but it took them 7 (!) albums to finally make it big.

In order to make this album, they temporarily moved to Los Angeles to record with producers Waddy Wachtel (Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Robbie Williams) and Greg Ladani (among others Fleetwood Mac). This proved to be quite a challenge for The Church. According to founding member Steve Kilbey: “It was Australian hippies versus West Coast guys who know the way they like to do things. We were a bit more undisciplined than they would have liked”.

Personalities clashed as the two sides were debating over guitar sounds, song structures, and work ethic. Under pressure from the producers, Kilbey took vocal lessons, an experience he later regarded as valuable.

The stress of living in the US influenced their recording, and left Kilbey feeling out of place:

“The Church came to L.A. and really reacted against the place because none of us liked it. I hated where I was living. I hated driving this horrible little red car around on the wrong side of the road. I hate that there’s no one walking on the streets and I missed my home. All the billboards, conversations I’d overhear, TV shows, everything that was happening to us was going into the music”.

Four weeks of gruelling rehearsals resulted in Starfish, which focused on capturing the band’s core sound. Which is bright, spacious, and clear.

The group wanted a live and dynamic album; They tried to record a live atmosphere that conveyed a real sense of “being there”. They found the results bare and simplistic; however, the public reception was unexpected.

Because it turned out as the band’s international breakthrough album, and went gold in America.

It is timeless, lush music.. in my opinion.

Small fact about this track: “Under the Milky Way” was featured in a 1989 episode of Miami Vice titled “Asian Cut” and more recently in the 2001 film Donnie Darko.

Also on the Donnie Darko Soundtrack was “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division. Because of that movie I really feel like these two tracks are made in the same universe or overall romantic 80’s ‘feel’.

Hans Zimmer

Barry Levinson’s wife loved Hans Zimmers’ soundtrack for “A World Apart”, so she bought the CD and gave it to Barry. He then stopped by Hans’ studio in London and asked Hans to move to the USA to start working on the soundtrack for Rain Man. Hans worked on over 160 movies and got an Oscar for the animated Lion King. He also worked on the 3 Batman movies by Christopher Nolan… for 12 years (!). Zimmer is really taking time and freaking out on every single sound. Plus, as mentioned, he did the synth programming on the Bladerunner 2049 OST (together with Benjamin Wallfish, great name).