Bill Bruford on His Ups and Downs With Yes and King Crimson, Life After Retirement
Ten years into his post-drumming life, the percussion legend reflects on playing with British prog's holy trinity, making the jump to jazz with Earthworks, and more
BY HANK SHTEAMER
OCTOBER 29, 2019
Rolling Stone Retirement is a fluid concept in music, but at 10 years and counting, Bill Bruford’s just might be the real deal. Since he announced he was calling it quits in 2009, the prog drumming legend — who worked with Yes, King Crimson, and Genesis before founding his own long-running jazz group, Earthworks, and came in at number 16 on Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Drummers list — hasn’t performed in public a single time, and he doesn’t see that changing anytime soon.
“I think to play rock — to play any kind of music, actually, but particularly rock — for a drummer, you have to be completely committed to it,” he tells RS via phone from his home in Surrey, England. “You can’t half-ass play at rock, or at jazz, either, you’ve got to play jazz or play rock — or something in between like I always was. And I’m at the stage in life now where I just can’t summon up that commitment to play any kind of music, really. There’s other things I want to do now: write books and be with my grandkids and so forth.”
He’s doing pretty well on the writing front, having published a candid and insightful 2009 autobiography, followed by 2018’s Uncharted, a heady but often illuminating study of creativity in drumming, which grew out of the same research at the University of Surrey that earned him a PhD in Music in 2016. And in between spending time with family, he’s also attending to his extensive solo catalog, reissuing albums by his late-Seventies fusion band Bruford, his duo with Dutch pianist Michiel Borstlap, and Earthworks itself.
“I’m afraid I’ve got sucked into that whole ‘managing your legacy’ thing,” Bruford says. “I confess to being very soppy about all this, and I cannot help but acknowledge the weakness of wanting my work to live on after I’ve gone.” One of Bruford’s latest archival projects is Earthworks Complete, a massive box set featuring the band’s entire studio and live output, plus extensive bonus material. Across more than 20 CDs and DVDs, the collection charts Earthworks’ evolution from a quirky, eclectic group built around Bruford’s Simmons electronic drums to a lean, muscular acoustic postbop outfit. In a broader way, it drives home how serious Bruford’s engagement with jazz was — and how, from the moment he left Yes at the height of their success to join King Crimson, a band that had blown his mind in 1969 and that he would play with on and off through 1997, he was always a musician who followed his own compass. (Click here to read Bruford’s thoughts on 12 of his favorite moments from his extensive discography.)
In a wide-ranging chat with RS, Bruford reflected on why he never looked back after quitting Yes, the thrills and frustrations of playing with King Crimson, his short-lived tenure with Genesis, making the jump from rock to jazz, his mixed feelings on the word “prog,” and more.
When was the last time you actually sat down at the drums? Ten years ago. That’s not quite right. … I mean, I may have played a couple of Motown things in the first year off. And playing Motown music is such fun — holy cow. We had a local Motown band which was great for a couple of weeks. We did two or three private events. We had a nine-piece band, I think, horns and the lot. Tremendous singers. It was great.
But since then: No, I don’t play anymore, and a lot of people seem to find that very weird, but I don’t find that strange at all.
What was your favorite Motown song to play? Laughs Oh, I don’t know — “Grapevine,” probably. Marvin Gaye’s thing. Just terrific.
So your new box set traces Earthworks from 1987 through the mid-2000s, but you’d been deeply into jazz since you were a teenager. Way back then, was it your life’s goal to play jazz? Would you have bypassed rock entirely if you’d had your choice? I’m not sure I thought in quite black and white like that. Definitely everybody kind of liked rock — or here in the U.K. what we might call “beat music” at the time. You know, like the Liverpool scene and the Swinging Blue Jeans and people like that, and Billy J. Kramer and to a degree the Beatles. And I was with a bunch of older guys, and they were importing Riverside jazz records from California, and stuff. Yeah, it was Art Blakey and Max Roach, and I just found all that so much more exciting. I could understand right away what the drummer was doing. And I have trouble to this day with the repetition in popular music, and the sort of lack of interaction within so-called rock or pop as opposed to jazz. So I instantly sort of preferred the one.
But then in 1968, everything changed, really. Big year. Huge year. And I was seeing Hendrix playing with Roland Kirk at Ronnie Scott’s and stuff and that would make the shirt fall off your back with excitement. So there was this new thing emerging. I didn’t know what it was; I didn’t really know what a career in rock or jazz meant. I was about 17, 16; you’d go to clubs very early in the U.K. I hadn’t really thought about a career. I thought my father would probably explode if I told him him I wanted to be a drummer.
Going back to the first Yes album, which turned 50 this year, it struck me how the basic elements of the band’s trademark sound were already there: It’s not Close to the Edge, but it is a very intricate, advanced take on rock music. How did the sound become so fully formed so early? I don’t know — you’d better credit Jon Anderson for that. He had been a pop singer called Hans Christian Anderson, I think, for a while, and that hadn’t worked out, and he thought, ‘I’ll make some more adventurous music, some stuff I’d like to make anyway. And it’ll have some classical music in it, and I’ll have a bunch of guys, and we’ll be able to sing like the Beach Boys, and you know, we’ll cover Fifth Dimension songs.’
And one of the things a lot of people miss about Yes, I think, is that it was just a covers band. And we started out just doing covers of lots of songs of the day, big Beatles songs, typically, Crosby and Stills, and I don’t know, Fifth Dimension, and even some West Side Story probably. And we learned to play those; we didn’t have a shared repertoire. A lot of the bands — like, say, Black Sabbath or something like that — came from the same street in Birmingham, or from Detroit, or somewhere. And we weren’t like that at all; we came from all different cultures and parts of the U.K., so we didn’t share a common music culture, a kind of rhythm & blues-based thing. We needed to take something and then change it, and it was through changing things that we came to know ourselves.
Was there sort of a breakthrough piece in terms of an original Yes composition? Yeah, I think so. We toyed with a few original things which were kind of alright but not great. But I think, on reflection — I’ve had many years to think about this — the band hit its real template, really, with “Heart of the Sunrise,” which came up on 1971’s Fragile. And that seemed to have it all; that was a shorter version of what was to become “Close to the Edge” and some of the longer-form things that we did. It probably only ran eight minutes or something, but we thought of it as a long song. And it had the drama and the poise and the kind of fey, pastoral English-y lyrics at the beginning where the music all gives way to a slightly feminine vocal. It had all the bits and pieces in place. Rough-hewn, maybe, but it was all there. Some would say maybe “Roundabout” was a better example, but we were finding our legs with both of those two.
Listening to your playing on those early Yes albums, it’s pretty clear that you were heavily into jazz. Were you consciously trying to bring that element into rock? I knew no other way to play the drums; there wasn’t a choice here. I had no experience of hitting a drum any harder; I had no experience of what it might be like to be a Texan rhythm & blues drummer, so we are all just a mixture of whatever had been on our record players. And we loved it all, and I loved it all, and I pushed together everything I thought was of interest, and I didn’t realize it had to go a particular way; everything felt completely open. I felt I could do anything I wanted, really, on drums.
It’s hard to overstate how naive we were, how young we were, how fast everything was developing, how fast we were learning. And you know, nobody talked about groove; nobody had discovered the word “groove” really, which I’m not quite sure when that came along, but it certainly emanated from America. Around here, we didn’t talk about that somehow. We would still be “swinging” here, rather than grooving.
That quality of swing is a trait that seems to link together a whole generation of British rock drummers. I know that Yes opened for Cream at their farewell show at the Royal Albert Hall 1968 — was Ginger Baker a revelation in terms of the mixing of jazz and rock? He was an influence, yeah — loved Ginger Baker’s stuff. He just was terrific, and he had a big, thick sound. Like Blakey, he could shake you; you’d feel it in the pit of your stomach. Really, really good. I loved that, and so different from those awful kind of British beat drummers from up north, Liverpool and stuff, that seemed so weedy and so feeble. So when I was very young, I wanted to be Ginger Baker, yeah. I wanted to have a cigarette hanging out of my mouth and a large ride cymbal at 90 degrees. He was very important.
Did you know him? Um, no. I knew of him. He was too frightening to speak to. So I saw him around, and he probably knew who this kid was a bit, but if you’re 15 or 16 and he’s 21, it just feels like an impossible gulf. But I loved some of his stuff, and the mid-Sixties stuff he did was just terrific, so I’m sad to see he’s gone. Having said that, he was a deeply unpleasant person, I think.
Reading your autobiography, it seems like you were getting pretty fed up with Yes’ process in the studio during Close to the Edge. But during, say, the period of Fragile, were you content and happy in the band then? Laughs Well, I’m not good at content and happy. I don’t think it really comes with the artistic vocation, particularly. Because content and happy to most creative people means some kind of movement forward, and I champ a bit at the bit, like a horse, if it’s somehow going too slowly. And many would say I’m too fast; I should slow down; I should have waited longer with Yes; I should have waited longer with King Crimson, or whatever — no, I was kicked out of King Crimson, really, or King Crimson kept collapsing around me. And with hindsight, you do what you do; you’re the kind of person you are. And somewhere toward the end of Close to the Edge, I couldn’t stand the thought of another — you know, sleeping on the sofa and waking up at 3 o’clock in the morning and seeing Chris Squire just slowly turning another knob on the bass sound laughs.
It became too much, and bear in mind also, by that point, I was probably 21 or 22 or something by then, and I’d only ever played with four other guys in my life, really. I played one or two side dates while I was trying to get ’round to playing with Yes. But I was phenomenally inexperienced, and it would’ve been great to play with almost anybody else and play any other kind of music. That’s how I was feeling around the end of Close to the Edge, and I just didn’t want to do the whole thing again because I knew they would only make the next one — it would take longer, it would cost much more, and it would go on and on and on forever, so I was right to leave; I was happy to leave.
It seems like such a mature decision for someone that young. Was there no part of you that was thinking about money and security rather than art? Yeah, I was a very romantic guy. I’d done a fair bit of reading about artists, and I think I was big on suffering for your art, probably — a kind of ludicrous idea. But, yeah, I’m not stupid also. I mean, I’d just been on two blindingly successful albums, and there’s a thing called a royalty statement, and it hadn’t kicked in by then, and there was going to be a lot of lawyers between me and the money. But eventually I got paid, pretty well. I’ve never complained about not being paid. But I admit, it was kind of scary, I suppose, but it just felt like I was always earning more money next year than this year; I was on an upward trajectory, for sure. And I thought, ‘Well, King Crimson play well; they’ve got an audience.’ I didn’t think about it too much.
It was pretty shocking to read in your autobiography that when you left Yes, you had to give away half your royalties for Close to the Edge to their new drummer, Alan White. Yeah. Well, I was advised to. “That would be nice,” said the manager, and so I did. And Alan — who’s a great friend of mine, and was wonderful — after about 40 years, I said to him, “Alan, we’ve had a good exchange here: I made the record, and you fantastically went around the world playing it and keeping the record alive, but I gave you half the royalties. So how ’bout we call it quits, and I have my other half of the royalties back? ‘Cause you know, it’s been a good bargain for both of us.” And he was a real gentleman; he said, “Sure, here’s your half of the record back.”
Oh, that’s great. Isn’t that a lovely story?
So as far as the move to Crimson, was there ever a point after you made the move where you thought, ‘What the hell have I done?’ Or was it instantly a liberating feeling? That’s definitely the feeling that was in the air that this is totally liberating to me. It felt really good, and the minute Robert Fripp played a bit of “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part One,” or something — and particularly “Part Two,” which was great — I thought, ‘This is it! This is what I came for.’ Absolutely terrific. So I was thrilled with that. And, again, hard to describe it more accurately than — we were rather a closed circle in that we weren’t aware of the world that might have said, “Wow, why did the drummer leave that band and go to another band?” It just wasn’t really in my thinking that much. What I knew was, that I was getting a cold shower. I was getting a whole kind of refreshment; I was detoxing. Maybe that’s a good word to use. Not that Yes was in any way toxic but I was having a change of life at age 22 or something, which was tremendous, and it ran for two years, until the end of Red, I guess. And by then, I’d picked up a whole lot more bruises, and a whole lot more experience and was getting better at most things I wanted to get better at, particularly playing the drum set, I think.
Well, if you were looking for a change, it seems like there could be nothing further from watching Chris Squire slowly turn knobs in the studio at 3 a.m. than being onstage with someone like King Crimson percussionist Jamie Muir. Laughs Yeah, I mean, Jamie was a completely … He was a character, and there’s never any video of him around, sadly, of him trying to climb the PA stacks — which was a dangerous thing to do, for a start — with blood pouring out of his mouth, hurling a chain at a thunder sheet back on the stage, missing Robert Fripp by not much. Ed. note: Muir was known for climbing speakers and biting on blood capsules during performances. So it was part circus and part surreal kind of performance art. And in a way, deeply theatrical, but deeply musical too; when he played the set, it was great. I mean, he was a little force of nature.
He didn’t start as a drummer, actually. He picked that stuff up a bit later on in life; he started as a trombone player, I believe. But he had poor lungs and poor blowing capacity, so he moved to drums. But also something of a philosopher. And he went off to become a monk, I think, in Scotland, for a while. So a very unusual guy. But he had a sort of force field. He was an energy person: You came into his magnetic field, and somehow your hair stood up on end and you were about to change in some way. I liked that. He was pretty rude about my stuff.
In what way? Ah, he just thought I was kind of showing off on the drums laughs. And he was right. Until I met Jamie, I thought the band existed to amuse me; I didn’t realize I existed to try to make the music work. I was a typical overconfident, perhaps over-technical drummer who was determined to show off most of the time. I was very young! Very young. I apologize.
That had to have been a pretty big adjustment going from working on the material from Close to the Edge and then going onstage with Crimson and improvising for a half hour. Yep, yep, that’s true. We had a bit of induction into that. I’d go over to Jamie’s house, and he’d lay out a bunch of percussion toys on the floor: small drums, little percussion instruments, rattles, shakers, and stuff. Yeah, and the two of us would just play: We’d scrabble around on the floor and we’d turn the tape recorder on and we’d record all sorts of stuff. And improvising is not something I find frightening in any way. I love improvising, whatever way it is, even this phone call. I’m thinking on my feet, as it were, and I don’t quite know where it’s going to go next, and I like that.
There was a fascinating quote that I read, you had said, “It is a common and thoughtless piece of journalism in general that lumps Genesis, Yes, and King Crimson all in the same thing. I can assure you, I can’t think of three more different organizations than the three and I have firsthand knowledge of all three …” That transition, from Yes’ Close to the Edge to King Crimson’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, seems to drive home how wrongheaded it is, this whole “prog” classification that would peg two bands like that as a single thing. Yeah. It’s interesting, isn’t it? That those British bands can now be lumped together as a genre called progressive rock — I think that’s fair enough for the point of discussing music. But personality-wise, you couldn’t find much similarity between, say, Jon Anderson and Robert Fripp, perhaps, or Jamie Muir and Chris Squire. These people were different! What they wanted was different; what they heard in their ears was different; what they thought music was for was different. What are you supposed to be doing with music? Is all it is nothing more than a three-minute kind of sweety on the end of a stick? Is that all it is, or is there a bit more to it? And how do we use it?
And King Crimson is more of a laboratory in that sense, I think, of what it’s possible to do within rock, and how might rock sound in the future, and when is rock not rock and where is the boundary of any of this, and so on and so forth. So it appealed to my conceptual side, King Crimson. I’ve liked the conceptual side of drumming and the conceptual side and purpose of being a musician far more than anything to do with the nuts and bolts of drumming. And if anybody ever asks me what kind of bass-drum pedal I use, I’ve never had the slightest idea laughs, and I kind of go cold. So I’m not very interested in that aspect of things, but I am interested in the bigger sort of macro view of drumming and what drummers are for, and so forth. And so King Crimson could not have been a better band for me to be in because you could play anything you wanted so long as Robert hadn’t heard it, as they used to say.
In your autobiography, you describe this strange period during the making of King Crimson’s 1974 album, Red, when Robert sort of went silent and refused to offer an opinion on anything. What was that like? That album is considered to be a masterpiece, but it sounds like it was very difficult to make. Deeply disturbing, really, and very difficult. You know, I have a thick skin, and I’ll bang on through it regardless to try to make the thing work, if humanly possible. But clearly Robert wasn’t… He was engaged, but in a different way than you or I would understand. So he was more or less playing, but without really saying anything or seemingly taking any enthusiastic participation in the project. So bassist-vocalist John Wetton and the engineer, George Chkiantz, and I finished it, with John leading, really, and it was a funny process. And Robert somewhere around there was experiencing all kinds of, I suppose, psychological difficulties of one sort and another. And I felt for him in a way. I mean, I always feel for people if they don’t seem to be engaged happily in our work together. But it was a very difficult album, very difficult. At the end of it, you just sort of throw down your sticks and think, oh, thank God that’s over.
Speaking of John Wetton, in your book, there was a really interesting description of your later band with him, U.K. You sort of described the group as having two factions, the arty side, with you and guitarist Allan Holdsworth, and the more commercial one, with John, who would later form Asia, and keyboardist-violinist Eddie Jobson. Was the difference in sensibilities really that stark? Laughs Did I exaggerate it for simplicity? Probably. But I think there’s a deep truth in that. Again, I said, that people in these progressive-rock groups were pretty different and some range from the idea that by definition, if it’s good, it’s got to be a hit — you know, it has to be a hit record. I see no connection between it being a hit and the music being valuable; I can’t see a connection there at all. So on the one hand, you have the commerce guys who think that “I Love You, Kathy” should be the title of a song because Kathy is the most common female Christian name in North America, for example, or perhaps Debbie — “I Love You, Debbie.” And there are those people, right through to Jamie Muir, who wouldn’t understand anything I’ve said in the last 30 seconds, and Allan Holdsworth, who was a mercurial soul of brilliant technical capacity, and he would take my position, which is, he’s going to play what he’s going to play to the best of his ability and if the audience loves it, that’s great, and if they don’t, that’s great too, that’s fine. So we covered both extremes, and I think it’s fair to say that.
I’m not advocating for one extreme or the other. Everybody’s entitled to put into and get from music whatever it is they can that gives meaning. And if what makes meaning for you is having a hit record, then great, except that I’m not the drummer for your band. As long as we were finding that out — as we did on the first U.K. record, which is terrific, great record, the first one … As we were finding that out, we sort of fell apart because we all knew somehow that we were stopping the group Asia from being Asia. It hadn’t been formed then, but you know what I mean: that John and Eddie and people would want to go on and make hugely popular music, and that’s fantastic for them.
Speaking of hugely popular music, I loved the part in your autobiography where you’re talking about your friend Phil Collins’ move toward pop. It seems like you really admired how unguarded and soulful his early solo songs were. Well, I can’t help but admire such an amazingly direct connection between performer and audience — when the performer does something and millions of people acknowledge that and say how strong it was. I think it’s fantastic. I love music that’s popular — I’m not very good at making it very popular. Similar with “Owner of a Lonely Heart” Ed. note: Yes’ 1983 hit from after Bruford left too — if whatever these people do can be condensed into this little three-minute thing, or five-minute thing even, and Phil was big at that time on kind of “the divorce album,” and clearly it really hit home, so I like that. I think I preferred that to, say, “Supper’s Ready,” or something from Genesis.
I’m hugely involved in music that I have some emotional connection to. I love that. If I have co-written something, or I’ve been asked to play it, or something, or play something that my colleagues have written, that’s great. I’m not a great session man. And I found that out in ’76, too, when I was working with Genesis. A proper drummer like Steve Gadd would know exactly what to do in that circumstance. And for me, I’m sort of a bit uncomfortable doing it, and nine months was about all I could do of that, I think.
Just because you really had no creative input — you were just doing a job? Indeed, there’s very little creative input. When these bands — and that would be the case on many of the very late King Crimson tours and/or the Yes tour I was on in ’91, I think, or ’92, somewhere around there — where the bands can really only function because they’re not being asked to create anything together. The minute they were asked to create new music, new material, do something different, then of course, all hell breaks loose and everybody falls apart, but so long as they’re just sticking to legacy music, to heritage stuff, and you just play Fragile all the way through or Close to the Edge all the way through onstage, then of course those bands can function, but on the more difficult, creative side that you might have found in Earthworks, for example — which people love — then that’s going to be harder.
There’s this cliché among rock drummers that they’ll often say that what they really want to do is play jazz. But it’s rare that anyone really jumps in as wholeheartedly as you did, and for so long. When you first started Earthworks, was it important to you to make a really all-in commitment when you first started and not just be dabbling or paying lip service? Yes, in a way. Nobody wants to be seen as dabbling. It’s humiliating and it’s a disservice to your colleagues and jazz musicians generally. Added to which, there’s an old adage which says that, if you want to cross the lake and get to the other side, you’re going to have to leave one shore to get to the other shore; you can’t keep your legs on both shores.
But there was a time when I was definitely going between big rock tours with Yes spin-off Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe or Yes, or something, and then coming back home and doing Earthworks and pianist Patrick Moraz or Michiel Borstlap or guitarist David Torn or bassist Tony Levin, or any one of the guys that I love to play with. So yes, I was going between the two, and there’s a lovely line from the actor Sean Connery who put that very well: He went to Hollywood and did James Bond movies for much too much money and then would come back and play the Royal Shakespeare Company on a salary that wouldn’t feed a dog. That’s very much a balance that musicians who are going to last more than three weeks at this learn how to do. One feeds the other, of course.
One thing that’s fascinating to me about Earthworks is that you almost seemed excited that the early musicians in the band basically had no idea who you were — or at least had never heard Yes and King Crimson. Laughs I just think that’s lovely. Some would find that surprising. I didn’t find that surprising at all, particularly; I mean, jazz guys don’t typically survey big stadium rock; they don’t know about that genre much — they’re too busy doing other things. Same with classical musicians who don’t know much about jazz; it’s still a fairly segmented world.
So in this first period of Earthworks, one thing that really stands out to me is that there’s kind of a lightheartedness to it, or a joyfulness to it, that really contrasts with, say, the Red era of King Crimson. Was that something you were wanting to do, lighten things in a way? No, I don’t think I had stipulated that. When you sit down and talk to a couple of guys and say, “Well, let’s try doing a band and here’s the thing, I’m going to play some electronic drums, and what I’d really like to do is play some of the chordal and harmonic movement in the music off electronic pads, and if you guys play single notes, then at least it’ll sound unusual and you will sound different because you’ll have a different-sounding percussive texture and terrain behind you.” And everybody got on board with that plan.
I don’t think I said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if it was light and fun?” But the guys in the band are like that. They express sadness and melancholy in different ways. For example, saxophonist Iain Ballamy has this beautiful ballad on the first Earthworks album called “It Needn’t End in Tears,” which is absolutely screaming for a lyric. Later, on an album called All Heaven Broke Loose, multi-instrumentalist Django Bates had a piece called “Candles Still Flicker in Romania’s Dark,” which is about, under Nicolae Ceaușescu, the remaining orphans stuffed in orphanages without any parents and stuff. It’s just horrific, and we’d get these nightly TV pictures, you know. And the way he would express that is different from the way John Wetton would do “One More Red Nightmare”; it’s a different sensibility, and Django’s is a very delicate one and very beautiful. So no, I didn’t stipulate anything like that at all; you just hope everybody can find a way in a group so that it’s balanced, and unlike the band U.K., it’s going to go further and there isn’t a permanent tension in it.
You’ve talked about how in the early years of Earthworks, you’d be playing these jazz gigs and people would show up with Yes albums for you to sign. Was there a point when you felt like you had escaped that gravity somewhat and established Earthworks as its own thing? How long did that take? Hard to know, really. Everything takes a while, for sure. And I think it’s fair to say that it’s a characteristic of all my great American friends that, on the whole, once you’ve established in the American psyche that you are a good baseball player, you can’t suddenly change and say, “Guess what, guys? I really love baseball, but guess what, I’m a tennis player. And now I want you to love me as a tennis player.” You know, Americans will love you once and love you really a lot once, but they don’t thank you at all if you want to change. And I don’t mind that. You know, I think Europeans are slightly different about that: They’ll kind of take you more as they find you on that night.
And it’s a huge generalization, but broadly, once you’ve established yourself in America, riches and beautiful young women are lavished upon you and you are feted and it’s lovely, except that you are also incarcerated. So there’s a feeling of that from the musician’s aspect, I think. And I didn’t mind — I’m happy to sign a Close to the Edge album and I’m happy to be called the drummer from Yes, if that’s what people want to call me. I don’t care. I know what I’m doing, so it’s not going to change much, whatever you call me.
Spending time with the full Earthworks catalog, I really enjoyed the move to the acoustic group in the later years — it feels really stripped-down and vital. Did you feel that with that shift that you were moving closer to the center of what you were meant to do as a bandleader? Yes, I suppose one is always trying to get closer to that center, although the center might keep moving, as you as an individual keep learning and changing what you want — it comes and goes a fair bit. But the idea I think at the time of a visceral kind of muscular acoustic music, along the line of bassist Dave Holland and The Razor’s Edge and that kind of thing was just gripping. And I didn’t realize that you could lay into a drum set fairly heavy with acoustic music. I don’t think I really realized that. And you need a strong bass player — holy cow. And how those upright bass players — like Earthworks’ Mark Hodgson — how they hang on in there sometimes when the going gets tough is amazing. So I love those records too: I thought The Sound of Surprise was one of my favorite records that we did of that era. Did you hear that one?
Oh, yeah, it’s great. That one I liked a lot. And it was a very poor seller, and it was the one that nobody really noticed. It probably came out under the shadow of some other big record that came out at the same time, I guess. But that was one of my favorites. So, yeah, I liked the band around that time; it was great. And we had an American agent, Ted Kurland — we were doing good stuff.
One of the Earthworks record titles, A Part and Yet Apart, seems to reflect your feelings of being in between these two worlds of jazz and rock. What was the most validated you ever felt by the jazz community at large, and what was the most excluded? Ooh, these are hard questions … Most validated by the jazz community? Oh, God, I don’t know. The first Earthworks record turned up in USA Today and got nice reviews from some of the better critics in the States particularly. If you call that some sort of a validation, that’s nice. Being not validated, I don’t recall that, really. I wouldn’t notice that, sorry.
Did you have a sense that there were listeners that were coming in from the rock side and you were opening them up to the larger world of jazz? Oh, yeah, You’d hear that a lot at Earthworks gigs. People would come because it was me, but they’d go out liking jazz. So you would hear the line, “Well, I didn’t think I really liked jazz at all, but if that’s jazz, I really like it.” You know, so I was a part and yet apart — a part of it and part away from it, in a way. And I had a distinct feeling, yeah, that we turned a number of people on to jazz that otherwise wouldn’t have come to anything like an instrumental evening of music. Just that, just an evening without a vocal song — they’d generally steer away from that.
That must have been gratifying in and of itself, as someone who had grown up with jazz, just feeling like you were opening people’s minds to it. That’s very gratifying. I loved it. And if that’s acceptance, that’s great, and I feel that I have a function doing that, and I feel I can do it well, and yeah, very happy. No problems.
In your autobiography, you mention that Max Roach, one of your early heroes, came to see King Crimson. Were you able to form any kind of meaningful relationship with him over the years? I couldn’t say meaningful. He said a lot of nice things about me. I met him a couple of times and was able to cover a couple of his bits of music. I’ve studied his drumming a fair bit. Loved his work, told him that. He was a very gracious guy.
We were connected by a guy called Steve Apicella who was a video director and Steve brought Max down to several King Crimson gigs and indeed an Earthworks gig. I can see him now, and I’ll tell you where it was; it was at the Montreal Jazz Festival. And there was a whole bunch of drummers in the first two or three rows to hear these so-called electronic drums that I was doing with Earthworks. And Max was very nice about it after the show, very sweet, but no, beyond that kind of professional relationship, I didn’t have any other connection with him. Lovely guy.
Still, that must have been incredible to play in front of someone who inspired you to play in the first place. Lovely, lovely. And so if you talk about validation, yeah, if you like, that’s validation, sure.
Speaking of influences and inspirations, you have to be aware that so many drummers in, say, contemporary metal have hailed you as a big influence. Does that make its way to you? Oh, that’s lovely. It has, yeah, indeed. And, you know, when Kurt Cobain said something nice about Red, there was some big validation there going on, I think, ’cause suddenly a whole army of young people said, “What’s King Crimson and what does Red mean?” Yeah, you know, ex–Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy, for example, has always been very generous in his assessment of my feeble efforts but apart from that, yeah, I’m thrilled.
Was getting into the Hall of Fame with Yes a big deal for you? That’s a good question. Well, not really as much as I probably made it out to be to the owners and people who run the Hall of Fame who need constant reinforcement that their show is the best show on Earth and that we’re all lining up to be in the Hall of Fame laughs. I was thrilled to be included and it was a lovely acknowledgement and I took the evening for what it was. The statuette is probably in my bathroom somewhere — I’m not very big on trophy rooms and things. So I’m just not good at prizes, really. To have your work acknowledged by Max Roach or somebody is probably worth more than a Hall of Fame statuette, but hey, I’m happy to go along with it. I’m not the curmudgeon who just can’t stand the idea of being invited or who just complains all the time about not being invited. I’m easy on it.
What did you think of Rick Wakeman’s speech? Boy, that went on a long time! Well, unfortunately it was hilarious laughs. But you know, it’s like, mock-exasperated “Rick!” We were dying of embarrassment up there, and that’s all I can say — that’s Rick. You get Rick loose on a stage, he’ll tell you something like that.
Would it mean something to you to see King Crimson get into the Hall of Fame? It would. I don’t think it ever will because I don’t think Robert would ever go along with that. I mean, if I’m not super-enthusiastic, I think he’s even cooler. So I wouldn’t want to speak for him, but deep down, he’d probably love it, but I don’t think he’d accept it, somehow. I don’t know — what do I know? He’s changed a lot over the years and so have I.
Are you in close touch with Robert these days, or any kind of touch? Not really, no. I mean, his organization is very agreeable; I know lots of the guys in the band. When King Crimson was playing recently here in London, I was backstage with my old buddies like Jakko Jakszyk and Tony Levin and Pat Mastelotto and those guys, and Robert looked in and said hi, and that’s about that, really. Everybody said, “Oh, come on and play ‘Schizoid Man,’ or something,” and I said, “Don’t be silly — I haven’t touched the drums for 10 years.” It got a bit like that — it was just fun seeing them.
I like to breeze through this stuff a bit. Yes asked me to announce them onstage at the Palladium, which is a bit like our version of Radio City Music Hall. The Palladium is a big theater that the British are much in love with, and standing on that and bringing on the members of Yes seemed kind of bizarre because I think the audience, rabid Yes fans, probably wanted me to play something, but what I was there to do was say hello and get the band onstage.
So I can’t help but wonder about your feelings on the term “prog.” If you talk to Robert Fripp, he has this sort of allergy to it. Oh, yeah, yeah, indeed. It is a singularly ugly word, isn’t it?
Laughs Well, where are you at with it? It’s so ugly. I like the idea of progression because that’s what I thought all musicians were supposed to do. I hadn’t heard any country music; I didn’t know that you just kind of didn’t do that laughs. Although I understand country music has progressed. I’m comfortable with the sentiment around the word. “Prog” is just so ugly; it’s just awful. I can’t give you any more than that, I don’t think.
There’s so much talk about a stigma developing against that movement around the late Seventies. As someone associated with it, did you ever feel that? Well, I’ve noticed that but I’ve been around so long of course that I’ve seen things go out of fashion and come back in fashion again. So there’s plenty of time in the Eighties, you know, the height of grunge or punk or somewhere, where anything progressive was just kind of laughed at. But I’m cool with that; it really doesn’t bother me at all, because I know sure as hell it’s going to reverse. So if you’re around for more than 40 or 50 years, you’ll hear it coming back in one way or another and a new generation will discover it. And there’s a lot of young musicians. There’s a great band out of Chicago called District 97, who are very good, and they’re here in the U.K. right now. And you know, it’s the next generation of so-called progressive guys who played much better than we ever played.
But they have to find their own way, though it’s difficult, because we’ve taken a lot of space. We old boys took up a lot of loose slack that was lying around that we could use for our progression. But those guys now are in a world where they have 50 years of tremendous popular music — or more. A hundred years of tremendous popular music, recorded and kept, retained, captured, that they now have to produce something better than that. So that’s how this works. It’s a tall order; it’s not easy.
Rick Wakeman on His Tumultuous History With Yes, Playing on Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’
"The whole Yes thing has been a mess since Chris Squire died," says the keyboardist. "Nobody knows what the hell is going on" BY ANDY GREENE
OCTOBER 11, 2019
When Yes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, the surviving members of the band lined up behind a podium at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn and delivered the sorts of speeches you’d expect from veteran musicians who had waited decades for this moment of validation. Frontman Jon Anderson thanked departed Yes members Chris Squire and Peter Banks, 1980s-era guitarist Trevor Rabin thanked his wife and son, drummer Alan White paid tribute to the fans, and guitarist Steve Howe read prepared remarks about how the band’s followers have the ability to “distinguish the textures and the harmonies and the discords and the dynamics of the dramatic and the humble or the soft and the love of the choir.”
Then Rick Wakeman stepped up to the podium. “Does this thing go up?” The keyboardist asked, pointing to a mic not nearly high enough for his 6’3” frame. “Story of my life.” After the not-so-subtle dick jokes, he spent the next four minutes delivering the filthiest and funniest speech in the long history of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, never once stopping to thank anybody or to say anything even remotely serious.
It ended with a tale of his supposed recent trip to a doctor to get his prostate examined. “Whilst I was having my examination, the doctor said to me, he said, ‘Mr. Wakeman, there’s no need to be embarrassed,’” he said. “‘It’s not unusual to get an erection with this kind of procedure.’ I said, ‘I haven’t got an erection.’ He said, ‘I know, but I have.’”
The uproarious speech — which was typical of the comedy routines Wakeman has been doing around England for years — came as a shock to many Americans that knew him merely as a sort of prog-rock wizard who wears golden capes while delivering jaw-dropping solos. Others know him for his studio work with the likes of David Bowie, Black Sabbath, and Cat Stevens, or his epic 1970s solo albums like The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
Wakeman is currently in the middle of a U.S. solo tour called Grumpy Old Rick where he plays songs from throughout his career like David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” and “Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken,” pausing between each one to tell funny stories about his life.
During a visit to New York a couple of weeks ago, the keyboardist sat down to talk about his long career, focusing on his tumultuous tenure in Yes, his plans for a 2020 Anderson Rabin Wakeman farewell tour, and continuing to play and record despite being diagnosed with arthritis in his hands a few years back.
I want to start by saying that I’ve been to nearly every Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony during the past 12 years and I laughed harder at your speech than any other one I’ve ever seen by a huge margin. Thank you very much. It was interesting because I was extremely proud that Yes got inducted. I thought it was long overdue. I thought we should have been in long ago because there’s a few bands that have since come in very late and I think, personally, it’s too late, especially when an important member of the band has passed away. You look at Chris [Squire] with Yes and Jon Lord with Deep Purple and you think, “These guys deserved to be here. They deserved to receive that accolade, especially since many are founding members of those bands.” That was the only slight disappointment, but I was thrilled that the band got in.
I have this thing — and I need to be brutally honest with you: I like watching award ceremonies. Like everyone in the U.K., we’re glued to the Golden Globes and the Oscars and to the Emmys and all that kind of thing. But the speeches! Give me strength. How many times can you thank “my mother and my father for buying my first guitar and my Uncle Henry who got my first guitar strings and helped tune them up for me and then my friend down the road …” Who gives a toss?!
Then it goes into, “Well, we formed the band back in 1897 and we had our first rehearsal …” The truth of the matter is that there’s 17,000 people there and they know all the history. That’s why they are there. They don’t need to be told that. It’s all very obvious because people around the tables are talking, and quite rightly so because they know all that. And so it becomes, “What are you doing this Christmas?” You can hear this hum that goes around the room.
I’m standing up there and very, very proud and a bit sad that Chris isn’t there. And then it was, “I’d like to thank my father and my brother who helped me tune …” I was going, “Oh, please!” and I heard the hum getting louder. I got Trev [Rabin] and Jon [Anderson] next to me and they know I do a lot of standup in the U.K. I’m known for it. Trev nudged me and said, “Go for it.” I went, “What?” He went, “Go for it! Liven it up!” I said, “Trev, I’m not known for doing comedy over here.” He said, “Now is a good time to start!”
As I’m walking up I’m thinking that I had a lot of routines that I do, but they’re long. So I started with a couple of one-liners that I use at some of the standup shows and see what happens. I did the, “Behind this building was the first place I ever had sex” joke. The place went quiet at first and people laughed and I thought, “Oh, wow!” I felt, “This could be interesting.” But I didn’t want to go into one of the routines and things that I do because they’re very long, so I’m hastily thinking “I could do a chunk of this and a chunk of that …”
That’s what I did. It wasn’t meant to be irreverent. It wasn’t meant to be anything bad against the Hall of Fame. It was just my personal statement of, “Doesn’t everyone get that speeches are boring.“
I think people in this country have a very wrong idea about you. You’re seen as this deeply serious man and it’s actually quite the opposite. When I play, I take playing seriously. But I don’t take myself serious. I’ve had so many bizarre things happen to me in my life and I tell the stories onstage. The moment you start to take yourself seriously, you’re in trouble.
I want to go through some key moments in your career. When you started out as a musician, what were you trying to achieve? Did you want to wind up in a rock band or did you have something else in mind? I know this sounds stupid, but I wanted to be the best at piano I could be no matter how hard I had to practice. I wanted to learn everything about the history of music. It was a wonderful period. I was born in 1949. My father was a piano player. He didn’t do it professionally, but he was great and he encouraged me. I had my classical piano lessons, but he said to me, “Listen to as many kinds of music as you can. Play as many different kinds of music as you can.”
By the time I was a young teenager I had been in jazz bands, blues bands, country & western bands, rock bands, folk bands … everything. I played everywhere and anywhere I could, sitting in for no money but just to get experience. It was all I wanted to do. I didn’t want to be the dreaded thing that X Factor contestants say: “I want to be famous!” None of my friends who were musicians at the time ever said that. We wanted to be the best we could and do the best we could. If you had a bit of success, great.
One of the bands I played in was called the Atlantic Blues. If I’m going to be honest, we were dreadful. We were bad. We were really bad, but we had great fun. We were a blues band and we went to a pub that had four bands playing and said, “Can we play?” And they’d go, “Yeah, you can do 15 minutes at the beginning.” If you did half-decent and people liked it the manger might say, “Come back next Wednesday and I’ll move you to third.” If you work your way up to a headliner he’ll say, “Come back next week and we’ll give you a few bucks.” Then you walk away with five dollars and you feel like you made it.
All you wanted to do was play and I was playing all sorts of music. My dad always said, “It’s not important to like all the music you play, but it’s important to understand it because you might understand why other people like it.” At that time I couldn’t stand country & western. I like country-rock, but the old country & western like the Jim Reeves stuff where the dog dies and everything, I couldn’t handle it. But my dad said, “Go play with a country & western band.” I said, “Oh, no, not that.”
But I did. It was in a town near me called Hayes. There was a Sunday lunchtime country & western day. So I went along and I sat in and played along. I still don’t particularly like the music, I’ll be brutally honest, but I started to understand why the people who came really did. In most cases, it was very personal to them. I learned to accept that just because I didn’t like it doesn’t mean that a lot of people didn’t. And my dad used to say, “There will be a lot of people that don’t like what you do, son.” And he was dead right!
Jumping forward a bit, tell me your first memory of ever meeting David Bowie. I saw him in 1968 in Regal Zonophone, which was the offices of Denny Cordell in Oxford Street in London. He was there with the great producers Tony Visconti and Gus Dudgeon. I was 18. It literally was Gus Dudgeon who said, “David, this is Rick Wakeman.” “Oh, nice to meet you.” That was the first meeting.
The next meeting was interesting because it was when we did “Space Oddity.” I was doing a lot of sessions. I did some for a band called Junior’s Eyes. They were really great and deserved a lot more recognition than they got. They did an album called Battersea Power Station. It was an album that was a little ahead of its time. And in the studio where I was doing the Hammond Organ for them, there was a Mellotron. That’s an instrument that created phony string sounds and things, very difficult to keep in tune. I was playing around with it while they were doing other things. Tony Visconti said to me, “How do you keep that in tune?” I said, “There’s a way you can fiddle with the pitch wheel.” He said, “Oh, that’s useful.”
In early 1969, I got a phone call from Gus. He was in the studio and they were doing “Space Oddity.” They wanted Mellotron on it and nobody could keep it in tune. I went up there and did “Space Oddity” with a Mellotron. David said to me, “Come have a talk. I’ve heard some of your piano playing. I like your piano playing. Do you want to do some stuff with me?” I said, “I’d be honored to.”
He was doing the David Bowie album. We did “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud” and a couple of other things. Then it was after that he said, “Come around to my house and I’m going to play you some songs for an album of mine I’m going to call Hunky Dory.”
He asked you to play with him on the Ziggy Stardust tour, right? He did. It was the day I sort of joined Yes. We were rehearsing. I’d put in two rehearsals with Yes putting together the Fragile album. At the second rehearsal Jon, Bill [Bruford], Chris, and Steve said, “Do you want to join?” And I said, “Yes, sounds good to me, yeah.”
A message had come through that David was with Mick Ronson at a club in Hampstead in North London and really wanted to see me. I left the rehearsal and drove to Hampstead and saw David and Mick [Ronson] and sat down. I’d already done a track for Ziggy Stardust. David said, “I’m putting Ziggy on the road.” I said, “That’s brilliant. That’s great.” He said, “I’m forming the band Spiders From Mars and I want you and Mick on it and we’ll have Trevor [Bolder] and Woody [Woodmansey]. Are you up for it?” I said, “Oh, I’ve just been asked to join Yes.” He said, “Well, you have a bit of thinking, don’t you?”
I drove home and I was trying to weigh it up because David was miles bigger than Yes were at the time. I thought, “What do I do? David is my biggest influence ever. I love playing his music. The only problem is if I I’m playing his music all the time, there will be a ceiling with how much I can participate and contribute. There will be a top line, whereas with Yes, the band is growing. It has new ideas about how it wants to do music and I love the idea of that. I can grow more with them.”
I called David the next day and I told him and he said, “Right decision. Absolutely right.” It did worry me a little if I upset him because I love the man so much. But then years later, in 1977, we were both living in Switzerland. We used to go to this little club called the Museum Club. We were in there one night and I said, “I’ve got to ask you about that time with Spiders and the Yes thing.” He said, “You made absolutely the right decision. You can grow with that band and there would have been a limit to what you could do with me. As you probably noticed, every time I start a whole new venture I use new musicians. I use musicians I want that I think are going to be best for that job. Chances are, you’d be out of a job now.”
How well did you know Yes before you joined? I didn’t know the original Yes album or Time and a Word. I knew The Yes Album when it came out. That became quite a cult album when it came out. I was with a band called Strawbs and we supported Yes at a show in northeastern England. And after we’d done our set, I stayed to listen to Yes because I’d never heard them live. It was bizarre because back then in early 1971, in a rock band your lead singer was six feet tall with long, black, greasy hair. Your guitarist had a Marshall stack and a Fender Strat and the bass player had a Fender Jazz Bass and another Marshall stack and the drummer would have a massive kit and the keyboard player would have an organ.
They came on and Tony Kaye was probably the only one I’d say was standard rock band material when he sat at his Hammond organ. And then on came Steve and Steve didn’t have a Marshall stack. He had a little Fender Twin amp on the floor and played a Gibson semi-acoustic guitar. I went, “What’s this? Nobody does this.”
Bill mic’d his drums up, which was unheard of back then, which was phenomenal. And Chris came on with a Rickenbacker [bass] and Rickenbackers were so out of fashion. No one touched a Rickenbacker and he had these amps called Sunn amps in cabinets and, basically, all of the treble was wound on full and the bass on full with the middle turned off. It created an incredible sound. Then on came the singer who was five feet nothing and had an alto voice. I went, “What is going on here?
But it was fantastic. The harmonies were good. The musicianship was good, which I really enjoyed. One of the things you can’t help thinking when you look at a band is, “If I was in that band, what would I do?” Not trying to get anyone out of a job or anything, but I thought they were tailor-made for orchestral sounds and keyboard sounds.
How did you get into the band? It was July of 1971 I got a phone call from Chris at 2 a.m. He said, “Hello, Chris Squire here.” I said, “It’s two in the morning. Do you want to call me later?” He said, “No. I’ve called you now. Look, we’re having some changes in the band. We want to go more down the keyboard-orchestral route with lots of more keyboards besides the organ. We think you’d be the right fit for the job. What do you think?” I said, “I love what you do. I think that could work really well.”
I was half asleep, but I arranged a meeting, which we had. We had tryouts, rehearsals, and it was on the day I had the David Bowie offer as well.
A lot of Yes fans see Close to the Edge as the single best Yes album. Do you agree? Yes. That’s absolutely right. I think it was one of the first moments we sort of understood what we were doing. When we were doing Fragile and we did “Heart of the Sunrise” and tracks like that, Yes always liked to record in what I call a jigsaw fashion. There would be lots of little bits and we’d stick it all together with glue. If it was in different keys, it was my job to find a way to get it from there to there. That was great fun. It was a lot of experimentation.
By the time we put Close to the Edge together, we knew pretty much how we worked and how it could be done. Close to the Edge, there was nothing contrived in that. It was exactly how we set out to be. It was wonderful, also, because it was that period in time where musicians were ahead of technology. There were no keyboards with presets, 10,000 different choices of things. You created your own sounds.
I remember talking to Keith Emerson about when you got a new Moog or a new instrument, there was no presets. You took it in your hotel room with a pair of headphones trying to get it to make a noise. When you got it to make a noise you were like, “I’ll make a note of that.” And that was what you did. That’s what we used to lovingly call the “sparkle tape” at the beginning of Close to the Edge. That took more than two weeks to make. We went out and recorded birds, recorded rivers, water, wind, trees, and rustling and put it all together to create this tape at the beginning of the album.
You can do that now in 20 seconds on the keyboard. It was a great period of time where the musician was ahead of the technology, where if you heard it, you had to do it.
The Close to the Edge tour was, I think, also your peak as a live band. Yeah. It was phenomenal. Ironically, we do pieces now like “Awaken” that are twice the length of “Close to the Edge,” but “Close to the Edge” did seem like an epic. It was wonderful to play on stage, but I could remember being onstage when we almost took a deep breath and went, “Right, it’s time for the rollercoaster ride.” It was a wonderful piece to play live. We haven’t played it live for years, which is a shame since it’s a great piece.
There are three pieces where if people say to me, “What’s prog rock?” and I can say … Prog rock has so many different avenues. You have Mars Volta and Dream Theater, but if you go back to the original Seventies prog, you are looking at tracks like “Close to the Edge,” “Awaken,” and “Heart of the Sunrise.” That’s what it was back then.
You famously dislike Tales From Topographic Oceans. Why is that?Tales from Toby’s Graphic Go-Cart, I used to call it. Well, I suppose it was in that era, like all bands — there’s no grey area with Yes. It’s all black and white in every respect. It got off with a bad start because Jon and I wanted to record in the country. It was that period of time where people were like, “Let’s go record in the country on a farm.” That’s what Jon and I fancied. Steve and Chris wanted to record in London because they both lived in the heart of London. Alan, bless him, was like, “I don’t mind where we record.” It was always two-two with Alan sitting on the fence.
There were quite heated arguments about it. The compromise was we recorded in London, but turned the studio into a farmyard. It was unbelievable. We had bales of hay in there. We had a cow with an electric utter that lit up and went backwards and forward. We had a white picket fencing going. It was hilarious. I had the only keyboard that had to be cleaned out of insects when we finished working.
Up until then, we always rehearsed the music and put together the pieces. We put together the pieces for Tales From Topographic Oceans and they were all different lengths. One was about eight minutes. One was 15. One was 19 and one was 12. That’s too much for a single album. You couldn’t get it on vinyl. But it wasn’t enough for a double album, so we had the choice of either editing to make it a single album, which nobody was even keen on, not even myself, or writing new material and turning it into a double album of four sides.
I said, “I’m OK with that, providing the music is good.” But we didn’t have anything written. So we spent time in the studio, almost busking, free-form thinking. “Oh, yeah, that’ll work. We’ll use that.” That, to me, wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t good enough at all. I said, “You can’t do that.” They were like, “Yes we can. It sounds good.” It’s the old thing. If you listen to something long enough, familiarity breeds acceptance. You go, “That’s really good!” And it wasn’t.
The trouble is Tales had a lot of good melodies and a lot of good songs. “Ritual (Nous Sommes du Soleil)” is pretty good. There are a lot of good themes. But then you’ve got all the padding bits. I know where the padding is and I know how it was put in, and that offended me. Rather than say in interviews and things, “Well, there’s some padding and bits of things I really don’t like and I’d rather weren’t there” I said, “I hate it.” I went to extremes. Likewise, Chris and the other guys went, “We love it!” I was like, “Fuck you, I hate it.”
Playing it live, it was not a crowd-pleaser. Even the lads admitted that. Onstage it was not a crowd-pleaser at all. We did the tour, and coming towards the end of the tour, I thought, “I can’t go on playing this.” We’d played America and then were back out in Europe and things again. I called a meeting, which anyone was entitled to do in the band, and said, “I’m really sorry, guys, but if this is the direction we’re going in, I can’t be a part of this.”
I left. It was interesting, because moving way ahead to 2002, I rejoined the band for four years to do some shows, mainly in America. When we got together we all said what we would like to play. I said, “You know what? I’d be very happy to play some of Tales if we edited it. If CDs had been invented when we did that album, it never would have been a problem because you can do your eight minutes, your 12, your 15, and 14.” Chris said, “You really want to play some of Tales? It dies onstage.” I said, “Maybe we can do some of the one with all the percussion and have some fun and shorten it.” We did it for a bit. It was interesting because they eventually voted they didn’t want to do it anymore. It was interesting. It went a full-circle.
You did pretty well as a solo artist in the mid-1970s. What drew you back to Yes later in the decade? It was interesting. When we were out on tour doing Tales, there was already talk of what became the Relayer record. We put together tapes in hotel room and things. I was listening to it and I thought, “This isn’t how I personally see Yes. It’s getting a bit jazzy. It isn’t how I see Yes. It’s maybe trying to be clever for clever’s sake. Where are the nice melodies and the songs I really like? If this is the route it’s going down, I have really made the right decision to leave.”
I then was asked on a live BBC radio program to review the Relayer album. I actually said, “I can’t win here. If I say ‘I love it,’ I’m still friends with the guys and so I’m supporting them. If I say I don’t like it, it’s sour grapes because I’m not on it. The truth of the matter is, I think it’s a perfect album for Yes because it’s what they wanted to do. I couldn’t offer anything to this music, so therefore I’m glad I’m not there.
Then in October 1976, a cassette was delivered to me at my house with a little note from Jon Anderson. It said, “We’re in Switzerland. We’re starting on our new record. Here’s a couple of ideas for the songs we’re doing.” One was “Going for the One” and the other was “Wondrous Stories.” It said, “Call Me.” I called him in Switzerland and said, “This is great! This is what should have happened after Close to the Edge if we’d done a proper follow-up.”
Jon and I used to have fearsome arguments, but he said, “Come over and play with us. We have a lot more to write.” I said, “Brilliant!” I flew to Switzerland on November 5th, 1976, and there I stayed until 2001. It was amazing. I sat down with Jon and thought the most important thing was for Jon and I to clear the air because we did argue. We sat down and it was probably one of the best conversations we ever had. He said, “I’m sorry if I go over the top sometimes with things.” I said, “Look, I’m the same and I apologize.”
We started talking about what we both wanted from Yes and from music. We came to the conclusion, because Jon had a completely different musical upbringing from me in every respect, that it was a bit like we’re both in London and we want to go to Tokyo. There’s two ways of getting there: You can either go via Moscow or via Anchorage and go from there. At one point, if I’m going the Moscow route and he’s going the Anchorage route, there will be a point where we are as far apart as humanly possible, but we’re both aiming for the same place. We agreed that we somehow wound up at the same place with Close to the Edge because we argued fiercely over it, but we got there. We agreed to agree that we were both aiming for the same thing, but had different ways of getting there. If we understood that, we’d both be OK because we knew we’d get there. And we never had a cross word after that day.
How did you feel in 1980 when you both left and the Buggles came in? That was funny. That was really funny. It was a strange time because prog rock was so wonderfully out of fashion. It was hilarious when I look back at it. We always knew it was going to happen, but it was so out of fashion. It was the equivalent of turning up at the Vatican and being like, “Can we put up some condom machines?” Atlantic didn’t know what to do with us. We were sent to Paris to make an album. Jon and I had written a load of songs, and Chris and Steve had written a load of songs. Jon and I weren’t particular keen on their songs, and Steve and Chris weren’t particularly keen on our songs.
It wasn’t going too well. It was actually pretty disastrous. We spent a lot of time in the studio not really doing much, just sort of getting nowhere fast. Alan solved the problem just before Christmas since we were all living in Paris. He went out nightclubbing and fell over and broke his ankle, which wasn’t great for a drummer. Suddenly we were all going home. On the day we were all going home, Jon and I went out for a drink in a little cafe in Paris. I bought a bottle of calvados. Jon isn’t a great drinker and we both got, shall we say, very emotional because calvados will do that. If you want to get really emotional, drink calvados.
So we’re both in tears saying, “This is not what should be happening with Yes.” Jon is going, “This isn’t the Yes I dream about. This is heartbreaking. I’m leaving.” I said, “Jon, if you’re leaving I’m leaving because I can’t take this either.” So Jon left and I left. We handed in our notices at the beginning of January and said, “We’re not coming back. That’s it.”
Brian [Lane], our manager, he’d got on his books the Buggles, which is Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes. They’d had a big hit with “Video Killed the Radio Star,” which is a great track, a great thing. They did an album called The Age of Plastic, which is really ahead of its time. I like that album a lot.
Brian now had a dilemma. He’s got an American tour booked for a band that no longer exists. He’s got a bass player, a guitarist and a drummer, but no Jon and no me. He’s got the shows all booked. Here with the Buggles, he’s got a keyboard player and a singer. There’s no time to do rehearsals and put things together, so it became BugglesYes.
The only mistake they made on the tour, and I don’t know whose idea this was because it wasn’t me — it could have been one of the agents or the promoter or management — they decided, “This isn’t going to go down too well with the Yes hardcore fans. It won’t go down well at all. Perhaps the easiest thing to do is we won’t mention anything.” [Laughs]
Chris told me later it was a nightmare. He said, “We’d walk onstage and people would cheer and be like, “Hey, Steve! Hey, Chris! Hey, Alan! Who the hell is that?” They had this fat, dumpy guy at the front singing and Geoff Downes. They’d be like, “That’s not Jon! That’s not Rick!” In retrospect, perhaps if they warned people. But it was a nightmare. Chris said it was an absolute nightmare from start to finish.
What should have happened is the tour should have been cancelled, but they did it and they did an album called Drama, which summed it all up perfectly. That was just another tale … talk about Tales From Topographic Oceans. It’s another tale of Yes woes and Yes history.
How did you feel in the early 1980s when you’re going through the radio and you hear “Heat of the Moment” by Asia and “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes. Your former bandmates had these huge pop hits. What was your reaction to that since you weren’t involved with any of it? John Wetton [from Asia] was a very close friend of mine. I liked John a lot. The Yes situation, I’ll be brutally honest with you, and I’ve said it a lot of times and it upsets a few people because there’s various Yes camps of people who like the band. There’s a lot that say that 90125 and the Big Generator period was not Yes, nothing to do with Yes, a disgrace, horrible.
I argue that 90125 was the most important album that Yes ever made. I’m not saying it was the best because I’m a Close to the Edge and “Awaken” man, but the most important because I think if it hadn’t been for that album, Yes could never have carried on. In fact, it had sort of finished and 90125 had been put together by Trevor [Rabin] under the name of the band Cinema. The record company said, “No, no. We aren’t doing it under Cinema. Get Jon back. Get him to sing it and we’ll put it out as a Yes album,” which is basically what happened.
Trevor Rabin is more responsible for that album than anyone else and I know that as a fact. Quite astonishing, a prog-rock band called Yes in the midst of the heavy punk era puts out an album that’s a monster hit with a monster single hit with “Owner of a Lonely Heart” and a massive sold-out stadium tour. That’s amazing. I’ve told Trevor, that was the most incredible album Yes ever did since it broke all the rules and got away with it.
How did you feel in the 1980s when everything was drum machines and synthesizers. Did you feel like a man out of time? Yeah. I think the thing is when you’re not misunderstood, but just not understood … I was slated by a lot of the press that I hated punk, but I’d say things that got ignored. I remember saying to one journalist, “You tell me that I hate punk. I’m the guy that found the Tubes. I’m the guy that took the Tubes to A&M. I loved the Tubes. I love bands like the Jam. What’s your problem? Where did you get this from? Just because I do prog rock doesn’t mean I hate everything else.” And people like Fee Waybill [of the Tubes] stuck up for me like there was no tomorrow and guys from the Jam and Hugh Cornwell [from the Stranglers]. But it didn’t matter. The die was cast.
Musically, I’ve got to be honest, it was really tough. I did something that my dad had always said is likely to happen. He said, “There will come a time you’ll have to make some music and do some things that perhaps isn’t what you want to do, but you’ve got bills to pay. You either do that or you go out and get a job.” And so I did all sorts of albums, New Age albums and things that different counties would buy; Japan would buy a lot of those, Eastern Europe, not for a lot of money, but it was enough.
Also, I was in a midst of a very bad hobby called “Keep Getting Married,” which was incredibly expensive. It was a tough time, but I kept going. I kept playing. I thought, “I have to do what I believe in.” You’ll have people saying, “This is what you should be doing.” I had to be honest with myself and go, “I know what I’m good at. If people don’t like it, that’s not very helpful, but there’s not much I can do about it.”
I stuck with it and, I suppose, things started to change a bit in the 1980s when I started doing a lot of television and a lot of comedy stuff on the TV. That got me a different audience. I got a lot of young people, a lot of students. It was really weird. Also, there was another show in England called Countdown that was mainly watched by senior citizens, Suddenly, the concerts that I still managed to do had a lot of students and a lot of really elderly people. You had kids running in and elderly people who could hardly walk in.
It was really interesting how things started to change. I carried on doing what I did. And then in 1989 we put ABWH [Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe] together and came out and that was a really good time since it was Jon, myself, Steve, and Bill Bruford. It was four fifths of the lineup that hadn’t been seen since way back in the Fragile and Close to the Edge days. We came to America, Clive Davis of Arista signed us, and we came over and played a lot of Yes stuff. We were stunned by the receptions we got. It was phenomenal.
There were two versions of Yes in that time. It got weird. There was. We called the other one Yes West since they were on the West Coast. It was interesting because we started doing a second album, again in France. It almost seems like anything we do in France is disastrous. We were halfway through it and our manager Brian came and said, “Look, it’s going to get a mess. We’re having talks about putting the two bands together and doing a tour with the eight of you, the Union tour.” I said, “How did you pick the eight?” He said, “There are eight of you that have done at least two albums and at least two tours.” We went, “OK.”
The problem was that we were three quarters of a way through an album. They were three quarters of a way through an album. So the album was given to a guy who shouldn’t even be allowed a food mixer, let alone an album. He did the most dreadful job on the Union album. When I heard it, I couldn’t believe it. It was early days of sequencers and I was like, “I never played that.” He just sorted through everyone’s parts and did what he wanted. I was furious. He invited all his mates on. I think the Pope was the only person who wasn’t on that album.
That has always baffled me. There were basically two bands for one album, but there’s also all these session guys as if you needed more guitarists and keyboardists. It was nuts! We went nuts. I called it the Onion album because it made me cry. When I heard it, I thought, “This isn’t Yes. We didn’t play that. We didn’t do that.” I spoke to him and he … oh, God … I discovered later his so-called CV where he claimed to do lots of stuff he hadn’t [done] at all. And he just got all his mates on it. The tour was great fun, but the album was a disgrace.
Was it hard to work out sharing the keyboard duties with Tony Kaye on the tour? No, it wasn’t. Tony was great. He said to me, “Look, you do whatever you want to do and I’ll just play along whenever.” He was great. We didn’t have a lot of problems at all. He did a lot of the sampling stuff because he liked doing that. It was no problem at all. Obviously, one bass player with Chris, that was fine. There were two drummers and Bill basically said to Alan, “You’ve been in the band for obviously a long time. You do what you usually do.” And he had a completely different kit built, an electronic kit. He said, “I’ll work within you.” Bill worked brilliantly around what Alan did. That was fantastic. And Jon was the only singer, so that was fine.
But there was friction between Trevor and Steve. To be fair, nothing detrimental to Steve, Trev openly wanted everyone to play on everything. He did actually suggest that on “Owner of a Lonely Heart” in the middle, how about Steve, you do the guitar solo because the crowd would love it. Steve wouldn’t even be onstage when we did it. I thought that was a shame since it could have done a lot of good. I could see where Steve was coming from, but I thought he was wrong.
The tour became known as East/West Berlin. On a couple of occasions, I got in trouble for taking some white gaffer tape and putting it down the middle and writing “East” on one side and “West” on the other. I had fun. I mean, I really enjoyed it. After I was tipped the wink by somebody in the Yes office in California that at the end of the tour, Bill, myself, and Steve were being superfluous for needs and would basically be gone.
I went, “Oh, OK.” That’s because basically all they wanted to do was keep the four Yes [members] they had, which was Trev, Alan, Chris, and Tony and have Jon back as the singer. That was their plan how to do it. I knew that it was happening and it didn’t worry me in the least. I was like, “I’m just going to enjoy this. I’m going to have great fun.” And that’s what I did.
At the end of the tour, the management did make a mistake. They thought the Yes fans would run along with it. They were not happy at all. The album they did [Talk] didn’t do that great. They started to go a bit pear-shaped. They sort of did it wrong, which was a great shame. But obviously you couldn’t keep going with an eight-piece Yes band. It was a great period of time. I loved doing the tour. I had a wonderful time and I suppose the fact I knew at the end of it, that was it, I enjoyed it even more.
To jump forward a bit, I spoke to Jon a little while ago and he told me the last few tours in the mid-2000s weren’t a lot of fun for him. Did you feel the same way? I’ll admit that I enjoyed playing. I do enjoy playing. I always enjoy playing. If I didn’t enjoy playing, I wouldn’t get onstage and play. The tour was 2002 to 2004. The first two years were pretty good. They really were. The band was playing really, really well. Come 2004, it started to go wrong. I won’t point fingers, but there was a lot of excesses going on in certain areas outside of the music. It was really affecting the playing of some of the band. That was difficult for Jon because Jon, basically, was reliant on what happened onstage with the instruments signaling what was happening and it was all over the place.
The last two years I didn’t enjoy because I was mainly spending the set listening for who was going off on a tangent because of, shall we say, over-indulgences in something and trying to salvage the situation. That was no fun. It was no fun at all. Jon was quite right. The last two years were extraordinary difficult. In fact, there was an ultimatum issued at the end of that to certain people: “Straighten yourself out because this can’t happen again.”
How did you feel in 2008 when they brought in a new singer? What happened was, Jon was very ill. He actually died. He was brought back to life. He was extraordinarily ill. And there was a conference call which was Steve, Chris, and Alan. They said, “Look, Jon is obviously not well, but we’re going to go out without him.” I said, “Look, you can’t go out without Jon. Zeppelin can’t go out without Robert Plant. The Who can’t go out without [Roger] Daltrey. When you have a distinguishable voice, you can’t go out without it.” They said, “Well, we are. We’re going out without Jon. Are you in?” I went, “No. I think it’s wrong, especially when you have Jon who is really, really ill. I don’t think it’s right in any respect. Let the guy get better, then we’ll go out.” “No, we’re going out now.” I said, “OK, good luck. But I can’t do this.”
There was nothing nasty said. Chris spoke to me a little while later and said, “If you’re not going out, who would you recommend to do some keyboards with us?” I said, “There’s lots of people that can do it, but if you want to save yourself money on T-shirts, getting a new name on, both my boys, Oliver and Adam, are very capable of doing the job. But you won’t get Adam because he’s with Ozzy Osbourne, as happy as you like and he’s not going to leave Ozzy. But you can get Oliver and he’s done an album with Steve. Steve knows him very well. So that would be fine.”
I take it Oliver didn’t leave on his own free will. No. I don’t know the full story. I know a little bit. Basically, it was all down to when Trevor Horn came in to finish the album [Fly From Here] they did. Trevor Horn said to Chris and Alan and Steve, “I want Geoff Downes in. So you have to sack Oliver because I want Geoff in.” Basically, Oliver got told in an e-mail in the day he was due to fly out and record with them. They said, “Don’t come.”
That did surprise me. I’d warned him. He’s a good lad and a good player, too. He did say, “Thanks for giving me the heads-up when I first joined.” I said, “Just go along. Play. Keep your nose clean and keep out of arguments.” That’s what he did and I was proud of him for doing it. It was a great experience for him. He learned a lot. I think he saw some things that he perhaps wished he hadn’t seen. He’s been a good boy, kept his mouth shut and hasn’t said anything. He’s said nothing but how much pleasure he had when he played.
I’ve heard you didn’t want ARW to be called Yes. No. I didn’t. I’m a funny old fellow. I have quite moralistic views. When Chris died, he was the only founding member still left in the band. He’s the only guy that had been in every incarnation of Yes, through thick and thin. I felt with so many different band members in and out that when Chris passed away, the decent thing to do would be to say, “OK, we’re putting the name Yes on the shelf. That’s it.”
We can still play Yes music. Steve, if you want to have a band, play Yes music. Jon, you can too. Anyone that has been in the band is fully entitled to play Yes music, but do it under a different name. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it degraded the name and the word and the music by what happened after Chris died. We did end up going out because promoters wanted it as Yes Featuring ARW, but it just confused people. They had no idea who they were going to see and what was going on.
It was wrong and I was very against it, I will admit. But we’re going to do some farewell shows next year and they are going to be ARW. It may be “ARW Performing an Evening of Yes Music.” That’s fine. But not Yes in the name of the band.
I spoke to Jon and he said there were disagreements about recording new music with ARW. Where did you stand on that? I always supported new music if it was really special. We started sending music backwards and forwards to each other and there were some pieces that started to come together that had big possibilities. I felt very much that it was time, not just to do songs, but we needed a couple of real epic things, like 21st-century “Awaken.” And Jon liked that idea, so did Trev. We started putting a couple of things together that were really coming together well.
But there was two problems. One, which is finance. There are no major record companies these days who would pay the money that would be needed to do a project like this properly. The only way we could do that is if we’re all together in the same room working like we used to. We have to work together and put things together like a jigsaw. We would need two months, minimum, in a room somewhere. You’ve got the difficulty that Jon lives up in San Luis Obispo and Trev lives down 1,000 miles away in Los Angeles and I’m in 7,000 miles away in the East Coast of England. The bass player, Lee Pomeroy, is in Southern England. And the drummer, Lou Molino, is also in England. It’s not like, “Let’s all meet up for coffee and have a chat about this.”
It needed to be properly financed for all us to get together. Also, we needed to choose somewhere where we could all work together, whether it be on the West Coast or in England or whether it be somewhere neutral. We never got around to agreeing on where that could be. There is certainly the basics of music that could possibly well be a very good album, but I personally, and I don’t think Trevor and Jon did, don’t want to put out an album just because we could. There was a sort of single put out, “Fragile Touch,” which, not for me … it was a nice song. But people forget I’m a Yes fan too. I was a member of a band I was a fan of, so I’m entitled to say “I like this” or “I’d like to hear this.”
“Fragile Touch” was a nice enough song, but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear from Yes. I wanted to hear some great playing and what I call some surprises. You go back to “Close to the Edge” and it’s full of surprises. You’ve got no idea where it’s going to go once it starts. That, to me, is what Yes music is.
You guys all played together at the Hall of Fame. What’s stopping you, Steve, Alan, Jon, and Trevor from touring all together? That’s a real good point. I think it’s because it wouldn’t work.
Why? First of all, there would be … I would give the first rehearsal half an hour before somebody walked out. It would happen before we even decided what to play or how to play. I think it would be difficult. My view is we did the Union tour and it worked, though it was awful as an album. It was brilliant. A reunion, another one? Would that work? I don’t think so. What would you do? What would you play? There’s no new, great material since that time. There is nothing that has been recorded from any of the Yes camps where you can go, “Great! We can introduce that now.” It will be the same classic stuff, really. If you were going to to write something, how on earth would you do it with so many people? It would be really, really difficult.
I look upon it like I’ve had a wonderful time with Yes. I still enjoy it with Trevor and Jon. I love playing. The Hall of Fame was great and it was wonderful to see Alan and Steve, but what would be achieved by everyone getting together and trying to do a reunion? We wouldn’t achieve anything. I’ve got very, very happy memories of everything I’ve done with Yes. Yeah, I’ve got a few moments which were not happy within Yes, but everyone has that within a band. The Tales From Topographic Oceans tour I really did not enjoy as well. But you do it and I did it to the best of my ability.
Ninety percent of everything I did with Yes, live and in the studio, I loved. I absolutely loved doing it and it was a joy. Do I want to tempt fate and do something that could end up a nightmare? Of course, back then there were big record companies like Warner, Arista, and Atlantic that wanted to back the band. Those companies don’t exist anymore. There isn’t a major company out there that would back a project like that.
Why are ARW going on a farewell tour? Ummm … OK … a mixture of honesty and then you can read into it what you will. None of us are getting any younger health-wise and things. It’s not the playing, though that does get a bit difficult at times. There’s the traveling and everything that goes with it. Jon is 74 now and he hasn’t had the greatest of health, though he’s been brilliant at looking after himself to keep himself going. But there’s a limit to what you can do.
I have been diagnosed with arthritis in both my hands. It’s controllable at the moment. I don’t take anything for it, pills or drugs, but I do exercises. I have creams and special gloves and things that keep me going. I know I have to practice really hard to keep my fingers supple. I always said that I never want to walk onstage and not play to the standard I want to. I don’t want anyone to applaud anything I do because of what I used to do, so there comes a time to stop.
Keith Emerson had terrible trouble with his hands and it just destroyed him. Keith and I were great friends and I know how difficult it was he couldn’t play. I think … I might be wrong. I might have a few more days than I think. I do have some days where they seize up quite a lot, but at the moment I can still play. The dexterity is still there. When I do the right exercises I am fine.
I reckon I have until probably the beginning to the end of 2022 and then I think I won’t be able to do it anymore. I’ll still be able to play, but not [up to] the standard live that I do now. I’ll still be able to record and do music and the odd concert, but they will be different concerts. That’s my reason why I voted along with everyone, actually, that we’ll do a farewell/thank-you tour to the fans when you can still do the best you do while you still can.
Might the set list be different from the previous ARW tours? I’ll be brutally honest with you, we haven’t discussed that at all. I think there are certainly pieces and things I’d like to bring in. It depends which era you pick from. There are lots of things we haven’t touched and I liked the way we took some of the old ones and changed them — like “Awaken,” we changed beyond belief. Trev did some brilliant things to do that which changed it quite a lot. I’d like to see pieces from Going for the One or “Arriving UFO” [from Tormato]. I’d say to Trev, “What can you do with this? Play around with it.” Maybe we could do “Siberian Khatru” or even “Close to the Edge.”
I didn’t think we could improve on “Awaken,” but we really did. There’s a lot of things we can do, but we haven’t discussed it yet. I’ve got to be brutally honest with you. We have not discussed it.
Tell me about Grumpy Old Rick piano tour. It’s something I’ve been doing onstage in the U.K. for about 30 years in different forms. I do a lot of comedy in the U.K., as I mentioned before. I’m just as known for comedy in the U.K. as I am for music, which is ridiculous, really. It’s a piano show and I’ve always liked piano shows because everything I write is on the piano. It’s always great to take pieces of music you’ve been involved with with different artists and play them on the piano because that is how they started. All the stuff I did with Bowie started on the piano. The Yes stuff I play, I wrote on the piano. The same with Cat Stevens and other people. It’s great to be able to do those pieces. I love variations of things I do on the piano.
I’ve been doing that for quite a bit, but it really all came about when David Bowie died and I did “Life on Mars” on the piano on the BBC and they webcammed it and in two days it had something ridiculous like two-and-a-half-million hits. People said, “You should record that.” I said, “No.” They said, “Record it and do it as a charity single.”
I don’t like charity singles. I hate charity singles. There are warehouses around the world full of charity singles. It’s absolutely ridiculous. “Let’s make a charity single!” “No!” I’d rather write a check. But it was my wife that said, “You could do ‘Life on Mars’ and ‘Space Oddity’ as a charity single, but the thing you have to ask yourself is, you were good friends with Bowie. You knew him well. What would he have said?” I said, “If it were for a good cancer charity, he’d probably say, ‘Yeah.’ That’s doing some good for the music.”
And so I did “Life on Mars” and “Space Oddity” as a single for a big cancer charity in England. The single did really well. It was Number One for about eight weeks. Then people said, “Why don’t you do an album of songs you like on the piano and do variations of them?” I put it off for a minute, but so many people asked that I went, “Oh, alright. It won’t sell, but I’ll do it.” But I did it and it sold unbelievably well. It’s called Piano Portraits and it was Top Five for 11 weeks or something.
Then I did a very successful tour with it and then Sony asked me to do a Christmas one, Christmas Portraits. I said, “That’s too soon after Piano Portraits. How about something in between?” So I did Piano Odyssey, which was another Top 10 album where I added a few strings to it and a choir in bits and pieces. That was really successful as well. I did tracks I love with great melodies, everything from “Bohemian Rhapsody” to “The Boxer” and all sorts of things. And I did a couple of Yes track sas well, which was a lot of fun.
I’ve just done the last one, Christmas Portraits, which comes out November 29th. It’s good fun to sit down at the piano. It’s much harder than people think because you’re so exposed. You’ve got no other instruments to hide behind or go, “You take a solo.” It’s all you and so you have to really concentrate. I love doing it. I go into a little bubble. I had a music teacher that taught me to see music as pictures, as colors. I still do to this day. Ninety percent of the time when I play with my eyes closed, I see pictures. I paint pictures to the music.
It’s the same thing when I do “Life on Mars.” I don’t know where the pictures are going to take me. Sometimes it’s a picture of things I remember from the Hubble Telescope. Other times it’s times I spent with David when we were neighbors. The pictures are almost like a hypnotic state. That’s the only way I can play. Occasionally if something happens and I come out of that hypnotic state and I look down on my fingers, I tend to go, “Ah, shit, what am I doing?” That’s where you go wrong.
The show is music on the piano from all different people I’ve worked with through the years, no singing because my singing is awful. In between I tell ludicrous stories of things that have happened to me over the years in my life. Somebody once said to me on a chat show in England on the TV, they said, “Nothing normal ever happens to you.” I said, “No, you’re right. It doesn’t.” Whatever it will be, it’s not straight-forward. Some of the stories are hilarious, I have to say.
To wrap up here, do you think it’s wrong that Steve and Alan are on tour and they call the band Yes? Umm … there are guys like Geoff Downes in that band that were in Yes …
Briefly. Briefly. Alan does a few bits on stage. As they would say in court, I refer you to the answer I gave earlier, counselor. I think when Chris passed away the name should have been retired and put on a shelf. Steve can carry on playing Yes music same as we did. We were just as guilty calling it Yes Featuring ARW, which I objected to vehemently. There’s no reason we can’t go out and play the music, but I really feel that the name should have been retired. I think it was disrespectful to Chris. There were all sorts of stories going around that “Oh, Chris wanted it to continue.” I know for a fact people that spoke to Chris and that isn’t true.
There’s a lot of things … Life is too short. I’m not interesting in getting into arguments or creating bad feelings and things. I don’t care what other people do unless it affects me. If it affects me, I’ll come in like a rocket. If they are happy and they feel justified by that, than that is fine. It’s like when we were Yes Featuring ARW. It didn’t feel comfortable because I couldn’t justify that’s what we should be doing.
If you want my real honest answer, the whole Yes thing is a mess since Chris died. It’s a total and utter mess for the fans and the people because nobody knows what the hell is going on. Nobody knows who is in what, who is doing what. It’s just one hilarious mess. It would make a great cartoon series.
You have left the band six different times, which could be a world record for the most times anyone has ever left a single band. [Big laugh] I can tell you all the reasons that I left! I can tell you when they were as well. The first one was May 1974. I can tell you the date. It was May 18th, my birthday, also the day that Journey [to the Centre of the Earth] went to Number One. I officially rejoined November 5th, 1976. Jon and I left officially in the first week of January,1980. That’s three. Then there was a short period with the Union thing. That’s four. And then another period the Keys to Ascension period, another fiasco, which was 1996. That’s five. Then in 2002 I rejoined again and left. That is six. If you call ARW, we’re getting on for seven!
It seems to me the fans need to let go of this fantasy you’re all going to sing “Kumbaya” and come together again for another reunion tour. It’s just never going to happen. I can’t see it happening, although I’ve learned in rock & roll the word “never” doesn’t exist. You’ve got to be very careful. Let’s put it this way, it’s highly unlikely. You’ve got more chance of Donald Trump getting divorced and marrying Hillary Clinton.
"I think in my life I've only met Jon Anderson once!" - The Prog Interview with Geoff Downes
By Dave Everley Prog April 21, 2019
The Yes and Asia keyboard player discusses a career that's run from the Wombles to prog rock gods...
Everybody needs to start somewhere. For Geoff Downes, that break came in the orchestra pit at London’s New Theatre. It was 1975, and the 23-year-old Downes was playing keyboards in a brand new stage show. And his unlikely paymasters? Pointy-nosed kids’ TV characters The Wombles.
“It was my first job after I finished music college,” says Downes, northern accent undiluted after more than 40 years on music’s frontlines. “I answered an ad in Melody Maker looking for musicians for a theatrical production, and I got the job. It turned out to be the stage version of The Wombles.”
And did he have to wear a costume? “Thankfully I didn’t,” he says with a laugh. “They were bloody unhealthy things.”
Downes has come a long way since rubbing shoulders with Uncle Bulgaria and Madame Cholet. His journey has taken him from new wave pop stardom with The Buggles to prog’s upper echelons as a two-time member of Yes, via a stint as a bona fide rock star with multimillion-selling 80s arena‑prog titans Asia.
The list of people he’s worked with over the years reads like a Who’s Who of prog royalty: Chris Squire, Steve Howe, Greg Lake, Carl Palmer, John Wetton. But his most enduring relationship has been with Trevor Horn, whom he first met as a member of disco singer Tina Charles’ backing band. If Downes and Horn haven’t quite been constant musical companions, they’ve taken many of their most significant steps together.
“I’ve never, ever argued with Trevor about anything,” says Downes. “Not once. Some writing partnerships only work if there’s some conflict, but we’ve never had that. We spent more time defending our own ideals from everybody else.”
Today, Downes shows no sign of slowing down. He’s currently seven years into his second stint as Yes’ keyboard player, while a fruitful collaboration with British-born, American-based singer-songwriter Chris Braide has produced three albums under the name Downes Braide Association. Unlike some of his flashier, more combustible contemporaries in the prog world, Downes’ course has been relatively free of turbulence.
“I’m a non-confrontational kind of person,” he says. “I don’t get upset by criticism. I’d rather be a catalyst to work with than someone who is in people’s faces. I’ve never actually fallen out with anybody. I don’t think there’s a musician I’d say I’ll never work with again in my life.”
But neither is Downes the quiet man of prog. “Oh, I’ve got some ego, I do like to pose a bit sometimes,” he says with a grin as he prepares to look back on his 40-plus years bridging the worlds of prog, pop, rock and, well, Womble music.
Which band first made you want to be a musician?
The light bulb moment was probably when I jumped the train to go to the Isle Of Wight festival in 1969. The Nice were playing and I saw Keith Emerson. That was probably one of the biggest things that led me along the road of being a keyboard player. I was really interested in the keyboard-driven bands that were around at the time – Procol Harum, the Canterbury bands. Anything where the keyboards played a dominant role.
You were born in Stockport and studied at Leeds College Of Music. When did you decide to move to London?
A friend of mine who I was at college with went there in advance. He lived in a big house in Clapham, south-west London and invited me to move in. Weird place, loads of odd people. Chrissie Hynde was living there. Nick Kent, the journalist from NME, had been living in the room before me. There were a few hypodermic syringes about. It was a pretty scary place.
Where was your head at musically at that point?
I’d moved away from prog. I was more into the disco scene at the time – Earth, Wind & Fire, people like that. Steely Dan too. It did have an influence on me over what came later with The Buggles.
Where exactly did you meet Trevor Horn?
There was an ad in Melody Maker saying, “Keyboard player wanted for chart act.” I went down to this rehearsal place in Bermondsey. I had a Minimoog and a Fender Rhodes in the back of my battered old Ford Escort estate. It turned out that it was for [disco singer] Tina Charles. Trevor gave me the job straight away. He said it was because he was impressed that I had my own keyboards. I’d actually borrowed them from a friend.
What were your initial impressions of him?
He seemed a good guy, pretty sincere. He didn’t feel like a long-lost buddy – it was more of a working relationship. But there was a bond between us. We were both a couple of northern lads trying to make it in London, struggling against the southerners. I think he liked the fact that I was a bit of a perfectionist and wanted to get everything dead right.
You put together The Bugs, who became The Buggles, not long afterwards. Was there a grand plan behind it?
It was just something we drifted into. Trevor had started to get these small production things and he used to rope me into them. At the same time I was doing ad jingles, just bread and butter stuff, and I’d get him involved in those. The Buggles mainly just grew out of that.
You came across like a pair of mad scientists locked away in a laboratory. How accurate a description is that?
In many ways that’s how we saw ourselves. We were the backroom boys. Our motto was, ‘The Buggles will never go live.’ It was only ever going to be two studio creatures beavering away.
And then Video Killed The Radio Star came along and everything changed…
I remember a very rudimentary demo we did and even at that point, there was something extra special about that song. But Trevor and I took the demo around to every single record label in London and got knocked back by them all: “Nah, don’t think so, it’s okay, but we just signed The Corgis.” It just so happened that my girlfriend at the time was working for Island. She played it for her boss, and it got to the ears of [Island boss] Chris Blackwell, who said, “You’d better sign these guys straight away.”
Did you enjoy being a pop star?
I did. It was something I’d aspired to, being on Top Of The Pops and all that stuff. So when it actually arrived, I took it in my stride. Having a number one record around the world was great. Trevor didn’t take to the teen mag stuff that went with it – he wasn’t really happy with that.
But within a year, both you and Trevor ended up in Yes. That was quite some left turn. How did it happen?
We were being managed by the same company and we’d ended up writing our second album in the studio next to Yes. Well, it was really just Steve [Howe], Chris [Squire] and Alan [White] – they’d just come back from Paris after the ill-fated sessions with Roy Thomas Baker. They wandered in one day and said, “Have you got any songs that might be suitable for us?” So we put together a couple of ideas and started playing them. We just carried on like that and eventually just sort of morphed into them.
What was the mood like when you joined?
They were slightly confused about what direction they were going to go in, because they were just rehearsing backing tracks at that time. They were playing some fantastic music, but it didn’t have any keyboards or vocals on it. We were the ideal thing to come along to them at that time and help carve a new direction on the Drama album.
Not everyone saw it like that. You were booed on the subsequent tour…
Oh yeah. There’s no doubt about that. The Americans were much more accepting – they were so stoned they didn’t really care who was in the band. But people were much more cynical in the UK: “Oh, The Yeggles have spoilt it all.” There was a lot of animosity towards us. I remember we were doing a gig in Brighton and halfway through the keyboard solo, someone shouted out, “Rick Wakeman!” in the middle of it.
Was that demoralising?
It was at the time. And ultimately it had a destructive effect. Chris thought that maybe we weren’t going anywhere with it. I think he was looking to do something else at that point. After the last show, at Hammersmith Odeon, it just dissolved. So I went back to working with Trevor on the second Buggles album. And then that’s when I got the call from the management, saying they were putting together this new band, Asia.
What was the idea behind Asia?
The plan was to offer a Yes-type alternative at a time when Yes wasn’t operating. The idea had been floating around a couple of years earlier, with Carl [Palmer] and John [Wetton] and, I think, Rick Wakeman or Eddie Jobson. Originally Asia was going to be a five-piece. That’s what the label wanted. We auditioned Robert Fleischman, who was briefly the singer in Journey. Trevor Rabin came over. He didn’t get the job because I don’t think Steve would have been happy with a second guitarist floating around. John was singing the vocals while we were looking for this extra person, and eventually we just turned around and said, “John sounds great, we’re sticking as a four-piece.”
The first Asia album was a huge success on the back of the single Heat Of The Moment…
That nearly didn’t end up on the album. It was an afterthought. We were going to lead off with Only Time Will Tell, but the label said, “Do you have anything else?” So John and I came up with Heat Of The Moment in one morning. Literally, the bones of the song were written in maybe a couple of hours.
What was it like being in the eye of the hurricane?
The massive success did offer up some problems. It was a big gravy train for a lot of people – management, the record label. People start to try and pull you in different directions, starting picking people off for their own ends.
It was a band made up of four successful musicians. Did you have egos to match?
I wouldn’t say so. Everyone had respect for each other. But then John and Steve weren’t really seeing eye to eye over a lot of things. It wasn’t fraught, they were just different personalities. Carl and I were more middle ground in that respect. I think that original line-up was always going to fall apart. We’d all come in at a higher level. We didn’t have to do our time scrubbing around the northern club circuit in the back of a transit van. It was no surprise when it started to change.
Asia went on hiatus after 1985’s Astra, and then you released your first solo album, The Light Program…
After Astra, we’d lost the confidence of the label, we didn’t have Steve on board and John wasn’t really happy with the way things were going. I had this idea to do something with all these synthesisers I’d got and the technology I worked with. That’s when I came up with The Light Program.
You say “all these synthesisers”. Just how many synthesisers did you actually have?
Oh, an astonishing amount. I must have had 40 different kinds of keyboards at that point. Most of them were in storage a lot of the time. But I’d been in three huge projects in a row, and I wanted to do something that was just me.
Did you enjoy working on your own?
It was interesting but I wouldn’t say totally satisfying. It was an experimental time and I enjoyed making up sounds and trying to emulate other instruments. But you can come up with some of the best work when you’re collaborating with other people. I’ve been lucky to work with some of the best musicians in the world, people like [ex-Deep Purple bassist] Glenn Hughes, Greg Lake…
You worked with Greg when he temporarily joined Asia in 1983, then again in the late 80s on an aborted collaboration. What was he like?
He was difficult to work with. He was a good guy, no doubt about it, and a fantastic musician and a fantastic singer. But he was very much a perfectionist. It wasn’t a very productive collaboration. We only wrote about six songs in six months. He didn’t want to sing one day or do this the next day. That project never had the legs.
You had a much more productive relationship with John Wetton. What was he like?
John was a blood brother to me, but he was a very enigmatic character. At times he was very insular, but then at others we’d talk for hours about football and politics. It’s well-documented that he had a lot of problems with alcohol over the years, but I never fell out with him. We never had cross words. He’d always take it out on somebody else. And he was a brilliant bass player. He was in the league of Chris Squire.
Chris Squire casts a big shadow over two very distinct parts of your career: your original stint in Yes and when you rejoined in 2011. What are your own memories of him?
Chris was the guy who invented how to live a rock’n’roll lifestyle and be a fantastic musician – he could do the two things together. He was a great guy socially. On the Drama tour, we had a private plane and he used to turn up wearing a very smart jacket and a pair of underpants, because he was late getting up at the hotel. That was Chris all over – they used to call him The Late Chris Squire. I know that frustrated people. Bill Bruford was super critical of him for being late all the time, but I just accepted it.
Can you remember the first gig you played after he died?
I can. It was strange, because I always got comfort from looking over at his side of the stage and him giving me a little wink, and that wasn’t there. Not only was he a big guy in terms of his size, but his presence was huge.
When Chris was ill, did you think he’d get better?
We did at the time. He had a very aggressive form of cancer, but at the same time, he was in a very good facility in Phoenix, one of the top cities in America for medical schools. We felt that maybe he had a chance. But unfortunately it took a downward turn quite quickly. And at that point everyone thought the worst.
The prog world lost Chris Squire, Greg Lake, John Wetton and Keith Emerson within the space of 18 months. How did that affect you?
It has been a bad few years, for sure. It does make you look at yourself and your own mortality, and you think, “Well, it’s going to happen one day.” By the same token you look at the achievements of all those great musicians and the impact they’ve had on people.
Right now, you’re firmly back in Yes. It’s been a fairly turbulent few years, what with Chris Squire’s death and Jon Anderson, Rick Wakeman and Trevor Rabin launching their own version of the band…
People have said to me that Yes is like a dysfunctional family. It seems to stumble its way forward with some high moments and some low moments. It runs essentially on the dedication of the fans who have followed every twist and turn. But there’s a general consensus that Yes will carry on and make new music and whatever.
Right now, you’re firmly back in Yes. It’s been a fairly turbulent few years, what with Chris Squire’s death and Jon Anderson, Rick Wakeman and Trevor Rabin launching their own version of the band…
People have said to me that Yes is like a dysfunctional family. It seems to stumble its way forward with some high moments and some low moments. It runs essentially on the dedication of the fans who have followed every twist and turn. But there’s a general consensus that Yes will carry on and make new music and whatever.
It seems like there’s tension between the two versions of the band. Is there?
Any real direct confrontations have hopefully been nipped in the bud. As time has progressed it’s become less critical. When they first came out they were pretty gung-ho – they were making a lot of comments in the press which were not very pleasant, calling us The Steve Howe Tribute Band. A lot of it was unnecessary. For the most part, we’ve attempted to keep the high road and not get involved too much with slagging them off.
Have you spoken to Rick or Jon?
No. The last time I saw Rick was at Keith Emerson’s memorial. He was perfectly decent, even though he wasn’t particularly enamoured with our version of Yes. I’ve very rarely spoken to Jon Anderson in my life. I think I’ve only met him once.
If you were in the same city as them on a night they were playing a gig, would you go and see them?
Probably not, no. I don’t think that would work. But they do their thing, they’ve got their own agenda going on. They’re not getting in my face. That’s all I’m particularly bothered about.
Do you ever wish you were more of a showman, like Rick or Keith Emerson?
No, I don’t. I enjoy being an integral part of something bigger rather than being a singular personality like that. I don’t think I could pull it off anyway. I know my limitations in that department.
What’s the secret to staying in demand for as long as you have?
I don’t know. I suppose I like the camaraderie of being in a band. There’s a point where you really don’t need to fall out with people, particularly when you’re my age.
Who is the biggest pain in the arse: singers or guitarists?
Singers are difficult, but then they’ve got the job of being at the front. I don’t mind guitarists. They just do their own thing and pose around.
Do you look back and think, “I’ve not done too badly?”
I could sit in the garden or go in my studio and look at the gold records on the wall and go, “It didn’t work out so bad, did it?” But I’m not one to rest on my laurels. I like to challenge myself. It’s been very interesting being with Yes. We’ve done a very varied set each time we’ve come out. That’s been interesting for me. It keeps you motivated.
If you had a chance to speak to that 23-year-old guy in the orchestra pit at the Wombles stage show, what piece of advice would you give him?
[Laughs] I’d tell him to keep on wombling.
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Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.
Music producer Trevor Horn invented the sound of the 1980s and then real life caught up with him
20th July 2019
By Teddy Jamieson Senior Features Writer
TREVOR Horn lives in a house (a very big house) in north London. There are floral paintings in the hall, family photos on the furniture, a double bass in the front room and a recording studio in the basement. The personal and the professional snuggled up alongside each other. It’s been a way of life for Horn for decades now.
It still is. Later this morning, he will go downstairs to the studio to oversee a recording session. As we sit talking, the distant punch of drums punctuates the conversation. Horn, now 70, has spent the last four decades in recording studios. These days that means not having to leave the house.
But he does. Only the other day Horn tells me, he was on his boat up on Loch Fyne. Later this month he will be back in Scotland in a professional capacity to play the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, one of a number of dates he's playing with a 20-strong band, including eight string players, 10cc's Lol Creme, Steve Ferrone on drums ("the best rock drummer in the world," Horn says), former Dire Straits member Alan Clark on Hammond organ and second keyboard and Phil Palmer, "one of the best guitar players ever". Plus, the odd special guest. All playing live.
“One of my pet peeves is that whenever pop music is presented to people these days, half of it’s coming off a hard drive,” Horn says. That will not be the case here.
And, of course, Horn himself will be playing, too. It's how he started after all. He was a bass player, first and foremost. He’s been reminding himself of that of late.
"I've been in the studio for 40 years now. You just get to the point where you have to go out and play and remind yourself of the real world."
In the end, perhaps, time is a circle. Go back far enough, back before he worked with Robbie Williams, Rod Stewart, Seal or Pet Shop Boys, back before he set up his own label ZTT and gave the world The Art of Noise and, of course, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, back before he produced ABC's Lexicon of Love and those Dollar singles, back even before Video Killed the Radio Star, and Trevor Horn, the man who "invented the eighties," was a jobbing musician.
This was in the 1970s. Another world, a world where Horn performed around the country in Mecca and Top Rank ballrooms. "In fact,” he recalls, “I worked with a few Scots band leaders. Ray McVay and his band of the day."
In between then and now Trevor Horn reinvented pop, met Jill Sinclair (in a recording studio, naturally), got married to her, had a family, and then lost her in a tragic accident. His is a pop life in all its joys and agonies.
Horn is looking good on his 70 years. A few lines, hair receding a little. The shiny suit and bug-eyed glasses he sported when he introduced himself to the world with The Buggles is long gone. But his soft north-eastern accent is still intact, even though he left County Durham the best part of half a century ago.
"It does feel a long time ago, yeah," he says when I bring it up. "You're bound to feel differently about things when you're 70. I suppose I was always ambitious. I'd come from Durham and Geordies are notorious for once they get moving, they loved to keep moving. Look at old Sting. I mean, Bryan Ferry comes from Washington, County Durham. Extraordinary that Washington would give Bryan Ferry to the world, you know. I'm not being rude. I'm a big Bryan Ferry fan."
Horn had a big part to play in the records of my own youth; Lexicon of Love, those Frankie singles. The question is, how did he do it? How did he go from working with Ray McVay to becoming the record producer of choice less than 10 years later?
"I fell into record production naturally,” he suggests. “When we did sessions for the BBC with Ray McVay, or when we did a party album, I would always go into the control room and listen to the playback because I loved the control room. I thought it was the most brilliant place.”
It took him a while to get there himself. "When I was about 25 I was Tina Charles's MD and a lot of my friends were songwriters and they really liked the band. It was a really good band, so they started to use me to do their tracks and that's how I fell into record production."
Ah, Tina Charles. I Love to Love (But my Baby Loves to Dance). No one asks you about Tina enough, Trevor. What are your memories of being her musical director? "It was probably an easier life than being her boyfriend," he laughs. And yes, he is speaking from experience.
By the mid-seventies Horn was trying to have his own hits. He was pushing 30 (and under pressure from his parents to get a real job), when Video Killed the Radio Star, written with Bruce Woolley and his fellow Buggle, Geoff Downes, was released. The single changed his life.
"By the time I got to 29 everyone was saying: 'What are you doing? You're driving around in an old banger. You're living from one week to the next.’
"It took me nearly five years to get a hit. But I was lucky when we got the hit it was massive."
Well, yes. A number one in 16 countries. The first song played on MTV when the video channel was launched.
Video … was also a taster of what pop would sound like in the decade to follow. "All my stuff started to sound weird in the late seventies,” Horn admits. “I was looking for something. All the big stars were so good at making records; Elton John records, from the point of view of arrangements and hi-fi, the Queen records. They were daunting. Let's face it, Queen wrote the book when it came to rock record production. Killer Queen has got every production gag on it that anybody has ever used."
Horn tried to make records sound like that, but they never did. "And gradually over a period of five years I evolved a kind of style."
To do so, he started exploring new technical possibilities. In the early 1980s, he even spent £18,000 on buying a Fairlight synth. A fortune at the time. "You could buy a house," Horn agrees. His wife Jill was also his business manager by this time. How did she feel about that purchase?
"My wife wasn't very pleased. But don't forget, I sold a hell of a lot of copies of Video Killed the Radio Star. Also, I was pretty committed to record production and I saw straight away that the Fairlight had incredible potential."
He handed the Fairlight over to his colleague JJ Jeczalik, who would go on to be a co-founder of Art of Noise, to work out how to use it. They then sampled Thereza Bazar singing "la la la" into the Fairlight, tracked it up 16 times (a process that took Jeczalik two weeks), "and then we could play it off the keyboard."
Suddenly, the future was revealed to Horn. And everyone else who was listening. Soon, the likes of Martin Fry were knocking on his door. Punk had given way to post-punk and new pop was waiting in the wings. Horn would be one of its midwives.
"I was a musician, so punk wasn't really an option for me, you know? ABC were an alternative synth band called something completely different."
Vice Versa. "Vice Versa, that's it. They carried their stuff in carrier bags. And then, I think, like a lot of people, they suddenly fancied being successful and writing proper songs.
"It was interesting connecting with that because you've got to realise, I was 31, 32. All my friends when they heard what I played them of ABC were ..." He blows his lips dismissively. "...'That's disco music.' And I said: 'Yes it is, but the lyrics are more what you'd expect from Bob Dylan or Neil Young really, the quality of them."
ABC's reinvention of themselves as purveyors of glossy, ambitious new pop also retooled Horn's reputation. Before long, everyone from Malcolm McLaren to Grace Jones were getting in touch to work with him.
Horn speaks hugely fondly of McLaren. Mostly. "The problem with Malcolm was he couldn't sing. And he had no sense of rhythm. Famously when he was rapping Buffalo Gals I had to punch him on the chest. I told him 'you have to try to make the words go with my fist,' just to keep him in time. By the time we got the vocal I was exhausted.
"But that was the only downside. We went to South Africa. Apartheid was still going on and we were in the only multiracial hotel and Malcolm had about eight people staying with him in his room and they were always ordering drinks because we were working through the night.
"I'm surprised they didn't kick him out because Malcolm had all these women with him, Zulu ladies or whatever. They'd order drinks, the waiters would show up with the drinks and they'd be family members. So, it was like a never-ending party."
And then in 1983, Horn set up the ZTT label with his wife and the music journalist Paul Morley. "I wanted to own the records that I made. But that comes with a price."
Which is? "Well, if you're working with someone as a producer you can walk away. But if you've signed someone to your record label you can't. So, that's a real pressure sometimes. Which is why I made Relax four times to try to get it right because it was my record label.
"It's like gambling. I'm out this much money on the table, I haven't won yet, but I'll double it."
In this case, though, you were gambling with your own money? "Yeah. That makes it a little more tense."
Famously, of course, the members of Frankie don't play on Relax. "They didn't play much at the start because – to put it into context – the Frankies when I met them, as far as I was aware, had only played five gigs. And, also, they didn't have the guitarist who was on the demos. They never told us that until after we signed the contract. And the guitar player who came in was a lovely guy, but he had only been playing the guitar for a couple of months. Now, I mean, what do you do?
"They weren't on Relax. But it was their ideas and they sang it.
"As we went on, they contributed more and more, so by the end they were really good. But then they fell out with each other."
Before that they were everywhere. The year 1984 was the year of Frankie. But it wasn’t inevitable. For a while there Relax was languishing in the charts. Critics were sniffy, old-style engineers hated how it sounded "because it was mostly samples," Horn points out.
But then the band snagged an appearance on Top of the Pops and the next morning Horn got a call saying they had just shifted 55,000 units. Suddenly Frankie were huge.
"It did put a hell of a lot of pressure on the follow-up," Horn notes.
Indeed, he spent ages recording Two Tribes. He spent weeks on the bass line alone. "I remember bumping into a fellow producer in a restaurant and I said: 'How's it going?' And he said: 'Oh, we've just finished the album. It's great. We did it in three weeks. How are you doing?' I said: 'Oh God, struggling with this bass.'
"And the album he did in three weeks was the end of that artist's career, whereas our track came out really well."
Frankie were a supernova. But they burnt out quickly. Holly Johnson's 1994 memoir A Bone in My Flute, is a raw, angry book which has little good to say about Horn or Sinclair (or the rest of the band for that matter). When I bring it up Horn gets a little snippy for the only time in our hour together. "I only got so far into Holly's book. I can see how if you are perceived as the brains behind the band how irritating it must be to have someone like me there. I lost interest in his book when he said: 'I woke up and I was being f***** by an Elvis impersonator.' I threw it away after that.
"I think a lot of the time he didn't really know what was going on. But he always had a very iconic voice, I thought. But, really, we did a lot of work organising what he did."
At this point he launches into a rather good impersonation of Holly's trademark Frankie "Yeah-eh".
"We had that on synclavier on a key. We could put it anywhere we wanted. Holly was relatively inexperienced and we organised a lot of that. People always resent you for that."
In between all the hours spent in a studio, Horn and Sinclair also started a family. They had four kids together. Which suffered more, family life or work life, Trevor?
"Family life always suffers when you're a workaholic, crazy, ambitious idiot. My late wife knew what I did and she was also my manager. She kept all of the bad people away. No one ever got near me."
At this point Horn’s mobile rings. It's his daughter and he speaks to her for a bit before turning back to me. Family comes first now, I say, smiling.
"Well, I am a single parent."
In June 2006, Jill Sinclair was accidentally shot by her son Aaron who was target-shooting with his air pistol. The air pellet hit her in the neck, severing an artery and causing extensive brain damage. She spent more than three years in a coma and, when she came out of it, she couldn't move or speak. She passed away in 2014.
Horn suddenly had to be the head of the family, looking after Jill, helping his daughter Rebecca transition to become Will, being there to support his children when their mother died.
"Being a single parent is a lot more difficult than anything I ever tackled before,” he admits. “When that happens to you, you find yourself in a pretty strange world."
What did he learn about himself from the experience, I wonder? "That I'm not all I'm cracked up to be, probably ... I don't know. To try and appreciate things more. To be with someone for 26 years and then suddenly they're gone, and they never come back. It's a pretty big thing to deal with, because your whole world changes completely.
"And I was married for life as far as I was concerned."
Jill's death was one of the reasons, Horn says, he started playing live again. "When I look back on it, I realise it was therapy. Five of us formed a band called The Producers and we started to do some shows."
As we all get older, life becomes a catalogue of losses. In 2017, Horn's LA home and studio burned to the ground in a fire.
"We had the house for so long, since 1991, and made so many records in it. But whenever it was summer and it got hot, you could see vapour coming up off the vegetation. So, you know if anything catches fire, it's not like a fire here.
"We were unlucky. Some homeless people who were under the 405 Freeway lit an illegal fire to cook some food or stay warm and it got out of control. It came charging down the canyon and then just at the last minute the wind direction changed, and it blew it straight into four houses. Mine was one of them.
"To have a two-storey house with three cars and a recording studio and a grand piano reduced to six inches of ash ...I'll never forget the smell of it.”
The thing is, though, he says, he got off lightly. "The three neighbours who got burnt out, it was their primary residence. They all got burnt out and it was heart-breaking. My immediate neighbour, an old Japanese lady whose husband had been the head of computers for UCLA and basically developed virtual reality, she was taken from her house at five in the morning. They put her in a motel nearby. She literally died two days after the fire. She was broken-hearted. She didn't have insurance.
"So, to compare my misfortune to hers ... All of my family were really sad about the house going because it was the last house that we had when their mother was alive, and we'd all spent so much time there. But at least nobody was injured. You can always replace stuff, but you can't replace people."
Downstairs the drums begin. Life ends. The music plays forever.
Trevor Horn is live in concert at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall next Saturday.
TREVOR HORN ON HIS LOVE OF SCOTLAND
Horn fell in love with Scotland back in the 1980s when he was working with Simple Minds:
“I loved the landscape. I loved the people, too, even they're not always pro-English. I remember being in a car with Jim Kerr's brother and he was being very rude about English people. And I said: 'Hang on, don't we support you?' And that made him really angry. And he wound down the window – we were in a traffic jam – and he shouted to the guy in a lorry: 'Eh, what do you think of the English?' And the guy said: 'Bastards!'
THE BEST OF TREVOR HORN
Video Killed the Radio Star, The Buggles (1979)
The song that turned Horn from a jobbing musician into a pop star. More importantly, it suggested a sound for the coming decade that Horn would spend the eighties pursuing. "When Video Killed the Radio Star was a hit everybody ignored us apart from Bryan Ferry. Bryan Ferry came over introduce himself, shook my hand and told me how much he liked the record. Lovely man. Other people told me I was an idiot. Bob Geldof said he preferred Bruce Woolley's version."
Give Me Back My Heart, Dollar, 1982
An aural bath swimming in Thereza Bazaar's multi-tracked celestial vocals. Martin Fry heard something in the singles Horn produced for Dollar that convinced him the producer was the man for Lexicon of Love.
Poison Arrow, ABC, 1982
Sly, knowing, sumptuous. The moment after the middle eight when the drums sound as if they are falling off a cliff is as thrilling as pop music gets.
Buffalo Gals, Malcolm McLaren, 1982.
1982 belonged to Horn. As well as Lexicon of Love, he also produced McLaren's Buffalo Gals, which helped introduce scratching to the UK. The subsequent album was a smorgasbord of world music and electronic sounds, which was a perfect example of McLaren's magpie eye for the new thing and the main chance."
“There was a great moment,” Horn says, “when he first sang where I said: 'Malcolm, you didn't sing the right tune or the right lyrics and you sang them in the wrong place.' I said, 'It needs to go like this.' And I remember he said to me, 'So, you think I should do it like you just did it? Because I can't. I can't do it in time and in tune. No, I'm a character. I just have to be a character."
Relax, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, 1983
An outrageous mess of sex and synths. Predictably, it caused controversy. Predictably the controversy ensured that it was huge.
Art of Noise, Close to the Edit, 1984
Horn, here working as performer and writer as well as producer, was at the cutting edge of eighties sounds.
Slave to the Rhythm, Grace Jones, 1985
In which Horn creates a sonic backdrop track immense enough to contain all of Grace Jones's personality.
Left to My Own Devices, Pet Shop Boys, 1988
Perhaps the last glorious hurrah of Horn's own imperial phase, a clattering dance track that lives up to the promise of Neil Tennant's cheeky lyric: "Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat."
All The Things She Said, t.A.T.u. 2002
Horn's take on the Russian original didn't really veer far from the Russian original, but it was a reminder of his ear for what made a memorable pop song, in this case an electronic take on the loud-quiet-loud dynamic of so much of American rock of the previous decade. The lesbian angle of the lyrics recalled the controversy that surrounded Relax.
I'm a Cuckoo, Belle and Sebastian, 2003
A glimpse of an alternative career in which Horn worked with indie bands instead of pop stars. Perfectly fine, if you like that sort of thing.
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