Yes! Rick Wakeman talks ahead of Birmingham solo gig
Keyboard legend Rick Wakeman made his name with prog rock stars Yes. He featured in the band across five tenures, between 1971 and 2004, and recently lined up again with bandmates Jon Anderson and Trevor Rabin.
But piano remains his first love and having quit his studies at the Royal College of Music in 1969, he played as a session man for David Bowie and on songs by T Rex, Elton John and Cat Stevens.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee returned to his first love earlier this year when he released Piano Portraits, a collection of 15 songs by David Bowie, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and others.
They were played on piano with new arrangements and featured alongside traditional tunes and classics from Tchaikovsky and Debussy, among others.
Rick will bring Piano Portraits In Concert to Birmingham’s Town Hall tonight, as part of his 50th anniversary celebration. The record made chart history when it became the first solo piano album to enter the UK’s top 10.
Initially inspired by the unprecedented reaction to his performance of David Bowie’s Life On Mars on BBC Radio 2 in early 2016, Piano Portraits features instrumental versions of hits Rick originally performed on (Space Oddity, Morning Has Broken and Wondrous Stories) as well of others specifically chosen for their wonderful melodies, including Stairway To Heaven, Help and Eleanor Rigby. He has also added a selection of some of his favourite classical pieces (Berceuse, Clair de Lune and Swan Lake).
The show will include at least eight of the pieces on the album, plus other musical surprises, and all will be interspersed with hilarious anecdotes from this well-known and accomplished raconteur. Rick’s one man shows are extremely popular and consistently sell out – a trend that looks likely to continue with the success of Piano Portraits.
He was encouraged to record Piano Portraits by his friends.
“It wasn’t my idea. A lot of friends of mine said this kind of idea was staring me in the face and asked why it took so long to do it. We’re doing this interview almost a year to the day that David Bowie passed away. David and I were good friends and I did a lot of stuff with him. The number one radio station in the UK, Radio Two, I did a tribute to David and did a version of Life On Mars.”
“I played the song and they did a web came of it and two days later the presenter there told me, “The web cam you did of Life on Mars has over two million hits.” I said, “You’re joking?!” A lot of people are asking, “why don’t you record it for a cancer charity?” Normally I’m against doing charity records as most of them lose fistfulls of money but I thought this was a good idea and recorded it for the Macmillan Cancer Trust and it did very well.
“It was a physical number one for six weeks. Then I started getting calls from record labels, some big and some not so big, all saying, “Hey, we’d love for you to do a piano album in a similar style to that you did for Life On Mars.” I thought it was an interesting idea. I spoke to all the labels to see how they’d envisioned it and Universal were great because they envisioned it exactly as I did — as a real mixture of music, not losing sight of what the original songs stood for but always working as piano pieces.
“So I decided to do it and went into a studio about an hour from my house, which has my favorite piano in the world, a model D Steinway. We spent quite a few weeks recording this album. We knew that every piece had to be a performance; you couldn’t just edit stuff.”
