Grumpy Old Rock Star: and Other Wondrous Stories (19 page)

‘. . . It’s up to you, Rick,’ continued Big Ian. ‘Er, Rick, please excuse me a moment,’ and with that he thumped Plug on the head with his free hand and then dropped him back off the stage.

Then he turned back to me and carried on talking.

As we walked off stage right, a little voice could be heard coming from down by the photographers’ pit . . .

‘Sorry, Ian.’

The other wonderful memory I have of Plug is of him during a huge arena tour with Yes. We were working with a very clever man called Michael Tait, a brilliant Australian who had designed some of the greatest lighting rigs in the world. He had to survey the crew as they scurried around these arenas setting up these immensely complicated lighting rigs, like a general watching over his army. You were talking here about eighty crew and an eight-hour build – it was serious stuff. The crews worked eight hours on, eight hours off and all the crews were colour-coded, such as black T-shirts for stage, yellow for lighting, red for sound and so on, as it was such a big operation. Michael would sit perched high up somewhere for the best vantage point and, every now and then, he would shout down instructions and orders, coordinating this massive effort.

It was from his seat with the gods that Michael delivered one of my favourite one-liners of all time. ‘Steve, those mikes are too close to the PA; they’ll feed back . . . Paul, have we got
some more spots for the drums? . . . Geoff, Geoff, can we run a test on that guitar? . . . and Plug . . . whatever you are doing, it’s wrong.’

One of the things I always did, and still do, before a tour started was take the band and crew out for dinner. For my 1984 tour, when we were all done rehearsing we headed for the Warwick in Maida Vale where some fairly heavy drinking ensued.

I’d love to know the connection between drinking too much and that neon sign in your head that says ‘MUST EAT CURRY’. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Well, that was what happened, so all twenty or so of us went off to this Indian restaurant round the corner. They very kindly pushed all the tables together, even though you could see they were more than a little apprehensive about what we might get up to.

The waiter came over and asked if we were ready to order.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘To start with we’ll have two hundred poppadums, please.’

They brought these poppadums in on God knows how many plates – it was like
Record Breakers
with Roy Castle or something, it was hilarious – and put these teetering piles of crockery on the table. Then they retired quickly to avoid having to take the actual main-course order.

‘How are we going to break these up, lads?’ someone piped up.

The next thing I knew, Ashley stood on the table, dropped his trousers and whacked his old chap on one of the piles of poppadums, sending bits flying everywhere and causing absolute uproar.

Within seconds we were all down to our underpants.

The police were very good about it.

‘The restaurant owner wants you to pay for the damage.’

‘What damage?’

I thought the only damage might have been if Ashley had scratched his old chap, but I decided it was best not to mention that to the policeman.

Life on the road.

Good times.

‘HAVE I DONE SOMETHING WRONG HERE, GENTLEMEN?’

Eastern European composers are absolutely my favourites. The greats, such as Prokofiev in particular, have always held a fascination for me. It wasn’t just their Eastern European composers’ incredible music, either: their own stories were compelling too. Take Chopin. After he died, his heart was cut out at his own request because of his fear of being buried alive. It was then taken back in an urn to Poland by his sister and placed in a pillar of the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw. So they say that although Chopin died in France, his heart will always be in Poland.

Which is rather lovely.

Although not the bit about cutting his heart out, obviously.

So you can imagine how delighted I was when I was invited to Poland to work with Janusz Olejniczak, one of the country’s finest pianists. The Frederick Chopin International Piano Competition is one of the oldest piano competitions in the world. It started in 1927 and has been held every five years since 1955. The competition attracts the very finest pianists from around the world. It really is a magnet for the absolute
elite players. For someone like me, those competitions couldn’t really be any more amazing. So to be asked to work alongside a winner of this prestigious competition was a dream come true.

Some context is needed here. This was 1982, before the Wall came down and certainly before the Eastern Bloc had opened up to the West. The height of Polish problems, in many respects. Cracks were showing, however, and young people in Poland were starting to get hold of Western press reports, the occasional smuggled vinyl disc or articles of the latest fashions. Although this was pre-Internet, communication was nevertheless improving at such a rate that it was getting less and less easy to maintain state control. In a vain bid to satisfy this exploding interest in all things Western, the Polish government came up with various hare-brained schemes, one of which was to get a Western pianist to play alongside a famed Polish musician to produce classical music with an electronic overtone.

Which was where I came in.

I was approached by an agent called Rod Weinberg who said my name had come up in conversation for this very task and would I be interested? I couldn’t say ‘Yes’ quick enough. The main reason I seemed to fit the bill was because although I had enjoyed commercial success in a ‘Western’ rock band I’d also had a full classical training culminating in two years at the Royal College of Music and had worked with major orchestras around the world.

So in the cold winter of 1982 I found myself on a plane to Warsaw. My first impression was it was bloody
freezing
! I can still feel the cold in my bones now. I quickly scurried into the shelter of the main airport terminal where the temperature gauge registered minus 25 degrees, and joined the back of the queue for customs.

Two hours
later, I got to the front of the queue.

You had to list everything you had with you, everything in your case, even everything you were wearing, down to buttons missing and so on. It was insane. And all this after I’d been invited to go there.

Once again, Harry Palmer kept flickering across my mind.

Eventually I got through customs and was met by a man called Yachek, a government official charged with looking after me (a task at which many world-class tour managers had, as you now know, failed abysmally). He instantly seemed a very pleasant albeit slightly reserved man, and we chatted along merrily. I could see he wasn’t an ‘ordinary’ worker, because he stuck out a little bit from the crowd: his clothes were a little Western in style, slightly better quality than most and with richer colours. Most obviously of all, he drove an old Ford Escort that was, quite frankly, falling apart – perhaps only slightly more road-worthy than my beautiful old Ford Anglia. That might not sound like a Howard Hughes standard of wealth, but in Poland very few people owned cars, you hardly saw one on the street, and of those nine out of every ten cars were very old, very battered Ladas, Skodas or Trabants. So driving this Escort was like rolling around in a Bentley. It was the best car I saw during my entire stay in Poland, by some considerable margin. It has to be said though that the old Ladas started first time every time in all sorts of unbelievable conditions so the bad name they got in the West is actually unfair.

Yachek drove me to a fairly dishevelled hotel that was used exclusively by visiting Western businessmen – not by any members of the general public – so locally it was considered quite upmarket. I was immediately struck by how
grey
everything was: the buildings, the clothes, the cars, people’s skin, everything. The street lighting was very low too, almost like either the energy was running out or there wasn’t the money to keep them on brighter. Perhaps it was both.

On arrival, I was checked in swiftly and taken to my sparse and very basic room. It had a small bed, a tiny shower room with a shower-head that, at best, dribbled water out at you feebly. The decor was . . . grey.

The rooms were almost certainly bugged. I told Rod Weinberg this (he had travelled with me), and about this time in Russia where in one of the few very sparsely decorated rooms I was staying in I said out loud to myself that it would be nice to have an extra bath towel – and five minutes later there was a knock at the door and a woman stood there with a bath towel in her hands to give me. Rod thought this was highly amusing and walked into his room saying in an extremely loud voice, ‘Don’t think much of the colour of this carpet!’

Nonetheless, I didn’t expect anything else – and besides, on our way to the hotel I noticed we passed Lazienki Park where the memorial statue to Chopin had been erected just before the Second World War. Every Sunday, in the warmer months of the year, musicians performed free piano recitals of his work next to the statue: it was a renowned and revered focal point for Chopin fanatics and pianists around the world.

I was desperate to go back to the park straight away.

Unfortunately, Yachek had said to me in reception that I was not allowed to go anywhere without him, under any circumstances. His room was just down the corridor and he insisted I could knock on his door at any time of the day or night, as long as I did not leave the hotel alone. A meeting with Janusz, this famed pianist who I was to work with, was arranged for just after breakfast the next morning.

I slept fairly fitfully that first night and woke very early from the hard bed. It was only 5 a.m. There was no breakfast place if I recall and I was keen to see what was happening outside. The room was virtually empty – certainly no television – so there was absolutely nothing to do.

I thought,
I’ll go to the park and look at that Chopin statue.

I knew I’d been told this was exactly the sort of thing not to do, but I wondered what harm could it really do? It was still half dark outside and I walked through the small, empty hotel foyer without a hitch, straight out of the door and into the forbidden streets. There was no one around. I saw only a couple of people fleetingly. The odd tram, a Lada, a cyclist.

Remembering the biting chill, I’d wrapped up heavily and had used the scarf to hide my face. The tiny strip of my eyes and forehead that was exposed to the cold was frozen within seconds. I remembered the way to the park as it wasn’t that far from where we were staying, so I walked there but the gates were closed.

Bugger
.

Then it started to snow.

Bugger
.

It was so cold that my feet, inside my woollen socks and fleece-lined boots, were frozen solid.

There was no one around at all now, so I climbed over the gate.

I was so desperate to see this statue and the stage where people played that I wasn’t going to let anything get in my way. I’d seen pictures; if you are a professional piano player you know what it looks like, but I wanted to
see
it for myself. I stood in front of the statue, soaking up the history, when I suddenly became aware of two figures standing just to my right.

‘Hello, Mr Wakeman.’

It was strange, because as a musician in various well-known bands I’m used to strangers saying, ‘Hey! Rick!’ and all that; yet, here in Poland, there was no reason to expect this, not least because my own mother wouldn’t have recognised me in the secretive scarf and hat.

They spoke perfect English. But they weren’t from England.

‘Hello,’ I said, almost by reflex.

‘My name is Boris and this is Ivan,’ the tallest one said.

You’re having a laugh
, I thought.

He wasn’t.

‘It’s very early and very cold, Mr Wakeman. What are you doing in the park?’

‘Well, it’s funny you should say that. I woke up really early and I’m supposed to be having a meeting later with Janusz Olejniczak about working with him, mixing wonderful Chopin works with some electronic keyboards, but I woke up early and, being bored, thought I’d come and look at this famous landmark. The gate was locked so I climbed over it. How did you get in?’

‘We have a key. We would like to take your photograph.’

‘Great,’ I said, relieved. ‘I’ll stand by the statue, shall I?’

Out of his large trench coat Boris produced a really old-school camera with a detachable flashbulb, like something Prohibition-era paparazzi would have used. He took a picture of me staring directly into the camera with the statue right behind me. He looked a little close to me but I wasn’t about to complain.

‘And would you like to turn ninety degrees to your right and I’ll take another picture, Mr Wakeman . . . ?’

I did as I was told . . .

‘And now 180 degrees please, so you are facing the other way . . .’

It was only at the last second that I realised what he was doing.

‘I’ve done something wrong, haven’t I?’ I said, with a growing sense of unease.

‘It’s OK. Please follow me.’

I didn’t really have much choice so I did, indeed, follow them.
At the park gates, Yachek’s trusty old battered Ford Escort was there and as he saw me he got out of the car. Like my friends Igor in Moscow and Barry the Perv in Paraguay, he was as white as the snow falling on the ground. I seem to do that to people. Ivan and Boris didn’t shout at Yachek but he was given a very firm talking-to.

In Russian.

Eventually, Boris came over to me and said, ‘Enjoy the rest of your stay in Poland, Mr Wakeman, but please do not go
anywhere
without speaking to Mr Yachek first.’

‘Thank you very much. I hope I haven’t got Mr Yachek into any trouble. I was only coming to see the statue.’ With that they left and I climbed into the Escort, suitably chastised.