Grumpy Old Rock Star: and Other Wondrous Stories (20 page)

Yachek looked quite cross but very politely said, ‘You’re not allowed to go out on your own – I told you this, you mustn’t go anywhere on your own. Please. I get privileges. I have an apartment just for me and my family, I have a stereo and a television and I have my car. I can lose all of that.’

I apologised profusely and felt awful.

‘Who was that, by the way?’

‘Russian. The KGB. Their embassy is almost directly opposite. They still monitor everything we do.’

After that brush with the Russian secret service, everything went relatively to plan. I went back to the hotel and met Janusz and we talked about Chopin and Western music and how we could make something new from these various influences. I came up with the idea of making something suitable for a string quartet.

‘Yes, they will like that,’ said Yachek.

I wasn’t sure who ‘they’ were, but Yachek then offered me any musicians I wanted, so I didn’t really care. He also said any venue and any orchestra would be made available, as would any recordings we might need. There was one big problem,
though – they didn’t have any electronic instruments which, when you are trying to write an electronic/classical collaboration, can be quite a sticking point. So, in other words, they gave me everything except the one thing I needed. I also couldn’t ship any keyboards to Poland at that time, as to even try and consider getting the paperwork was nigh-on impossible and whilst musicians, manpower, recording facilities etc. were free, there was no hard currency budget to get in equipment.

While I worked on the music with Janusz, I was also invited outside the city to various houses that belonged to other renowned musicians and local dignitaries. Janusz was also enjoying some privileges and he invited me to his apartment and also to his parents’ house. I remember going to one small house belonging to a friend of Janusz and the table was laid for one person with a plate on which was beetroot and salad and a pig’s trotter. In many of these households, if there was any meat available it was pig’s trotter. Nobody else ate. I was shown to the single chair where I ate everything; it was obvious in certain cases that I was getting the best food they had in the house, so not eating it was not an option, out of simple courtesy if nothing else. These people were in the depths of poverty and yet would have given me their last grain of rice to make me feel welcome. Very, very proud people, lovely. To this day I have a wonderful warm feeling towards the Polish people. They are some of the kindest and nicest folk I have met on my travels.

One particularly fascinating character I met was Janusz’s father-in-law. He was a publisher, so he worked with the authorities on what was and wasn’t allowed to be printed for public consumption. He worked in a magnificent oak-lined office – a throwback to Mervyn Conn from all those years ago! Next to his room was a receptionist’s room, just like at Mervyn’s.
But we couldn’t have been in a more different universe to Leicester Square.

I went into his office and, once again, there was a mysterious man in a suit joining the meeting. It was blatantly obvious that I was not going to be left on my own anywhere in case I asked anything I shouldn’t ask, or said anything I shouldn’t be saying or was told anything I shouldn’t be told. We had weak tea and talked generally about music and books. Already, in a few short days, I’d learned to be very careful about what I said and what I didn’t say.

As I was leaving, the publisher said to me quietly, ‘It would be nice if you came back soon. Come back and have tea with me tomorrow, before you go home.’

I did exactly that and, for some reason, we were alone this time.

Yachek, who had accompanied me as usual, began to pale.

The publisher asked me into another room on my own.

And that’s when Yachek went a whiter shade of white.

As the publisher closed the door, he said, ‘What do you know about Warsaw?’

‘A little more than most, but a lot less than many,’ I answered honestly. ‘I know the tragedy of Warsaw at the end of the war when the Russians obstructed Polish resistance efforts and in effect allowed the Germans to burn the city to the ground.’

‘Do you know about the band of child soldiers, Mr Wakeman?’

He then proceeded to tell me about these child soldiers who lived in the hundreds of miles of sewers below Warsaw and formed some sort of resistance. There are statues
in memoriam
of these poor kids and it was very moving to hear the tale told by such a man. The Russians couldn’t track them down in this extensive and antiquated sewage system and couldn’t blow them up because it would destroy the waste
system for the city. Then he showed me a book of photographs, a pictorial chronology of exactly what the Russians and Germans did to Warsaw at the end of the war. I hasten to add that what the Allies did to Dresden was no less inhumane and it does seem that war has no love for people, history, art and beauty. I remember speaking to an American astronaut friend of mine not so long ago who said that every world leader should go into space and look down at the earth, which becomes just a tiny speck among millions and millions of other tiny specks, so they can realise that our tiny speck is the only known place in this universe with life, and then perhaps they would think differently about slowly destroying it, as all world leaders seem intent on doing.

Back to the oak-panelled room: ‘Never ever underestimate the Poles,’ he said to me. ‘If someone said there were cabbages available, there’d be a two-mile queue. The last people in this two-mile queue would wait patiently, knowing that there would almost certainly be nothing left when they got to the front. But they’d wait nonetheless. If ever the opportunity arises, you watch Poland rise: we are the hardest-working people you will ever meet.’

I couldn’t agree more. If you kept animals in the way that some of the Polish people were kept back then, the RSPCA would take you to court.

I couldn’t help but think that, at that time, Poland was in the worst possible geographical sandwich: East Germany on one side and Russia on the other. It was so sad. A few months after the Wall came down, I went back to Poland, which now had a Western border. The change was unbelievable. My friend, the publisher, was right. ‘Watch the Poles rise,’ he’d said . . . and they certainly had. They had embraced their new-found freedom with hard work and creativity. I take my hat off to them.

As I was about to leave the company of this amazing man, who had so many stories to tell sitting in this oak-lined office, he leaned over to me and whispered in my ear . . .

‘Mr Wakeman, please do not speak a word of this to anyone, but I was one of those children . . .’

‘NO, MR WAKEMAN, SIX MONTHS TO LIVE’

You remember all that medical advice after I’d had those two heart attacks? And do you remember how I didn’t actually heed any of it? Well, let me tell you how I finally came to stop smoking and drinking.

Initially, my heart attacks and degenerative ill health had very little impact on my choice of lifestyle. As you know, against all medical advice I travelled uninsured to America to tour
King Arthur
, had a jolly splendid time and underwent more ECGs than the Bionic Man. I have to say that when I came back from the States I was feeling really, really good. I had laid off the drink a bit and I had cut down the smoking a lot. I phoned up Jess Conrad, who organised matches for the Top Ten XI football side (which I’d previously been a keen member of) and asked him when the next match was.

‘Are you sure you’re well enough, Rick?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine, yes.’

I played the game and scored four goals.

I have to be honest and say that it was as much down to the other players as me; you see, it was common knowledge that I’d
had heart attacks and been really ill. So on the day of the game, no one would come near me, everyone was terrified to tackle me. At one point, for no particular reason, I did get banged up in the air and came down with quite a crunch.

You’ve never seen twenty-one men panic so fast.

I was lying there gathering myself to get up and all I could hear were these whisperings of ‘. . . heart attack?’ or ‘. . . still breathing?’ or ‘. . . ambulance?’ Someone came right up to me and said, ‘Shall I give him the kiss of life?’

‘I’ve only hurt my bloody elbow!’ I roared, laughing and wincing at the same time.

Not long after the game I had to go to Harefield Hospital for another of my regular check-ups. Even though I was progressing well I still had to be closely monitored. On this occasion the consultant hadn’t seen me before and seemed not to know about my recent jaunt in the States. He started asking me the usual stuff.

‘Mr Wakeman, your ECG is good, your blood pressure’s fine, it’s all excellent. I can see you’ve been taking it easy and heeding our advice. Good.’

‘Well, er, not exactly. I’ve just come back from a lengthy tour of America.’

‘Oh, I see. But
otherwise
you’ve been taking it easy?’

‘Well, sort of, although I played a game of football last week.’

‘Remarkable. There’s no scarring on the heart, everything looks great. Obviously the pills we gave you are working perfectly.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I ran out of them six weeks ago.’

They discharged me completely three months later.

As you know, I did give up cigarettes but only because I’d moved on to cigars. The doctors were horrified. Smoking was a real concern for the heart. They said I obviously drank too much but, ‘For God’s sake, stop smoking, Mr Wakeman!’ I tried and I tried and I tried. The New Year’s resolutions came and went but could I even last until Lent?

Not a hope in hell.

Then a bizarre thing happened.

We were on tour with Yes in 1979 and had a break from the road in October. As I often did during a prolonged period of time off, I rented a house in California to relax in. It was pointless flying home because by the time I’d got over the jet lag it was time to fly back again.

Mornings in my West Coast retreat were particularly robust on the flatulence front (more about that later). A veritable cacophony of sound and smells. On this particular morning, I was sitting at the table enjoying my usual breakfast of a Café Crème cigar and a large, strong cup of coffee (my first of ten such each morning). I opened the cigar tin, looked down at the little cigarillos . . . and for some reason I do not know to this day, I thought,
I really don’t want to smoke any more
.

And that was it.

I stopped smoking there and then.

October 1979.

Even more bizarrely, I have never had a single withdrawal symptom, not one. Years later, I might unearth a cigar tin from the back of a cupboard and I’d just look at it and throw it in the bin. There has never been any chance that I’d go back to it.

The habit’s persistence is incredible to me because there are billions spent on anti-smoking campaigns, nicotine patches, hypnotherapy, counselling and all sorts of wonderful, energetic remedies for the curse of smoking.

But really, in my experience, the process of quitting is really very straightforward. You have to want to. If you don’t really want to, then all the patches, creams and tablets in the world won’t help you.

So now it’s time to tell you how I gave up the drink. I suspect many of you will be skimming through this section in your eagerness to get to the flatulence story I promised you, but I shall continue. Despite having had two heart attacks and numerous
health repercussions due to my excessive boozing, I still drank like a fish. By the mid-1980s my capacity was still legendary, you couldn’t put a price on it. Well, actually, someone did.

I knew a lot of journalists in Fleet Street and often saw them at a famous pub called the White Hart, which was better known as the Stab in the Back. It earned its rather gory nickname because the only time an editor would take a journalist there was to give him the sack. There was a little eating area on one side, so you knew that if your boss said, ‘Hey, let’s go down the White Hart for a bite to eat,’ then that was the end of that.

It was an old-fashioned pub just off Fleet Street, a perfect journalistic time warp with old-fashioned reporters’ phones all along one wall. I used to sit in there and meet some great people. Frank Dickens used to draw the Bristow cartoons for the
Evening Standard
and he’d regularly be in there. He once did the most amazing cartoon of me on a napkin, as quick as you like. You’d be sitting drinking with him and a girl would rush in from the editor’s office asking him to file his drawings urgently for deadline. Frank was a serious drinker and, on more than one occasion, I actually saw the girl Tippex out the beer-glass rings on his drawings before she scurried off.

There were loads of characters like Frank. I was one of the few outsiders to the journalist profession who was welcome there, so I got to know many journalists and in later years that’s how I found out that there was a price on my head.

The deal was, any journalist who knew me and could take me out drinking and
actually get me pissed
would win £100 and two bottles of vintage champagne.

Many tried, all of them failed.

I very quickly lost count of the number of sozzled journos I left propped up semi-conscious at the Stab in the Back. I’ve often thought about my alarming capacity for drink and I think it must be something to do with my DNA make-up. This idea is reinforced
by the fact that I didn’t actually get that drunk, I would never stagger around legless. I could go out on a really heavy session and talk coherently all through the night and then walk home. My theory is further reinforced by the fact that until I became ill in the mid-80s
I never got hangovers
. I could go out and, literally, drink a plane dry, then wake up in the morning with no hangover whatsoever. I might occasionally feel tired, but that was from being up late and was nothing that a good strong cup of coffee couldn’t fix.