Grumpy Old Rock Star: and Other Wondrous Stories (6 page)

I travelled down there first thing in the morning because I wanted to pay a visit to an aunt and uncle I had living in Portsmouth. After I’d seen them, I headed off to the radio station but it was still only lunchtime, so I took a detour into the pub a few doors down. I made friends with the landlord, sank a few pints, had a bite to eat, found the dartboard and had an altogether very pleasant afternoon until they closed at three.

In the early evening, I went round to the radio station and met a really young kid who presented the midnight rock show. We chatted about all sorts and he obviously loved music. His job was to come in just before the rock show started and turn off the pre-recorded tapes of a gardening show that was on at 11 p.m. He explained that, late at night, the station wasn’t manned by anyone else and by the time the show started there’d only be myself and him in the building.

‘Do you fancy a pint and a sandwich next door?’ I asked.

‘Ah, well, I shouldn’t really, I’m not really a drinker . . .’

I think he came out of some sense of duty. After a couple of rounds, I asked him if he’d ever drunk port and brandy. Perhaps not altogether surprisingly, he hadn’t.

‘I’ll buy you one.’

By eleven-fifteen, it really was time to get back to the station and, besides, it was throwing-out time.

Or in the case of the young engineer, throwing-up time.

As the landlord shouted, ‘Time, gentlemen, please!’ across the pub, this kid stood up and then fell flat on his face across the table. Poleaxed, he was. Paralytic, unconscious. With the help of the landlord, I manhandled him into the radio station and poured coffee
and water down his neck for twenty minutes. He was incapable of doing anything.

I finally roused him so he was at least conscious and tumbled him into this tiny studio. I tried to fix his glazed eyes and said, ‘Listen, don’t worry, we’ll play
King Arthur
, it’s a long record, we can just play it all the way through and you can get some more coffee.’

‘I feel sick . . .’ came the less-than-encouraging reply.

As it turned out, we never got as far as being able to play my record. When the gardening programme was coming to a close he was supposed to start the rock programme. He took the mike, and then, live on glorious Radio Solent – ‘The Sound of the Solent’, no less – he made his considered announcement.

‘Fuck gardening, does anyone actually listen to that shit? This is Rick Wakeman’s
King Arthur
and it’s much better.’

He tried vainly to put the needle on the record but it just jumped wildly, scratched loudly and then leapt to halfway through the first side shortly before he returned to his previous state of unconsciousness.

Within seconds, the phone-in indicators on the control desk in the studio had lit up like a Christmas tree.

There wasn’t much I could do, really, so I sat there and waited for the inevitable. Sure enough, about fifteen minutes later Dave Christian stormed into the building, shouting – furious he was.

The following day Tony Burdfield rang me from his office at A&M Records.

‘Rick, can’t you go anywhere?’

‘Oh, come on, Tony, it really wasn’t that bad . . .’

‘Rick, he didn’t say “bum”. He said “fuck” and “shit” live on air.’

To be fair, this was 1975, it was pretty unheard of. When the Sex Pistols did it two years later on Bill Grundy’s television show, they became national hate figures. My fate was far worse.

I got banned from Radio Solent for life.

I wrote Dave Christian a long letter explaining that it was totally my fault, that the kid hadn’t really wanted to go for a drink but was just doing what he thought was the right thing for the station, entertaining a guest and all that, that he was in among serious drinking company and should be absolutely exonerated. Rather than sacking him, they transferred him to another station.

About ten years later, I was invited down to Radio Solent – which by now had changed hands – to do a quiz in aid of Children in Need. I hadn’t even got through the main door when I was met by this security man, looking rather embarrassed.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Wakeman, there’s been some kind of mix-up. It has become apparent that a few years ago you were banned from Radio Solent for life. The directors have had a meeting and decided to uphold that ban.’

‘Are you serious? I’m here to support Children in Need – you are having me on, aren’t you?’

‘No. I’m sorry, Mr Wakeman.’

So they wouldn’t let me in.

Not even for Children in Need.

The Sound of the Solent, eh?

I can’t believe anyone would be so petty, all those years later. But judging by the number of places that still uphold life bans against me, which include Julie’s Restaurant in Notting Hill Gate and the Roof Gardens in Kensington, then it’s not surprising really!

‘HELP YOURSELF, TUCK IN’

Rewind a year and life for me back in the Yes camp was good. No lifetime bans from Radio Solent, for a start. I’d joined in 1971 and that year we’d released the acclaimed album
Fragile
, followed the next year by
Close to the Edge
. I was working with technically gifted musicians, touring the world and selling millions of records. We were a huge band with massive record sales. Our live shows were constant sell-outs and, without being immodest, we really were a very large band.

The interesting thing about Yes was that it was completely different people who all had their very strong, good points and conversely also had some quite unbelievably bad points – myself most definitely included. We were all entirely different. That dynamic was kind of essential to our chemistry.

Take vegetables, for example.

And meat.

Or in the case of most of Yes, the lack of meat.

I liked to eat meat. The rest of the band were vegetarians. Also, they didn’t drink – although rumour had it that one or two indulged in the odd substance here and there. So I was a little
bit of a fish out of water, to some extent. I was the steak-eating heavy drinker. Meat seven times a week, please.

Nowadays, I’m the only teetotaller and eat meat no more than three times a week.

To be fair, Steve Howe doesn’t drink much – the odd glass of wine – but the rest all like a drink. And they are all now confirmed carnivores, again with the exception of Steve (who has stuck by his position all these years and I take my hat off to him). So there has been a complete reversal of roles.

Before I go on, I’d like to mention one thing that I’ve never understood about vegetarianism. I have no objections to it at all, but what I don’t understand is if you don’t like meat, why do you make things like nut cutlets to look like a chop? And tofu to look like sausages or burgers? I’ve never understood that.

I digress.

On Yes tours, food was constantly a hot potato, on the menu, dish of the day – you take your pick of clichés. For one tour, it was decided that we would take a chef on the road with us. I wasn’t surprised, as we’d pretty much taken everything else we needed over the years, so why not a chef?! Some of the band were quite extreme with their vegetarianism. For a couple of Yes, having a meal with no meat in it was not enough; they had to know pretty much the origin of the soil it was planted in, the organic farming methods used in its production, the name of the guy who planted this food and, ideally, the species and health of the birds who had shit on the organic soil where these plants and vegetables were grown. Well, that might be possible in the noughties in an organic wholefood specialist shop; but try this in a Holiday Inn coffee shop in the Deep South in the early 1970s. Some of the band were going without food for days and it was becoming impossible.

So our manager, Brian ‘Deal-a-Day’ Lane, called a meeting at his Notting Hill Gate office. We looked at the reality of the band
members’ food preferences and, of course, the only way around this was to take a chef on the road.

Yes was never really blessed with management who knew how to handle the band. However, in all fairness, I’m not sure that Yes were ‘handle-able’, because none of us would take advice. Whatever meeting we were in, whatever advice we were given, we would all just sit there and listen patiently, then go out and do whatever we wanted. Which was invariably a disaster.

So that’s what we did in this case. We decided to hire a chef for the tour. In between mouthfuls of sirloin, I remonstrated.

‘Hang on, guys, I have absolutely no objections to getting a chef. I accept you have strong principles and a chef will accommodate that. What I don’t accept is that this chef isn’t going to come cheap and, what’s more, we are going to need to take a kitchen on the road with us too. Now, no disrespect to you guys, but I don’t think I should pay one fifth of these costs.’

They said that I could eat their vegetarian food too, if that helped.

Perfectly reasonably, I said, ‘I do not want to have an organically reared nut cutlet in the evening for the whole tour with a lettuce leaf that has been washed on the banks of the River Nile by a spiritual woman’s feet . . . or something. I really don’t want to know.’

At this point, Deal-a-Day stepped in and suggested that the chef could cook separate meat-crammed meals for me. This seemed like a fair compromise and, on reflection, I actually liked the idea of having these delicious meals made for me – after all, tour grub is pretty lousy and I do like my food.

So we hired this fabulous English chef and he flew out to America with us for the tour. He had all the top professional stoves and an amazing amount of equipment. Basically, what happened was this: at each hotel, we rented a small reception room, laid the table out and then at the end of each show we
would go back to this room and all sit round and eat, including the management and any other members of the tour party.

Very early on the first day I’d chatted with the chef about what he was going to cook for me. I was actually very interested by now and glad we’d taken him along. I just agreed to eat whatever vegetables he was cooking for the rest of the band, and he said he’d stick a bit of steak or chops in for me too, in a separate pan. This all worked out very nicely.

Then, on the first Saturday of the tour, this chef took me to one side and said, ‘Rick, do you fancy a nice big roast tomorrow?’

‘Bloody hell, do I fancy a roast!’

‘Well, I haven’t asked before because there’s no point cooking a roast for one person, but I understand your manager will be eating with us and your accountant David Moss, and neither of them are veggies. What do you think?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Right, Rick, I’ll go out today and buy a smashing turkey with all the trimmings.’

I was beginning to think that taking a chef out on tour was a stroke of genius.

We played the Sunday show and I headed back to the hotel virtually floating on saliva at the prospect of this roast. We all sat down and the chef brought out the rest of the band’s food first: a lettuce leaf, a carrot or two, celery sticks, whatever . . . and they all tucked in, giving it the old rather unconvincing ‘mmmm’ and ‘delicious’.

Then he walked out, went back to the kitchen and a minute later banged back through the door with an enormous silver platter on which sat a 22 lb turkey, golden brown, heaped high with sausages wrapped in bacon, potatoes and parsnips. It was a sensational sight.

The veggies around the table stopped eating, some of them with forks halfway to their mouths.

Jon said, ‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a roast turkey, Jon.’

‘Yes, I know it’s a roast turkey, Rick, but what is it doing here?’

The chef, meanwhile, put the roast in front of me and started serving it up; the smell was incredible.

Someone said, ‘Er, could I try some roasted parsnips, please?’

‘Sorry, chaps, cooked in goose fat.’

‘And the potatoes . . . ?’

‘Goose fat. Rick, shall I cut the breast or the leg, sir?’

I could barely pick my plate up, there was that much roast turkey piled onto it. With the exception of Steve, I think every veggie around the table watched every mouthful go in. Steve never batted an eyelid, but the rest were struggling badly. After they’d all finished their veggie meals a mass exodus ensued, clearly to avoid being around this delightful roast for too long.

A few minutes later I still hadn’t finished and was just heaping some more sausages wrapped in bacon on my plate when the door opened. It was Alan.

‘All right, Rick. I was thinking, I know I’m veggie and all that, but to be honest, I do eat the occasional piece of white meat. Any chance I could try some of the turkey?’

‘Alan, of course you can – tuck in, help yourself,’ I said.

‘OK, thanks, but I’ll take it back to my room, if that’s OK.’

He hastily put some of the roast turkey and trimmings on a plate and off he scurried.

Five minutes later, the door opened and Jon walked in.

‘All right, Rick. I was thinking, I do have the odd bit of chicken now and then, so I was wondering . . .’

‘Help yourself, tuck in, Jon,’ I offered.

‘Cheers, Rick. I’ll take it back to my room, though, if you don’t mind.’

Ten minutes later, door opens, Chris walks in.

‘All right, Rick . . . I, er . . .’

‘Help yourself.’

I turned to the chef who was grinning widely. ‘Probably best if you don’t mention this, my friend . . .’

Fast-forward to 2003, and Yes were playing some overseas shows. We were at an airport eating rubbish departure-lounge snacks and I had opted for a sweaty cheese sandwich. I think it was Alan who said, ‘That’s funny, Rick, you’re eating cheese and, apart from Steve, we’re all eating meat. That reminds me, do you remember the time you had the chef make you a roast-turkey dinner in the States . . . ?’

I smiled knowingly, in between mouthfuls of cheese.

People often wondered what planet the various members of Yes were on. Some even suggested that we regularly visited other planets to get our music. And clothes. And hair. And stage sets. I’d like to think that Yes was a pioneering band, I don’t think that’s unreasonable. Especially in the early days with regards to some of the stuff we did onstage. Take a look at
Spinal Tap
– we did that stuff for real.