Rick Wakeman looks back on his tumultuous history with Yes, playing on David Bowie's 'Space Oddity,' and much more in a career-spanning interview
was the most important album that Yes ever made. I’m not saying it was the best because I’m aand “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 andhad 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.
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.
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 thealbum. 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 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.
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.”What happened was, Jon was very ill.
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. 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.
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.
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.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 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.
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