His title is synonymous with extra: keyboards stacked larger than Stonehenge; capes that resemble the outer shell of an interplanetary spacecraft; and, after all, idea albums. On ice. Nevertheless, nothing slots right into a pigeonhole with out a battle. Humorous, personable, and earthily unpretentious, keyboardist Rick Wakeman, born on Might 18, 1949, has lent his experience to a wide range of recordings – by his personal estimation, contributing session performances to greater than 2,000 songs. Having amassed an astonishing, nearly overwhelming physique of labor, we’ll provide you with a starter course with this information to the most effective Rick Wakeman songs.
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One early session with important ramifications was for the band Junior’s Eyes, whose 1969 Battersea Energy Station album was produced by Tony Visconti. The producer subsequently requested Wakeman and guitarist Mick Wayne to play on the recording of a single by one other of his shoppers – a sure David Bowie. The only in query was the epochal “Space Oddity”: Wakeman’s questing Mellotron half earned him a laughable-in-retrospect session price of £9, however, extra importantly, led to an everlasting friendship and on-off skilled relationship with Bowie.
Wakeman’s admiration for the determinedly idiosyncratic singer-songwriter was limitless, not least after Bowie performed the keyboardist for the songs he had written for 1971’s Hunky Dory album, one after the opposite, on his Hagstrom 12-string acoustic guitar. In Wakeman’s recollection, Bowie requested him to interpret these for piano; nonetheless, in a remark posted on the BowieNet web site, Bowie talked about that this “lovely fella” was barely misremembering the event, and that a number of of the album’s songs – notably, “Changes” and “Life On Mars?” – had been really written on piano within the first occasion.
The latter particularly is a present: not only a career-high for each Bowie and Wakeman, however a candidate for the best tune ever written, by anybody. Wakeman is at his rippling, rhapsodic, touch-sensitive greatest, leaning into the tune’s vertiginous chord development on Trident Studio’s Bechstein grand – the identical piano utilized by Paul McCartney on The Beatles’ epochal “Hey Jude.”
If “Life On Mars?” represents the jewel in Wakeman’s session crown, his enjoying additionally featured, incongruously, on any variety of light-pop diversions of the interval by the likes of The Brotherhood Of Man, Tony Christie, White Plains, and Edison Lighthouse. Moderately extra distinguished had been classes for Lou Reed, The Kinks, Elton John, and T.Rex. For the latter’s “Get It On,” Wakeman was requested to execute a mere piano glissando – however, to his credit score, Marc Bolan is claimed to have referred to as Wakeman in in order to supply the nonetheless cash-strapped musician with a much-appreciated session price. Point out also needs to be product of Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken” (from 1971’s Teaser And The Firecat). As florid piano accompaniments to monumental hit singles go, this needs to be probably the most well-known – and Wakeman rightly stays happy with his efficiency.
A lot of the keyboardist’s session work happened as the results of the enhance in profile offered by his “day job” with revered English folk-rockers The Strawbs. Having joined the band in 1970, Wakeman made a powerful mark with the piano showcase “Temperament Of Mind,” as featured on the reside Simply A Assortment Of Antiques And Curios album. Elegant and technically exact, the piece strikes seamlessly by way of numerous moods and modes – ragtime, baroque, blues – and tempers its virtuosic tendencies with wryly comedic “chase music” digressions.
The next yr’s From The Witchwood contained “A Glimpse Of Heaven,” Wakeman’s favourite Strawbs observe, with its exultant starburst of phased, Leslie-speakered Hammond organ. Nevertheless, the summer season of 1971 noticed Wakeman leaping ship to affix Sure, thereby sealing his status and benefiting from a wage rise, from £18 per week with The Strawbs, to £50.
Wakeman wasted no time in incomes his hold. The fourth Sure album, November 1971’s Fragile, comprises among the finest Rick Wakeman songs of the period, the imperious “Heart Of The Sunrise,” on which the keyboardist interweaves a fancy community of traces and textures on Hammond organ, Mellotron, piano, and Minimoog – the latter purchased for half its buy worth from Oliver! co-star Jack Wild, who mistook its monophonic mode of operation for a fault within the system itself.
Pushing their talents to the purpose of collapse, Sure adopted Fragile with 1972’s Shut To The Edge, a pinnacle in prog’s controversial canon. The side-long title observe particularly is wilfully, recklessly bold. For its midsection, Wakeman recorded a passage on the church organ at St Giles’ Cripplegate (additionally used for “Jane Seymour” from his first solo album correct, The Six Wives Of Henry VIII) – but it surely’s his percolating Hammond obbligato that also dislocates jaws, 4 many years later.
In a state of affairs that Wakeman has mordantly likened to the Richard Burton-Liz Taylor relationship, the keyboardist was destined to depart and rejoin Sure a number of instances over the following years. Mockingly, one among his most thrilling and achieved performances for the band got here on the peak of punk, in 1977, with “Awaken” from the Going For The One album. The dauntless vanity of its virtuosity stays among the finest Rick Wakeman songs and virtually qualifies as a punk gesture in itself.
4 years earlier, in 1973, Wakeman’s enjoying was in unprecedented demand. Along with savoring globe-spanning success with Sure, he bagged one other high-profile session scalp along with his bravura activate Black Sabbath’s “Sabbra Cadabra” (from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath), its regal synth motif contrastingly offset with a cool pub-piano line. In keeping with dependable legend, Wakeman refused monetary recompense for the session, opting as an alternative for beer.
The identical yr additionally noticed the launch of Wakeman’s pathologically fecund solo profession (greater than 100 albums underneath his title have been launched thus far) with The Six Wives Of Henry VIII, the primary of three grandiloquent, spendthrift, long-form idea works which collectively represent his industrial peak. From Six Wives, “Catherine Parr” stays among the finest Rick Wakeman songs: a Hammond, piano, and Moog masterclass, the velocity and dexterity of which defies rational perception. Wakeman permits himself no hiding place; contemplate the stamina and focus required for these twinkling arpeggios alone.
The next yr’s Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, recorded reside at London’s Royal Pageant Corridor, gave Wakeman his solely No.1 album – and a coronary heart assault into the cut price when he collapsed after a efficiency of the piece on the Crystal Palace Bowl. With attribute nonchalance, Wakeman spent his hospital-bound weeks of convalescence composing “The Last Battle” for his subsequent idea enterprise (with covert autobiographical resonances), 1975’s The Myths And Legends Of King Arthur And The Knights Of The Spherical Desk: sure, the very album that ended up being staged on ice when Wakeman cannily determined to use the rink already in situ at Wembley Enviornment. One in every of Arthur’s showpieces, “Sir Lancelot And The Black Night,” acquired a captivating afterlife when it was sampled by J Dilla on “Sum Epic Shit” (Wakeman’s materials has actually offered an everyday supply of samples through the years, for artists together with De La Soul and LL Cool J).
It’s an act of folly to suppose that one can précis a again catalogue that runs into three figures in just some phrases. It’s maybe simpler to recommend that Wakeman has dutifully catered for each nook of his fanbase within the intervening years since his industrial zenith. “Statue Of Justice,” from 1977’s Prime 30 album Prison Report, stays among the finest Rick Wakeman songs: a firestorm of intense, dramatic convolutions, whereas “The Pulse,” from 1979’s Rhapsodies, is a cold nod to the prevalent synth-pop of the day. Those that favor Wakeman’s enjoying in discreet and understated neo-classical mode are directed in the direction of “The Peregrine Falcon,” from 1993’s Heritage Suite, or “The Swans,” from 1994’s Romance Of The Victorian Age, which Wakeman recorded along with his equally virtuosic son Adam. There once more, these with a hankering for pop-oriented space-rock ought to search out “The Mission,” from 2003’s Out There, which reunites Wakeman each along with his Mellotron and his stalwart 70s accompanists, The English Rock Ensemble.
Most rewardingly, 2010’s The Residing Tree, recorded along with his erstwhile colleague, Sure vocalist Jon Anderson, is low-key, affecting, and affectionate. The likes of “Morning Star” and “Garden” are late-period highlights that lightly repudiate the dimming of the day with a timelessness that characterizes the most effective Rick Wakeman songs.
