Grumpy Rick is no Scrooge at Christmas
It’s the most wonderful time of the year for Rick Wakeman, despite the title of his festive show.
RICK Wakeman will be regaling audiences with spellbinding piano music and hilarious stories in his Grumpy Old Christmas Show. From his days as a session musician (and working with David Bowie early in his career), through folk-rock band The Strawbs and world-wide acclaim as a member of prog pioneers Yes, raconteur Rick has a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of stories and anecdotes.
Rick was delighted with his recent ‘Grumpy’ tour of North America. “It was 100 times better than I thought it could be,” he says smiling. “It’s been so successful that we’re booking in another 30 dates for next year. Considering that no-one over there knew how the one-man shows worked, it was amazing.”
Rick made British chart history in 2017 when his Piano Portraits album became the first solo piano instrumental album to enter the UK Top 10 immediately upon release
– a feat he repeated in 2018 with Piano Odyssey. His new album, Christmas Portraits, could well make it as hat-trick.
The new album features familiar festive music, all personally chosen and arranged by Rick, including The First Noel, A Winter’s Tale, In The Bleak Midwinter and Silent Night.
“Christmas is my absolute favourite time of year,” Rick says. “I love every aspect of it, especially traditional music and songs which have wonderfully simplistic melodies that are perfect for adaptation. That is something I love to do and that is exactly what this album is.”
But how did it come about? “After Piano Portraits, Sony asked me for a meeting and they said ‘we like the way you do variations on tunes people know and we thought it would be good if you did the same for Christmas songs’. Well, I thought it could work, but I had to give it the same thought as I did with Portraits.
“I returned to Sony and said that I would do it, but it needed a gap after Piano Portraits, and the pieces needed some strings – and I did Piano Odyssey in the interim.”
He continues: “Earlier this year I made a note of 42 pieces of Christmas music then played around with them at the piano for a couple of weeks. I realised that some didn’t work and I whittled the list down to 23 and then I started work with my engineer Erik Jordan.
‘‘Some were finished at about one minute 30 seconds and I thought that it was another Morning Has Broken scenario.”
Rick’s fans will know that when he recorded the single Morning Has Broken with Cat Stevens the song was under a minute long, so he added an intro, middle-eight and outro to stretch the song out.
“What we did was combine two and sometimes three songs into one, so The Holly and the Ivy is combined with Mary’s Boy Child and I Saw Three Ships is combined with When a Child is Born.
“It’s an album that’s different from other Christmas albums – you can play it anywhere. I’m really thrilled with it.”
Rick found The Granary in Norfolk a great place to record.
“They have the Steinway Model D Grand Piano, which is my favourite piano of all time. As such, the sessions were never tiring. We generally worked from ten till five, although Erik would stay to listen to what we had done, and the next day might have some suggestions.”
And as for the tour, Rick is promising us lots of music and stories.
“There will probably be more music than chat this time around and maybe 50 per cent of the music will be Christmas stuff. As usual there’ll be certain pieces I have to do such as Life On Mars.”
Some of the stories he’ll tell will be in Rick’s third book of Stories of a Grumpy Old Rock Star that he is working on and should see the light of day before the end of 2021.
And is Rick looking forward to the tour? “It’s a simple choice,” he says laughing, “Christmas concerts or traipsing round the shops – no contest, really!”
●●Rick Wakeman will be bringing The Grumpy Old Christmas Show to Town Hall, Birmingham, on Monday, December 9, and Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, on Saturday, December 21.