UNCOMMON MAN

1944-2016

t may be that even his death, by his own hand, expressed Keith Emerson’s total immersion in music. His long-time girlfriend, Mari Kawaguchi, who found his body at their Santa Monica apartment, told a Daily Mail reporter he was “a sensitive soul” tormented with worry about planned farewell concerts in Japan because worsening nerve damage to his right hand and arm – he’d had surgery in 1993 – might prevent him meeting his own “perfectionist” standards. She added that derogatory comments on social media following his final concert last year at London’s Barbican in July had hit him hard. Although Emerson generally seemed a light-hearted interviewee, this echoes past hints that, intermittently, he’d suffered to the core the artist-performer’s exposed vulnerabilities. When he composed his Piano Concerto No. 1 (Works Volume 1, 1977) he admitted partial motivation from rock critics carping that he adapted classical pieces because he couldn’t write his own; he wanted to prove himself, he said – “Look, I’m a composer!” And when this writer interviewed him in 1991, amid fond reminiscences, he said: “We did get a hammering. They said we were doing it just from a ‘How clever I am!’ point of view. But we never did.” Instead, he insisted that ELP, a prog-rock band routinely dubbed “pretentious”, stood for their own kind of musical honesty: “Whereas a lot of bands from our generation developed their style from black blues bands, I think you can see that we’ve stuck to our heritage, what we really know, not pretended to be something we’re not.” But that argument didn’t give his wildly eclectic musical scope due credit. An evacuee war baby born in Todmorden, Yorkshire, he then grew up in Goring, Sussex, son of a telephone engineer cum amateur pianist who encouraged him to explore. So he bounded from show-biz joanna merchants like Joe Henderson and Russ Conway, to diverse jazz pianists André Previn, George Shearing and Keith Jarrett and Hammond organists Jack McDuff and Jimmy Smith, to Nashville’s Floyd

ICramer, to Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard… all the while reckoning himself “a serious child who used to walk around with Beethoven sonatas under my arm”. Barely touched by formal training, he graduated from the Worthing Youth Swing Orchestra to joining Gary Farr And The T-Bones and The V.I.P.s (1966-67) on the R&B circuit before forming a backing band for formerIkette-gone-solo P.P. Arnold. They turned into The Nice (1967-70): Emerson plus bassist/singer Lee Jackson and drummer Brian Davison. They gigged non-stop and recorded four albums, as Emerson developed the rumbustious musical and performance elements he brought to ELP. He rocked Bach, Bartók and Copland. He hauled his 350-pound Hammond up on one corner and spun it like a top, and stabbed it with two Hitler Youth knives (presented to him by roadie Lemmy Kilmister), producing wondrous new noises and much hilarity (the flying piano did come later). He heard Walter/ Wendy Carlos’s groundbreaking Moog synthesizer album Switched-On Bach (1968), loved it, bought one as soon as he could afford it and worked with its inventor, Bob, on constant improvements. Urged to write his own material by manager Andrew Loog Oldham, as per Jagger and Richards, he came up with The Five Bridges Suite (Five Bridges, 1970). By which time he’d already realised he needed the greater oomph of King Crimson bassist/singer Greg Lake and Atomic Rooster drummer Carl Palmer, and started ELP. After one warm-up gig, they debuted at the Isle Of Wight Festival, Saturday, August 29, 1970, alongside The Who and Miles Davis. Concluding their unbridled version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition, they fired two cannons Emerson had picked up “on the Kings Road” (so he told me) which leapt in the air and threatened to demolish the stage. Some debut. Through to 1978 they released seven studio albums – the damp squib Love Beach emerged after they’d split – and two lives, which probably portrayed them best, dynamics to dynamite: Pictures At An Exhibition (1971) and Welcome Back, My Friends, To The Show That Never Ends… Ladies And Gentlemen, Emerson, Lake & Palmer (1974). Five of them hit both the UK Top 10 and US Top 20. Throughout, Emerson careered from genre to genre, often crashcutting from classical grandeur to jazz heat or his own radical discordant escapades for dramatic effect… or for a laugh. Throughout, he broke ribs, broke his nose, ripped fingernails off, burnt or stabbed sundry body parts and came up smiling along with his fans. Once in Brighton the Tarkus armadillo-tank thing (don’t know? don’t ask) filled his piano with bits of polystyrene snow and on came the road crew armed with rock’n’roll dustpans and brushes. “The audience loved it,” Emerson told me, “they sat there fascinated as the road crew took the whole action of the piano out, hoovered it on both sides, reassembled it and I came back and did my solo.” Such was the joy of being Keith Emerson. His final extravaganza – insisting on a 70-piece orchestra for ELP’s 1977 American tour – may have sunk the band fiscally, but they went down all guns blazing. And no doubt he relished most of his post-megastar ventures in movie soundtracks, supergroups, solo and orchestral albums and gigs, autobiography (Pictures Of An Exhibitionist, 2003) and reunions with both The Nice (2002) and ELP (1991-98; they last played together at the High Voltage Festival, London, July 25, 2010). Emerson is survived by Mari Kawaguchi, his former wife Elinor, and their two sons, Aaron and Damon. Phil Sutcliffe

Sensitive soul, joy-bringing exhibitionist and keyboard maestro Keith Emerson died on March 10.