by Rick Wakeman
As soon as the door closed and his footsteps could be heard fading down the corridor, we sprang into action. We emptied his suitcase and using a combination of sweaty towels and a breeze-block that we’d found in the venue we carefully refilled it so that it felt the same weight, zipped it up and reattached all the airline labels. Previously we’d left stuff like gigantic vibrators and 2,000 ribbed condoms on the very top of the contents of another tour manager’s case, but we were particularly proud of our creative thinking with the breeze-block. The crew were always superb at this sort of work. As mentioned before, we even went to great lengths to make sure it weighed roughly the same and then we put it back in the exact same place where he’d left it.
For safe keeping.
Halfway through the gig, Alex picked up his suitcase and headed off to the airport. He was due to return after the weekend.
Monday morning came and there was no sign of him.
Lunchtime. Still no sign of him.
So I phoned the office and asked them if they knew of his whereabouts.
‘Yes, we do, Rick. They’ve only just let him out of custody and he wants to kill you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because when he got to customs in London, they stopped him on a routine check and they asked if anyone had tampered with his case and what was in there, to which he replied, “No, I packed it myself and it’s just my personal belongings.” When they opened up his case, Rick, they found a breeze-block . . .’
‘Did they? Oh dear . . .’
‘. . . And promptly arrested him. They took the breeze-block off for forensic testing and kept him in custody the entire weekend. He never even got home. He said he will never work with you again and if he sees you in person he will kill you.’
‘Oh, so he’s not a happy bunny, then.’
There are certain things you didn’t do if you were in a touring band in the 1970s:
1) Fall asleep on an aeroplane. If you did fall asleep, then you did so knowing it was open season for your band mates. Nowadays, with all the restrictions on what you can carry on board, you couldn’t get away with this stuff, but we used to have a field day if one of the crew or band took a nap – a particular favourite was to go to the loo and fill a plastic bag with farts, regardless of how long it took (Martin Shields, our trumpet player, was excellent at this as he seemed to be able to produce methane on request – and also when not requested) then return and release said flatulence below the nose of said sleeping victim. Another top trick was to get a cup of warm water and put the sleeper’s index finger in it. For some reason, this will often cause them to wet themselves. It was sheer joy watching the wet patch appear and then waiting to see what they would do when they woke up and tried not to let anybody know what had happened.
2) Never put the slip for your breakfast order outside your room the night before. Fatal. Crew and band members would trawl up and down the corridors to see if anyone had made this mistake. Any slip that was outside a door would be heavily amended with the odd addition to the order. On one tour in Australia with our orchestra manager Bob Angles we absolutely nailed it. I actually took photographs of Bob shouting at three bewildered waiters who had brought the order on six trolleys. I can still hear him now, shouting, ‘Why on earth do you think I would want forty-six sausages? And eleven rounds of toast? And fifty rashers of bacon? I’m in a single room!’ The hotel staff had not questioned his ridiculous order because he was the orchestra manager and they presumed he must be ordering for the entire orchestra. The best part was that Bob never actually cottoned on that it was us. He’d just complain about how hotels never seemed to be able to get room service right!
3) Leave your suitcase unattended. See above. Unless you like breeze-blocks and police cells.
4) Leave your key with anyone. In America during the 1970s they had a habit of putting elevators on the outside of buildings. You always knew when there was a band in residence because the entire contents of someone’s room – someone who’d left their key with a ‘friend’ – would be put in one of the elevators. Bed, bedside table, wardrobe, mattress, clothes, television, everything.
5) Sleep in a room next door to my singer Gary Pickford-Hopkins. Why? Well, Gary was a great singer and a lovely guy, who used to play in a band called Wild Turkey. Gary was prone to sleepwalk but, bizarrely, only when he needed to urinate. Apparently this isn’t uncommon.
Nor is it uncommon for the person to have absolutely no recollection of this the next morning. My Uncle Peter’s favourite place to wee when half asleep was my Aunty Barbara’s handbag. With Gary, there would literally be a knock on your hotel door at 3 a.m. and you’d open it up to find him standing there, at which point he would undo his flies in his sleep and piss where he was standing. Sometimes he would actually come into the room, say nothing, and you had to dive for cover as in an open space he could spray it about a bit.
Which, as you can imagine, is a little odd the first time it happens.
Breeze-Block Story Number 2: My choice of builders’ materials for my tour managers came back to haunt me during one visit to Holland. I was on a short tour and press jaunt with the PR man from A&M Records, the lovely Mike Ledgerwood. We’d played a great show and then headed back to this little hotel which was right by one of the canals, all very picturesque. The band actually preferred these little hotels to the huge posh chain ones – you might think that they felt more relaxed in the intimate boutique atmosphere of a more petite building, but actually it was largely because they would allow you to drink a lot later and a lot more heavily than you were supposed to. And they’d always be happy to make you a sandwich, which was very pleasant.
This particular hotel had a very nice little courtyard out the back, next to the manager’s office, which was made of – yes, you guessed – breeze-blocks. The far wall of this courtyard was decorated with potted plants and some trellises and climbers. It was really very nicely done.
I actually took a moment to admire this wall, it was that nice.
Looking back, I should have seen it coming.
That night I went out with Mike for a few drinks. We drank till the hotel bar closed and then Mike said, ‘Where shall we go now, Rick?’
‘The only places that are going to be open this late, Mike, are in the red-light district . . .’
So off we trotted to the rather less salubrious area of town. We found a suitable ‘establishment’ and went inside. There was a really nice bar where they were very welcoming and made us feel comfortable, immediately bringing over a drinks menu. Now, these places are not where heavy drinkers tend to go, not least because the general clientele have other things on their minds but mainly because the prices are extortionate. And I mean extortionate.
We didn’t care, though, and started caning the drink. Not long after, the ‘manager’ of the establishment came over and asked us if we were ready for him to send some girls over.
‘Thank you kindly,’ I said, ‘but we aren’t here for girls . . .’
. . . At which point he looked at how close Mike and I were sitting to each other, immediately presumed we did not bat for his side, and smiled knowingly.
‘. . . But it would be very splendid if you could bring over another round. That’s all we want and you’re the only place that is open.’
‘These won’t be the cheapest drinks in town, sir. Are you sure?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
It transpired that the drinks were more expensive than the women. I didn’t mind, it was all going on the record-company expenses! And a receipt for ‘Drinks’ was going to flag up a lot less suspicion in the record-company accounts department than ‘Monica, thirty minutes’.
So we got ratted – we drank shedloads. By 4 a.m., we’d had our fill and asked for the bill, which was stonking. Suitably well oiled, we got a limo back to the hotel where I staggered up to my room for some much-needed kip. My spinning head had hardly been on the pillow for five minutes when the phone in my room rang. It was the hotel duty mana
ger, sounding very irate.
‘Mr Wakeman, I would like you to come down to the reception immediately, please.’
‘But it’s half-four, can’t we talk in the morning . . .’
‘Please, Mr Wakeman, it is important.’
When I got to reception, a bleary-eyed Mike from A&M was already there. The manager was standing next to him.
‘Come with me please, Mr Wakeman.’
Mike and I followed him out to the courtyard. At this point, I was so tired and drunk that it was all beginning to become rather surreal.
The courtyard looked somewhat different to how I remembered it the previous day. The wall wasn’t there any more and there was just a long pipe seemingly coming from nowhere with a radiator suspended in mid-air at the end of it.
‘I thought there was a wall there,’ I said.
‘There was,’ the manager replied.
He led us out of reception and into the street. The hotel was right by the canal and, sure enough, there was this breeze-block wall. While I’d been out drinking the band and crew had dismantled the wall, removing all the flowerpots and trellises, and had somehow rebuilt it brick by brick out on the bank outside the hotel and in the canal as well.
At that moment, I heard sniggering from the clouds and I turned around, looked up and there were the band and crew pissing themselves laughing from one of the windows.
They weren’t laughing, mind you, when we were all standing on the street outside the hotel with our bags at 5 a.m. The final insult was when the manager came out with an estimate for how much the damage would cost – we had a golden rule that if anyone ever did any damage they paid for it personally, it did not come out of the band fund.
When the lads heard the cost, I overheard one of them whisper . . .
‘Worth every penny!’
One consistently hilarious aspect of touring is the crew – you get to meet all sorts of weird and wonderful characters. They are first up and last to bed – boy, do they work hard, and do we, the band, reward them with respect and huge salaries?
Of course not.
Let me tell you about one of my favourite crew members, Plug the Roadie.
Whoever you put in charge of the road crew gets to pick the rest of the team. It makes sense, because they’ll most likely pick people they are happy with and know will do the job well. Later, through the second half of the 1980s, the technology advanced so much that these guys in the crew had to be supremely qualified and it was quite sad because a lot of the old-school roadies just fell by the wayside.
I don’t know what happened to Plug in the end, but I do know he was one of the loveliest guys you could wish to meet.
However, he knew as much about roadie-ing as the Pope knows about condoms. I have two cracking memories of Plug. First off, we were on tour and a chap called Big Ian was in charge of the crew – he was very exacting and has since made a big name for himself in the business, going on to be a tour manager for AC/DC and other acts of such profile. He was supremely good at his job. Just to neatly contradict myself, though, Ian had inherited Plug, rather than chosen him. Plug, bless him, could sometimes be a little bit clumsy.
I was walking across the stage at Newcastle City Hall one night, talking to Ian about some technical issue . . .
‘So, Rick, one option you’ve got here is . . .’
. . . When a mike stand came hurtling up from the floor area below the front of the stage and hit Ian on the head. Big Ian did not bat an eyelid and just carried on talking to me as if it had never happened . . .
‘. . . Or alternatively you could do this . . .’
. . . And as he spoke, he bent down on his left-hand side and seemingly without looking plucked Plug up by his collar. He didn’t look at him once, so poor old Plug was just hanging there like a pheasant strung up in a cellar . . .
‘. . . It’s up to you, Rick,’ continued Big Ian. ‘Er, Rick, please excuse me a moment,’ and with that he thumped Plug on the head with his free hand and then dropped him back off the stage.
Then he turned back to me and carried on talking.
As we walked off stage right, a little voice could be heard coming from down by the photographers’ pit . . .
‘Sorry, Ian.’
The other wonderful memory I have of Plug is of him during a huge arena tour with Yes. We were working with a very clever man called Michael Tait, a brilliant Australian who had designed some of the greatest lighting rigs in the world. He had to survey the crew as they scurried around these arenas setting up these immensely complicated lighting rigs, like a general watching over his army. You were talking here about eighty crew and an eight-hour build – it was serious stuff. The crews worked eight hours on, eight hours off and all the crews were colour-coded, such as black T-shirts for stage, yellow for lighting, red for sound and so on, as it was such a big operation. Michael would sit perched high up somewhere for the best vantage point and, every now and then, he would shout down instructions and orders, coordinating this massive effort.
It was from his seat with the gods that Michael delivered one of my favourite one-liners of all time. ‘Steve, those mikes are too close to the PA; they’ll feed back . . . Paul, have we got some more spots for the drums? . . . Geoff, Geoff, can we run a test on that guitar? . . . and Plug . . . whatever you are doing, it’s wrong.’
One of the things I always did, and still do, before a tour started was take the band and crew out for dinner. For my 1984 tour, when we were all done rehearsing we headed for the Warwick in Maida Vale where some fairly heavy drinking ensued.
I’d love to know the connection between drinking too much and that neon sign in your head that says ‘MUST EAT CURRY’. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Well, that was what happened, so all twenty or so of us went off to this Indian restaurant round the corner. They very kindly pushed all the tables together, even though you could see they were more than a little apprehensive about what we might get up to.
The waiter came over and asked if we were ready to order.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘To start with we’ll have two hundred poppadums, please.’
They brought these poppadums in on God knows how many plates – it was like Record Breakers with Roy Castle or something, it was hilarious – and put these teetering piles of crockery on the table. Then they retired quickly to avoid having to take the actual main-course order.
‘How are we going to break these up, lads?’ someone piped up.
The next thing I knew, Ashley stood on the table, dropped his trousers and whacked his old chap on one of the piles of poppadums, sending bits flying everywhere and causing absolute uproar.
Within seconds we were all down to our underpants.
The police were very good about it.
‘The restaurant owner wants you to pay for the damage.’
‘What damage?’
I thought the only damage might have been if Ashley had scratched his old chap, but I decided it was best not to mention that to the policeman.
Life on the road.
Good times.
‘HAVE I DONE SOMETHING WRONG HERE, GENTLEMEN?’
Eastern European composers are absolutely my favourites. The greats, such as Prokofiev in particular, have always held a fascination for me. It wasn’t just their Eastern European composers’ incredible music, either: their own stories were compelling too. Take Chopin. After he died, his heart was cut out at his own request because of his fear of being buried alive. It was then taken back in an urn to Poland by his sister and placed in a pillar of the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw. So they say that although Chopin died in France, his heart will always be in Poland.
Which is rather lovely.
Although not the bit about cutting his heart out, obviously.
So you can imagine how delighted I was when I was invited to Poland to work with Janusz Olejniczak, one of the country’s finest pianists. The Frederick Chopin International Piano Competition is one of the oldest piano competitions in the world. It started in
1927 and has been held every five years since 1955. The competition attracts the very finest pianists from around the world. It really is a magnet for the absolute elite players. For someone like me, those competitions couldn’t really be any more amazing. So to be asked to work alongside a winner of this prestigious competition was a dream come true.
Some context is needed here. This was 1982, before the Wall came down and certainly before the Eastern Bloc had opened up to the West. The height of Polish problems, in many respects. Cracks were showing, however, and young people in Poland were starting to get hold of Western press reports, the occasional smuggled vinyl disc or articles of the latest fashions. Although this was pre-Internet, communication was nevertheless improving at such a rate that it was getting less and less easy to maintain state control. In a vain bid to satisfy this exploding interest in all things Western, the Polish government came up with various hare-brained schemes, one of which was to get a Western pianist to play alongside a famed Polish musician to produce classical music with an electronic overtone.
Which was where I came in.
I was approached by an agent called Rod Weinberg who said my name had come up in conversation for this very task and would I be interested? I couldn’t say ‘Yes’ quick enough. The main reason I seemed to fit the bill was because although I had enjoyed commercial success in a ‘Western’ rock band I’d also had a full classical training culminating in two years at the Royal College of Music and had worked with major orchestras around the world.
So in the cold winter of 1982 I found myself on a plane to Warsaw. My first impression was it was bloody freezing! I can still feel the cold in my bones now. I quickly scurried into the shelter of the main airport terminal where the temperature gauge registered minus 25 degrees, and joined the back of the queue for customs.
Two hours later, I got to the front of the queue.
You had to list everything you had with you, everything in your case, even everything you were wearing, down to buttons missing and so on. It was insane. And all this after I’d been invited to go there.
