Further Adventures of a Grumpy Old Rock Star

SIGNINGS

LET ME TELL you about Bob Flett and his wooden leg. Life out on the road in a rock ’n’ roll band is full of practical jokes. When I do my one-man show it’s a fairly modest affair with only four crew but they love to play tricks on me. Often, when I arrive at a dressing room, there’s always a few letters and mementoes to sign; one of the crew’s favourite tricks is occasionally to write a fake fan letter. These are always very easy to spot because they’re invariably ridiculous. One particular night we were at the Theatre Clwydd in Mold and I was sitting on my own in the dressing room opening a few of these letters. One of them was from a certain Mrs Flett.

Dear Mr Wakeman,

I thought you’d like to know how much your music has played a part in the lives of my husband and I. Bob had a very bad sporting accident many, many years ago and has suffered great pain with his leg ever since. So much so that for some time now he has been desperate to have his leg amputated . . .

Oh, this is good, this is one of the crew’s best-ever letters . . .

By now I’m howling, this is definitely their funniest one yet . . .

Bob chose various songs from The Aspirant Series and specifically highlighted one particular piece because it was ideal for the exact moment when his leg came off . . . so we look forward to hopefully meeting you afterwards, where Bob can show you some of the artificial legs he’s had the design of your album covers painted on.

This was genius. I stood up and went out to the backstage area to find the crew and congratulate them on their creative writing. My tour manager at the time was Mike Holden so I found him and said, ‘Nice one, Mike, this is an absolute cracker!’

‘What is, Rick?’

‘You know, this letter about Bob Flett and his leg . . .’

‘Not me, Rick – I’d love to take the credit if it’s that good but it isn’t me. Besides, it’s not my handwriting.’

‘Well, who was it? Doom? Ian? It can’t be Malcolm because there are words with more than three syllables . . .’

I went out to the front of house and Doom was soundchecking the keyboards.

‘Great letter, Doom, really made me laugh.’

‘What letter’s that, Rick?’

‘Rick, you’re not gonna believe this but there’s a bloke outside says he’s called Bob Flett and he’d love to meet you after the show.’

Admiring his persistence, I played along some more and said, ‘Yes, of course there is, Mike, and I’d love to meet him. Just the one leg is it?’

Anyway, the show finished and I went out to meet a few fans. Then Mike took me to one side and walked us over to a couple.

‘Rick, I’d like you to meet Bob Flett.’

He was for real. There, standing in front of me, was a man who’d had his leg cut off to my music. Put yourself in my shoes (or, in his case, shoe). What do I say?

All I could think of was ‘Hello’, but Bob, bless him, was absolutely lovely. He immediately started telling me all about his leg, while I stood there in this theatre in north Wales thinking I’d just entered the Twilight Zone . . .

‘Oh, Rick, it’s so nice to meet you in person. I can’t tell you how much of a relief it was to have my leg off. It was fantastic. I was in so much pain, I can’t tell you. And the actual moment it came off was brilliant, Rick, they were playing your music just like I’d asked and I could almost feel the leg when it fell on the floor. One of the nurses almost fainted but I was ecstatic – it was gone, clean off. No more pain, Rick!’

I had to ask the question.

‘That’s great, Bob. And that bit in your letter about the album covers . . .?’

Without being asked, Bob proceeded to roll up his trouser to reveal a full artificial leg, festooned with artwork from Journey To The Centre of the Earth.

And, yes, I did sign it.

Signings are a very important part of a musician’s life. Some bands love them, others consider it a waste of valuable drinking time. Well organised they are great. You get to meet the real fans, many of whom have become friends. Badly organised, which basically means being told at the last minute, is a curse. Of course, like many bands, Yes were not immune to such last-minute curses.

The best of the ‘Curse of the Signings’ was at the now-defunct Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles some time around 2002. I don’t think anyone had told Chris (Squire), our bass player we were doing a signing so he had been out for a very long liquid lunch. We all arrived and Paul Silveira, our tour manager said, ‘We have a little bit of a problem, Chris is here, but he’s basically paralytic.’

It wasn’t his fault – no one had told him about the signing – but the fact was that he was barely able to stand, never mind sign anything. We tried coffee and water but all to no avail. He was very jovial though and I tried to help out by giving him a hair of the dog in the form of a nice bottle of Chablis. The Chablis went down very well, and Chris went down very shortly after it.

‘Not a great idea, Rick,’ one of the band said to me.

We eventually had to start so we went down the stairs into the main part of the store to find about 1,500 people queuing round the block to see us. We sat Chris down and he immediately put his head on the table top and went to sleep. Nothing would rouse him. So we started the signing but people seemed totally oblivious to the snoring and were actually trying to get him to sign their albums.

‘Chris, Chris, it’s so cool to meet you, could you sign this for me, please?’

I did have a great deal of sympathy because in my drinking days I had regularly found myself in a similar situation to that in which Chris now found himself.

The best moment, however, was reserved for when Chris woke up.

He had absolutely no idea where he was or why there were 1,500 people queuing in a line and parading past him. Not a problem, he simply put his head back on the table and started snoring again.

Around 2003 we had a phase of signing tits. I don’t know where that came from (the phase, not the tits); it was all very bizarre and very ‘un-Yes-like’. Needless to say, it did not go down well with the wives and girlfriends.

It all started off somewhere down in California after we’d played an open-air show as part of a big festival. We were all seated on this small stage and the fans came up and had a quick chat, then we signed a few album sleeves and whatnot. Then a somewhat buxom girl stood opposite Jon, who very politely said, ‘But you haven’t got anything to sign . . .?’

She promptly lifted up her T-shirt to reveal a rather large pair of breasts and said, as cool as you like, ‘Sign these!’ I wasn’t married at the time so I found it all most amusing and couldn’t wait to sign. We all signed them, even Steve, although his writing was a little bit shaky. Within minutes, the word had spread and every fourth or fifth woman was hoiking her top up for us to sign her breasts. Chris was probably the most imaginative as he found a way of writing Chris Squire over both breasts and at the same time being able to not have to dot the ‘i’ in either his forename or surname by using the nipples. An absolute work of art.

Here’s hoping it doesn’t kick off, then, I thought to myself.

I looked along the line and there were a couple of hundred people in the line but nobody I recognised. Quite close to the front were what appeared to be a mother and daughter and directly behind them a pair of very elderly ladies looking quite bemused. They must be Countdowners, I can remember thinking. I made a mental note to have a nice little chat with them when they reached the front of the queue.

Eventually the very attractive mother and daughter reached the desk. The mum was in her late thirties and her daughter was probably in her late teens. When they got to the front, the mum looked a little sheepish and so I spoke first to the daughter.

‘How old are you?’ I asked.

‘Nineteen,’ she replied.

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have thought my sort of music was your cup of tea . . .’

‘Oh, I mainly like Live At Jongleurs, to be honest,’ she said, ‘but actually I did enjoy the concert. I came mainly for Mum, you see.’ Then she turned to her mum and whispered, ‘Go on, Mum, ask him.’

‘I don’t want to,’ she said.

‘Go on, Mum, ask him,’ she insisted.

‘No, I don’t want to.’

‘Well, if you won’t,’ the daughter said, ‘then I will.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you met my mum about twenty years ago at one of your rock concerts.’

It became very quiet in the queue and I went a considerably whiter shade of pale.

‘No! Nothing like that,’ she laughed.

The queue laughed uproariously.

I laughed somewhat nervously.

The daughter then explained to me that at the concert twenty years ago, I’d signed a pair of her mum’s knickers and she carried on by saying ‘Mum wondered if you’d sign another pair for old time’s sake.’

A little chuckle went down the line and I laughed myself; it was all very friendly and good fun.

‘Yes, of course!’ I said.

The mum undid her handbag and took out a felt-tip pen. I then waited for her to take out a pair of knickers, but no . . . she stood up, promptly undid her belt, unzipped her jeans and dropped them to her ankles, revealing the skimpiest of thongs. Although my hand was shaking a little, I did the best I could and signed my name slowly and methodically. It was not an easy task to accomplish and it took me ages to write my middle name – Christopher!

It was now very quiet in the queue, but the silence was broken by one of the elderly ladies who were next in the queue, turning to her friend and saying, ‘Oh dear, Ethel, we don’t have to do that, do we?’

Thankfully, they didn’t.

‘Young man, I’ve very much enjoyed your concert tonight.’

‘Well, thank you very much, thank you for coming along.’

‘I had no idea you played the piano. You’re really quite good.’

‘Well, thank you very much – I have been playing for a while now.’

‘Oh, splendid, well done, you are a talented young man. Have you made any discs?’

‘Yes. One hundred and thirty-six.’

Seemingly impressed, she turned to go. But then she looked back at me and said, ‘Have you sold all of them yet?’

It’s not just knickers or breasts that you get asked to autograph. It can be even more glamorous and rock ’n’ roll. Like signing keyboard manuals. Because some of my music is reasonably complex and obviously in the 1970s I was renowned for having pretty state-of-the-art technology on the road, the assumption is made by a certain type of fan that I have some deep passion for the technical side of music. To be honest, I don’t really; I have a passing interest because it can help you write and perform better music sometimes, but I’m not a technical person – I just play the piano and keyboards.

A typical signing conversation with one of these techie fans goes something like this:

‘Hello, Rick, nice to meet you. Can you sign this, please? It’s the ultra-rare manual for the 1971 deleted classic synth, The Bumble Bluebottle Mark 2 – do you know it?’

‘Er . . .’

‘You know, the analogue module with the calibrated capacitors?’

‘Oh, yes, that one, very good . . .’

‘Well, what do you think of it?’

‘A superb machine for its time’

And off they go, straight on to eBay no doubt, to buy up some old relic because I had basically endorsed it as the finest rare synth ever built.

Apparently.

Those of you who bought my first collection of stories, Grumpy Old Rock Star (still available from all good bookshops, and the odd crappy one too, I suspect), may have even had the misfortune to come and hear me tell some of the stories on the promotional tour I did. I loved doing the literary festivals and found the bookshop events were all highly entertaining. One of my favourites was probably the one in Ely. A lovely man called Robert Topping runs a few bookshops and he is always a pleasure to work with, plus I love his store. (Once I’d finished the tour, I realised I’d spent a fortune on buying other books while waiting to do my own book signings.)

I couldn’t see a table in Robert’s store but he explained that the signing wasn’t going to be in the bookshop itself. I was quite pleased, because I was essentially doing a bit of stand-up and, although my routine isn’t exactly full of effin’ and blindin’, there are quite a few stories that you wouldn’t necessarily want your grandmother or any passing child to overhear.

Robert also explained that he’d had to find a bigger venue because the demand for tickets had been huge. ‘This is largely due to Ian Rankin,’ he explained, ‘who did a reading here a couple of weeks ago and told the audience not to miss your evening under any circumstances. Tickets then went like wildfire and we needed to find a bigger place.’

‘Great. Where did you book?’

‘The Catholic church.’

‘You haven’t heard me speak before, have you?’ I retorted, not a little concerned.

Great.

We walked round the corner to the Catholic church and sure enough, there was the priest sitting in the front row. On the journey over, I’d been thinking through all my stories, trying to work out in advance what I could and couldn’t say. Within minutes, I’d realised that I couldn’t really do about 95 per cent of my material in front of a priest. So, in the face of certain humiliation, I decided to throw caution to the wind and just do the best I could under the circumstances. I strode up to the pulpit, said hello and then for reasons still unbeknown to myself, launched into a completely different opening gambit to my usual beginning.

‘I’m actually a Baptist, but I have been in a Catholic church before, you know,’ I started, looking across at the priest. ‘Yes, I went in for confession. I stepped into the confession box and the old curtain went back and I said, “Forgive me father for I have sinned.”

‘“Confess your sins, my son,” came the retort from the other side of the confessional box.

‘“Last week I had a wild orgy, lasting four days, with seventeen virgins which included the use of handcuffs, whips and vast amounts of melted chocolate.”’

(Cue a few uncomfortable shufflings in the church pews.)

‘There was a short pause and then the voice on the other side of the confessional said, “I know that voice. You’re Rick Wakeman. But you’re not a Catholic, you’re a Baptist, so why are you telling me this?”

‘To which I replied, “I’m telling everyone!”’

You never know how many people are going to turn up at a signing. When I was promoting an album called Silent Nights I had several signings to do and it was, to be fair, a mixed bag. On one particular day I had two stores to do, the first one in Birmingham and then I was due to race down the M1 for a signing in High Wycombe. The one at the HMV store in Birmingham was fantastic: there were about twelve hundred people and an absolutely massive queue.

The second signing of the day in High Wycombe had, by way of neat contrast, no queue at all. In fact, no people at all. A grand total of zero. A real first. Not one solitary person turned up. It was in Woolworths and they’d made a really big effort, there was a huge table with a lovely red carpet in front of it, there were towering piles of albums ready for me to sign, posters, iced water, there’d been adverts on local radio – it was all perfect.

Apart from the fact that no one had come.

I’d actually phoned my record company on the way down the motorway to ask how many they were expecting in High Wycombe but they’d been evasive and said they couldn’t really tell. Sometimes, if the prospects for a signing are looking bleak, record companies might get a ‘Rent-a-Crowd’ in. If you are not a rich record company, then you’ll basically get all the shop’s staff to go along at lunchtime to queue up and do exactly the same thing. As the artist, you’ll eventually end up recognising these ‘fans’ in the queue; I’ve even become quite chatty with some of them, none of whom were remotely interested in my music.

I’d been a little bit ahead of schedule for High Wycombe so I took the manager to one side and said, ‘Maybe I’m too early – perhaps you’re expecting a late rush?’

‘Er, no, we aren’t.’

‘Probably not, no. Most folk round here just go straight home.’

Great.

‘Right,’ I said, trying to remain positive, ‘how do you normally do with signings?’

‘Not very good, really – pretty awful, in fact. I’m not sure people round here really like ’em.’

In the face of adversity, I refused to give in. ‘I tell you what,’ I suggested, ‘I’ll go and sit at the table anyway, and let’s see what happens. You never know, there might be a mad rush in a minute.’

‘I doubt it,’ the manager said forlornly.

So I went and sat on my own in the middle of the High Wycombe branch of Woolworths, with a long, empty red carpet in front of me and about two hundred unsold albums behind me. The manager put the record on the shop’s tannoy but it didn’t even fall on deaf ears of any kind because there weren’t any ears in the shop.

Then I saw a middle-aged lady making a beeline for me. She stopped halfway across the store to look at my poster, then continued heading towards me. A punter at last! Normally, a turnout of one would have been a catastrophe, obviously, but somehow, refusing to be beaten and taking my seat at the long table of loneliness regardless of the colossal odds stacked against me, her approach felt like a victory, a vindication of my spirit, a pat on the back for the good old British bulldog.

With possibly my biggest-ever smile and my unused felt-tip pen quivering at the ready, I said hello to this woman as she reached the table.

‘Oh, hello, dear,’ she replied. ‘I wonder, can you tell me where the baby clothes are, please?’

I didn’t know where the baby department was, so I got up and went to find the manager. He didn’t offer to come over and help her, so I trudged back, took my seat in front of the non-existent queue of non-existent fans and said, ‘It’s up the back.’

‘You’re welcome.’