I’M NOT A big fan of birthday parties. The reason I don’t like birthdays is nothing to do with getting one year older, it’s more the fact that I don’t like there being one less birthday in your life. Plus, I’ve never really seen that many birthday parties go to plan. It’s quite nice on tour because the crowd sometimes sing ‘Happy Birthday’ but otherwise, I’m not really a fan.
I only ever had one party when I was a kid and that was for my tenth birthday. To be honest, I think a lot of that was down to finance – in my younger days my parents had very little. However, when I was ten I was allowed eight friends over from school for a birthday party. We ate the usual jelly and sandwiches and cake but then it started to get a little bit out of hand. When my father arrived home from work, he reached the front gate at exactly the same time as Barry Sayers – with a dart stuck in the back of his head – was being led by two medics towards a waiting ambulance. I heard Mum in the kitchen in a terrible state, phoning Barry’s mother and trying to explain why her little boy was having a dart pulled out of his head. I also remember her saying to my father, ‘That’s the last time Richard has a party here.’
And it was.
To be fair, there was great kudos waiting for me when I got to school the next day. ‘Did you hear about Wakey’s party? Barry Sayers got hit by a dart that went straight through his brain.’
Even for my twenty-first, I wasn’t fussed, so I just went down to the Apollo pub in West Harrow and had a ploughman’s and a pint with my good friend Dan Wooding.
However, there was one birthday celebration of mine that was extremely memorable, although I wasn’t the central figure in what happened.
It was 1976 and I’d released a record called No Earthly Connection, which I then took out on the road. It was a stellar band, which included amongst others Tony Fernandez (The Greasy Wop) on drums, Roger Newell on bass, Martin Shields on trumpet and the great Ashley Holt on vocals. Amongst the remaining musicians was one particular gentleman whom I will give a pseudonym to for the purpose of relating the events of this particular evening and call him Roger Rivers.
Roger was somewhat older than the rest of the band and did his level best to keep us on the straight and narrow. We were all in our twenties but Roger was in his late thirties. He was a great musician and was known on tour as ‘Dad’ because he always used to say, ‘Come on, come on, lads, early start in the morning. Off to bed.’ We loved Roger to bits – he was a lovely man.
Roger had had quite a tough time. His first wife suffered from a very serious illness that sadly eventually took her life. We had an awful lot of admiration for Roger both as a person and as a musician and greatly admired how he’d kept going through what must have been terrible times.
In 1976 Roger was not in any relationship. We arrived in Hamburg as part of the German leg of the tour and it was my birthday. We were signed to Ariola Records over there, quite a big label. They wanted to take us out on the town and Hamburg is . . . well, let’s just say Hamburg can be an interesting city to visit!
The record executives took us to one of the famous Hamburg clubs in the red-light district. Those of you who know about my visit to a red-light club in Holland (It’s in Grumpy Old Rock Star – if your local store’s sold out, maybe you could try Amazon) will also know these places tend to be very expensive if all you are actually after is a drink. There were women gyrating about the place and I seem to recall someone was doing something with a snake and a cucumber, but we were just after the booze. The English Rock Ensemble were notorious drinkers, as by now I’m sure you well know, and so when the Ariola bosses said the drinks were on them all night – we couldn’t believe our luck.
‘It’s Rick’s birthday! Champagne!’
As we were quaffing this bubbly, numerous voluptuous women were coming round offering various services but we were just interested in getting rat-arsed. That’s what my band did. We never really had groupies as such, it was a drinking man’s band. We were not pretty boys either so tended to attract the synthesiser brigade. No knickers thrown onto our stages, just synthesiser manuals! The type of music we played didn’t really attract women either. Prog bands are notorious for 95 per cent male audiences and anyway we just wanted to get pissed. To be honest, if we were given the choice of either having some woman draping herself over us or playing darts with a pint, I think it would have been the latter every time. In fact I know it would, but maybe after the darts match was over . . .
While we were drinking this champagne chased down with extremely large Scotches there were a variety of acts on the small stage, all pretty soft titillation really. Then the record-company man pointed out that if you went into a cubicle to watch a sex show it was one price, but if you were willing to take part it was free. None of us were bothered and thought it was all an unwelcome distraction from bankrupting his record label with an appallingly expensive champagne bill. (I believe the final tally was over four thousand pounds – remember this was 1976.)
So we merrily carried on sinking bottle after bottle of bubbly when suddenly there was an announcement in German and then in English: ‘Ladies and gentleman, we have a guest who wishes to perform for you with Marlene.’
This was just about enough for us to look up from our drinks in expectation of something memorable.
It was memorable all right, but not for the reasons we were thinking.
‘Ladies and gentleman, all the way from England . . .’ at which point ‘God Save The Queen’ came blaring through the sound system. All eyes were glued to the small stage as the curtains opened . . .
. . . And there was Roger, half-naked, with this busty Marlene sitting on top of him, gyrating and making erotic gestures. The stage set was decked out like a 1930’s sitting room.
Roger could obviously see over the top of her gyrating body and at first looked stunned to see so many eyes staring at him! He looked across at all of us and these immortal words, that have since become legendary in the rock ’n’ roll world, left his lips.
‘Bloody hell, Marlene, what are all this people doing in my living room?’
We all stood up and cheered and the standing ovation lasted for a good five minutes.
It was priceless – we couldn’t believe our eyes. Roger told us later that he’d gone into a cubicle by mistake thinking it was the loo and this woman had basically dragged him out and onto this settee behind a curtain. He thought, Why not? Then next thing he knew he was on a stage and we were all looking and howling over our drinks. Roger became a hero after that for quite some time. So that was one of my favourite birthday parties – good old Roger.
I have one last comment to make about birthdays. I made a decision some time ago when I was fifty-nine that when my sixtieth birthday arrived, I wouldn’t be sixty, but start working backwards. In other words I would be fifty-eight again and the next year fifty-seven and so on.
I eventually reached this milestone and realised that if I went backwards I wouldn’t get my heating allowance, free bus pass and free prescriptions, so I scrapped that idea.
I might not like birthdays, but I’ve experienced an unusually large number of incidents to do with births. For example, whenever I see an empty seat at a concert – which fortunately isn’t very often – I think of Lancaster. There is a wonderful little theatre there called The Grand that is the third-oldest in the country, having first opened in 1782. The locals had raised all sorts of money to keep it open and had somehow managed to take over running it to keep it alive; however, they were always desperate for new funds and I’m always keen to support community theatre and have been a patron of several such places over the years. At the time, I only lived over the water on the Isle of Man so I happily agreed to play a charity show for them with my acoustic guitarist at the time, David Paton.
The stage was incredibly small, but the auditorium itself was a beautiful, ornate room. There was only enough room for two keyboards, David on a stool, and a very small PA but I didn’t mind at all: I was eager to play the show and help out. So I was particularly pleased to find out before the show that they could have sold the theatre out ten times over due to demand.
However, when I walked on to the stage and started chatting with the crowd I noticed there was one empty seat. As I said, it was a very small auditorium so it stuck out like a sore thumb and I was obviously a little perplexed as they had a waiting list as long as your arm for any cancellations. So in the interval I asked the theatre manager about the empty seat.
‘Ah, yes, well, all the seats were full, Rick, but just before the show started, we had a phone call saying that the wife of a gentleman in the audience had just gone into labour, that she’d been was rushed to hospital and he needed to go to her immediately.’
‘Fair enough,’ I replied, ‘although it’d be really good if you could fill the seat for the second half – it just looks a bit odd.’
‘Of course, Rick, we’ll see what we can do.’
I trotted out for the second half and, sure enough, there was a man sitting in the previously empty seat. I did the show and afterwards there was a knock at my door from the theatre manager saying there was someone who wanted to meet me.
‘It’s the gentleman whose wife went into labour, Rick . . .’
‘Oh, really? Has he just missed the end?’
‘No, Rick, he was here for the whole of the second half.’
I thought, Blimey, that’s a bit quick, so I invited him in. He was a very dour, very big Lancastrian. He shook my hand very firmly and said, ‘Rick, pleasure to meet thee. I’ve always wanted to meet you and see you play live, especially in such an intimate theatre.’
‘Well, that’s really very kind of you, I’m really glad you enjoyed the second half. I hear your wife went into labour. Is everything okay?’
‘Yes, fine. But I have to say she’s a right inconsiderate cow.’
‘Er, pardon?’
‘Absolute total inconsiderate cow. She’s not due for another two weeks and she knew how much I wanted to come to this concert. She can’t stand you – she only likes something to dance to and I’m not a dancer and she said you’ve got to be epileptic to dance to Rick Wakeman’s stuff. Plus she couldn’t go anywhere because she’s too fat, so I was coming here on my own, it was going to be a lovely night. I’m here one minute before you go on and the inconsiderate cow goes into labour. I cannot believe it. I’m convinced she’s bloody done it deliberately.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I went along to the hospital and she was in labour and I said, “Now look, you’ve got forty-five minutes to give birth. That gives me fifteen minutes to get back and see the second half.”
‘Impossible.’
‘Not when you’re in a hurry. She had a little girl.’
‘Lovely.’
‘Yeah, lovely. I’m proud of them both and love them both to bits. It’s just her rotten timing, I suppose. Anyway, listen, Rick, what did I miss in the first half?’
I told him what I’d played and said that as I’d got more shows coming up quite locally, he should come along with his wife as my personal guest.
‘That’s really very kind of you, Rick,’ he replied and off he went.
About two months later this couple came along to another show nearby. Afterwards I got to meet his wife and she was a lovely lady. He shook my hand really firmly again and said, ‘Great show, Rick, really enjoyed it.’
‘Thank you, really glad you came.’ Then I turned to his wife and said, ‘You didn’t enjoy it, did you?’
‘No, I didn’t, no. I like something you can dance along to and your stuff, Rick, well, you’d need to be—’
‘I know, yes, epileptic . . .’
She nodded politely.
‘Listen, I hope your little new arrival is doing really well and any time you want to see another show, you are most welcome, just let me know.’
‘Well, I’m sure he will, Rick, but if you don’t mind, I’d rather not.’
I’ve been involved in births on other occasions. After most shows, people will come up to you and invariably their daughter’s boyfriend is in a band or they themselves are in a band. They give you a CD and ask you to have a listen but the problem is, if I did that I’d have no time in the day to do anything else! But you try to listen and be encouraging as best you can.
One evening after a show, I’d noticed this lady with a man trailing a couple of paces behind her, with two children about eight or nine years old alongside him. There’s a certain type of hovering – I knew they were waiting for me. I looked over and smiled and they came across and said ‘Hi’. She explained that she and her husband had met at one of my concerts many years ago.
‘Oh, that’s lovely, glad I could help,’ I replied, genuinely pleased.
‘You did more than that, Rick,’ she continued. ‘We actually got engaged at one of your concerts too.’
‘Oh, that’s splendid! Lovely to hear.’
‘And when we got married, we actually walked down the aisle to your music.’
I’m thinking, Crikey, I’m not sure I’m that good!
‘I’m very flattered, thank you. I feel very honoured.’
But there was more.
‘When both Tommy and Louise were born, my husband videoed the entire births, everything, all whilst your music was playing.’
‘What a lovely memory for you both,’ I said, not entirely sure why she was telling me.
At this point the husband piped up for the first time, rather nervously.
‘Although your music was playing during the births, other noises and screams obliterated quite a lot of the musical textures so I overdubbed your music again when editing. I hope you like the result.’
And with that, he gave me a VHS tape marked ‘Tommy and Louise. The Births.’
‘It’s really very good quality. You can see the detail really very clearly.’
I didn’t know what to say. What can you say to that?
Stumbling for words a little, I said, ‘That’s really very kind of you but I think this is probably something very special to you two.’ Phew, quick thinking, Wakey, well done.
‘Oh no, Rick, we feel like you are part of our family, you really must accept it with our thanks,’ the woman said, undeterred.
Still stuttering somewhat I said, ‘That’s ever so kind, but I really do think this is something to treasure in the confines of your own family home. It’s really very private.’ I felt terrible because they looked ever so disappointed.
At that moment, Doom (remember Stuart Sawney? My keyboard tech) walked over.
‘What’s that, Rick?’ he said, looking at the tape I was handing back.
‘It’s a videotape of their children being born, with my music in the background.’
‘Really? What music have they chosen then? Journey to the Placenta of the Earth?’
They missed the joke completely and the woman said, ‘No, it was mainly to pieces from King Arthur.’
I stifled a snigger, trying hard not to laugh and hurt their feelings, and after they’d gone said, ‘Doom, that was a very special tape from their lives and I have explained how deeply flattered I am but that I couldn’t possibly take a copy and invade their privacy by watching their children being born. You’d have done the same, Doom, surely?’
Doom paused, deep in thought. After a few moments he spoke. ‘You’re right Rick. I would have done the same, but I wouldn’t have refused if they’d offered a video of the conception.’