Rick Wakeman of Yes on Writing Music About Outer Space... and David Bowie

'David Bowie Could Well Have Been Right, There Was Life on Mars'

Frank Mastropolo

The Moon. NASA

As the Artemis II mission continues around the Moon, it seemed like a good time to revisit this 2021 interview with keyboardist Rick Wakeman. Wakeman cemented his reputation as one of the godfathers of progressive rock after joining Yes in 1971. The keyboardist’s first album with the band, Fragile, included two staples of classic rock radio: “Roundabout” and “Long Distance Runaround.”

Before joining Yes, Wakeman was a member of the Strawbs, a folk rock group. During that period, Wakeman was an in-demand session musician, recording with Elton John, Cat Stevens, and David Bowie, whom he calls “the most inspiring person I ever worked with.”

Wakeman moved in and out of Yes as he launched a prolific solo career in 1973 with The Six Wives of Henry VIII. It was the first of more than 90 solo albums. 

Prog rock fans and music critics were ecstatic about Wakeman’s 2020 album, The Red Planet. Its eight newly composed instrumental tracks marked a return to Wakeman’s progressive rock roots. Wakeman was inspired by the three missions scheduled to land on Mars in 2021.

The titles of the album’s tracks are named for geological formations on Mars. The first single, “Ascraeus Mons,” derives its name from a large volcano in the planet’s Tharsis region. 

How do you write music about a place no one has ever been?

In a strange way you almost imagine you’re there. I got loads of fantastic photos, both online and other stuff that I got from friends of mine at NASA. You dive into them. I had all the photos scattered around the piano and just looked at them, went into sort of a semi-daze and then if I came up with something that I thought really fitted the pictures, I wrote it down. I did that over a period of a couple of months until I’d got lots of manuscript full of different bits of music.

Then I started putting them all together. It is quite amazing. The photos these days are so good. They’re almost, you could be standing there taking the photos, they’re that sharp and bright. And you can sort of imagine that you’re there.

What I do when I do a project anyway, I try to avoid getting involved with anything else. I could just lock myself into whatever the subject matter is. With so much happening with Mars, with three missions arriving in March, they’re on their way there already, plus they’re already talking about how they can set things up so that the first astronauts can get there. They’re looking heavily at how they can actually put astronauts into a form of hibernation.

It’s a really exciting time. Especially since they discovered that yes, it does have water and that two or three billion years ago it was like Earth. So suddenly it turns out that my great mate David Bowie could well have been right, there was life on Mars.

Did working with David Bowie influence your interest in outer space?

I had it before, I must admit, but David certainly added more fuel to the fire because it fascinated him so obviously with “Space Oddity” and “Life on Mars?” It obviously fueled that and I got heavily involved over the years with NASA. They’ve been kind enough to send quite a lot of my music up on the shuttles, which I’ve got some wonderful photos of the crew in the shuttles with my CDs flying around in the air, it’s great.

I first started working with David in 1969 when we did “Space Oddity.” Then right through with other stuff and through Hunky Dory and then a little bit of Ziggy Stardust, then on “Absolute Beginners.” Then in ’76, ’77, I moved to Switzerland where he was living at the time. And we became neighbors. I say neighbors, we both lived up the same mountain. If you live in Switzerland you haven’t got much choice, really.

And we used to meet in a little club called the Museum Club in Montreux and we used to just talk for hours, everything from music to politics to life in general. So I knew him very much as a person as well. But he was the most inspiring person I ever worked with. He was just amazing. He knew just how to work in a studio. He always picked fantastic producers like Tony Visconti, Gus Dudgeon, Ken Scott. He also knew how to work with musicians and how to treat musicians. I learned so much from him. It’s been my template for how I work.

As you put together the elements of a new project, where are vocalists in order of importance?

Once I get my hands on a project, when something appears that inspires me, as I start putting music and things together, it really does become very obvious as to what kind of album it’s going to be. And this album, right from word go, I thought, this has to be an instrumental album. This has to be a keyboard instrumental album in the same way that I did The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Criminal Record. It’s not an album that I want to have vocals on. It’s not something that I need that vocalization to help paint the picture of what I’m trying to do.

So there was never a moment where I thought, oh, I’d like to have vocals here or I’d like to put some vocals on this. It was always very much down to the music, the sounds, and the themes.

Were you influenced by the prog rock bands that formed in the 1960s? And if so, which ones?

Vanilla Fudge. I loved Vanilla Fudge, I thought they were fantastic. I think the whole prog rock thing in the UK, yes, there was sort of what I’d call semi-prog rock bands at the time. King Crimson, they were before a lot. And also early Deep Purple and early Genesis, obviously. Deep Purple’s first album, Shades of Deep Purple, which was in 1968, had some what I’d call proggy stuff on there. Listen to their version of “Help!” It was the original lineup, with Nick Simper, Rod Evans, Ian Paice, Ritchie Blackmore and Jon Lord, of course. And what they did on tracks like “Help!”, they were taking pieces of music, and their own, and doing them in ways that people weren’t thinking at the time.

And that really is the essence of prog rock. It’s to know what the rules are but then break them. So that you create your own rules. And I think the lovely thing is now there’s hardly a band in existence that doesn’t have some sort of prog rock in them, whether they realize it or not.

Because at one time back in the ’60s a lot of music was formatted. I did loads of sessions for people, and every song was a format. Prog rock broke all those rules. And that enabled musicians of all kinds to go, well, we can do it as well. So it played a massive part in creating the diversity of music that we’ve got today.

Frank Mastropolo is the author of the new series on New York Rock & Roll History. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.