Rick Wakeman on his ‘preposterously productive’ career and new album ‘The Red Planet’

The inspiration for Rick Wakeman’s new album is exactly as you’d hope from a legendary figure of 1970s progressive rock. It involves Queen guitarist Brian May and the world’s top astrophysicists, whom Wakeman met a few years ago at the Starmus International Festival of astronomy and the arts in Tenerife. “Really clever, these guys, unbelievably clever,” he says, speaking from his home in Norfolk, in the east of England.

It was 2014 and the cape-wearing keyboardist had been invited to play a concert at the festival by May, who has an astrophysics PhD. While there he attended a lecture by Stephen Hawking. “I didn’t understand one word but I was absolutely riveted,” he says.

Next year’s Starmus, due to be held in Armenia, marks the 50th anniversary of the first orbit of Mars by a space probe. Wakeman will be among the musicians appearing. He describes how the event’s founder, the astrophysicist Garik Israelian, updated him about the latest Martian findings.

“He told me that it’s beginning to look as though 20bn years ago [more probably, 2bn years ago] Mars was a blue planet with oceans and rivers. ‘Your good friend David Bowie may well have been right,’ he said to me,” Wakeman recalls. The rock musician — who played the celebrated piano part on Bowie’s song “Life on Mars?” in 1971 — went very quiet as the scientist spoke. Inside, a light went on. “Bingo!” he said to himself.

The Red Planet, an instrumental album about Mars, is the product of that conversation. The style is classic prog, cut from the magnificently ambitious cloth of Wakeman’s solo records from the 1970s. Made with his backing band The English Rock Ensemble — guitarist Dave Colquhoun, bassist Lee Pomeroy, drummer Ash Soan — it turns the clock back to the days when keyboard-led concept albums about Tudor matrimony (1973’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII), vintage sci-fi (1974’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth) and the metaphysics of music (1976’s No Earthly Connection) could become top 10 hits.

Now 71, Wakeman has had an immensely, even preposterously, productive career. According to his website, The Red Planet is his 122nd solo album. There have been numerous others with the band Yes and its various offshoots. “I am musically driven and have been — oh crikey — ever since I first heard my father playing music in the house at the piano,” he says. “There’s two things I think that the world could never survive without and that’s music and laughter.”

He grew up in Northolt, a suburb in outer London. His father was an accomplished amateur pianist who worked his way up to become director of a building supplies company. His mother worked for a removals company. Wakeman’s musical talents led to a place at the Royal College of Music, although he didn’t complete the course, dropping out in 1969 to become a session musician. He played on songs by Cat Stevens, Lou Reed, Elton John and T-Rex. Working with Bowie proved a turning point.

“Back in 1971, when I did ‘Life on Mars?’ with him, I was round at his house when he first played it to me on a battered old 12-string guitar. I thought what a great song,” Wakeman says. Bowie told him to play it back to him on the piano. “How?” Wakeman asked him. “You know how I want you to play it,” Bowie said, gnomically. A puzzled Wakeman played the tune. “That’s how I want you to play it,” said Bowie.

The lesson that Wakeman learnt, contrary to prog’s reputation for arid virtuosity, was to trust feeling over technique. “Bowie said: ‘When you’re doing your own albums, which you undoubtedly will do, if you have a vision of how you want the music to be it’s important to pick musicians who you know instinctively understand what you want. You can pick the best musicians in the world but it’s useless if they don’t understand what you want.’ I’ve used that a lot.”

Briefly a member of folk-rock band The Strawbs, he jumped ship to Yes in 1971. He brought showmanship and verve to the role of keyboardist. Wearing sequinned capes and playing a vast number of different instruments, often at the same time — Hammond organs, Moog and Korg synthesisers, pianos — he performed with the same attacking flair as a lead guitarist.

“It was tough in a band in the 1960s because guitarists got louder and louder thanks to my dear late friend Jim Marshall,” he says, referring to the creator of the Marshall amplifier. “I used to say to him: ‘You made our keyboard lives a misery.’” But revenge became possible when the engineer Robert Moog began selling his Minimoog synthesiser in 1970.

“Guitarists hated it,” Wakeman says cheerily. “It has a sound that will cut through concrete. I remember the first time I brought it into Yes and played a solo line, there was a look of abject horror from the guitars department. I said, ‘And I can go louder!’”

To his fans, he epitomised rock’s most Olympian phase of development. For detractors, who were almost as numerous, he symbolised its dissipation into self-indulgence and grandiosity. “I was once asked in an interview, back in the 1970s: ‘Prog rock is overblown, it’s full of pompous asses and people showing off. What do you have to say to that?’ I said, ‘That’s a pretty good description’,” he says.

In his heyday, he became notorious for mounting ruinously expensive live shows, involving full orchestras, choirs, inflatable dinosaurs and ice skaters pretending to be Arthurian knights. But this reputation for Spinal Tap excess has obscured the role he played in bringing electronic instruments to the forefront of popular music. In doing so, he and fellow keyboard wizards such as Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake & Palmer filled a void left by classical music.

“In the past, when new instruments came along they were introduced into the orchestra,” he says. “Whereas for some unknown reason when electronics came along, no one said, ‘Hold on mate, these should be in the orchestra.’ That to me was a huge mistake and opened the door for another genre to take over. That genre was prog rock.”

His many keyboards are packed up in boxes at the moment. He and his wife Rachel Kaufman are in the middle of a move from Norfolk to the neighbouring county, Suffolk. He suffers from arthritis in his hands, a painful condition for a keyboardist. It’s the latest episode in a long history of ill-health, including two heart attacks in his 20s. But he radiates good humour.

“I’ve always been an optimist. I’m a glass half-full person,” he says. “Optimism” was one of one of the first words he wrote down when planning The Red Planet, due to the new discoveries being made about the titular planet. “My only regret is that it will take another 30 years or so to find out even more about Mars,” he says, baulking at the timeframe. But his tone brightens. “As one of the lads in the band said: ‘It doesn’t matter Rick, you probably came from there in the first place.’”

‘The Red Planet’ is released by Madfish Music on August 28