Rick Wakeman’s favourite album by The Beatles
When you’re someone as virtuosic as Rick Wakeman, it’s perhaps easy to see everything else in the music canon as small fry. This is not to say that the keyboardist is more egocentric than any other rock star out there, but he is a man who has never known the meaning of formula, of repetitivness, or sticking by the rules, and you can imagine, in this sense, that he’s maybe not the easiest person to impress.
In Wakeman’s case, this applies right up to the quartet, who are largely considered the four overlords of rock and roll, although he might not give them such a glowing assessment. The Beatles were, and mostly still are, the absolute dynamite kings of the scene who everyone simply bowed down to in awe – yet for the Yes keyboardist, there was only truly one album that lived up to its swirling, psychedelic height.
It could almost go without saying that this was, of course, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in 1967, but transcending the scores of musicology ever since to be regarded as single-handedly one of the greatest albums of all time. For Wakeman, who at this point was shortly set to rise the ranks with his earliest studio sessions including David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ in but a few short years, this world-altering approach to sound was what spoke to his soul the most, away from the ordinary scores of rock and roll.
Reflecting on the greatness of his favourite Fab Four album recently to Goldmine, Wakeman said: “To be honest, it’s the only Beatles album that got to me. George Martin brought the wonderful songs onto a new plain… pure concept genius.” As such, through his coy choice of wording, another thing becomes clear from Wakeman’s appreciation of the album – that it wasn’t just The Beatles themselves, but the backstage hero behind it that he appreciated the most.
When Wakeman went on, in the following years, to produce his own mythical trilogy of concept albums – The Six Wives of Henry VIII in 1973, Journey to the Centre of the Earth in 1974, and The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in 1975 – although they bore very different eventual creations, the genesis of their making must have been born out of The Beatles’ initial idea.
As such, when Wakeman became one of the most prominent creators of concept albums that the rock music world had ever seen, in many ways, he could only do so because of the path The Beatles had laid before him. That’s not to say that the keyboardist was simply an imitation of them at all – as it would be an insult to both parties – but there’s no denying that someone like Wakeman, with a career so eccentric and prolific under his belt, might never have had the leeway to produce records so outright experimental without Sgt Pepper coming first.
Of course, everyone loves the album, whether it’s for the sheer sonic quality or for the extent of lore that comes with it. But the next time you give it a spin, it’s worth remembering just how large the crater of its impact left – because, quite simply, there wouldn’t be an entire sprawling facet of music without it, leaving the glittering careers of people like Wakeman in its midst.
