Journey to the Centre of the Earth: City Hall

If you're anything like my age, your first encounter with Journey to the Centre of the Earth was the cheesy but brilliant cartoon version on TV in the seventies, but this is about Rick Wakeman’s much more worthy attempt at immortalising the Jules Verne classic.

There’s a real market these days in ‘heritage bands’. Their days of troubling the chart compilers are long gone. They don’t sell records anymore, they just sell concert tickets. Rick Wakeman fills that role perfectly, but he’s known to different people for different reasons. Fans of seventies pop/rock will know him as a member of the Strawbs and then Yes, or for his solo outing such as the album he’s performing tonight. More recently he’s been a Grumpy Old Man, and a very entertaining occupant of Countdown’s Dictionary Corner. More interestingly for me he’s was the barely visible talent behind the early career of several major chart acts. Tonight he began the show with a musical diversion into the lesser known parts of his career. For example, if you hear Cat Stevens’ Morning Has Broken, it is Rick’s arrangement and playing that you’re listening to. Not that it was easy to find that out at the time. When he was asked to arrange it, the song was nothing more than Cat Sevens strumming his guitar and singing an old hymn. They heard him playing a piano piece in the studio, and said ‘can we have that bit’. He said no, as it a piece he’d written for his forthcoming project ‘The Six Wives of Henry VIII’, but he did them something similar. Imagine the disappointment he felt when his arrangement wasn’t even mentioned on the album sleeve. He’s even seen the sheet music today, complete with his arrangement, listed as being ‘traditional’.

The piano part on ‘Life on Mars’? That’s Rick too. He was a session musician in constant demand in the seventies. There was reputedly one week when he played on over half of the songs in the top 30. Trouble is, he’s forgotten much of the work he did around that time.

With that as a background to tonight’s City Hall show, he came on stage tonight to preview the show with a first half of chat, corny old jokes and a bit of music to warm us up for the second-half performance of the entire, unedited version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I must admit I’ve heard him tell his stories of session work with the soon-to-be-famous in a more entertaining way, but perhaps he knew we’d all heard them before.

The second-half performance was what we were all here for. Think of it what you will, you have to admire his vision for putting together a rock band, a choir and a 50-piece orchestra to perform such an overblown piece of rock theatre, but back in the Seventies, it was what you did. Progressive rock was at its creative height. The Who performed their rock opera Tommy, ELP dazzled us with their classical interpretations of Mussorgsky, and Rick Wakeman wrote an orchestral version of a Jules Verne novel, narrated by Richard Burton. It’s become almost a cliché to view punk as a reaction to all this pomp and pretension, and that’s not how it was, believe me, I was there. Punk was just another strand of the musical rainbow which existed then. It became tabloid headlines for 18 months, and seemed to be everywhere, but then quietly faded away. What it did was blow away the idea that you had to have a major record company behind you to succeed, but that’s another story. 

Triumphant it certainly was. Philip Franks took the narrator’s role, and the story unfolded, exactly as we all knew it would, as there can have been few in the audience tonight not familiar with every note, as I imagine most of them have been listening to it on and off for the last 40 years. It hasn’t been performed with a full orchestra since the late seventies, ever since the music went missing after it was put into storage, but the recently rediscovered conductor’s score meant we could all relive the indulgences and excesses of what became known as ‘orchestral prog rock’. Although the album of the live performance went on to sell 15 million copies, it took real determination to get the music recorded at all. Accompanied by about 70 musicians and singers, the second set showed why his vision of a musical interpretation of the Jules Verne story was worth fighting for. Duelling guitars and keyboards with a full string accompaniment, extended drum solos, choirs singing about giant turtles and dragons teeth, it was all here. I actually enjoyed the encore more than the set-piece of the second half, as it allowed the band a bit more scope for improvisation.

This kind of show is a one off so appreciate it while you can. It’s difficult to see music like this ever being created again and live performances like this will not be repeated very often. The good news for Rick is that his fans have not only grown older, but are a bit more wealthy now too, so they’re quite happy to support the ‘heritage rock’ that this is a part of and celebrate its 40th anniversary.