When Rick Wakeman accepted the job of turning on the Christmas lights in Diss two years ago, he knew it was a weightier responsibility than, to a distanced observer, it might have appeared. The Norfolk market town raised a grand total of £5 for its festive display in 2003 and subsequently found itself called “the stingiest town in Britain” on national TV. The night in question would not just be about letting the light in, but banishing the dark of the past. To his credit, Wakeman – former Yes keyboard player, self-confessed grumpy old (renaissance) man, DJ and all-round good guy – stepped confidently forward to pull the switch. And for the next few seconds, proud civic cheers rang out until, dramatically, the town centre was plunged into blackness – along, Wakeman recalls, “with every residence within a two-mile radius”.
If you live on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, it’s hard to be oblivious of Wakeman. If he’s not turning on the Christmas lights in Diss (2007, mercifully, went without a hitch) or opening the charity coffee morning at the village hall in Yaxley, he’s campaigning against the closure of the post office in Scole. Despite being from the allegedly pompous, unearthly world of progressive rock, he’s always struck me as more deserving of a “man of the people” tag than any ageing luminary from prog’s enemy genre, punk. This is further illustrated by his golf: he’s brushed shoulder turns with everyone from Nick Faldo to Alice Cooper, but holds membership at Diss, an unassuming course, partly comprised of common land.
Being local, I’ve often played at Diss, too. While lacking the trimmings of many other nearby courses, it’s considerably more community-spirited, with a small-scale charm that obviously appeals enormously to Wakeman. Earlier this year, when the club cat, Bob, was killed by a car, Wakeman helped inaugurate a tournament, the Bob Trophy, in his memory. As we walk across the car park, he has oodles of time for a septuagenarian lady who wants to share her thoughts about the controversy surrounding Carol Vorderman’s recent pay cut on a long-running TV quiz show. “That’s really my core fan base,” he laughs. “People 20 years older than me who watch Countdown. I don’t think most of them even know I was in Yes.”
Actually, for even the most musically-stuck-in-the-1970s of people (such as myself), it’s sometimes easy to forget how Wakeman originally made his name, such is his latter-day success as a multi-tasking raconteur. His recent book, Grumpy Old Rock Star, is almost unique in the annals of music-themed baby-boomer reminiscences, in that its author seems less interested in glorifying his cultural heyday than highlighting the buffoonery accompanying it. It is the story of a kind of one-man Spinal Tap, which is doubly remarkable since, somehow, in the past two decades, Wakeman has found time to be a one-man Caddyshack as well. Two holes into our round, I’m on my knees on the green: not because I’m lining up my birdie putt, as I should be, but because I’m laughing as Wakeman tells me of the time he played in a pro-celebrity event near Milan and the starter announced him as “Rock Wankman”. (“I put her right, and then she apologised and announced me as ‘Rick Wankman’ instead.”)
His first full round of golf, he says, was in the mid-1980s, alongside an ascendant Nick Faldo in a pro-am competition at Wentworth, where, after a disastrous tee shot, Wakeman ended up with the unusual distinction of playing his third shot further away from the hole than where he’d played his first. Four years earlier, during a South African tour, he also turned down a starter lesson from “some bloke dressed in black who kept pestering me”, later discovered to be nine-time Major champion Gary Player.
These days, Wakeman plays comfortably to a 14 handicap, but I notice a pattern to his golf: when he’s swept up in an anecdote, he hits the ball brilliantly. When he’s in listener mode, he’s liable to a dangerous hook. On the 13th hole, as he quizzes me about my putter, he double bogeys, exacerbating a recent shoulder injury. Two holes later he rallies with a birdie while reminiscing about the time, on holiday from his then-home in London, he played alone at Bigbury Golf Club in Devon in a downpour, returned to find the clubhouse full, and told the club steward how impressed he was by the place’s lively social scene: “‘Oh,’ he told me. ‘It’s not normally like this. They’re all here to see some prat from London who’s playing in the rain!’”
Things deteriorate again on the 17th, as he loses a ball and falls foul of an ill-placed fairway telegraph pole that he’s come to believe is his nemesis. I wonder if this is what it’s like being Rick Wakeman: you’re either telling an anecdote, or hovering precariously around a situation with the potential to become the centre of one. On the one hand, you’re the keyboard wizard who makes people dress up as horses and dance on ice. On the other, you’re the cheerful bloke in a big jumper who laughs at him. You’re a legend of rock indulgence, yet also a humble local newspaper hero who, as he loads his clubs into his car, discusses the sad demise of the area’s small businesses. Once the owner of 23 automobiles, Wakeman now has just two. It seems somehow fitting that one is a Porsche and the other is a Morris Traveller.
More photos here.
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