Rick Wakeman on why every day is the best day

“My mum unfortunately died of breast cancer and the last few years I would go round and see her and one day I saw that she had got out her best tea service. I asked why, whether it was a special day. And she just said that she had realised that every day was the best day, every day was a special day. There was no point sitting on it. She had kept the best tea service in a cupboard all her life and she had inherited it from my grandmother who had kept it behind glass all her life and she said she had realised that it was the best day every day and that she was going to use it. And she was absolutely right.”

Rick is now convinced: “There is no future. There is only today.” And it's an approach he carries with him into his work, for the moment his Christmas tour and then into his projects for next year.

Keyboard player/composer/raconteur Rick is on the road with his Grumpy Christmas Stocking Tour, with dates including December 21 in Worthing Assembly Hall. Audiences can expect music taken across the breadth of Rick’s career, from his work as keyboard player in prog rock band YES to his solo career and session work, plus covers given an unexpected twist and festive tunes uniquely rearranged Wakeman style, performed on grand piano and electric keyboards – all interwoven with Rick’s “typically ridiculous stories”, which as he says, “always contain an element of truth – it’s up to the audience to decide how much!”

Coming out of the pandemic and as we negotiate the cost of living crisis, Rick feels that everything has changed: “People say that you can always reschedule things that you lost during the pandemic but the point is that I would have carried on working so really that was two years of lost work. And I just think life has changed now. I'm working on something new and I just realised that you cannot plan for the norm. We've just got to think that now is the opportunity to do all the things that we wanted to do, to do all the things that we are putting off for the future, all the things that we had on our bucket list that we would never otherwise have got round to. The time to do them is right now. I lost 19 friends during Covid. You will be speaking to someone one day and the next day they've gone and that was that. I just think the future doesn't exist. The future is now.”

Particularly amid the uncertainty: “During the pandemic the whole entertainment business was completely wrecked in every respect. And I don't think we're back yet what it was and I don't think it will be back to what it was in my lifetime. People got used to what was the norm disappearing. People are working from home and don't see any reason to go back to the office. I think everyone has recognised that everything is different and I think speaking about events, it's clear that people are not going to things in the way that they used to. It's going to be at least five years before everyone is properly back and probably a lot longer than that. But I'm lucky in that I travel a lot and it's very easy to forget that every other country in the world is having exactly the same problems as us and some of them are having it even worse than us. But I just don't think anybody could have foreseen what has been happening… or if they really did, they just didn't say!”