RICK WAKEMAN – SIX WIVES OF HENRY VIII, LIVE AT HAMPTON COURT PALACE

Highly recognizable as the ghostly, Richard O’Brien-esque synthmaster of 70’s prog kings Yes, Rick Wakeman also had a fairly illustrious solo career, and it was at the height of his drug and alcohol-fueled frenzy of historical fantasy concept albums that Wakeman was, ironically, at his strongest. This album was released at a time when Mike Oldfield’s very superior Tubular Bells was still smashing the international rock charts, so it has been argued that this is a much overlooked work of instrumental genius. Wakeman always made it a pointed mission to do things on a collossal scale – take his exorbitant opuses King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and the Journey To The Centre of The Earth live album; both sprawling symphonic rock operas, resplendent with 85-piece orchestras and hideously flat session singers. The beauty of Six Wives is its simplicity – there are no terrible lyric passages or annoying shrieking string arrangements, rather it’s a more intimate arrangement of a simple rock core with Wakeman’s elaborate, distinct keyboard work. What we have here is his long-beloved concept of bringing it to a live audience, but more on the scale of his mid-1970’s megaliths – so he’s given us a giant orchestra again and various new-age digital replacements for his analog 70’s gear. It’s a decent live recording, with the odd healthy bum note and roaring (predominantly male, by the sounds of it) middle-aged crowd of fans, and it’s not a bad representation of a not-bad record. However, if you thought the Sailor’s Hornpipe at the end of Tubular Bells was hard to deal with, get a load of wife no.2 Kathryn Howard, and you will appreciate in full just how rampant the English prog generation’s fondness for idiotic traditional sea-shanty spoofs can be. Good heavens, Rick, you could’ve left that out.

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