superstar Rick Wakeman talks to Viv Hardwick about enjoying success as one of TV’s grumpy old men and why he feels he’s never going to run short of things to tell his audience.

IS WORLD famous rock keyboardist, composer, author, radio presenter and TV personality Rick Wakeman happy with his reputation as the Mr Grumpy of life? “Oh absolutely. I moan about everything. You have to in this country, it’s the only way you can survive. We have to moan because we can’t do anything about it. It doesn’t matter who the Government is or who the council is. I think we’re aiming for a complete nation of civil servants and, at the end of the day, they’ll be about six of us left to have a little grumble,” jokes the man bringing his sold-out show to Durham Gala Theatre on Saturday.

On selling out a string of one-man shows, where he’ll discuss his career and play his favourite pieces of music, including his many reunions with Prog Rock band Yes, Wakeman says: “It’s lovely. I don’t really do a tour, I do about 20 of these a year because it means every night becomes an opening night. I have a plethora of stories I pick from and I have a lot of fun. I’m pretty surprised that in the depths of a recession I’ve pretty well sold out everywhere.

“My late father used to say ‘if you can’t enjoy it then why the hell do you expect anyone else to?’ So I like to put in what I think other people would like to hear.”

So there are extracts from TV’s Grumpy Old Men, Countdown and the many shows he’s down with bands and as a solo performer.

“Having crammed so much into my career so far, the great thing is that I can refresh the show each year.

Someone who came to see me two or three years ago will find it’s a 75 per cent different show,” explains Wakeman who is reuniting with his former Yes frontman, Jon Anderson, to perform at The Sage Gateshead in November.

This will be a semi-acoustic show with Wakeman on keyboards featuring some of the two men’s recent work plus songs from The Living Tree, a new album due out at that time.

“We also break down the Yes stuff to its bare bones and this time round we are going to ask people as they come in the foyer to write down questions and we’ll base some of our silly stories on these questions. This should be quite a giggle,” says Wakeman, who reveals that a lot of his shows are based on requests posted on his comprehensive website (rwcc.com/grumpyoldrockstar) by fans.

“Amazingly enough, if I get enough people saying ‘can you play a version of And You And I?’ and we will do that.”

One of the best stories I’d heard recently about Wakeman is that he’d once bought an early Minimoog synthesiser from actor Jack Wild “for half price” in 1971.

The late star of Oliver! thought it was defective because it only played one note at a time.

“It wasn’t half-price, the instrument was about £1,500 and I gave him about £30 for it because he thought it was broken. I couldn’t find anything wrong and duly got back to him – he was a lovely man who I knew right up to his death – and he said ‘I can’t get it to work properly, when I play, it only plays one note at a time. I said ‘it’s monophonic’ it only does play one note at a time’. He replied that it was no good to him and that I should keep it,” says Wakeman, who confesses that the instrument was then stolen in the mid-Seventies.

Wakeman still takes a keen interest in the advances in electronic music and uses his technical team to weed out the most promising advances that he can use in future.

“I still use a mixture of old stuff and new stuff, but it’s mainly the keyboards and the playing that I’m interested in. Everything is moving at such a fast rate you have to try and keep up,” he explains.

So did he ever have a gameplan?

“I’ve always privately had a book I keep which I write in where I would like to be in a year, two years and up to five. I tend to aim for the sun on the principle that I’ve got a reasonable chance of reaching the moon. That’s how it works. I don’t believe in looking over the past because it’s the past which shapes the present. I never look back, but obviously you can go back if it’s going to be useful. When people ask me about regrets I tell them that I’m not interested. As long as you learn from mistakes it’s all right,” says the man who sold over 15m albums of The Six Wives of Henry VIII in 1973. But it took him until last year to persuade Hampton Court Palace to stage the first complete live performance of the work.

So why then did he rejoin Yes no fewer than five times over the years?

He responds: “If you took the main five or six people you normally work with at The Northern Echo, had breakfast with them, travelled in with them every day, worked alongside them all day, had lunch with them and then had dinner with them and worked into the evening.

The only time you didn’t see them was when you went to sleep. How long do you think it would take before you wanted to kill one of them?”

In my case it would take about a day, I tell him.

“Exactly. That’s where a band is so different from any other job. You do everything together. It’s very rarely musical niggles that break a band. If you spend 24 hours a day with someone you end up wanting to kill each other. We got it sorted out in the end… we basically see each other and travelled separately and even have rooms on different floors. I think most bands break up because they don’t give each other enough space,” Wakeman says.

Next year he’ll complete a trilogy of Grumpy Old Rock Star books and the Norfolk-Sufflock based star boasts “I’ve run out of skeletons” to be discussed.

Wakeman’s on recond as being a Tory supporter, so is he slightly happier with David Cameron in charge? “I am, but I’m never happy with everything and when I go to conferences I tell them so. What I find astonishing is that you’ve got a load of LibDems who are complaining like crazy that they can’t get their own way on things and yet another dozen seats either way and they wouldn’t have a say in anything. If I was a LibDem supporter I’d be over the moon at the moment,” says Wakeman who confesses he admired former Sedgefield MP Tony Blair for the early stages of his days at 10 Downing Street.

“I don’t agree with what happened afterwards, but I think a little patience with what the Coalition are trying to do will let us know in two or three years. Everyone is using this wonderful word global… it’s not a global problem it’s our bloody problem.”

■ Rick Wakeman, Durham Gala Theatre, Saturday, Sold-out

■ Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman, The Sage Gateshead, Hall One.

7.30pm. £7-£32.50. Box Office: 0191-443-4661 thesagegateshead.org