THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY VIII

I've made a good faith attempt to get into Rick Wakeman's solo work, but I have to say that much of it took a while to grow on me. Rick is an excellent keyboardist, but an extremely poor editor; if he were more careful about which compositions or elements of compositions he allowed to make the final cut for release and which he held back for more work, he'd be making less releases but I think the overall quality would improve.

That said, this album is clearly a standout when it comes to technical execution, and after a long period of being a bit ambivalent about it I've found it's ended up growing on me, Made at a time when he felt that his own creative contributions were being sidelined in Yes, the album gave Rick an outlet for his own compositions which he couldn't find in his band work at the time.

Part of what previously turned me off is that there's a lot of showing-off of the technical capabilities both of Rick himself and his array of synthesisers, though to be fair, in this respect there's a lot to show off. I have to admit that I prefer the sort of original compositions Rick devises to the "rocking the classics approach" of the likes of Keith Emerson or Wendy Carlos, simply because he's composing with a thorough understanding of his instruments in mind, rather than taking material composed for other instrumentation and then trying to use keyboards to fill in for as much of the orchestra as possible.

There's also a certain playfulness and a range of influences which weren't so widely-embraced in Yes by this point - at points there's even a certain funkiness to proceedings which the Close to the Edge/Tales From Topographic Oceans era of the band would have simply never contemplated. It's that playful side to the album, balanced very capably with its more serious aspects (the transitions between sections always make some sort of emotional sense, rather than feeling abrupt) which represents Rick's big accomplishment here, and is the reason the whole endeavour works so well.