{"id":25528,"date":"2014-05-06T09:17:52","date_gmt":"2014-05-06T14:17:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25528"},"modified":"2014-05-06T09:18:51","modified_gmt":"2014-05-06T14:18:51","slug":"rick-wakeman-on-the-best-financial-advice-he-ever-received","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/05\/06\/rick-wakeman-on-the-best-financial-advice-he-ever-received\/","title":{"rendered":"Rick Wakeman on the best financial advice he ever received"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/finance\/personalfinance\/fameandfortune\/10804471\/Rick-Wakeman-David-Bowies-advice-made-me-millions.html\" target=\"_blank\">Lorraine McBride<\/a> talks to Rick Wakeman about his career.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><script src=\"http:\/\/player.ooyala.com\/player.js?embedCode=JyZjJwbTpf8lzn5H0kNwVIHdEQcokcOL&#038;width=620&#038;height=349&#038;deepLinkEmbedCode=JyZjJwbTpf8lzn5H0kNwVIHdEQcokcOL&#038;video_pcode=RvbGU6Z74XE_a3bj4QwRGByhq9h2&#038;playerBrandingId=ZTIxYmJjZDM2NWYzZDViZGRiOWJjYzc5&#038;thruParam_tmgui[relatedVideo]=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.api.ooyala.com%2Fv2%2Fassets%3Fwhere%3Dembed_code%2Bin%26api_key%3DRvbGU6Z74XE_a3bj4QwRGByhq9h2.WFFAb%26expires%3D1640995199%26signature%3Djy0k5y0KlKnXRvaz8YfB%252Fs1iFHFedXPEda0wTd6P0Fo\"><\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Has there ever been a time when you worried how you were going to pay the bills?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Yes, there have always been times like that. In the late Sixties, when I played at the Top Rank ballroom, being an organist meant carting my organ around to sessions, which cost two thirds of my earnings, on top of running a car, which was when I learnt the word \u201cexpenses\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>My rent cost \u00a38 a week and I can remember being really short. In 1970, I was up in London looking for session work and Marc Bolan who was a great mate, gave me a session for Get It On. All I had to do was a glissando on the piano. I said to him afterwards, \u201cYou could have done that,\u201d and he replied, \u201cWell, you want your rent money don\u2019t you?\u201d Tough times, but when I joined Yes, I went from \u00a318 a week to \u00a350 a week.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Yes made a fortune, what did you spend it on?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We were all told to go out and buy a nice house, which was an eye-opener because I\u2019d only known a two-up, two-down and a Ford Anglia. Suddenly we were talking five-bed, des-res. I remember looking around one house for sale in Gerrards Cross and the lady said, \u201cThis is the breakfast room.\u201d I said: \u201cWhat, just for breakfast?\u201d because it was just a different world.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Lots of rock stars get ripped off, did you learn any tough lessons?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Yes, everybody in the business did. One thing you start to learn, usually too late, is that being top of the tree doesn\u2019t last forever. You drop down a few branches and find your position but you set yourself a lifestyle that requires \u201ctop of the tree\u201d earnings to pay for it. Then of course, you have the unexpected events like a divorce of which I\u2019ve had three.<\/p>\n<p>Suddenly you grow up very quickly and certainly when a problem hits, you back-pedal to try and work out how to sort it out. I was lucky. I had a very good accountant who helped tremendously and I learnt to listen but it took a long time. It probably wasn\u2019t until the turn of the millennium when I found myself in yet another divorce, when the situation seems unbelievable, you really start to listen. <\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><strong>What\u2019s been your best financial move?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Undoubtedly listening to David Bowie who said: \u201cBe your own man and don\u2019t listen to people who don\u2019t know a hatchet from a crotchet and try to fulfil their own ideas through you because they haven\u2019t got any.\u201d I wanted to do <em>Journey to the Centre of the Earth<\/em> with an orchestra but there wasn\u2019t enough money from the record company. I ended up mortgaging my house, selling everything I owned. I begged, borrowed and stole to do it. But the record company didn\u2019t want it and I faced losing everything because I was so heavily in debt.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually my record company in America loved it, insisted it was released and it sold 15\u2009million copies and that really taught me to be my own man. Spending money I didn\u2019t have was simply my best financial decision because if I hadn\u2019t done it, 40 years on, I wouldn\u2019t be doing my shows now. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lorraine McBride talks to Rick Wakeman about his career. Has there ever been a time when you worried how you were going to pay the bills? Yes, there have always been times like that. In the late Sixties, when I played at the Top Rank ballroom, being an organist meant carting my organ around to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,831,28],"tags":[200,275,915],"class_list":["post-25528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-business","category-media","tag-music","tag-personalfinance","tag-progrock"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6DK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25528"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25529,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25528\/revisions\/25529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}