Rick at Bic - 10th May, 2014

Rick Wakeman played to a very nearly full (3,300) capacity Bournemouth International Centre,
reviving his seminal work 'Journey To The Centre Of The Earth' 40 years after its first
performance at the Royal Festival Hall. Joined by a full orchestra, The English Chamber Choir
and singers Ashley Holt and Hayley Sanderson the first half of the concert gave us an insight
into 'how' the piece was first conceived and brought to reality and pays tribute to the five
people Rick regards as most important in its creation.

A full performance of the 2013 revamped follows and then an encore with parts of the sequel
'Return to the Centre of the Earth' and a finale. The crowd loved it. Having watched Rick
dozens of times over the past 30 years playing, sometimes, in smallish church halls to a
handful of die-hard fans it was a real pleasure to share with him the experience of seeing
a full concert hall giving him a rapturous reception!

The sound was clear and generally excellent, there were no Moog tuning issues as there had
been on some of the previous dates and all seemed to go rather smoothly!

I recorded from about 4 rows back on the right hand side of the audience using a Roland R05
digital recorder with built in mikes. Unfortunately it was in the breast pocket of a cotton
shirt as a security man was quite close by so I lost a small amount of 'top' from 17k plus.

Transferred to PC with ProTools XI with a small amount of minor EQ-ing and limiting (done
by my University trained recording engineer son) then I loaded into mastering software and
levelled part one to balance the music and speech then separated into individual tracks, saved
as FLAC (level 8) and checksummed.

A 16 bit version will follow soon.


Band

Rick Wakeman - keyboards
Ashley Holt - vocals
Hayley Sanderson - vocals
Matt Pegg - bass
Dave Colquhoun - guitar
Tony Fernandez - drums

Philip Franks - Narration

The English Chamber Choir
The New World Symphony Orchestra