He has toured the world as a member of Yes, he's a familiar face on TV and now Rick Wakeman is coming to Colne with a show like no other.

YOU'D think that Rick Wakeman would have seen and done it all.

Bearing in mind this is a man who went on tour with a show about King Arthur on ice, donned a silver cape and virtually disappeared behind banks of keyboards with prog rock legends Yes and has even been a regular guest on Countdown.

But he's genuinely excited about his new one-man show - Rick Wakeman's Grumpy Old Picture Show - which comes to Colne Muni in April.

"To be honest, I thought I'd taken the one-man show idea as far as I could," he said. "After all, you can only stand behind a pile of keyboards and tell a few anecdotes so many times. But this is genuinely original. No-one's really tried it before."

Rick first went out on the road with the show last year, playing just 12 dates.

"Again I thought that would be it but the reviews were amazing and even before the tour finished we had theatres getting in touch asking to put it on," he said. So next month Rick will embark on a 24-date tour of the UK, accompanied by his trusty keyboards and piano, plus some hi-tech software which will allow him to tell his life story and play along with some of the most famous names in the music business - and even perform a duet with himself!

"It does mean that I have to be pretty disciplined as I am the live element working with a lot of archive material," he said. "And anyone who has seen my shows before knows I have a tendency to digress. On the last tour, when we went out with the picture show, I would see the stage manager starting to look really worried when I broke away from the running order and I'd have to quickly get back to it."

Rick first came up with the idea for the show on a train journey after a lunch with the man behind the Grumpy Old Men TV show.

"I always carry a pad around and I'd written down the word "grumpy". Then someone asked me for some pictures for a magazine interview I'd done and I wrote "pictures" down and the Grumpy Old Picture Show came from there," he said.

When Rick ran the idea past his technical crew they weren't impressed.

"They said do you realise how difficult that's going to be and how expensive it's going to be? It's ridiculous - but it's a great idea'," he said. "They told me to leave them to it and a fortnight later they'd worked it out. We're using some stuff that's been devised just for this show."

Rick has become the patron saint of grumpy old men across the country with his regular appearances on TV but he regards the term with affection.

"I think there's a degreee of fatalism about people who are grumpy," he said. "You know there's something you don't like but you really can't do anything about it except moan - and that moan is usually very funny to others.

"If you say someone's grumpy you usually have a smile on your face when you say it."

Now he's much in demand as an after-dinner speaker, he has many TV commitments, his own radio show and numerous musical projects.

But the bad news for Yes fans is that he can't see himself embarking on another major tour with the band, which includes Accrington-born Jon Anderson.

"I really don't want to commit to a 150-date tour," he said. "At the end of the last Yes tour a guy came up to me and said how much he'd enjoyed a show we'd done in Memphis and I couldn't remember having done it. I went home and tried to write down all the shows we'd done and I couldn't name half of them. I think that's wrong as it has to be special when you play live. If it's not, there's a chance you are going through the motions and I don't want that.

"Besides, things are going quite nicely at the moment as I'm really busy doing little bits of everything, which is what I really enjoy."

  • Rick Wakeman's Grumpy Old Picture Show, Colne Muni, Thursday, April 24. Details from the box office on 01282 661234.