Journey to the Centre of the Earth (album)

German Professor Lidinbrook discovers an old parchment that detailed a journey to the centre of Earth undertaken by Arne Saknussemm, an Icelandic alchemist. The parchment, when decoded into Latin and translated by Lidinbrook's nephew Axel, reveals an entrance to the route in the extinct volcano of Snæfellsjökull in Iceland. The pair embark on their journey with their guide Hans.[12]

Upon entering the volcano they pass a lava gallery and find themselves in an intersection of two paths. Lidinbrook chooses the eastern tunnel, but after three days it had taken the trio to a dead end. They returned with just one day's supply of water, reaching the intersection weak and tired. After sleep, they continued their journey and Hans hears flowing water behind a wall of rock and attacks it with a pick axe, revealing a stream of boiling water they named the Hansbach.

The three temporarily separate, and a lone Axel becomes increasingly frightened. Thinking of those who he had left at home, he cries and runs through a tunnel blindly. He almost gives up, but suddenly hears Lidinbrook's voice in the distance and calculates he is just four miles apart and sets off to reunite. At one point the ground beneath Axel collapses and he finds himself with Lidinbrook and Hans in a giant mushroom forest nearby cliffs and sea.

The trio build a raft and set sail for a port they named after Axel's fiancée, Port Grauben. Five days into their sail, they witness a battle between an Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus. The Ichthyosaurus wins, and the travellers are hit with a four-day storm and take shelter by some overhanging rocks. The storm had caused them to travel only some miles north of Port Grauben, so they set on land to track Saknussem's original route once more. They cross a plain of bones and into a forest inhabited by giant Mastodons led by a 12-ft high Proteus, a mythological human. Stunned, the three flee the forest for the Lidinbrook Sea and enter a dark tunnel that plunged deep into rock which they blast through with dynamite. The explosion causes an earthquake, and they become trapped in an active volcano shaft which projects them to the surface of the Earth by Mount Etna in Sicily.

The Royal Festival Hall where Journey was recorded.

The concerts and album were first announced in October 1973,[11] and organised during a break when Yes were touring Tales from Topographic Oceans. Two sell-out performances were held at 6 and 8 p.m. on Friday 18 January 1974 at the Royal Festival Hall in London, attended by 3,000 people each.[13][14] Rehearsals took place at Farmyard Studios in Little Chalfont, owned by Trevor Morais and on the day of the shows, began at 9 a.m.[15][3] Each performance lasted for one hour and forty minutes.[11] Performing with Wakeman and his band were the London Symphony Orchestra and the English Chamber Choir conducted by Measham. A projection screen was placed above the stage, initially to display stock footage of mountains and caves, but permission was granted from 20th Century Fox to show excerpts from the 1959 adventure film of the same name to accompany the music.[14][3] An initial plan was to have the concerts filmed for a prospective home video release when it was "commercially viable", but it did not come into fruition.[11]

The shows were introduced with an excerpt of Symphony No. 1 by Sergei Rachmaninoff. The first half was taken up by "Catherine Parr", "Catherine Howard", and "Anne Boleyn" from The Six Wives of Henry VIII, with comical pieces "A Road to Ruin" and a comical rendition of "Twelfth Street Rag" with banjos, minstrel dancers, and accompanying footage of Laurel and Hardy and various silent films.[15][16][17] Wakeman thought the segment would be a disaster as the film arrived at the venue shortly before the first performance and resorted to improvising on the piano without knowing what the footage was.[18] Wakeman wanted the first half to be "musical and entertaining" and a way of easing Journey to the audience, which made up the second half of the program.[3][15][13] The encore was "The Pearl and Dean Piano Concerto", a humorous piece based on various television and film music.[19] News reporter Chris Welch attended the shows and noted: "Several members of the choir could be seen jiving during the more rhythmic moments, and when Rick played some beautiful classical piano, approving nods could be detected from the massed ranks of the orchestra".[16] A party was held after the second show which Wakeman did not attend due to exhaustion. According to Welch, "He was driven home – asleep".[16]

Wakeman had hoped to record both concerts and select the best performance of the two, but the London Symphony Orchestra requested double pay if this went ahead. He then took "the frightening decision of only recording the second performance and hoping there weren't too many mistakes".[20] The performance was recorded using Ronnie Lane's Mobile Studio which housed a 16-track studio fitted in an Airstream trailer.[12][18] The first half of the second show was recorded, initially as a test to see if the equipment worked correctly. It remained unreleased until 2002 as part of Wakeman's limited edition box set Treasure Chest.[19]

The recordings were produced by Wakeman, and mixed by him and engineer Paul Tregurtha at Morgan Studios in London from 21 to 29 January 1974.[12] They encountered a number of problems during this time. Wakeman said: "Someone in the street had accidentally kicked out the vocal mike cable just before we started recording. So we boosted up the vocals that were picked up on the other mikes".[18] A snare drum and its microphone broke during the performance, and Hemmings re-recorded some narration in the studio after a tape change occurred during of one of his passages. There were four bars of "complete shambles" between the orchestra and the band, so an identical passage that occurred later in the performance was inserted.[18]

The original plan was for A&M Records to produce the album quickly for a February 1974 release, but the additional time required to fix the recordings and a shortage of vinyl at the time caused the label to push the release to early April. This sparked concern from management for potential bootleg recordings of the concert to be sold to the public. A&M reported that a later release would "tie in more conveniently with Wakeman's plans" as he had resumed touring with Yes during this time.[21] Wakeman heard cuts of the album during the subsequent Yes tour, rejecting several of them. "I just didn't like the sound, and it was worth doing it properly for the sake of a few extra days".[18] Another factor in the delay was a paper shortage as the original album design consisted of a gatefold sleeve with an 8-page booklet, but the designer refused to reduce the package to a standard sleeve.[18]

The album received some negative reaction upon its release, with music critics having described the record as a "classical pastiche...genuinely appalling" and "brutal synthesiser overkill".[30] Journey however, was well received by others. A journalist for The Sunday Times missed the Royal Festival Hall concert, but thought on record the music "comes over magnificently ... a striking work which only occasionally lapses into pretentiousness".[31] Music journalist Chris Welch of Melody Maker thought the album was "entertaining, fresh and disalarmingly unpretentious ... This could be a score for a Hollywood musical – tuneful, but with epic overtones". Welch noted Wakeman's "familiarity of the story" and his "close observance to detail engenders a warmth to the work, which made it a resounding success as a concert performance".[31] In a retrospective review, Mike DeGange of Allmusic called the album "one of progressive rock's crowning achievements" and noted "interesting conglomerations of orchestral and synthesized music".[32]

In July 1974, Wakeman headlined the Crystal Palace Garden Party concert, performing the album in its entirety with selections from The Six Wives of Henry VIII. This was followed by his debut concert tour as a solo artist, starting with a North American leg in September and October 1974. He was joined by his band, the English Rock Ensemble, formed of drummer Barney James, guitarist Jeffrey Crampton, vocalists Ashley Holt and Garry Pickford-Hopkins, bassist Roger Newell, and percussionist John Hodgson. Each show saw the group performing with the 45-piece National Philharmonic Orchestra and the 16-piece Choir of America, both formed of freelance musicians based in New York City, conducted by Measham with Terry Taplin as narrator. Under doctors orders, Wakeman was required to pass a heart monitor test prior to each show. The tour visited Japan, Australia, and New Zealand between January and March 1975.

All music is composed by Rick Wakeman.