The heyday of progressive rock in the 70s was also the heyday of the flamboyant, classically trained keyboard player – the “keyboard wizards” as they were known at the time – and none were more flamboyant than Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman.
Emerson was never going to be content sitting studiously behind his keyboard. Jimi Hendrix had played his guitar with his teeth, rubbed it over his body and speaker cabinets, and set fire to it. He’d raised the bar high in terms of showmanship and Emerson was keen to claim some of that action. Back in the late 60s, while in The Nice, he stuck knives into the keys of his Hammond L-100 organ to produce a drone, rocked it back and forth to get feedback, appeared to hump it, and at times lay underneath it as if it were humping him, an approach he carried on into the 70s with Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Although he stopped short of setting fire to the Hammond, he did burn a painting of an American flag at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1968 in protest against
