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By mid-1973, Wakeman had been with the progressive rock band Yes for almost two years, and he had released his debut solo effort, The Six Wives of Henry VIII. For his next release Wakeman wished to make an album that told a story with its music, something that he had been inspired to do so since his father took him to see a performance of the symphonic fairy tale Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev which features a narrator telling the story and an orchestra illustrating the action.[1] Wakeman had wanted to do an orchestral rock piece based on the 1864 science fiction novel A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne as early as November 1971, but he put the project on hold until he had finished recording The Six Wives of Henry VIII in October 1972,[2] and had accumulated some money and had written some music for it.[3]