Prog Rock

Confession time! Within the confines of even the most credible closet there lurks at least one rattling sack of bones waiting for the opportunity to leap out and flip the skeletal finger at a carefully cultivated concept of cool .
A drawling, life-on-the-edge wannabe Rocker would prefer it if the public remained unaware of a past which included, say, a stint as chess captain at a privileged school. In my own case, it s definitely time to own up to a period when Punk and Power Pop didn t dominate the Dansette chez Byrne, but rather the portentous powerchords and pretentious poetry of Prog Rock.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis, Flash, Druid, PFM, Refugee, Gentle Giant, Focus, Fruupp, Camel. No question about it, a collection sprinkled with those lads was bound to make you appear clever and attractive to girls moreso than any of that inane, meaningless Rock n Roll or Soul stuff I mean, people actually danced to things like that! Yet soaring majestically over the field like Pegasus at a point-to-point were Yes, a band who d headed for the heart of the symphonic sunrise with their third outing, 1972 s The Yes Album and never looked down or back.
I got better of course and still have the all-clear cert from Dr.Rock dated 1976 to prove it but my embracing of the possibilities presented by the brave new world of Punk didn t completely free me of a certain affection for Yes, as was proved by a 1978 trip to London to see the band, the first time myself and my mates had been let out of the country by ourselves.
To make matters worse from a credibility point of view the relevant Yes tour to promote the Tormato album coincided with the band s tenth anniversary and at the behest of two friends I sent off a letter to Melody Maker (times were hard then and I possessed the only biro and jotter in the area) enquiring as to the exact date that singer Jon Anderson and bassist Chris Squire first met in the La Chasse Club in Soho. A vague reply arrived two weeks later but imagine our surprise when the tour programme, written by MM s then-editor Chris Welch, kicked off with a piece about these three Irishmen who intended to organise a Yes celebration to coincide with the anniversary, our missive being held up as testimony to the longstanding appeal of the band. So now you know.
That was you, was it? laughs Chris Squire down the phone from New York. We were used to getting letters from all over the place but that seemed extraordinarily specific What was the exact date myself and Jon first met? as I recall and naturally we hadn t a clue, it was the 60s after all! Still, I hope you had a good time of it anyway. I remember on that tour thinking God, we ve actually stuck it out for ten whole years but to have gone from 1968 into a new millennium just seems utterly unbelievable. I m not kidding when I say that at the outset we thought we d be doing really well if we got as far as four albums. Where did it all go wrong!

From making their debut at Cream s farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1969, Yes established a solid UK and US following but sales of their eponymous debut and 1970 s Time And A Word were hardly encouraging, prompting guitarist Peter Banks to leave. As is frequently the way with these things, it was only when replaced by Steve Howe (a former member of Tomorrow who d played on the psychedelic classic My White Bicycle ) that the band s direction really began to take shape.
The Yes Album contained Yours Is No Disgrace , Starship Trooper and I ve Seen All Good People , songs which marked out Yes increasingly elaborate arrangements, both instrumental and vocal, which made sense given that Squire and Anderson were huge fans of The Byrds, Fifth Dimension and The Beach Boys. But the final piece in the jigsaw came when former Strawb Rick Wakeman replaced Tony Kaye on keyboards for Fragile, their second full-length release of 1971.
When Rick joined it just all clicked into place, says Squire. We d been grasping at something over the first two albums without quite knowing what we were aiming for, but Steve coming on board for The Yes Album moved things along dramatically and Rick just put the seal on things. It s difficult for bands nowadays to picture just how fast things moved back then, but between April 1969 and December 1971 we released four albums and toured constantly.
By the time Fragile came out we were so far removed from the debut that it sounded like a different band, Jon s vocals apart, of course. Bands just don t get that chance now, if the first album doesn t sell you re gone and if it does the companies want you to wring every last drop out of it before letting you get on with the next one, which is why bands get bored sitting on songs for anything up to three years before getting a chance to record them. We didn t have time to get bored. Flogged us to death they did!
Fragile broke the band in the States (and gave them a Top 20 hit there in the shape of the 9-minute Roundabout ) and, with Wakeman settled in alongside Squire, Anderson, Howe and drummer Bill Bruford, Yes began to stretch themselves even further, delivering what many feel to be the definitive Prog Rock album with 1972 s Close To The Edge (I shudder to think how many times I played this during my mid-teen years and to this day I still haven t a clue what any of it is about) before going bananas entirely the following year, not only releasing a triple live album (Yessongs) but unleashing a double studio set on the world.
Based on the Shastric scriptures, as picked up on by Anderson courtesy of a lengthy footnote in a Yogi s autobiography he happened to be reading on tour, Tales From Topographic Oceans was well-nigh impenetrable even to people who d be prepared to spoof you blind that Close To The Edge was as easy to follow as Old Shep .
It confused a lot of people, that s for sure, explains Squire, somewhat needlessly. It certainly confused Rick, who thought we were becoming parodies of ourselves and left. And what does he go off and do then, The Myths And Legends Of King Arthur And The Knights Of The Round Table, and performs the bloody thing on ice! With the benefit of hindsight, Tales was a bit much but because it was so extreme it meant that we weren t pigeonholing ourselves as a band. There was so much stuff to digest on that record that it gave us the leeway to head in whichever direction we wanted, whereas if we d just done a condensed version it would have been no more than Close To The Edge Part II and we wouldn t have been able to branch out. I m still proud of that record and stand by it.
While Yes continued to write lengthy, technically dazzling songs and adorned their album sleeves with the Tolkeinesque fantasy art of Roger Dean there was something unholy stirring in the scuzzy dives of London and New York. When Punk began to show its scabrous skull above the parapet of popular culture in 1976 the excesses of the Prog Rock brigade were its prime target, so how did Yes react to being labelled as dinosaurs?
It didn t bother us in the slightest, he says. You must remember that we were an absolutely huge band, selling millions of albums and undertaking colossal world tours so a bunch of young bands calling us names was hardly going to bother us too much. I was only 28 when Anarchy In The UK came out for God s sake, there were people in The Stranglers who were older than me! We d read about what was happening, sure, but our attitude was pretty much You do what you do, we ll do what we do . Any band worth its salt gets on with their own thing, we re all musicians and to reduce it to the level of a playground fight doesn t do anyone any favours. Mind you, our songs did get a bit shorter from 1977 onwards.
What with Anderson collaborating with Vangelis on a regular basis and Wakeman coming and going every second album or so, it was
inevitable that something would have to give, and in 1980 came one of the odder twists in the Yes tale when the singer left to be replaced by . . . Buggles!
Yeah, that stunned a few people alright, laughs the bassist. Jon wanted a break, Rick had gone again and we had an album to finish. Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes were working in the next studio while all this was going on and it really was as simple as knocking on the door and asking Do you fancy doing this? That album Drama had its moments but then Steve left with Geoff to form Asia and Jon came back just a separation really.
With Anderson back in the fold and guitarist Trevor Rabin subbing for Howe,Yes stunned more than their fans by recording the mega-selling 90125 which included the AOR radio standard Owner Of A Lonely Heart and they continued on their merry way until the early 90s, when some serious rifts occurred.
It all got very, very messy for a while, admits Chris. The ins and outs are a bit complicated to go into but basically what happened was that Trevor Rabin and I were operating as Yes while there was a breakaway unit called Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman & Howe touring under the banner An evening of Yes music with. , which I thought was a bit below the belt, to put it mildly. That was the only time in the entire history of the band where several personal relationships suffered, but we got over it. Old hippies, always seeing the good side of people!

The year 2000 sees the core Yes unit of
Squire, Anderson, Bruford and Howe back together with a new album The Ladder, complete with a video game tie-in ( People might find that strange but a lot of our fans are, er, fond of computers I almost said nerds there, didn t I! ) and easing their way into the new millennium with a 150-minute show comprising a chunk of the new record with excerpts from their vast back-catalogue. Their recent return to Ireland also causes Squire to chuckle at the last time they played in this country.
It was 1969, he reminisces, and we were part of a triple bill with The Nice and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah band. Belfast went well, as did Dublin but then we headed out West I think it may have been County Clare, I m not too sure to play some festival or other. Well, it wasn t exactly the best-organised event in the history of rock n roll because when we got there and set the gear up it turned out that the only power source for everything was one long cable going back to a single three-pin socket in a shed behind a farmhouse. So we all just went to the pub, got pissed and had a great session with the locals. Viv Stanshall of The Bonzos was in impeccable form as Master of Ceremonies as I recall. Still, I m sure things have come a long way since then. In fact we ve all come a long way since then.