Lambe Yes

Every Album, Every Song. Expanded edition
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78952-089-7
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: On Track

Yes are the archetypal 1970s progressive rock group. Playing powerful and adventurous music when it was briefly part of the mainstream, the band thrilled millions with their iconic albums and epic live shows. Records like Fragile and Close To The Edge helped define an era and although the band dissolved at the end of the decade, Yes emerged once again with 90125, a streamlined, modern sound in the 1980s and a US number one hit single in 'Owner of a Lonely Heart'. Now in their sixth decade, the band continues to release albums and play live into the new millennium, despite numerous, sometimes controversial, lineup changes.
This book examines each one of Yes's studio albums, highlighting the many high points, and the rarer missteps, as well as focussing on the changes in band dynamics which led to some varied - but always interesting - music. This new, expanded edition celebrates a flurry of recent Yes activity, including new albums The Quest and Mirror To The Sky as well as a detailed examination of the band's live recordings, making this the most up-to-date and comprehensive guide to the band's music yet written It is essential reading for Yes' legions of fans worldwide.

Stephen Lambe is an author, publisher and festival promoter. He is an acknowledged expert on progressive rock, having written the best-selling Citizens Of Hope And Glory - The History Of Progressive Rock for Amberley in 2011 - and has discussed the subject on BBC Radio. He has co-hosted the Summer's End Progressive Rock Festival since 2006 and is a former Chairman of the Classic Rock Society. His first live concert - of many hundreds - was Yes at Wembley Arena in 1978. He lives in Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, UK.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lambe, Stephen

Leseproben

Introduction

Was there ever such a complex band as Yes?

By that, of course, I mean structurally complex. I can think of few groups that have had so many line-up changes, and yet so many members that have left the band and later rejoined; a band that have had so many different methodologies and motivations for creating music; a band that has been so divided by inter-band politics and squabbles over money. Yet Yes are a group of musicians that, at their best, have made some of the most spectacular and uplifting music ever created. It makes for a colourful story and one that has lasted for over 55 years in one form or another. Only for a couple of barren years in the early 1980s was there no band called Yes at all, and while other periods have seen the band dormant, someone – somewhere – was holding the torch. Musicians were planning or talking or writing. And fans were waiting.

One of the crucial factors that made Yes the band it was, happened before they formed in London in early 1968, from the ashes of a psychedelic band called Mabel Greer’s Toyshop. Aside from drummer Bill ‘Tubs’ Bruford – who found his way into the band by the sheer weight of his talent as an eighteen-year-old – the band that formed was made up of relatively seasoned musicians. Tony Kaye was 22. Chris Squire and Peter Banks – who had already played together in the band The Syn – were both twenty but had played in professional groups since 1965. Jon Anderson had survived a lengthy stint in touring band The Warriors, but had also recorded a couple of singles under the name Hans Christian. He was a positively elderly 23. The band already had some chops, and while there was much still to learn, the individual musicians could play together safe in the knowledge of each other’s competence.

Those levels of competence were soon to be tested, however. On the first two albums, the listener can almost feel Yes finding their feet and prodding at the limits of what was possible in popular music. Although only a limited success, the use of the orchestra on Time And A Word was at least ambitious, an attempt to try something new. It is no surprise that the impetus to do this came from Anderson, the visionary ‘Napoleon’ with the unusual voice and an even more unusual view of the world. In Squire and Bruford, the band already had a world-class rhythm section, and so much more than a standard bass and drums duo.

But what of the other two? Kaye was a talented and dextrous player but rather rooted – at this stage at least – to the jazz/blues organ stylings of the 1960s. In most bands, Peter Banks would have been the star, yet in Yes, he didn’t quite cut the mustard, replaced in 1970 by another musician of astonishing ability in Steve Howe.

Kaye hung around for the ground-breaking Yes Album, the band’s breakthrough record in the UK, a hybrid of the progressive rock the band were beginning to pioneer and other more derivative styles, but the arrival of Rick Wakeman for Fragile opened doors to much bolder styles of music, with instruments like the Moog and the Mellotron played not as novelty items but as key instruments in an ever-expanding palette of sounds. By Close To The Edge this transition was complete, with the band producing one of the defining albums of the early 1970s, taking the record-buying public on the same journey wherever the listeners were in the world.

Bruford departed for King Crimson – chasing the art rather than the money – and was replaced by the impressively hard-hitting and mobile Alan White (imagine Buddy Rich replaced by Animal from The Muppets). But lengthy tours and a ground-breaking triple live album and film in Yessongs, continued the momentum as Yes became one of the biggest bands in the world. It is likely that this momentum was slowed by the release of the bold but (arguably) inconsistent Tales From Topographic Oceans, leading to Wakeman’s departure and the recruitment of the equally extravagant and talented Patrick Moraz. 1974’s Relayer was even bolder, if anything – a real ‘fuck you’ to those that had criticised Tales, and with 1975 and 1976 taken up by touring, the money kept rolling in.

1976 saw the next line-up change, which was motivated as much by management needs and the rather less-than-savoury financial aspects of the band, as by musical considerations. Moraz was out – fired while rehearsing in his own country, no less – and Wakeman was back. His performance on Going For The One as a glorified session man was exemplary, and everyone else was also on fine form in this excellent album, largely made up of shorter pieces, but topped off by the astonishing, 15-minute ‘Awaken’. Less so the patchy Tormato, which saw the band beginning to fragment again and then break apart completely in Paris at the end of 1979.

Howe, White and Squire continued with the fiery Drama bolstered by British pop duo (and self-confessed Yes fans) the Buggles – Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes – in a band now called by its detractors (not to mention a fair few fans), as The Yuggles. After a difficult tour with an inexperienced Horn struggling both vocally and with the ‘sin’ of not being Jon Anderson, the band called it a day. However, the Yes ‘brand’ was revived in 1983 when management once again saw pound signs by tagging on Jon Anderson onto an existing Squire/White project with South African guitarist Trevor Rabin and a returning Tony Kaye, called Cinema. Against the odds, 90125 was a huge success, bolstered by ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’, a number one single in the USA and a spectacular world tour. But they failed to capitalise, taking too long to produce a rather soulless and over-produced follow-up in Big Generator. Anderson jumped ship for the second time.

What came next may have felt unsavoury at the time. Anderson formed his own alternative ‘Yes’ using a band of cast-offs (if one were to put it unkindly) or the musicians that many felt should have been in Yes all along (to be more charitable). The resulting band was pretty decent, with Bill Bruford, in particular, invigorating and invigorated with his banks of electronic percussion, even if the sounds he created with it have dated somewhat. However, with Yes still technically existing on the west coast of America, a reckoning was sure to come, and come it did. The lawyers and managers got their heads together and created an eight-headed monster. If the album, Union, was a variable and often unsatisfactory beast, the tour itself was rather better, getting the best of its cast of thousands (well, eight).

What next?

Howe, Wakeman and Bruford were out again, and while the next album and tour saw a return to the 90125 line up – with an eye to the charts, one suspects – the spark failed to ignite a return to past glories. First, there was oblivion, then a glimmer of hope as the Going For The One line-up had another go, this time via an attempt to recapture the long-form glories of the early 1970s via The Keys To Ascension albums. However, by this time it was 1996 and the band were starting to chase shadows as one strange management decision followed another. If Open Your Eyes, with new young blood Billy Sherwood and Igor Khoroshev on board, was a bit of a bodge, they followed that with their last attempt to be ‘new’ and ‘relevant’ via the The Ladder album.

The shows supporting that patchy record was arguably their last attempt to ‘tour’ a brand new album, and the line-up changes continued into the 2000s. After the Magnification album – good but largely ignored – which took advantage of a lack of a keyboard player by replacing the role with an orchestra – and the subsequent Symphonic Tour, Wakeman returned in 2003. If the 1990s were about the attempt to recapture past glories, then the early 2000s were about the band becoming comfortable in its own skin, happy to recreate the past. The 2004 world tour, though, exhausted everyone, particularly Anderson. A 40th Anniversary Tour was planned in 2008, but with Anderson having suffered severe respiratory problems and Wakeman fearing what another long-term tour might do to his own health, first Oliver Wakeman (Rick’s eldest son, with a playing style similar to his old man) and then French-Canadian singer Benoît David were recruited. Many fans cried foul. This was poor treatment of the man that represented the soul of the band, they said, with some justification.

Nonetheless, the band continued to tour led by Squire, Howe and White, even planning new material. The resulting album Fly From Here, which saw the younger Wakeman replaced by Geoff Downes, returning after 30 years, was co-ordinated by Trevor Horn, and saw Horn and Downes providing a lot of the songs, most of it written in the early 1980s. This was a smart move – a new Yes album with strong, older material. However, with David also out eventually – another victim of a band unwilling to lose momentum while a band member suffered health issues – and excellent new singer Jon Davison recruited, the band continued to tour and had one more album in it, the tired and poorly received Heaven and Earth.

There were several more stings in the tail, however. The health of neither Squire nor White held up. Chris Squire suffered from a rare form of Leukaemia and, in 2015, became the second member of the Yes family to pass away, following Peter Banks in 2013. White’s health...