Yes

“Progressive music” we used to call it. There was even a society devoted to the genre at school. Nowadays I see it more often referred to as “prog rock”. “Pompous”, “overblown”, “pretentious” are the adjectives of choice. The standard narrative has it that such ego-fuelled noodling was killed off by the hawking and spitting punks of the late 1970s, just as the prog rockers had seen off the simpering Flower Power of the ‘60s. Revolutions are rarely so cut-and-dried, however. Returning in middle age to King Crimson, Genesis, Yes – the loves of my youth – I find continuity across the decades. As a pre-teen my first enthusiasm was Simon & Garfunkel. How delicious to read in biographies of Yes that what brought founder members Jon Anderson and Chris Squire together in 1968 and inspired the close harmonies that would be so characteristic of the band’s vocals was a love of that same clean-cut New York duo! (This found clearest expression in an extraordinary ten-minute reimagining of Paul Simon’s ‘America’, a bonus track on the Fragile CD.)

 

The Yes Album, released in February 1971, was my entry point. Perhaps not Yes’s greatest album. I’d award that honour to 1972’s Close To The Edge. With the elephantine three-disc set that was Tales From Topographic Oceans (1973) they began to lose the plot. A transitional album, then. Their two previous LPs had included cover versions. Now they wrote all their own material and presented it with new-won confidence. This was the age of “getting it together in the country”, so in the autumn of 1970 the band chilled out at a farm in North Devon to develop their ideas before moving to Advision Studios in London, where they worked with trusted engineer-producer Eddie Offord. 

 

The line-up was near perfect by this point, underpinned by a fabulous rhythm section: Bill Bruford’s resourceful drumming locked in with Chris Squire’s propulsive bass. In Steve Howe they’d now acquired a hugely inventive guitarist, versatile across a range of styles. Whether playing his Gibson semi-acoustic or his Martin acoustic, Howe never puts a finger wrong. As someone struggling to master a few chords myself, I was fascinated by ‘Clap’, his solo guitar contribution to the album. Recorded live at the Lyceum Theatre, London, this Chet Atkins-influenced number sits a little askew from the prog-rocking on either side of it, but like his relaxed, jazzy solo in ‘Perpetual Change’ it showcases what he – and the band – were now capable of. 

 

Tony Kaye is underestimated as a keyboard player and his Hammond organ is prominent throughout. He was no lover of the newly fashionable synthesiser. By the time of the next album he’d left, replaced by Rick Wakeman, the caped crusader who would happily play anything with a keyboard – usually three or four of the things at the same time. (Wakeman, I felt, was always better in the band than out of it. His later solo projects, like The Six Wives Of Henry VIII, prioritised fluency and virtuosity for the sheer hell of it.)

 

The frontman, though, in every sense, was vocalist and main lyricist Jon Anderson. Anderson’s enunciation was unusually good for a rock singer, and his purity of tone and distinctive Accrington accent set him apart. (In a video from the 1990s he actually drops into a parody at one point of George Formby, Lancashire’s foremost ukulele-botherer!)  So you heard the lyrics on a Yes album, although they weren’t printed on the sleeve or a separate lyrics sheet. I heard them, but I’m still not sure if I got them. On first exposure to ‘Yours Is No Disgrace’, I remember my teenage self thinking, “your what is no disgrace?” Years later I read in the burgeoning literature on the band that the song is “about the Vietnam War”, its lyrics contrasting the suffering of the soldiers in Indo-China with people partying in Las Vegas. I suppose the lines “Battleships confide in me” and “mutilated armies gather near” were a clue. Likewise, keen ears attuned to ‘I’ve Seen All Good People’, the opening track on Side Two, have spotted, about three minutes into the track and buried deep in the mix, a quote from John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace A Chance’. 

 

Do lyrics matter in this sort of music? These boys were not singer-songwriters in autobiographical vein, despite their early reverence for Paul Simon. Abstract word-painting, sci-fi metaphor, Humpty-Dumpty invitations to polysemy – these seemed, rather, to be their currency. Anderson was very into enlightenment and the search for God: I registered that. It was obvious enough on the ‘Life Seeker’ section of The Yes Album, and I knew he invoked Hermann Hesse on Close to the Edge and Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda on Topographic Oceans. But “about the Vietnam War”? Not in the sense that ‘We Shall Overcome’ is “about” the civil rights struggle, surely? 

 

Perhaps, because of Yes’s ambitions to be taken seriously, I imagined they aspired to the condition of “absolute” music. After all, what is a Beethoven string quartet “about”? We “progressive music” fans thought we were a cut above because we knew Brahms and Liszt weren’t just Cockney rhyming slang. A schoolfriend with more classical training and analytic skills than I could muster pointed me to the subtle use of “polymetre” in ‘Perpetual Change’, the album’s final track, where a riff in one time signature is superimposed over a bass pattern in other metres. Clever. 

The record isn’t without blemish. The curiously titled ‘Würm’, which builds repetitively over a three-chord vamp, is a bit tedious. The use of stereo panning now seems gimmicky. Yet, for an album recorded over fifty years ago, it still sounds fresh and creative. I’m not embarrassed to revisit my younger self when I listen to it anew.

[First published in RnR magazine].