Prog Special: Yes

There has never been a band like Yes. Not only are they one of the biggest prog acts in history, but they did more than most to expand the vocabulary of rock’n’roll. In their hands, it took on the scope and ambition of classical music and jazz. The fact they did all of that while seemingly hiring and firing new members every week makes it even more remarkable. Of course, if you’re reading this, you’ll know all that. You’ll also know that the band have never been given the respect they deserve from the mainstream music industry – despite selling millions of albums, notching up several hit singles and packing out huge arenas for more than 50 years, they’ve been ignored and misunderstood for most of their career. This special…

“Yes bore no resemblance to anything else that was about at the time and I thought, ‘Shit, this is going to be a great band.’”Rick Wakeman On the morning that Prog speaks to Rick Wakeman, the veteran keyboard player is in a very good mood and about as far removed from his ‘Grumpy Old Rick’ Twitter handle as is possible to imagine. The reason? “I’m going to get my [Covid vaccine] jab this morning,” he says with some enthusiasm. It’s also possible another reason the 71-year-old is so chipper is that he’s talking about the events of 1971, a year that saw his career coincidentally given a massive shot in the arm after joining Yes. In February 1971, The Yes Album was released and, nine months later, Fragile: two remarkable…

“At the time I was working a lot on Friends Magazine with the late Jon Goodchild, who’d come over from the States from Rolling Stone. He was their art director at the time. Out of the blue, he asked me to do some stuff for this upcoming Yes album, which they were recording at the time. “He, being a designer, had this idea of getting the band against a white backdrop. He’d got some Marshall stacks sent to him in this photographic studio and we had the band’s name stencilled on the back and the plan was that we’d stand the band around them and we’d start from there. “We got set up and waited for ages. We checked our setup and checked it all again for something to do.…

“Phil Carson, the then-boss of Atlantic Records in England, introduced me to the band at Advision Studios. I went there with my massively decorated copy of Parsifal illustrated by Willy Pogany. The illustrations, decorations and the text were very intense. I said to the band it would be fantastic to have this magical story in this sort of form. Of course, we couldn’t put out an album that was like an old book but there’s a little attempt at that in printing on the brown paper on the inside and having that booklet within it. So it was the faintest of faintest shadows of how it might have been. “The gatefold cover I saw as a story, a fantasy. It wasn’t symbolic of anything. It was part of a story…

In 1968, 19-year-old Chris Squire came round in the geriatric ward of the Chelsea And Westminster Hospital, convinced he was dead. He’d ended up there after taking homemade LSD, and being found, crazed and gibbering, by his girlfriend at the flat they shared in nearby Kensington. “It was like being in God’s waiting room,” Squire recalls now. “For a while I really didn’t know if I was still alive.” When he realised he wasn’t dead, Squire returned to the flat – and stayed there for months. “This girl looked after me,” he sighs. “She worked all day and I stayed in all day. The most I could manage was a trip to the shops at the end of the road.” There was, he insists, one good outcome to all this.…

Yes’s 21st album, Heaven & Earth, was produced by Roy Thomas Baker, whose past console credits include Queen, Journey, The Cars and very nearly Yes in 1979. Baker had been booked to oversee the follow-up to 1978’s Tormato. Unfortunately, by the time he’d arrived in Paris, where the band had started recording, the group had almost broken up. Squire recalls that Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman had been writing songs together, and that he and the rest of the group [Alan White and Steve Howe] weren’t overly impressed with the results: “We got as far as four backing tracks.” Then disaster struck when White went to a roller-disco and broke his ankle. “Without a drummer we couldn’t do any more, so we shelved it.” “And I buggered off back to…