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Yes The Yes Album

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What does it sound like?:

It came into our house like every album in 1970 and early ‘71 did; in a Harlequin Records bag, (or Derek’s Records, Wax, or Bonaparte Records,) carried by my brother, two years my senior; Kev. He was an avid record-buyer, even at sixteen. He had started with the British Blues bands, led by Fleetwood Mac and his hero, Peter Green, and backed up by Ten Years After and Eric Clapton. Free were a constant, as was Rory Gallagher, before Led Zeppelin joined the party, cheered on by Deep Purple and Mountain. Yet, on a day in April 1971, inside that Harlequin Records bag, The Yes Album came into my life.

I may only have been fourteen but, through Kev, I had spent two years being exposed to all of this wonderful music. We shared a bedroom and his huge poster of Peter Green, all long, curly hair and thick beard, and THAT Les Paul, was the first thing I saw every morning. I had been indoctrinated into the most magical, exciting world at an early age and was like a sponge, soaking up every drop of whatever delicious musical beverage he brought into the house.

Kev took the album out of the bag and turned on the Bush radiogram in the corner of the lounge. It hummed. He took the record carefully out of the sleeve and the inner-bag and placed it onto the turntable. There was the familiar thud of the needle as it landed on the outer groove, a slight pause and then…my life would never be quite the same again.

Fifty-two years on, The Yes Album is still one of my favourite albums – I am currently on my seventh copy and about to invest in the eighth – and I still play it often. So, when the chance came up to go and hear the new Steven Wilson remastered version, in a pristine acoustic environment, I could not raise my hand fast enough.

L Acoustics is an audio company with offices in London, Paris, Los Angeles and Singapore. If you’ve been to gigs at Hammersmith Apollo, Lafayette or Kentish Town Forum, then you’ve heard the band through an L Acoustics P.A system. They are the speaker of choice at many festivals, on both sides of the Atlantic. If you’ve heard one of their domestic systems, then you must have spent time on a luxury yacht or in a rooftop penthouse.

L Acoustics London office is in a smart residential street in Highgate, North London and, for the first time in my 67 years, ‘my name is on the door.’ I take a seat in the back row of a wide room and hear the distinctive voice of Prog Magazine’s editor, Jerry Ewing, chatting to the lady at the door. If Jerry’s here, this is a big deal.

At 6.15pm the lady from L Acoustics introduces herself and tells the thirty or so people in the room a bit about the company and then what we are going to hear. She also says that Steven Wilson was going to be there but had cancelled due to a family accident, (not serious, apparently.)

The lights dim, except for the large green ones on the top of each of the eighteen speakers, spaced five feet apart, all the way around the room. The familiar sound of Yours Is No Disgrace fills the room and I am fourteen again, sitting on the settee as the same chords leap out of the single speaker of that big old Bush radiogram, in April 1971.

Steven Wilson has done a fantastic job of remastering the Yes catalogue; he even made me fall back in love with Tales From Topographic Oceans, for God’s sake; and his genius continues with The Yes Album. Tony Kaye’s keyboards are now much more audible, the fantastic harmony vocals now sound full and lush, and Chris Squire’s bass rumbles and growls out of the speakers like some mythical monster, approaching from the depths of hell. The drums are clear as a bell, with the kick-drum now more prominent and urgent than it was. And where the hell did that acoustic guitar come from?

The Yes Album is a guitar record. Steve Howe had joined Yes in June 1970 and, after a few gigs, the band disappeared to a farm in Devon, to write and rehearse material for this, their third album. At the end of the Summer, Yes moved back to London, to Advision Studios in Gosfield Street, Fitzrovia, two streets away from the BBC’s Portland Place building. Advision had recently taken delivery of one of the first 16-track tape machines in London and Yes were determined to take full advantage of the expanded landscape.
Steve Howe was 23 years-old at the time, (Kaye and Jon Anderson were both 25, Squire, 22 and drummer Bill Bruford was 21,) and, with the help of 27 year-old engineer and producer, Eddy Offord, Howe began to fill that expanded landscape.

His guitars are everywhere. They appear in front of me, behind me, above me, (yes, there are speakers in the ceiling,) and are thrillingly exciting. The young Londoner was a ferocious player at the time, at the peak of his powers, and this is his Everest.

The songs are so familiar and the forty-two minutes rush by, my right leg playing the imaginary kick-pedal, (quietly,) as usual. As Perpetual Change fades out there is a round of applause and I find the hairs on my arms standing up as the rush of excitement courses through my body.

While I had been listening in the darkness I had been aware of someone moving behind me and now, as the lights come up, I look to my right to see the 74 year-old version of the drummer I’d just been listening to, the young kid on my poster with the curly, golden hair and the winning smile. Six feet away from me is Bill Scott Bruford.

The lady from L Acoustics explains that Bill was to have been interviewed by Steven Wilson so, in his absence, she is going to ask for questions from the audience.

Bill is famously reticent, especially when discussing his time in Yes, and tonight is no different, although we do get flashes of recall. He calls the album ‘charming’ and remembers how young and inexperienced he was. He recalls how his kit was mic’d up by ‘two overheads and one on the kick,’ while Howe was allocated seven tracks for his guitars. When asked how ‘the new boy’ got to have nearly half of the available recording space, he replies, ‘You’d have to ask the new boy.’ He qualifies that by saying that the dynamic in lots of studios is that the pushier you are, the more you get your way, and that ‘the new boy’, even at 23, was already an experienced operator in that respect.

Bill felt that his drums sounded a little isolated in the new mix and was asked if he cringes listening back, if he would do things differently now. He replies, ‘Oh God, yes; completely.’ He also reveals that Yes were about to be dropped from Atlantic Records, which is partly why they were announcing themselves, with their new line-up, as if they were a new band, and calling it The Yes Album.

It struck me, as it often does, that we know every note, every stroke of an album and we adore what we hear; it becomes set in our brain. To the musicians, those notes and strokes are simply what they played on that day and, if the producer had chosen a different take, then we might never have heard what has become ‘our version.’

The event ends and I put my coat on, summoning up just enough courage to introduce myself to Jerry Ewing, telling him that I have some of his sister Sarah’s amazing art on my walls, (Big Big Train fans will be more than familiar with Sarah and her part in the band’s story,) before stepping out into the cold night. The depths of my courage were insufficient for me to speak to Bill, to tell him what his playing meant to me, that he was one of the reasons I played drums and that I had his poster on my wall as a kid.

This is not a full review of the new release of The Yes Album; there is a lot more to the package than simply Steven’s fantastic remix/remaster, including two newly-sourced 1971 gigs. The boxset features the 2014 remixed The Yes Album and instrumental versions of all six album tracks in the upcoming Super Deluxe Edition. In addition, the Blu-ray disc offers four new mixes of The Yes Album, including two versions in 5.1 Surround Sound, the 2023 Remaster, and the Dolby Atmos Mix and the whole lot is due out on 24th November from those lovely people at Rhino.
The Yes Album was the start of my journey into a wider spectrum of music; much wider than I had been exposed to before. Even at fourteen I knew that this was something different and that, while I would never desert Fleetwood Mac, Free and Led Zep, here was a rabbit-hole worth getting lost down. If I could have told my fourteen year old self that, fifty two years later, he’d be sitting six feet from Bill Bruford while he described recording that album, that he would be about to spend over a hundred quid on his eighth copy of it, and had been asked to write about it, I think he would have fainted clean away. To be honest, when I spotted Bill Bruford, 67 year-old me nearly did.

What does it all *mean*?

It means that I have spent a small fortune on this album, over the years.

Goes well with…

Good ears.

Release Date:

24th November 2023

Might suit people who like…

Great sound.

18

Comments

  1. Aw Niall, that brought a tear to my eye. I was sorry I was too far away to have attended this (I was quicker off the mark than you responding to the invite on here! 🙂 ), but it’s great to know the invitation was used by someone like you who clearly has a lot of love and respect for the album.

    Your description of it sounds very very enticing, ALMOST enough to make me shell out for this new edition. I imagine Steve’s guitar solo at the end of Starship Trooper must have raised the roof: that’s the bit I would have been most looking forward to.

    Love your comment about how to the musicians involved, this was just one take on one certain day. Food for thought.

    I’m jealous that Bill Bruford was there! Like you, I would definitely have been too nervous to speak to him as well. He’s a colossus that towers over a great swathe of my favourite records, and seems like an all round nice individual with a lot of integrity.

    Excellent post! Well done to you!

  3. Fabulous review (as always) and it certainly was a perfect match in someone who knows the album so well being the one to review it.

    I have all the previous SW remixes of the Yes catalogue and I would really love this one too – in particular the Blu Ray. However, the big big but is that it’s only available as a box set with vinyl, CD and Blu Ray. I don’t want the vinyl……. It continues to annoy me that the record companies put out the expensive mixed media boxsets. It makes no sense to me that they are bundled (and yes I understand that it’s the record companies way of fleecing more cash from us). Why they can’t just issue a standalone BluRay……..

  4. I’d certainly shell out for a Blu-ray of the Atmos mix but the whole thing is too rich as I have the 2014 version, regardless of how much I love this album (and I do). Happy memories of discovering this with my cohort in (probably) 1974. Three of us sat in front of my mate Dave’s Dad’s Trio hi-fi with the lights off just transported somewhere else by this, followed closely by Close To The Edge.

    Be interesting to see if they release an Atmos version to streaming as seems to be getting popular.

  5. By the way, since we are sharing stories of discovering this album, I’ll share mine as well. Nothing particularly special about the story, but I think it’s one of those albums that sinks itself deep into you on first listen and creates a “Where where you when you first…” moment.

    I was 17 years old, and on a school trip to Paris. My exposure to Yes up to that point had only been from the song Survival on my dad’s The Age of Atlantic compilation LP – I didn’t really like it as I couldn’t get a handle on what they were trying to do.

    But me and my friend had brought a few tapes for our walkmans, and swapped some with each other. Listening to it on headphones (and I’m sure the track order was different, and the album ended with Starship Trooper) was a holy experience. I never looked back!

    On the same trip, it was also the first time I heard Pink Floyd’s Animals, which was a similar experience.

  6. Wow, this takes me back. I was a slave to Yes by the time this came out, having got into Time and a Word after seeing them at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on October 31st 1970 where they played 4 tracks from it, supported by Dada (Elkie Brooks, Robert Palmer et al). Oh and also Paul Simon’s ‘America’; blew me away. Went skating at Queensway rink and bought it in Harlequin afterwards, scooting back to boarding school in Mill Hill to play it several times on the first day. Still a favourite of theirs. Felt they disappeared up their own importance after, or possibly during, Topographic.

    • @Jayhawk In the ’90’s I made myself a cassette of Topographic which cut out most of side 3 and the drum solo. The edits were spot on, (done on a tape to tape cassette player,) and I was so proud of it. It’s long gone but I still listen to the album that way. There is so much good stuff on it, it’s a shame that its got the reputation it has.

        • I enjoyed reading that Jayhawk, thanks! Dada were also on that Age of Atlantic compilation I mentioned above, singing a terrific version of The Last Time. I actually heard that and got into it before I knew of the Stones one. I’ve never heard anything else about Dada and haven’t ever sought them out: had no idea it was Elkie Brooks and Robert Palmer??

          RE Tales from Topographic Oceans: I had a similar view for years and years… but I wished I had taken the plunge earlier and listened to the next two albums Relayer and Going For The One properly, because once I did I realised how great they are. Then gradually I joined up the dots by going back to Topographic again and (largely thanks to Steven Wilson’s surround sound remix) is now one of my favourites. I recommend going back and taking a plunge in the Oceans!

          Niall, occasionally I’ve had the same thought of creating an edited version of Topographic. But every time I do I can’t work out what to cut out and I realise I love the whole thing.

          I’m ashamed to say now that I used to be ashamed to be a Yes fan, and my fandom was something I largely kept to myself. They were extremely unhip in the 90s and 00s if I remember, and there was no internet to speak of to find like-minded individuals. I think I started changing my mind when I once had a conversation with the drummer of Biffy Clyro (check me and my star connections) and he was crazy about them, which surprised me. I think it was bands like them, and Muse and maybe Radiohead, that started to turn the tide a bit and make Yes (and prog in general) a bit more acceptable.

          I wish I had just embraced my fandom and taken the opportunity to go and see them when they were still talking to each other. I’ve seen footage of the current incarnation and it’s a sorry sight, I’m afraid to say. My hope lies with Jon Anderson, who still has The Voice, and I’m hungry for this sequel to Olias of Sunhillow he has been banging on about for about 20 years. I also wish he would come and do a proper tour of the UK.

            • The history of Vinegar Joe is slightly more complex.
              Ahmet Ertegun wanted to reduce subsidises to Dada so they were encouraged to slim down.
              Robert Palmer was already an Island artist, hence Chris Blackwell getting involved and the smaller sized band being signed to that label in the UK.
              Dada leader Pete Gage was not sufficiently deferential to CB and hence the band got saddled with the name Vinegar Joe, which CB insisted upon, as a veiled insult to Gage.
              CB always saw VJ as a launch pad for RP’s solo career. It puzzles me as to why he didn’t get behind Elkie Brooks. Purely as a singer EB was in a different league to both Marianne Faithfull and Grace Jones. Given the fantastic albums they both produced because they were given backing by Island, one wonders how things might have turned out with a different level of support for EB.
              After the third VJ album, Six Star General was released RP announced he was leaving.
              PG met with RP to try and dissuade him. RP told him that, to mark his solo deal, CB had bought him a house in the Bahamas, so he couldn’t realistically go back on the deal.
              There is a lot more to the VJ story, but that would have to be told elsewhere.

  8. Great review – was a massive fan of Yes with The Yes Album. Close to the edge, Fragile and even Yessongs but Topographic spoiled it for me. The one and only time I saw them live they played it start to finish in its entirety and we only got Yours is no disgrace and Roundabout as encores. It was a brave choice by them and the audience were less than enthusiastic as they had never heard it before and 4 lp sides of new music as complicated as this was a lot to take in.
    I have great respect for this line up and Chris Squire in particular is sadly missed but Yes now are forever rooted in a time and place that I will most likely not return to.

  13. Nice one Niall, eloquent as ever.
    It was only fairly recently that I became fully aware of earlier Yes albums, I have spent my life believing this was the debut.

    How did you swing the invite and the name on the guest list?

  14. Marvellous review. Makes me want to play the album.

    Back in the day I was a Yes naysayer. I did a milk round with an older-than-me fan. He drove the truck. We used to go to his house for brunch when the round was finished. He played Yes, Gentle Giant and sh*t like that. Yessongs nearly broke me. He became a singer of a group called Snatchback. I introduced him to Loaded. He sang Sweet Jane brilliantly.

    Many years later, when I realised what a great bloke Rick Wakeman is, after Absolute Beginners made me appreciate how good a pianist he is and how close he was to Bowie, only then, did I give Yes another go. Ironically, the album I like best is one he didn’t play on.

      • You don’t necessarily need multiple mics to record a kit or even a whole band. But having more (poss one for each drum, or additional mics closer and/or further away from the kit) allows you to mix the drums and the ambient sound to get closer to what you feel is the optimum sound.

    • I assumed it was for multiple takes? I can definitely imagine someone like Steve Howe recording seven takes of a guitar part then choosing the best one (or making the final take a blend of the best ones). Someone else might correct me, but I really don’t think any electric guitar in those days was recorded with more than one mic.

      • I knew I had seen something like this before – if you dig out your 2014 copy of The Yes Album and check in the last few pages of the booklet… (there are images here: https://www.45worlds.com/cdalbum/cd/gyrbd40106)… You will see the “track sheet” for Starship Trooper, which shows what different instruments were recorded to each track of the 16 track tape. You can see there Bruford’s drums take up the first three tracks: “OH 1” and “OH 2” are the “overhead” mics (two for a stereo effect), and there’s also a track for the “kick and snare” (so he must have been slightly wrong: sounds like there was a mic on the snare as well, but mixed to the same track as the kick).
        Howe’s guitars are dotted through the rest of the tracks: “electric guitar 1”, “electric guitar 7″… so must be a set of different guitar takes recorded from a single mic each time.
        (Interesting to see Squire has not one but two bass tracks)

        Studio documents like these fascinate me. In the words of a great Afterword stalwart, I am very dull.

        • In an effort to out-dull Arthur… when balancing a set of drum mics, Kick + Snare are the first you mix. For a right-handed drummer, OH Right will be the Snare, rack Toms, the Hi-Hat + Crash cymbals; OH Left will be floor Tom + Ride cymbal.

          The edges of the master tape are most at risk of damage, so Kick is on track 2, not on track 1. OH L will be on Track 1 because if you momentarily lose the floor Tom and Ride, it isn’t the end of the world, as they aren’t played very often.

          Bass on tape tends to spread sideways across the tape, so Kick, Bass 1 and Bass 2 are not on adjacent tracks, but spread across tracks 2, 4 & 8. Any bleed onto tracks 1, 3, 5, 7 & 9 can be filtered out with EQ.

          • Wow, I bow to the master! That’s fascinating (but still dull….) about the reason for the bass and kick being on non-adjacent tracks and not on track 1. I did not know that.

            In this case, I can see there are quite a few tracks where there are multiple instruments. Do you think this 16 track would itself have been a mix-down from previous takes? (To take the drums in particular – would the snare and kick have been mixed live to Track 2 on the master at the point of recording, or is that master Track 2 a mix-down and it would previously have been captured on separate tracks?)

            With today’s DAW approach with infinite takes and tracks, it’s difficult to appreciate the amount of compromise in these old days. You can see why the band members of Yes would have been fighting for individual track space!

            • I expect the whole kit was recorded together, with the kick & snare on tracks (say) 14 &15 along with bass, one guitar and a guide vocal. Kick & snare then mixed and bounced onto track 2. Then tracks 14 & 15 erased to be reused for the guitar overdubs.

              You know the drum sound of Bo Rap? Drums don’t actually sound like that. That’s the sound of multiple bounces from one track to another as Fred added yet another vocal overdub, and each time a bit of ferrite dust wore off the tape.

              • ‘bouncing down’… Wow, getting flashbacks to my Tascam 4 track days in the 90s!

                Thanks, that’s fascinating. I know there’s tonnes of forensic stuff of this kind on the Beatles (I know they bounced from one 4 track machine to another usually to free up more tracks) but I would love more of this kind of stuff for other bands.

                I think in another life I might have been a sound engineer in the 60s and 70s. It’s much less interesting now with virtual tracks and plugins and everything at your finger tips.

    • Ah drum recording. Using a mic on each drum is essentially putting off how the performance sounds until the album is mixed, so if the mixer decides the drummer shouldn’t have hit the middle tom tom as hard as he did at the time they can reduce the level a bit, plus mess about with eq per drum etc etc. Getting techy, phase is a big issue as all the mics catch bits of other drums and cancel each other out and this has to be allowed for too.

      The contrary position is the drummer decides how loud the hits are and you record the whole performance – a la jazz recordings in the 50s. But…you need a great room, a great drummer, and a great sounding kit, as there is little room for fettling with the sound after.

      Glyn Johns, who knows a bit about recording, used this approach to record John Bonham (“I’ll decide what the fucking drums sound like” etc). He uses two mics carefully positioned to record the whole kit, and the drummer has to be “self balancing” as good drummers are.

      Adherents to this approach (me Sir!) might mic the snare and kick drum too for fine tuning, but the overhead and boundary mics should be enough.

      This is what’s behind the story about Don Henley losing his rag with Glyn Johns – “Why can’t you make me sound like fucking John Bonham?”.

      GJ – “Because you can’t play like fucking John Bonham.

      See the great man here:

      • I once spent an afternoon soundcheck individually adding my Shure Beta series mics to a large drum kit in a local Baptist chapel with excellent acoustics – Beta 52 on the kick, 4 Beta 56s on the snare and 3 toms, a pencil mic on the hi-hat, a pair of pencil mics on the overheads.

        My chum from Sound On Sound magazine came along and replaced my OHs with some ribbon mics he had in for review. Astonishing. I turned everything else, except the kick mic, off.

      • Fascinating video that. It seems very common that these old guys who seem to have all these secret recording skills – 9 times out of 10 their advice is always just “leave it, stop tinkering with it”! I watched a similar video recently with the guy who produced Steely Dan (can’t remember his name).

      • @Twang A similar story from Robin Trower about Geoff Emerick:

        “The studio was quite big, and we basically all played sectioned off in the same room. Here was the weird thing, getting back to Geoff Emerick. While we played, Geoff just listened while he walked around the room and placed the mics where he thought things sounded best. He basically put one mic close to the amp, one mid field and one far away. There was no science—it was just him and his magic set of ears.”

  16. That’s a splendid review Niall, thank you. The Yes Album is one of my favourites and, like Jayhawk above, I saw Yes back in the day prior to the issue of the album. It was 13th January 1971 in the legendary Greens Playhouse, Glasgow. However, Yes were only second on the bill supporting Iron Butterfly with Dada first on. I remember that, as well as Elkie Brooks & Robert Palmer, Dada had another 8 or 9 members on stage. However, we were there to see Yes who were high on our list at that time. They did several songs from The Yes Album. They blew Iron Butterfly off the stage. I think most of the crowd would have preferred more of Yes rather than Iron Butterfly who were very loud and who we reckoned were ‘spaced out man’. I seem to remember a very long ‘In a Gadda Da Vida’ and much rambling of the band members. I will be driving from Dumfries to Glasgow on Friday and The Yes Album will be on Qubuz for the journey.

    • Inagaddadavida was long. Fancy that. The album track itself is 18 mins Hard to imagine the live version being shorter.

      Iron Butterfly were a lumpen band ,I can well imagine Yes blew em off the stage.

  17. It was another Friday night, and we’d all agreed to gather at Steve’s for a Risk contest. We’d adopted the game after getting bored with Monopoly, and then discovered that we could invent our own rules – riffing on the official ones for Risk – to make it a little more realistic.

    We’d decided to have a Risk League – a close handfull of us, all in the fifth form, all really into music, all starting to build our own little collections of LPs, meeting up every week or two for a Risk marathon at which the host would provide snacks and drinks, or, more accurately, at which the host’s parents would provide snacks and drinks.

    Every member of the League had a favourite band, and so we all knew what we’d probably hear played at a session – I’d play some Santana, Graham would be playing the Mahavishnus, Chris H would play us the Floyd, Chris J would likely blast out some Crimson, Allen either Lindisfarne or The Moodies.

    Steve on the other hand had been a Wishbone Ash man for some time, so it was with great interest that we watched as he pulled a new offering from the stereogramme shelf, a disc in an odd sleeve showing a hairy bunch gathered around a styrofoam human head, all bathed in a lurid green light. They all looked rather serious, not to mention ill. None of us had heard of them before.

    While we chose a colour for our Risk pieces, set up the board ready to start the game, and sprawled out across his living room floor, he dropped the needle on the first track of side one, and within about 90 seconds the room was filled with Yes fans.

    • Wow, it feels like you are psychically tapping into my own formative memories. Risk! Believe it or not, I also even had a Risk buddy called Steve as well.

      I used to not mind that much getting some territories taken off me and having to retreat for a bit, as it always gave me a chance to DJ for a bit in the background.

      We used to have specific records we would put on when the tension built up and when we could sense someone was making a play to take the game. Most memorable was Lalo Schifrin’s mighty disco-funk version of the Jaws theme! You always knew things were getting serious when that was wheeled out. And Baby Elephant Walk by Henry Mancini when someone was being bold with a move but was clearly doomed to failure 🙂

      Happy days.

      A funny thing is I remember our games used to last until the early hours of the morning (with copious alcohol consumption). Any time I’ve tried a game in recent years it’s been over in less than two hours. Did something in the rules change that I haven’t noticed? Or did we just take our time more in those days? Who knows.

      Is there such a thing as virtual Risk? It would be great to get a game going on here, if that was at all possible. Sounds like the kind of thing that should exist.

      • Another Risk fan here.

        Formative years spent on lengthy games between an established gang. We developed a set of sub-rules to encourage the making and breaking of formal alliances, which made the experience ever more personal; a sole individual would often be left alone at the table while others adjourned to a nearby room with the clear intent of plotting their imminent destruction.

        In my 20s I was involved in a semi-regular game of Risk held in the backroom of a seedy bar in Buenos Aires, which was attended by the son of the Australian ambassador to Argentina. On one memorable occasion he was called to the dice in the middle of attempting to chat up one of the waitresses and exited the conversation with the immortal line “Sorry, darling – I have to go defend the motherland”.

        It’s a brilliant game for making friends and starting arguments. There are a number of digital versions which facilitate play over the Internet.

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