The story of Yes

A bar in Soho

Yes began with a tall bass player from north west London. Chris Squire was born in Kingsbury on the fourth of March 1948 and grew up singing in a church choir that was good enough to perform at St Paul's Cathedral. At sixteen he was suspended from school for having long hair and handed money for a haircut. He simply never went back. He took a job selling guitars at a shop on Regent Street and used the staff discount to buy the Rickenbacker bass that would define his sound. In 1967 a bad trip on a friend's home made LSD put him in hospital for days, unsure of who he was. He spent the following months hiding away in his girlfriend's flat, practising bass all day long, and that is where his style took shape.[1]

The singer came from much further north. John Roy Anderson was born in Accrington, Lancashire, on the twenty fifth of October 1944. He left school at fifteen when his father fell ill, and worked on a farm, as a milkman and as a lorry driver hauling bricks. What he really wanted was to play football for Accrington Stanley. He was the club's ball boy and mascot for a year, but at five foot five he was turned down as too slight. Music took over when he joined his brother Tony in a local beat group called the Warriors. After that band fell apart in Germany, Anderson drifted to London in 1968, where he released two singles that went nowhere under the stage name Hans Christian.[1] [2]

In the spring of 1968 Anderson was broke and helping out behind the bar at La Chasse, a little drinking club in Soho run by Jack Barrie. Barrie had watched Squire's band, Mabel Greer's Toyshop, at the Marquee down the road, and thought the musicians were good but plainly going nowhere. He introduced the bass player to the singer. The two found they both loved Simon and Garfunkel and close harmony singing, and that very evening they started writing a song called Sweetness, which ended up on the first Yes album. Anderson began singing with Squire's group, and guitarist Peter Banks, Squire's old bandmate from the Syn, came back after being sacked by another band for refusing to cut his hair.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A young drummer named Bill Bruford, who had placed an advert in Melody Maker looking for work, joined in June 1968, and in July the classically trained organist Tony Kaye completed the line up. Choosing a name took longer. Banks is usually credited with the answer, a short, punchy word meant only as a stopgap until something better came along. Nothing better ever did. They played their first show as Yes on the third of August 1968, at a youth camp in East Mersea in Essex, with a set built mostly on songs by the Beatles and Traffic. In September they filled in at a London club for Sly and the Family Stone, who had failed to turn up, and the host, Roy Flynn, became their manager that same night.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Almost at once the drummer quit. Bruford left to study at the University of Leeds, but when the university would not give him a year off, Anderson and Squire talked him back in time for a huge night, supporting Cream at their farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall on the twenty sixth of November 1968. Seeing an early King Crimson show in 1969 rattled the band, who realised they had serious competition and started rehearsing properly. They signed to Atlantic Records and released their debut album, simply called Yes, that summer. It missed the British charts, but Lester Bangs praised its taste and subtlety in Rolling Stone, and a Melody Maker columnist picked Yes and Led Zeppelin as the two bands most likely to succeed.[1] [2] [3]

New guitar, new keys, new sound

For their second album, Time and a Word, Anderson and Squire wanted an orchestra behind the band. Peter Banks thought it was a daft idea and clashed with the producer, Tony Colton. On the eighteenth of April 1970, after a gig at Luton College of Technology, Banks was fired. He later said Anderson and Squire made the call, and that Kaye and Bruford had no idea it was coming. The album came out that summer and reached number forty five in Britain, the band's first chart entry. Banks was replaced by Steve Howe of the psychedelic group Tomorrow. Because the American sleeve used a fresh band photograph, Howe ended up pictured on an album he never played a note on.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Steve Howe was born in Holloway, north London, in 1947, and taught himself guitar from the age of twelve without ever learning to read music. His treasured instrument was a hollow bodied Gibson ES 175, an unusual choice for a rock player, and people laughed at him for it. With Howe on board, Yes headed to Devon to write. A cottage near Barnstaple did not work out, because they were not allowed to make any noise after dark, so they advertised in the local paper and moved to Langley Farm near South Molton. Howe loved the place so much that he later bought it. The songs they worked up there became The Yes Album, their first record made entirely of their own material.[1] [2]

The timing was critical. Atlantic had been thinking about dropping Yes after two albums that did not sell, but The Yes Album, released in February 1971, reached number four in Britain and eventually sold a million copies in America. After a European tour with Iron Butterfly, Yes bought that band's entire sound system, and that June they played North America for the first time, opening for Jethro Tull in Edmonton. On the road, though, tension grew between Howe and Kaye. Kaye wanted to stick to piano and Hammond organ, while the others wanted the new sounds of the Mellotron and the Moog synthesizer. In the summer of 1971 Kaye was fired. He later said manager Brian Lane paid him ten thousand dollars for his future Yes royalties.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His replacement was already a star of the recording studio. Rick Wakeman, from Perivale in west London, had dropped out of the Royal College of Music and played on an estimated two thousand sessions, including the Mellotron on David Bowie's Space Oddity and the piano on Cat Stevens' Morning Has Broken. Studio people called him One Take Wakeman. In the summer of 1971, on the very same day, he was asked to join Bowie's new backing band, the Spiders from Mars, and to join Yes. He chose Yes. As he tells it, he only agreed to come to a rehearsal, but when he dropped Steve Howe home afterwards, Howe asked if he could pick him up in the morning. And so, it seemed, he had joined.[1] [2] [3]

Fragile and Close to the Edge

The song that broke Yes in America was born in the back of a van. In March 1971, driving from Aberdeen to Glasgow after a show in Aviemore, Anderson and Howe went round roundabout after roundabout, maybe forty of them by Anderson's count, with mountains vanishing into low cloud on either side. They started writing about the journey there and then. In the studio, Wakeman gave the song a dramatic opening made from piano chords played backwards, and he nailed his organ solo in a single take. Edited down to about three and a half minutes, Roundabout reached number thirteen on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972, and Anderson and Howe won a songwriting award for it the next year.[1] [2]

Roundabout opened Fragile, released on the twelfth of November 1971. To save studio time and money, the band split the record between four group pieces and five short solo spots, one for each member. A contract tangle between record labels stopped Wakeman from recording his own composition, so he arranged a piece of Brahms instead, which he later called dreadful. Fragile was also the first Yes cover painted by Roger Dean, the start of a partnership of floating islands and strange landscapes that came to define how the band looked. The album went top ten on both sides of the Atlantic, peaking at number four in America. From that tour on, Yes walked on stage to a recording of Stravinsky's Firebird.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1972 the band returned to Advision Studios in London with the producer and engineer Eddy Offord to make Close to the Edge. Songs were built a few bars at a time, argued over, voted on and spliced together, and the band then had to learn to play them. The title track ran close to nineteen minutes and filled a whole side of vinyl. Anderson drew on Hermann Hesse's novel Siddhartha, and Wakeman's organ solo was played on a real church organ at St Giles Cripplegate in the City of London. The sessions were exhausting. One morning Anderson walked home at dawn, broke down in tears, and wrote the word musician into the empty occupation box in his passport.[1] [2]

For Bill Bruford, the endless debating was torture. He compared making the album to climbing Everest, and he was tired of Squire's chronic lateness. In July 1972, with the record finished but not yet released, he left for King Crimson, joking that it was one of the only rock gigs where you could play in strange time signatures and still stay in decent hotels. The tour was days away. Yes turned to Alan White, a friend of Offord's who had drummed for John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band and had once sat in at a Yes rehearsal. White was given about three days to learn the whole repertoire, and he pulled it off, opening the tour in Dallas on the thirtieth of July 1972.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Close to the Edge reached number three in America and number four in Britain, and it later went platinum. The shows that followed were captured on Yessongs, a triple live album released in May 1973 that sold strongly despite its rough sound, and on a concert film shot at London's Rainbow Theatre. Wakeman had become a showman in his own right. On the American tour in the autumn of 1972 he started wearing glittering capes on stage, and with his long blond hair he looked like a rock wizard next to his more reserved bandmates. Yes were now one of the biggest bands in the world, and they were about to attempt the most ambitious record of their career.[1] [2] [3]

Topographic Oceans and Relayer

The idea came from a party. At Bill Bruford's wedding celebration in March 1973, the King Crimson percussionist Jamie Muir urged Anderson to read Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. Weeks later, in a hotel room in Tokyo, Anderson got lost in a long footnote describing four bodies of Hindu scripture called the shastras. He decided Yes should make a four part epic, one side of a double album for each. He and Howe worked on it by candlelight in hotel rooms across America, and finished the outline in an all night session in Savannah, Georgia, that ended at seven in the morning. Anderson first wanted to call it Tales from Tobergraphic Oceans, until an Atlantic executive pointed him to the real word, topographic.[1] [2]

Anderson wanted to record in a tent in a forest, with generators buried in the ground so nobody could hear them. The rest of the band told him, more or less, to get a life. They booked Morgan Studios in north west London instead, partly for its new twenty four track tape machine, the first in Britain. So the studio was dressed up as a farm, with potted plants, white picket fences around Wakeman's keyboards, amplifiers stacked on bales of hay, and cardboard cows and sheep. Black Sabbath were recording next door, and Ozzy Osbourne remembered a model cow with electronic udders. Anderson even had a tiled booth built to copy the sound of singing in his bathroom, and tiles kept falling off during takes.[1] [2] [3]

Tales from Topographic Oceans came out on the seventh of December 1973, a double album with just four tracks. It was the first album in Britain to go gold on advance orders alone, and it topped the UK chart, but critics savaged it as the peak of prog rock excess. Wakeman felt the music was padded out and spent much of the recording in the studio bar, where he played synthesizer on Black Sabbath's Sabbra Cadabra and was paid in beer. On tour, in protest, he ate a takeaway curry on stage in Manchester. Anderson later called that tour the lowest point of his career. Wakeman confirmed he was leaving on the eighteenth of May 1974, his twenty fifth birthday.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That same day he learned that his solo album Journey to the Centre of the Earth had gone straight to number one in Britain. He had remortgaged his house and sold cars to pay for it, recording it live with the London Symphony Orchestra. But the pace was brutal. At a big outdoor show at Crystal Palace in July 1974, worn out and hurting, and smoking and drinking heavily, he needed morphine injections to finish. Soon afterwards, at twenty five, he suffered a heart attack. He ignored his doctors, kept smoking and drinking, and wrote much of his next album, King Arthur, from his hospital bed. He later staged it on ice at Wembley, complete with costumed skaters and a castle.[1] [2]

Yes tried out replacements, including the Greek composer Vangelis, before choosing the Swiss keyboard player Patrick Moraz, who arrived in August 1974 while the band were recording at Squire's home in Virginia Water, Surrey. At his audition he watched them play part of a piece called Sound Chaser and was asked to come up with an opening on the spot. What he played ended up on the record. Relayer, released that November, leaned into jazz fusion. Its side long piece, The Gates of Delirium, was inspired by Tolstoy's War and Peace and staged a battle using scrap metal and car parts as percussion, before closing with the gentle prayer Soon. It reached number four in Britain and number five in America.[1] [2] [3]

Tax exiles, tomatoes and the Buggles

In 1975 and 1976 every member of Yes released a solo album. Anderson taught himself to play every instrument on Olias of Sunhillow, which reached the British top ten, while Squire named his Fish Out of Water, after his nickname. Then the band went back on the road on an enormous scale. On the twelfth of June 1976, on a bill with Peter Frampton at John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, they drew more than one hundred thousand people. Later that year, to get away from British taxes, the band moved to Montreux in Switzerland to record at Mountain Studios. Anderson sent early versions of the new songs to Wakeman, who liked them far more than anything on Tales.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Wakeman came in as a hired session player and was soon persuaded by Squire to rejoin full time. Patrick Moraz was let go. He later said he suffered badly from being dropped so suddenly, and that he was never paid for his part in the 1976 tour. Going for the One, released in July 1977, had shorter, more direct songs, a church organ played down a telephone line from nearby Vevey, and a sleeve by the design team Hipgnosis instead of Roger Dean. It went to number one in Britain, and Wonderous Stories reached number seven, their biggest British hit single. The move to Switzerland had a personal cost too. It helped end Wakeman's first marriage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Punk was exploding when Tormato arrived in September 1978, and the music press treated Yes as dinosaurs. The band had parted with Eddy Offord midway through and produced the rest themselves, and the album came out sounding strangely murky. Decades later an engineer preparing a reissue found a likely reason. Offord had recorded with Dolby noise reduction, but nobody had marked it on the tapes, so they were never decoded properly. Even so, Tormato went platinum in America within two months. The tour was played in the round, on a revolving stage with sound hanging overhead, and their dates at Madison Square Garden earned an award for taking more than a million dollars.[1] [2] [3]

In late 1979 Yes went to Paris with the producer Roy Thomas Baker, and the band split down the middle. Anderson and Wakeman wanted delicate, fantastical music, while Howe, Squire and White wanted something heavier. The others started turning up late, Wakeman sometimes refused to leave his hotel room, and he and Anderson ended up drinking Calvados in a bar, agreeing this was no longer the band they loved. The sessions stopped in December when Alan White broke his ankle roller skating at a disco, with Richard Branson among the skaters. Things were no better when they regrouped in London, and after a serious row over money, Anderson left in March 1980, with a dispirited Wakeman going too.[1] [2] [3]

The replacements were a shock. Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes of the Buggles, fresh from the worldwide hit Video Killed the Radio Star, shared a manager, Brian Lane, and even an office with Yes. They offered the band a song, and Squire noticed that Horn's high voice was not far from Anderson's. Within weeks they were full members, and only then did they learn that Anderson had really gone. Drama, released in August 1980, was harder and heavier than anything before it, and reached number two in Britain. America welcomed the new line up, but British crowds booed and jeered Horn and Downes, and Horn, straining for Anderson's notes night after night, struggled badly with nerves.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Cinema, and a number one

After the tour, Horn and Brian Lane were let go, Squire and White drifted off, and Howe and Downes went their own way. In March 1981 the band's management confirmed that Yes no longer existed. Howe and Downes formed Asia, whose debut became the biggest selling album of 1982 in America. Squire and White, meanwhile, jammed with Jimmy Page, who was trying to pull himself out of depression after the death of John Bonham. They called the trio XYZ, short for ex Yes and Zeppelin. Robert Plant came to listen, found the music complicated, and was not ready to return so soon after losing his friend. The project fizzled amid squabbles between managers, though some ideas later turned up on Yes records.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Enter Trevor Rabin, a South African guitarist who had been a star at home with the band Rabbitt. Frustrated that restrictions of the apartheid era stopped South African bands touring abroad, he moved to London and then Los Angeles. The Arista boss Clive Davis turned down his demos, including a song called Owner of a Lonely Heart, as too left field for the charts. In 1982 Atlantic's Phil Carson, a long time Yes ally, introduced Rabin to Squire and White over sushi in west London, and that night they had what Squire called the worst jam in history. It felt right anyway. With original keyboard player Tony Kaye back, they called the new band Cinema, and Carson paid for the early work himself.[1] [2] [3]

Trevor Horn, by now a hot pop producer, agreed to produce, and quickly clashed with Kaye, who left mid sessions and whose parts Rabin mostly took over. Then management decided the album needed a more distinctive singer. Squire called Anderson, and because of old friction between their wives, played him the tapes in a car parked outside Anderson's home. Anderson liked what he heard, spent a few weeks adding vocals and reworking lyrics, and in June 1983, on Atlantic's advice, Cinema became Yes. Rabin was uneasy. He felt he had joined a brand new band and suddenly found himself inside a reunion with a famous past. Kaye was later coaxed back in time for the tour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The album was named after its catalogue number, 90125. Released in November 1983, it sold three million copies in America, the biggest Yes album ever. Owner of a Lonely Heart, with Horn's cut and paste production, programmed drums and startling sampled effects, spent two weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1984. It was their only American number one, though it reached only number twenty eight at home. The instrumental Cinema won the band's only Grammy. Before the tour could start, Rabin was swimming in a Miami hotel pool when a woman coming down a slide crashed into him, rupturing his spleen and sending him into emergency surgery.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The 1984 and 1985 tour was the most lucrative in Yes history and included headline slots at the very first Rock in Rio. The follow up was a slog. Big Generator was started in 1985 in a castle in Carimate, Italy, moved to London and then Los Angeles, and Horn walked away partway through, leaving Rabin to finish the job. It finally arrived in September 1987 and went platinum, with Love Will Find a Way topping the American rock radio chart. But Anderson increasingly felt pushed aside by Rabin and Squire and tired of the pop direction. By the end of 1988 he had taken his leave, saying he would never stay in Yes purely for the money.[1] [2] [3]

Two bands called Yes

Anderson spent the summer of 1988 on the Greek island of Hydra and hit on the idea of reuniting the early seventies line up. Howe, Wakeman and Bruford joined him, with Bruford's King Crimson partner Tony Levin on bass, and they recorded on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. Squire co owned the Yes name, so they could not use it, and the band was called Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe. Their album came out in June 1989 and went gold in America. They toured as An Evening of Yes Music, which drew legal fire from Atlantic over the use of the name. Bruford later admitted he did it largely to pay for his jazz band, Earthworks.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Meanwhile the Squire and Rabin camp auditioned new singers, among them Supertramp's Roger Hodgson and Kansas singer Steve Walsh. When the ABWH label rejected their second album as too weak, Anderson asked Rabin for a song. Rabin sent three, and the label wanted all of them. Record executives then brokered a merger, and the result was Union, released in April 1991 under the Yes name. It sold around one and a half million copies, yet almost everyone in the band disowned it, because session players had replaced many of Wakeman's and Howe's parts. Bruford called it the worst record he had ever been on, and Wakeman nicknamed it Onion, because thinking about it made him cry.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Union tour of 1991 and 1992 was a different story. For the only time, eight members of Yes stood together, on a revolving circular stage with two drummers, two keyboard players and two guitarists. Tony Kaye remembered that everyone predicted it could never work, so the money on offer was modest, and then it turned into a huge success. Wakeman later named it his favourite Yes tour, largely because of the close friendship he struck up with Rabin. Howe and Rabin, on the other hand, never really warmed to each other. When the tour ended, Bruford went back to jazz and never played in Yes again, and everyone headed back to their separate corners.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Phil Carson came back with an offer for the eighties line up to record for his new label, Victory Music. Wakeman was meant to take part but was dropped over management complications, and Howe was not invited. Talk, released in March 1994, was built largely by Rabin at home on four linked Apple Macintosh computers, making it one of the first rock albums recorded and mixed entirely on hard disk. On the tour, fans in some seats could tune portable radios to hear the show through headphones. But Victory went bust, the album got little promotion, and Squire disliked the computerised sound. Rabin left in 1995 and became a film composer, scoring films such as Con Air and Armageddon.[1] [2] [3]

Keys, ladders and a symphony

In November 1995 Anderson, Squire and White invited Wakeman and Howe back, reuniting the classic seventies line up. Anderson had moved to San Luis Obispo in California, so in March 1996 they played three shows at the town's Fremont Theater and recorded new studio pieces nearby. The results were spread across two albums, Keys to Ascension and Keys to Ascension 2. Wakeman was unhappy that what could have been a full studio album had been split up like that, and that a tour was being arranged without his agreement, and in May 1997 he quit once again. Those sessions turned out to be the last studio recordings by that celebrated line up.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Squire turned to Billy Sherwood, a multi instrumentalist from Las Vegas whose godfather was the comedian Milton Berle. Sherwood had nearly become the band's singer around 1989 and had toured with them in 1994. He and Squire reshaped songs from their side project, Conspiracy, into Open Your Eyes, released in November 1997 with Sherwood as a full member. It stalled at number one hundred and fifty one in America. For the tour, Yes hired Igor Khoroshev, a Moscow born keyboard player who had grown up buying Yes records on the black market and idolised Patrick Moraz. His first audition was shaky, but he got a second chance, and by 1999 he was a full member of the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Ladder was made in Vancouver with the Canadian producer Bruce Fairbairn, and the band were so happy with him they talked about working together again. But Fairbairn died suddenly of a heart attack during the final mixing, and the album, released in September 1999, is dedicated to him. One track became the theme of the computer game Homeworld. Sherwood left on good terms after the tour, and trouble followed. During the Masterworks tour, on the twenty third of July 2000, Khoroshev was accused of assaulting two female security guards backstage at a venue in Bristow, Virginia. He was charged with two misdemeanours, the matter was settled out of court and he was never convicted, but he left the band when the tour ended.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Yes chose to carry on without a keyboard player and made Magnification with a full orchestra, their first since 1970. It sold poorly, but the orchestral tour went down well. In April 2002 Wakeman returned for a fifth and final time, and the classic line up toured the world, including Australia for the first time since 1973. In 2003 a minor planet was named Yes in the band's honour. But touring was wearing Anderson down. He later said he was coughing so much that the only time he stopped was on stage, and that he and Wakeman rode in the happy bus while the other three rode in the grumpy one. After their thirty fifth anniversary tour in 2004, Yes went on hiatus.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A new voice, and losing the founders

A fortieth anniversary tour was planned for 2008, with Wakeman's son Oliver on keyboards because his father had been advised to sit it out for health reasons. Then on the thirteenth of May 2008 Anderson suffered a severe asthma attack, was diagnosed with acute respiratory failure, and was told by doctors not to work for at least six months. The tour was cancelled. Squire, Howe and White did not want to wait. That September they announced dates with a new singer, Benoît David, a Canadian who fronted a Yes tribute band called Close to the Edge and whom Squire had found on YouTube. Because Anderson co owned the name, they toured at first as Steve Howe, Chris Squire and Alan White of Yes.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Anderson was hurt. He wrote publicly that apart from one phone call from Alan White, nobody in the band had been in touch to ask how he was, and that he wished it had all been done in a more gentlemanly way. He later said nobody told him he had been replaced, and that he heard it from a friend. In October 2009 Squire declared that the new line up was now Yes. Anderson threw himself into solo work and touring with Wakeman, and told Rolling Stone that after being angry at first, he had decided to let the boys go off and be rock and rollers. That same year he became an American citizen.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2011 Trevor Horn came back to produce Fly from Here, built around a song he and Downes had written back in the Drama days, and Downes replaced Oliver Wakeman on keyboards. Horn even sang guide vocals for David to follow. But on tour David developed a respiratory illness that damaged his singing. He remembered Squire being unsympathetic and simply telling him to fix it. He left in early 2012, later retired from music, and went back to running his own repair business. His replacement was Jon Davison of the band Glass Hammer, recommended by Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, who had been Davison's best friend since their school days.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In March 2013 Peter Banks, the man who had given Yes its name, died of heart failure at sixty five, in the rented flat in Barnet, north London, where he had been born and raised. He had struggled for years with depression and illness, including blood poisoning linked to untreated dental problems, and doctors had found a tumour. A friend raised the alarm when he failed to turn up to a recording session. Banks had no children and no will, and for days his body lay unclaimed in the local mortuary. There was no money for a funeral, so his long time friend and manager George Mizer set up an online appeal, and fans paid for it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2014 Yes released Heaven and Earth, Davison's first album with the band and, as it turned out, Squire's last. In May 2015 the band revealed that Squire had acute erythroid leukaemia, a rare form of the disease. He asked Billy Sherwood to cover for him on a summer tour with Toto, and emailed his bandmates telling them to keep things going and that he would see them in the spring. He died on the twenty seventh of June 2015 in Phoenix, Arizona, aged sixty seven, in the arms of his wife, Scotland. He was the only musician on every Yes studio album released in his lifetime. On the seventh of August, Yes played without him for the first time in forty seven years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Hall of Fame, farewells and Aurora

With no founding member left in Yes, Anderson, Rabin and Wakeman launched their own group in 2016 and toured as An Evening of Yes Music and More. On the seventh of April 2017, Yes were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, introduced by Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush. The honoured line up matched the eight piece Union band, with Squire included after his death. Anderson, Howe, Rabin, Wakeman and White played Roundabout with Geddy Lee on bass, then Owner of a Lonely Heart with Howe on bass. Bruford came but did not play. Tony Kaye stayed away, partly in protest that Peter Banks had been left out.[1] [2] [3]

Soon afterwards, with the blessing of Squire's widow, the trio renamed themselves Yes Featuring Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin, Rick Wakeman, and in 2018 two different bands celebrated fifty years of Yes, to the confusion of plenty of fans. Anderson insisted relations between the camps were fine. Tragedy struck Steve Howe in September 2017, when his son Virgil, a musician with the band Little Barrie, died, and Yes cancelled the rest of their tour. Alan White, meanwhile, was coming back from back surgery and then a bacterial infection in his joints, so Jay Schellen joined as a second drummer. The Anderson, Rabin and Wakeman group had split for good by 2020.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

During the pandemic, the band pieced together The Quest by sending parts between studios, with Howe producing. Released in October 2021, it was the first Yes album with no founding member, and Alan White's last. On the twenty second of May 2022 the band announced that White would miss their tour marking fifty years of Close to the Edge. He died four days later, on the twenty sixth of May, at his home near Seattle, aged seventy two. Two months earlier, thieves had stolen platinum discs and the drum kit he had played with the Plastic Ono Band. He had played more than three thousand shows with Yes. In February 2023, Jay Schellen became a permanent member.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In January 2023 Warner Music bought the rights to the band's classic Atlantic recordings. The current line up of Howe, Downes, Davison, Sherwood and Schellen followed with Mirror to the Sky in May 2023, and then Aurora, their twenty fourth studio album, on the twelfth of June 2026, with artwork once again by Roger Dean, working alongside his daughter. Howe sees the three recent albums as a kind of trilogy. Jon Anderson, meanwhile, tours America with a band called the Band Geeks, playing the seventies classics. After years of hoping for a reunion, by 2024 he was saying he already had the Yes he wanted. As of 2026, both keep the music alive in their own way.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Across nearly six decades, Yes have counted twenty full time members, sold more than thirty million albums worldwide, and been called the definitive English progressive rock band. Squire's growling, melodic bass inspired players from Rush's Geddy Lee to Iron Maiden's Steve Harris and Dream Theater's John Myung, and Queen's John Deacon named him his favourite bass player. Roger Dean's paintings and bubble logo gave a whole genre its look. And there is a piece of the sky for them, too. Alongside a minor planet named Yes, there is an asteroid named after Chris Squire, whose catalogue number is ninety thousand one hundred and twenty five, the same as the album that brought Yes back.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Yes

Jon Anderson and Chris Squire. The two founders met at a Soho bar in 1968 and wrote their first song together that night. Anderson supplied most of the lyrics and big concepts, while Squire was the band's anchor for forty seven years. Their bond was often strained. When Squire tracked him down in 1983, old friction between their wives meant he played Anderson the new tapes in his car. In 2008 it was Squire who pressed on without him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jon Anderson and Steve Howe. Anderson and Howe were the band's great writing partnership of the seventies, writing Roundabout in a van, Close to the Edge at Howe's home in Hampstead, and mapping out Tales from Topographic Oceans by candlelight in hotel rooms. Their paths split after 2008. Howe said in 2013 that he loved Anderson but could not see him returning, yet they shared the stage again at the Hall of Fame in 2017.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Chris Squire and Bill Bruford. Early on the two shared a house in Fulham, and Bruford is credited with giving Squire his nickname, Fish, after the long hours he spent in the bath and a hotel room he flooded in Oslo. In the studio they clashed, as Squire asked Bruford to change his drum parts and kept the band waiting with his chronic lateness. That friction helped push Bruford out in 1972.[1] [2] [3]

Rick Wakeman and Jon Anderson. The keyboard player and the singer were natural allies. In Paris in 1979 they walked out of a rehearsal to drink Calvados together, and they left the band within weeks of each other. Anderson said the two of them rode in the happy bus on the early 2000s tours. They later toured as a duo, and joined Trevor Rabin in their own version of Yes from 2016.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rick Wakeman and Trevor Rabin. They only overlapped on the Union tour of 1991 and 1992, but it was enough. Wakeman later called that tour his favourite with Yes because of the friendship he formed with Rabin, and plans for him to play on Talk fell through, one of Wakeman's regrets. The pair finally joined forces properly with Jon Anderson in 2016.[1] [2] [3]

Trevor Rabin and Trevor Horn. Their start was rocky. When Squire suggested Horn as a singer for Cinema, Rabin nearly quit, and when Horn was proposed as producer, Rabin's reaction was, who, the Dollar guy. Over the 90125 sessions they built a strong working bond, though they still disagree about who did what on Owner of a Lonely Heart and whether Horn deserved a songwriting credit.[1] [2]

Tony Kaye and Brian Lane. Brian Lane managed Yes from 1970, and later managed the Buggles and Rick Wakeman too. When Kaye was fired in 1971, he says Lane paid him ten thousand dollars in exchange for his future Yes royalties, which Kaye called a typical Brian Lane trick, though he says he got the rights back eventually. Lane himself was dismissed by the band after the Drama tour in 1980.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Alan White and John Lennon. In 1969 Lennon saw White drumming in a London club and phoned him the next day. White assumed it was a prank and hung up, until Lennon rang back. He played with the Plastic Ono Band in Toronto, then on Instant Karma and the Imagine album. Fifty years later, on the 2019 tour, Yes played Imagine as an encore in White's honour.[1] [2] [3]

Alan White and Jon Anderson. White was Anderson's best man when he married Jane Luttenberger in 1997. When Anderson fell ill in 2008 and the band moved on without him, he wrote that the only bandmate who had phoned to check on him was White. Years later, Anderson called him sweet, even while admitting the rest of the band and he were no longer pretending to be mates.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Steve Howe and Geoff Downes. They met when Downes joined for Drama in 1980, and when Yes fell apart they formed Asia together, whose debut was the best selling album of 1982 in America. Howe left Asia in 1983 after Downes and Carl Palmer sided with John Wetton, but the two reunited in Asia in 2006 and in Yes in 2011. According to the band, the two of them were the central creative axis of the 2026 album Aurora.[1] [2] [3]

Peter Banks and Yes. Banks named the band, designed their first logo and played on their first two albums before he was fired in 1970. He stayed bitter for years, but he came to early shows with his replacement and kept in touch with Anderson. When the Hall of Fame left him out in 2017, Tony Kaye boycotted the ceremony partly in protest.[1] [2] [3]

Phil Carson and Yes. The Atlantic executive persuaded the label to keep Yes after their second album flopped, introduced them to the engineer Eddy Offord, and personally bankrolled Cinema until Atlantic signed it, flying to Paris to play Owner of a Lonely Heart to Ahmet Ertegun on a cassette player with flat batteries. He later brought the eighties line up back for Talk on his own label.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Yes

• Jon Anderson wrote the word musician into his passport after one exhausting night making Close to the Edge. Walking home at dawn after an all night session, Anderson broke down in tears. He decided he could officially call himself a musician, and filled in the blank occupation section of his passport.[1]
• Wakeman's organ solo on Close to the Edge was played on a real church organ in the City of London. The solo was recorded on the pipe organ of St Giles Cripplegate. A better take was accidentally thrown in the scraps bin during mixing, so an audible tape edit remains on the record.[1]
• A finished piece of Close to the Edge was once thrown away by studio cleaners. The band had picked a take, only to find the cleaning staff had binned the tape. After a frantic search through the dustbins outside Advision Studios, it was found and spliced back in.[1]
• The finished tapes of Tales from Topographic Oceans nearly ended up under a bus. Eddy Offord put the tapes on his car roof while looking for his keys and drove off. They fell into the road, and Anderson ran back to rescue them from an oncoming bus.[1]
• Rick Wakeman played synthesizer on Black Sabbath's Sabbra Cadabra, and was paid in beer. Sabbath were recording next door to Yes at Morgan Studios in 1973. Ozzy Osbourne befriended the bored Wakeman, who refused money for his part, so the band paid him in beer.[1] [2]
• Wakeman bought his first Minimoog at half price because the seller thought it was broken. The actor Jack Wild sold it to him believing it was faulty, because it could only play one note at a time. That is simply how early Minimoogs worked.[1]
• While playing with the Strawbs in Paris, Wakeman accidentally pushed Salvador Dalí off the stage. The surrealist artist wandered on stage uninvited during a show. Not recognising him, Wakeman shoved him aside so he could carry on with his keyboard solo.[1]
• Music from Wakeman's King Arthur album became the theme for BBC election night coverage. The opening track, Arthur, was used for BBC general election broadcasts from 1979 to 2005, apart from 2001, and again from 2019 onwards.[1]
• The church organ on Going for the One was recorded down a telephone line from another town. While the band worked at Mountain Studios in Montreux, the organ was played in a church in nearby Vevey and piped into the studio over a telephone line.[1]
• Tormato's famously murky sound may come down to a missing label on the tapes. An engineer preparing the 2004 reissue found Offord had used Dolby noise reduction without marking it. Decoded properly, most of the tracks suddenly sounded far better.[1]
• The 1979 Paris sessions ended when Alan White broke his ankle roller skating. White was at a roller disco, skating with Richard Branson, when he fractured a bone in his right ankle, leaving him unable to play for six weeks.[1]
• Steve Howe says he fired Eddy Offord from Drama after the engineer tried to cook a wild pigeon. Howe, a strict vegetarian, said Offord's behaviour had become erratic, and ended with him catching a pigeon outside and trying to fry it in the studio kitchen.[1]
• Trevor Horn cut his honeymoon to three days in Bournemouth to finish Drama, and Steve Howe came along. Horn went straight back to the studio after his wedding. A planned two week trip to Miami Beach became a short stay in Bournemouth, which Howe also attended.[1]
• Brian Lane reportedly used an accounting mistake to get Atlantic to fund Drama. Atlantic refused his request for a two hundred thousand dollar advance, but the label had accidentally transferred four hundred thousand dollars to his account, and he used that as leverage.[1]
• 90125 was nearly called 80102. The album was named after its catalogue number. The first choice, 80102, was not available in every country, so it became 90125.[1] [2]
• Alan White's discarded drum samples from 90125 became the backbone of the Art of Noise hit Beat Box. Fairlight programmer J. J. Jeczalik reused White's sampled drumming for the Art of Noise, and Beat Box went to number one on the American dance chart.[1]
• When John Lennon first phoned Alan White, White hung up, thinking it was a prank. Lennon had seen him play in a London club. White put the phone down, but Lennon rang straight back, and within a day White was flying to Toronto with the Plastic Ono Band.[1] [2]
• Alan White's teenage band won a talent contest judged by Ringo Starr and Brian Epstein. In 1964 his band the Blue Chips won an amateur contest at the London Palladium, earning a record deal, though their singles did not sell.[1]
• Chris Squire's nickname, Fish, partly came from how long he spent in the bath. Bill Bruford, who shared a house with him, noted his marathon baths and a hotel room in Oslo he flooded. He was also a Pisces, and bass is a fish.[1]
• A fossil fish was named after Chris Squire. In 2011 scientists named a species of fossil fish Tarkus squirei, a nod to his nickname, Fish.[1]
• Squire's commemorative plaque plays on his legendary lateness. His habit of being late was so famous that the brown plaque honouring him after his death calls him The Late Chris Squire.[1]
• Squire's famous Rickenbacker bass was once covered in wallpaper. Before its final cream finish, the bass was decorated first with flowery wallpaper and then with silver paper, and was sanded down each time, changing its sound.[1]
• Tony Kaye is wearing a real cast on the cover of The Yes Album. He had been hurt in one of the band's road accidents when they travelled to gigs in a small car. Those early accidents are part of why Steve Howe has always preferred to travel by his own car.[1]
• Steve Howe's early band was supposed to appear in the film Blow Up. The In Crowd filmed a day on the 1966 movie and a prop of Howe's guitar was built for smashing. They were replaced by the Yardbirds, and Jeff Beck smashed it instead.[1]
• Jon Anderson sang on a King Crimson album. He sang the opening section of the title track on Lizard in 1970, because the part was too high for the band's singer, Gordon Haskell.[1]
• A Jon Anderson vocal is sampled on a Kanye West track. His singing from Mike Oldfield's In High Places is prominently sampled on Dark Fantasy, from Kanye West's 2010 album.[1]
• After Owner of a Lonely Heart hit number one, Trevor Rabin wrote to the record boss who rejected it. Arista's Clive Davis had turned down his demos. When the song topped the chart, Rabin sent Davis a letter saying he guessed he had been wrong.[1] [2]
• Trevor Rabin's film scoring career started with guitar lessons for Steven Seagal. After a lesson, Seagal asked if he could do anything in return. Rabin said he wanted to score films, and Seagal hired him for The Glimmer Man.[1]
• On the 1994 Talk tour, some fans listened to Yes through headphones on portable radios. Rabin's Concertsonics system broadcast the show on an FM frequency to certain seating areas, so fans could tune in with their own radios.[1] [2]
• A Yes song closes the classic computer game Homeworld. Homeworld, the title track from The Ladder, was written for the 1999 space strategy game and plays over its closing credits.[1] [2]
• Before Yes found him on YouTube, Benoît David had sold appliances and used cars in Montreal. He learned English on his paper round, worked at a Sears store and a Toyota dealer, and sang in a Yes tribute band called Close to the Edge.[1]
• Patrick Moraz was born on an aeroplane. The Swiss keyboard player was born on the twenty fourth of June 1948 in flight, though Morges in Switzerland is usually given as his hometown.[1]
• Geoff Downes is in Guinness World Records for keyboards. He once performed with a record twenty eight keyboards on stage in a single show.[1]
• Jay Schellen's teenage band was named after a Yes song. Long before he became Yes's drummer, Schellen formed a group called Ritual, named after a piece on Tales from Topographic Oceans.[1]
• A minor planet has been named Yes since 2003. On the eighteenth of March 2003, minor planet number 7707 was named Yes in the band's honour. Jon Anderson and Chris Squire later got asteroids of their own.[1] [2] [3]
• Yes sold out Madison Square Garden sixteen times in a row. On the 1980 Drama tour they were given a commemorative award for their sixteenth consecutive sold out show at the arena since 1974.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.