“Jon would say to me, ‘What have you got that’s a bit like that…’ so I’d play him something and he’d go, ‘That’s great. “I’ve a lot of cassettes of Jon and I sitting in places like New York or Cincinnati recording songs,” recalls Howe. Over several post-gig evenings in candlelit hotel rooms, locked away from all the usual distractions from life on the road, they trawled through a huge accumulated array of musical sketches and motifs, searching for pieces to complement Anderson’s thematic ideas. “We were really up for the big, challenging things like, ‘Let’s do an album with four Close To The Edges,’” laughs the guitarist. With lights and staging, you could take them on a journey.” I wanted to create music that had length and breadth and adventure, that would carry the audience through this experience. “There were a lot of bands up there soloing forever but that wasn’t what I wanted to do.

Anderson was determined their music should avoid showboating licks for their own sake. The punch Yes delivered came not from a single source but rather their collective force. An epic release, it meshed adventurous solo excursions with tightly knit arrangements. With Close To The Edge, they went bigger still. Always a band on a mission and in a hurry to push forward, Yes were keen to do whatever was in their power to be at the forefront of a musical movement where nothing that was worth anything stood still for very long.Ĭhris Squire observed that the build-up to Tales… had been going on for some time, with Heart Of The Sunrise marking the realisation of an ambition to produce something on a much bigger scale. But challenge is exactly what Yes thrived on. When the band played the four-sided opus live, many fans found it a challenge. Although achieving Gold status on both sides of the Atlantic, it received a mauling from many critics.

“Crazy” turned out to be one of the nicer things said about the sixth Yes studio album upon its release in December 1973.

Nous sommes du soleol lyrics