BIOGRAPHY ****** BIOGRAPHY ****** BIOGRAPHY YES Biography In 2021 YES signed a deal with progressive label Inside Out Music and announced that a new album, their first for seven years, is released on 1st October. The Quest is a strong collection of collaborative compositions posing the great questions of life and finding that we have our destiny within our own hands. Steve Howe says “(Inside Out boss Thomas Waber) is pretty demanding, you can’t fool Thomas.” “He’s knowledgeable about YES fans, and their expectations. He was not going to be happy until we met those expectations.” The music of YES has endured over the years and has been handed down through generations of music lovers. At Sheffield City Hall, in 2018, one fan described how he had first seen YES play the very same venue more than forty years earlier. He was there with his son who had grown up with the music of YES and was as big a fan as his dad. “That’s nice and I’m so glad that’s true,” Steve Howe reflected. “We weren’t just running round doing things, we were doing things that have lasted. That’s because of the collaborations, it’s the team-work that signifies YES.” Until the global pandemic, YES had been touring annually with their Album Series tours, each tour showcasing one of their classic albums in full together with other favourite concert numbers. During the pandemic YES got together from all corners of the World - Alan & Billy in USA, Steve and Geoff in the UK and Jon between the USA, Barbados and the UK… and started writing and composing music for The Quest. American drummer Jay Schellen was added to the touring line-up to ease the burden for Alan White. “Alan’s a real trooper,” said Steve Howe. “He’s had his health issues and we work with Alan so that he’s not loaded with the whole set. We have Jay doing large parts of the set.” For half a century YES have been the definitive band of the progressive music genre, the band by which all others are judged. Their ground-breaking albums of the 70s set the standard for the genre and influenced countless others who followed in their wake. YES is Steve Howe (guitars, backing vocals), Alan White (drums, backing vocals), Geoff Downes (keyboards), Jon Davison (lead vocals, acoustic guitar) and Billy Sherwood (bass guitar, backing vocals). The touring line-up is supplemented by Jay Schellen (drums, percussion). Chris Squire (bass guitar) and Jon Anderson (vocals) met whilst members of Mabel Greer’s Toyshop and left to form YES in 1968. Two early albums for the fledgling band, YES (1969) and Time And A Word (1970), could only hint at what lay ahead. Guitarist Steve Howe (Tomorrow, Bodast) joined YES, in 1970 as a replacement for Peter Banks as the band began work on The Yes Album, the album that would first define them a force in progressive rock and contained the perennial concert favourites Yours Is No Disgrace and Starship Trooper. Howe would quickly gain an international reputation as an outstanding guitarist, extraordinarily versatile in styles from hard- punching rock riffs to intricate acoustic solo pieces in a classical style. The Yes Album (1971) featured a live recording of Steve’s solo piece Clap. “I found myself fighting a trend as rock went to a kind of blues style,” says Howe. “I’d done that in my early years and I thought I’d bring something different, so I went back to the acoustic guitar and that really tested out what YES were. The Yes Album had Clap, and I was thrilled that the guys wanted to put it on there. “By the time Fragile (1971) came along we were really working together to make the most highly original sounds that we could make. I think Fragile really sets the bar for Close To The Edge and the following albums, we had this original sound. “We reached a real high, doing Fragile and then Close To The Edge (1972). We value the musicianship, the artistic ideas and the vocalising that people bring and that’s why we’re still doing it, because it’s exciting to do! Close To The Edge was very experimental, we took things a stage further and I’m very pleased we were brave enough to do that.” Following the recording of Close To The Edge drummer Bill Bruford left to join King Crimson. Producer Eddie Offord’s flatmate Alan White, who had recently played on John Lennon’s Imagine, was invited to join in time for the tour, having just three days to learn the band’s repertoire. “The first gig was not too bad,” White recalls, “There was so much adrenalin and every facet of my being was singularly focused on the goal and it was a fantastic show. The second one went downhill, and the third one. I had to re-address things, little hiccups in the road, and had to build things back up. By the fourth I kind of had a handle on it, I took it in my stride. “I never imagined being on the scene for 50 years when I was a kid but the music’s challenging, it keeps you on your toes and we’ve been very successful over the years. That’s the story of my life, really. You get something offered to you and you think it’ll be half a year. You just jump in the deep end!” White’s contribution was captured for the triple live album Yessongs (1973) and his YES studio debut Tales Of Topographic Oceans (1973) was also the band’s first UK Number 1 album. White has been ever-present on all subsequent studio albums. “Alan became our drummer and he did change the style,” Howe noted. “When you listen to the drumming on, say, Drama, you can see how the aspects of the drumming became more important in a different way to Bill. Alan brought a more regular style of drumming but it developed into a new drumming style for YES of which Drama is a great example.” By 1980, only Howe, Squire and White remained as they went back into the studio again. YES’ management were also looking after electronic pop duo The Buggles, whose Video Killed The Radio Star had been a massive global hit in 1979. Geoff Downes (keyboards) and Trevor Horn (vocals/bass) were at first asked to offer some creative input and then invited to join the band. “For us it was a weird dream,” Downes laughs. “YES were just playing around with riffs and ideas. We went into a rehearsal room with them and threw a few songs into the ring and they said ‘Why don’t you join us?’ “Both Trevor and I were big YES fans anyway. There were progressive influences in The Buggles stuff but the brief was we wanted to break in to the scene and two guys as an electronic duo, you can’t form a prog band around that. It was a dream for me because being the keyboard player for YES is probably one of the highest profile keyboard gigs you can ever come across.” Drama (1980) displayed a harder, aggressive edge not seen by YES since the Relayer album of 1974. Despite the major personnel changes, Drama was still a huge hit with the fans, peaking at Number 2 on the UK albums chart. “For me, it was a real breakthrough,” Downes adds. “The first YES show that I did in Toronto stands out because I’d never done anything like that before, in front of 20,000 people. It was a huge highlight of my career.” Joining YES introduced Downes to Steve Howe and, in 1982, they would join together with drummer Carl Palmer and bass guitarist and vocalist John Wetton to form ASIA, enjoying phenomenal success with a more commercial, radio-friendly style of rock. Billy Sherwood began working on ideas with Chris Squire in 1989 and made his first appearance on the album Union (a collaboration between the YES of 1991 and the off-shoot Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe (ABWH) band. Union would also mark Billy Sherwood’s first recording with YES, as a writer and additional bass player on one track. Howe returned to YES in 1996 for Keys To Ascension (1996) and Keys To Ascension 2 (1997) a mix of live and new studio tracks and featuring Sherwood among the production team. Sherwood was a member of the band, together with Howe, for the Open Your Eyes album, later in 1997, and The Ladder (1999). Geoff Downes also returned to YES for the 2012 album Fly From Here featuring vocalist Benoît David During the subsequent tour David was taken ill, causing the final tour dates to be cancelled. His replacement was American vocalist Jon Davison, recommended to Chris Squire by Taylor Hawkins of The Foo Fighters and simultaneously spotted in on-line content by YES’ management of the time. “There were two angles coming in at me about the potential position,” says Davison, “and the stars really aligned “I remember the first gig being in New Zealand and that was the first time they ever played there. I felt it was a symbolic blessing because we were able to share a new experience together. It was a whirlwind of excitement. When Steve was doing his solo acoustic section, I was sitting behind Alan’s drums, and I could take a breath and look out at the big arena. I remember thinking, “Am I really here? Is this really happening? Davison began preparing material for a new YES album while the band was on the road, engaging with each of the other members.