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Review: Yes, Bristol Beacon – ‘Quality musicianship and evergreen classics’
There are Topographic Oceans in the Beacon foyer. But well-heeled Yes enthusiasts won’t see much change from £7,500 if they want to own this limited edition artwork.
Having an exhibition as your support act is a new innovation in prog. Over in a corner, the diminutive, white-haired figure of Roger Dean is signing autographs and chatting amiably to an obsessive fan of his fabulous album cover art.
is needed now More than ever
As anyone who writes about prog knows only too well, Yes fans are the most obsessive of the lot, taking polarised positions on matters of controversy that make supporters of convicted felon Donald Trump seem sane and reasonable.
Mercifully the ‘This isn’t Yes/glorified tribute act’ brigade – who won’t countenance any version of Yes that doesn’t include Jon Anderson or Rick Wakeman – are absent tonight, leaving those of us who just want to hear this timeless music played by exceptional musicians.
And as de facto leader Steve Howe remarks admiringly of his bandmates, you need a very high standard of musicianship to play in Yes in 2024.
This isn’t one of those album anniversary tours. Instead, it’s been branded the Classic Tales of Yes tour, which suggests we’ll get the usual set of early seventies classics, with little from the band’s unusually productive last three years.
And so it proves, with nothing at all from 2021’s The Quest and just the rather excellent Cut from the Stars from last year’s Mirror to the Sky album.
Strikingly, the show opens with a song from one of Yes’s most controversial albums, 1980’s Drama, which has undergone a welcome reassessment in recent years. This means vocalist Jon Davison has to channel Trevor Horn rather than Jon Anderson.
Machine Messiah sees Yes at their most harsh and metallic, anticipating the advent of prog-metal, which might alarm older fans. They then vault forward to 1999’s The Ladder for It Will Be a Good Day (The River).
Howe’s steel guitar puts in an appearance for the ace title track of 1977’s Going for the One, which topped the UK album charts and gave those expectorating punk rockers a well-deserved kick in the teeth with the sheer quality of its compositions.
Then it’s back to 1971’s The Yes Album for I’ve Seen All Good People. All eyes are on recently recruited drummer Jay Schellen, who replaced the late Alan White and is playing his first show in Bristol. He deputised for White in the past, so knows full well the nature of the challenge.
Those early Yes classics were played by a jazz drummer (Bill Bruford) and later reinterpreted by a rock drummer (White). Schellen’s background is in rock and metal, so it’s hardly surprising to find him sticking firmly to the White approach, with which we’re mostly familiar.
1970’s Time and a Word is the earliest song played tonight, with Howe reminiscing about learning it when he replaced Peter Banks. Those multi-part harmony vocals sound absolutely gorgeous on this and Don’t Kill the Whale – Yes’s big eco song from the mediocre Tormato album.
The first set finishes with a magnificent reading of Turn of the Century from Going for the One, which Davison cites as his favourite Yes song to sing.
After a 20 minute interval, they’re back with South Side of the Sky from Fragile, which Rick Wakeman also revived when he played here in February (though Geoff Downes actually appears to have more keyboards on stage tonight than Wakeman did).
But the meat of the second set is a condensed 20 minute version of Tales from Topographic Oceans, which draws heavily on side one (The Revealing Science of God). Howe has always been a staunch defender of this unfairly derided double album and has obviously put a lot of work into abbreviating it.
But for those of us who are intimately familiar with the music, it’s slightly disconcerting to anticipate what’s coming next and then find the band jumping to the next major theme. “What happened to this song we once knew so well,” as the lyric puts it, now rather pointedly.
Multi-tasking, multi-talented Howe gets his acoustic guitar showcase during the Leaves of Green section (beautifully sung by Davison), his busy guitar tech scurrying on with not only a stool but also a bespoke footstool. The whole thing might take a bit of getting used to if they decide to repeat it, but it undoubtedly works very well.
Although Yes play nothing from Close to the Edge tonight, the encore brings a couple of evergreen classics (Roundabout and Starship Trooper, with a brief detour into the Fabs’ I Feel Fine), with bassist Billy Sherwood once again demonstrating that he’s the perfect replacement for the late Chris Squire.
This iteration of the quintessential English prog band might be majority American, but the Yes spirit remains intact.
All photos: Mike Evans
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