Music That Changed Me: Yessongs

Review of the classic live album by Yes

So long ago…when I was still a wee chappie traversing my spotty adolescence of supreme awkwardness, Yes were a band who I had yet to experience. This was the early seventies. Their crowning achievement, Close to the Edge, was recently out and Tales from Topographic Oceans was yet to hit the heady pinnacles of prog excess.

I took a train ride to Reading with a fiver in my pocket to hunt out my next adventure in vinyl. Being a long haired kid, big on ideas but radically short on cash, buying the next album was always something to be considered carefully. It meant keeping my ear to the ground on what was happening, reading the album review pages of NME, maintaining a weekly ingestion of The Old Grey Whistle Test and capturing the zeitgeist through a mysterious process known only to the young. The latter is lost sometime in your twenties and it is never regained. How could it be?

After endless flicking through the album covers, all in their protective plastic covers, standing shoulder to shoulder with the other freaks, while casually glancing over to what they were perusing, I eventually pulled out the live triple album of Yes. As with all their albums of that time it had the distinctive art of Roger Dean, on its cover. Roger Dean was a legend in his own right. Any album, and…