Jon Anderson has kindly decided to
explain the meaning of life to me. "Right, this table," says the lead
singer of Yes, gesturing towards the coffee table, "is the world as we know
it. There are mountains, valleys, animals and interdimensional energies that we
don't know about." He pauses. "Or maybe we do. Actually, I know a lot
of people that do. Interdimensional energies," he nods sagely, "are a
very powerful thing."
But back to the table. "The human experience is as big as that," he
says, picking up an ashtray, "compared to everything else that's going on.
The horrible stuff, the terrible daily shit that you read about, is as big as
that. The people that live in Seville or Detroit - although it's tough in
Detroit sometimes - or Calcutta - kinda funky! - South America, South Africa,
all these people are getting on with life." He grabs a box of matches and
rattles it. "This is the media, CNN, everything that's happening in Israel
and Arabia. It's a very small part of life, but because we're connected to the
media we think that's what life's all about, and it ain't."
He's completely lost me, so he tries a different tack. "If you start
wondering about birdcalls and, erm, why birds are alive and what they seem to do
around us, and trees and nature and so forth, which me and my wife Jane do...
We're just such bird-lovers. We were there in the park today, just feeding the
ducks. We were loving the baby ducks. And what's wrong with that?"
What indeed? Nevertheless, we seem to have strayed from the whole meaning of
life issue. "Well, it was a beautiful moment. And you think life is a
beautiful thing and you've got to live accordingly. You've got to magnify all
your better feelings and better urges and better conscious ideas and that's your
life's evolvement. There's only one reason we live. It's very simple. To find
the creator. That's just my understanding," he adds quickly. "I'm
still working on it."
I'm growing to like Jon Anderson - it's hard not to warm to someone who is
willing to let you in on the meaning of life within minutes of meeting you - but
he is a rock star from an entirely alien era. His conversation is pitched
somewhere between David Icke and Smashey and Nicey. He is wont to say things
like "In the early 90s, a lovely lil' lady from Hawaii came by who was able
to ignite my third eye" with a deadly earnestness. He also claims to have
been visited by angels in a hotel room in Las Vegas. They told him to remember
William Blake. This was, understandably, "a very sobering experience".
His personal philosophy ("I say to my beautiful wife Jane, I wouldn't have
met you if I hadn't gone through my whole life to get to you when we met")
can be as inscrutable as his lyrics, which in Yes's early-1970s heyday spawned a
cottage industry in explicatory pamphlets.
If Anderson seems a little peculiar, it's nothing compared with the music of
Yes. At a time when it is frequently claimed that progressive rock is back, in
the shape of Radiohead, Elbow and the Mars Volta, it's certainly instructive to
listen to the genuine article. A quick spin of early-1970s albums such as Close
to the Edge or Fragile reveals that rumours of prog's resurrection are
premature. No current band bears even the remotest resemblance to Yes. Their
songs appear to last for months, packed with tricksy, neurotic riffs, lurching
shifts in tempo and time signature and twiddly keyboard solos that stretch into
the middle of next week.
That's before you get to the words, which beggar belief. They somehow
contrive to be completely incomprehensible and deeply portentous. "As the
silence of seasons on we relive abridge sails afloat," pipes Anderson on
The Remembering: High the Memory, from 1974's Tales From Topographic Oceans, his
Accrington vowels adding perhaps an element of pathos to the purple prose.
"As to call light the soul shall sing of the velvet sailors course
on." And that is one of his more accessible lyrics.
Unsurprisingly, Anderson is still big on their mystical significance:
"I'm still working it out myself as my consciousness evolves." Yes's
keyboard player, Rick Wakeman, a beer-and-skittles character who famously ate a
curry on stage at Manchester Free Trade Hall during one of Tales From
Topographic Oceans' more recherché passages, has cruelly suggested that
Anderson didn't have a clue what he was singing about.
Either way, the overall effect makes Radiohead sound like Bill Haley and the
Comets. You can scarcely believe that anything this arcane ever found an
audience. But it did. Formed in 1968, by the mid-1970s Yes were vastly
successful, particularly in the US. They still hold a record for selling out
Madison Square Gardens for seven consecutive nights in 1977. Their success bred
staggering indulgence. Capes were worn on stage and mansions were bought in the
countryside. Steve Howe would fly his Gibson guitar in its own seat on Concorde.
When Yes could not decide whether to record an album in London or "in a
forest at the dead of night" (the latter, it scarcely needs explaining, was
Anderson's idea), a compromise was reached: the album was recorded in a
Willesden studio decorated with bales of hay and a cardboard cow with
electrically powered moveable udders.
Nevertheless, despite the loon pants, the mystical lyrics and the third eye,
Anderson emerges from Yes's history as less a wide-eyed hippy than a hard-headed
operator, perhaps as a result of a tough childhood spent working as a farmhand.
He may be the only rock star in history to have been compared to three different
dictators. His nickname within Yes was Napoleon, but departing drummer Bill
Bruford went further, noting Anderson's similarity to Hitler and Stalin. When I
mention this, he looks momentarily nonplussed - "Stalin?" - before
sternly defending himself.
"I just wanted to build and grow and develop, so that there was a reason
for why we became successful. Because I believed and still believe that success
is only part of the story. It makes you want to get better and better so as not
to let yourself down and not to let the people down who like what you do and you
don't waste your success. So I would be very, very hard if I saw anybody in the
band not having respect for their talent. I hated that. There's a lot of people
out there with more talent, but just didn't get the break. I've seen them. I've
heard them." He reels this off as if he's said it many times before. You
suspect the other members of Yes may have heard similar monologues.
However, not even Anderson's cheerleading could stop punk rock, which left
double concept albums based on Paramhansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi
looking slightly de trop. In its aftermath, as Wakeman once put it with
characteristic delicacy, Yes "were about as welcome as a fart in a Chanel
factory". The subsequent years have been an endless cycle of acrimonious
departures and reformations fuelled by financial necessity: in their pomp, the
members of Yes apparently spent most of their money as quickly as they made it.
Although their music has never undergone the kind of critical reappraisal
afforded Pink Floyd, they can still pack stadiums with dutiful fans who
subscribe to Homer Simpson's philosophy of music: "Everyone knows rock
attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact."
"It's tough at the moment," says Anderson. "Everybody in the
band wants to be appreciated for who we are, enjoyed by the media for what we
are - 35 years is a long time to be a band. We'd love more people to come and
see the band, and that takes good publicity and good promotion. Wheels are very
slowly turning in that direction. There's going to be a 'Best of' coming out.
The wheels are in motion to try and reassure us that we didn't spend the last 35
years going downhill."
Anderson suddenly sounds rather reflective and glum. Then, perhaps
remembering one of his many "experiences with other conscious energies that
have instilled a realisation that all is well", he brightens. "Still,
we have survived. Nobody's dead yet. I'm amazed at how well we play on stage
every night. It's a continuation of growth. It's part of a natural understanding
that we went through the hippy 60s in order to enter the 21st century, in order
to have the golden age, if you want to call it a word. We're still growing into
that place of higher consciousness, we are becoming a global conscience. The
idea is to unravel the onion and let go of the ego and evolve to that place
where you perceive everything to be a beautiful experience rather than a
daunting experience."
He's lost me again - we appear to be heading inexorably back towards the
realms of interdimensional energies and loving the baby ducks - but Anderson
seems happy enough. "The state of things at the moment," he smiles,
"is incredibly beautiful."
· The Ultimate Yes 35th Anniversary Collection is out now on WSM.
