Produced by Joseph Cottrell, Jeffrey Crecelius and Ken Fuller

This week we had a great conversation with the delightful Pete Greenwood about his recollections of the Tales Tour when it visited Manchester for two concerts in 1973. The gigs spurred Pete on to pursue his own bass playing and that eventually led to him performing all four sides of Tales himself with the Yes tribute band, Seyes. Fortunately for us, the Tales concerts left an indelible impression on Pete and he shares lots of stories from 1973 with Mark and me. I’m sure you will enjoy listening to those as much as we did.

• What was it like seeing the Tales stage set for the first time?
• How did the audience react to the brand new music?
• Did Rick Wakeman really eat a curry?

Let us know if you agree with us!

Produced by Joseph Cottrell, Jeffrey Crecelius and Ken Fuller

This week, Mark and I have been looking through the lyrics of the 80s Yes albums, including ABWH. So that meant considering Drama, 90125, Big Generator and ABWH. It was interesting to consider lyrics probably written by at least Jon ANderson, Trevor Horn and Trevor Rabin. It’s an area we seldom look at so it was very enjoyable to examine a different aspect of the music of Yes and I definitely learned a lot from what Mark said about his choices. I’m sure you will as well. As always, we’d love to see what your suggestions are for great 80s Yes lyrics so do leave your choices on the show notes for this episode.

• Are there differences between lyrics by different Yes frontmen?

• Do the other writers try to sound like Jon Anderson?

• What makes a good Yes lyric?

Produced by Joseph Cottrell, Jeffrey Crecelius and Ken Fuller

This week, Mark and I take our cue from the recent announcement of the Talk deluxe box set to be released at the end of this month. It contains a live recording of a 1994 concert in Canandaigua, New York (interestingly seemingly misspelt on the adverts) that includes 5 songs from the recently released album. So we were wondering how the latest songs sounded in 1994 in a live setting.

The best bootleg available up to now has been the TV broadcast from Santiago in Chile during the fairly short South American Tour of 1994. Mark owns a DVD of the show but it’s available to everyone, including me, on YouTube and the version I have included below is the whole of the broadcast version including interviews with the band and behind the scenes footage. It’s well worth a watch in full.

Mark and I focussed on just the Talk songs for this discussion, however, and there’s plenty to enjoy, as you might imagine. This lineup of the band included Billy Sherwood in his first stint and benefits from his singing, guitar playing, keyboards, bass and assorted percussion. He is, as I’m sure you know, a man of many parts. See if you agree with our assessment of the Talk songs from this performance.

• Was it possible to replicate all the studio trickery live?
• Are the band in synch?
• How did the audience react?

Let us know if you agree with us!

Produced by Joseph Cottrell, Jeffrey Crecelius and Ken Fuller

This week, Mark and I climbed aboard our state of the art time machine to visit the past of the world’s greatest progressive rock band. We each chose 3 Yes tours we would love to be able to visit and gave each other clues to guess which ones we were thinking of. You’ll get the idea I’m sure.

Do play along yourself and see if you can guess the tours in question before Mark or I do - you probably will. Then, why not add your own to the show notes for this week - set a few clues and then see if anyone can guess in the comments. We had a lot of fun with this activity so join us to test your own knowledge. Set phasers to fun, as they say.

• Where will our time machine take us?
• Can you guess from our cryptic clues?
• Do we show off our Yes knowledge or our Yes ignorance?

Let us know if you agree with us!

Produced by Joseph Cottrell, Jeffrey Crecelius and Ken Fuller

Mark and I had a great time this week thinking about interesting or unusual Yes musical textures. We both came up with 3 examples that we thought were surprising or different so do have a look below to hear the clips we are referring to and add your own examples to the comments section. You may be surprised with some of our suggestions - that’s somewhat the idea, after all.

• What interesting textures can you think of in Yes music?
• Is it down to instrumentation, arrangement or a combination?
• Do Mark and I choose the same things again?