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New Yes book arrives! Dialogue by Jon Kirkman

I asked my super-talented son, William, to take some ‘un-boxing photos’. Great record of the process! It’s a really beautiful book, packed with a ridiculous number of wonderful pictures and interviews. Get it here – if you can – stocks are running out I think!

http://www.williammulryne.co.uk/

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4 replies on “New Yes book arrives! Dialogue by Jon Kirkman”

Great to see, do you know when it was posted? Mine was being sent out today but I don’t know how many days it will take to arrive (mainland UK).

I’m sure everyone who gets a copy will enjoy it. It’s been a labor of love to put together the last 4 years, this new edition and the previous one that came out in Nov. ’14.

Excellent episode. Very much looking forward to hearing the Producer’s Cut of Fly From Here. A record I completely (and shamefully) ignored on release. The first and only Yes record I haven’t snapped up in the week of release since Relayer. Call it a case of burned fingers as up to now Magnification has been the only Yes studio record made post GFTO that I would even think about taking to a desert island. I would take Change We Must, A Life Within A Day and Syndestructible before any of them. Sadly it took the death of Chris Squire to get me to reassess Fly From Here and it really is quite brilliant.

Key for me is that the glossy West Coast 80s elements in the music are adding to the classic core sound of the band rather than seeking to erase the idiosyncrasies that made the band unique in the first place. Especially when it comes to the rhythm section. Maybe it took Trevor Horn to remind them of their uniqueness and their Englishness. Steve Howe’s playing also seems to be refreshed, playing and inventing at his true level.

Another key issue is that the lyrics are a quantum leap forward from the very literal New Age buzzword poetry Jon Anderson served up in the 90s and 00s. One of the things I loved about the band in the first place was that the lyrics were providing the phrasing and accents for Anderson’s instrument rather than telling me anything I urgently needed to know (or didn’t know already). Not being literal made it easier to just hear it all as sound poetry. Back in the day meaning was more than adequately expressed in the emotions conveyed by the band as a collective. You could drift in and out of the literal meaning and not be any worse off. Which is not a criticism. In that respect they were pretty much unique and it all went to show how much they had imbued their early jazz, classical and film music influences. Fly From Here doesn’t go down that path, on one level it is very literal (while also operating on a metaphorical level) but the writing is good enough to make that more than ok.

Anyway …. I can highly recommend the record to anyone with the best part of both feet planted in a pre 1980 musical universe and I am now really looking forward to hearing this new favourite in a fresh light.

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