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What If…Keystudio, KTA & KTA II – PART 2 with Geoff Bailie – 472

Produced by Jeffrey Crecelius, Wayne Hall and Preston Frazier

Joining us on the show this week it’s that man again, Geoff Bailie. The redoubtable gentleman of prog helps us to discuss some written and audio contributions from Jeremy North, John Parry, John Thomson, Simon Barrow and Stephen Lambe. Do you agree with any of us? Let us know!

  • What could have happened in 1996-7?
  • What if Rick Wakeman had stayed?
  • What would we be listening to now?

Listen to the episode and let us know what you think!

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Show notes and links:

Join us in August to record episode 500 here:

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Lewis Clarke / West Devon : Yes Tor / CC BY-SA 2.0

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YMP Patrons:

Producers:

  • Jeffrey Crecelius
  • Preston Frazier and
  • Wayne Hall

Patrons:

Aaron Steelman

Dave Owen

Mark James Lang

Paul Tomei

Joost Maglev

David Heyden

Martin Kjellberg

Paul Wilson

Bob Martilotta

Lind

Michael O’Connor

William Hayes
Brian Sullivan

David Pannell

Miguel Falcão

Lobate Scarp

Chris Bandini

David Watkinson

Neal Kaforey

Rachel Hadaway

Craig Estenes

Dem

Paul Hailes

Mark ‘Zarkol’ Baggs

Doug Curran

Robert Nasir

Fergus Cubbage

Scott Colombo

Fred Barringer

Scott Smith
Geoff Bailie

Simon Barrow
Geoffrey Mason

Stephen Lambe

Guy R DeRome

Steve Dill

Henrik Antonsson

Steve Perry

Hogne Bø Pettersen

Steve Rode

IanNB

Steve Scott

Jamie McQuinn

Steven Roehr

Ken Fuller

Terence Sadler

Michael Handerhan

Tim Stannard

Jim

Todd Dudley

John Cowan

Tony Handley

John Holden

Joseph Cottrell

John Parry

Keith Hoisington

John Thomson

Barry Gorsky

Alan Begg



Robert and David

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Theme music

The music I use is the last movement of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. This has been used as introduction music at many Yes concerts. My theme music is not take from a live concert – I put it together from the following two creative commons sources: thanvannispen and archive.org

4 replies on “What If…Keystudio, KTA & KTA II – PART 2 with Geoff Bailie – 472”

Another excellent episode. I like the live Keys tracks a lot more than most people apparently. I need to go back and give them another listen as it has been a while. There is a lot of good material among the studio tracks but my problem with them remains that which I have with a lot of post-Drama Yes music – not enough of Chris being Chris, too many root note 4/4 sections and not enough melodic counterpoint. The parts are beautifully played and his sound is as-ever just perfect but there isn’t a lot there that surprises me in the way that he does on the first ten records. Everyone has a right to reassess their role as an artist but I fear that around 1980 someone had a word in his ear along the lines of “you’re going to have to put a lid on all that weird Baroque stuff if you want to keep selling records”. It’s not like the Keystudio tracks don’t have plenty of room for an unleashed Squire to play out more. It’s probably also the first set of studio recordings where a repetitive, on-the- beat snare started to really bug me on a Yes record . Though mostly I love what Rick does get to contribute on these tracks.

Great show – thanks for engaging so much with listener comments! I’m making it a point to listen to Keystudio a couple more times. (But, please, someone, tell me why they used that horrible photograph. They look like a bunch of old guys trying to look cool at a school reunion.)
The conversation produced a heretical thought. Rick was never going to rejoin the band in any kind of stable way, so the promise of the Keys recordings was always a bit of a pipedream. When he was engaged, he did great things. But as Mark or Geoff pointed out, he had so many things going on. So the Keys recordings were probably always going to be a one-off. Maybe what is amazing about Yes is that they have done so many one-offs (or two-offs?) — Relayer, Drama, Keys, Fly From Here — and in the process have remained a vibrant band. Whatever we think of the Heaven & Earth era Yes, how many other bands have carried off this longevity?

I loved this episode. I have to say that I love Mark too so the feeling’s mutual.
As you said Kevin, the thing about YES fans is that the opinions differ. While mine may have been at one extreme and other at the other, I feel I need to flesh out why I said what I did.
I bought the Keys CD as it came out not retrospectively and expected something great, same with the second a short while later. In both cases I felt that the live recordings were meant to suck us in to buying them because the new material wasn’t good enough. That was, I felt to be the case. The new material while ok was pretty bland compared to earlier periods. That continued into their later music too.

I put it down to two factors. Firstly I’d significantly opened my ears to ‘classical’ music and secondly, YES had started to prat about with their MOJO changing members and styles. Face it, Steve and Rick were never great songwriters. I still say that YES never did anything really good since Talk.
However, I was pleased to hear that I think I was not alone in my opinion of the cash grab that YES were on. I think that the majority of the other opinions of the Keys new music was that it was iffy and sometimes OK but they were far more polite than was I

I love you guys, I love this community.

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