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I received an interesting email from a listener this week. She asked if anyone was aware of the connections between a song by the Italian prog group PFM and Yes’ Gates of Delirium. I’ll explain more when I go through the email with Mark a little later on.
Many thanks to the Patrons who gave their feedback on the topic and before you listen to Mark and my take, you may want to listen to the music involved. I’ve embedded the PFM and the Yes songs in the show notes below so head on over to yesmusicpodcast.com and see what you think – then please do add your thoughts to the comments section.
Let us know if you agree with us!
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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.
14 replies on “Yes stole The Gates of Delirium – 659”
I have to say that I’ve not heard of this group I’m not sure why that is , however I can’t hear gates or anything from Relayer.
I do know this much about Relayer is that I did see the 76 tour where it was played and to this day it is still one of my favorite Yes shows. I remember when Relayer came out I’m pretty sure by the time Yes came back to Detroit in 76 I had burned through at least three albums because I thought this album was a great work and at the time I was all about Close to the Edge. I’m sure if you listen to other great work you will hear things they may sound like other artist. Jan Hammer and Jerry Goodman because they were with the Mahavishnu Orchestra seen them play before John McLaughlin as a warm up group lot of similarities in style and sound. They were were both great.
Anyways Great show as always
Paul Tomei
Premiata Forneria Marconi’s “Generale” from Per un amico is at turns clever, chaotic, and just plain fun.
But a precursor to The Gates Of Delirium … much less a source?
No, not at all.
Personally, I find that Generale owes as much to jazz fusion & Zappa, as anything prog rock.
Yes, the style is loosely reminiscent of the battle sequences of ‘Gates (or vice versa), but no more so than any two songs of a given style.
In fact, it reminds me more of Close To The Edge than ‘Gates (especially two minutes into the former’s The Solid Time of Change section).
All props and respect to PFM … they really are extraordinary … but zero plagiarism detected here.
G’Day Kevin and Mark
Thanks for another intriguing and insightful show. While I don’t rank Relayer among my fave Yes music albums, I recognise it as an extraordinary artistic accomplishment.
Like Paul in comment above I had not heard of PFM. Thanks for linking the track in question. Having listened briefly to it I am inclined to echo the consensus that I don’t hear much from ‘Gates’. Similar guitar tone maybe, running bass and general ‘fusion’ style energy to evoke a battle scene ( title is The General, remember?). Somebody was correct to point out the same piano scale Keith Emerson uses on the ‘Endless Enigma’, which was released shortly before this PFM piece.
However since you brought it up again, I am honestly baffled by the controversy surrounding the use of Francis Monkman’s music in the tune The Ice Bridge. If somebody claimed they had written a piece of music and then had forgotten it, I could easily believe that. But to spend hours in a studio replicating the complimentary parts and complex sequences that hallmarked ‘Dawn of an Era’, believing it to be your own composition -defies all credibility.
I have some recordings of my own from forty years ago. I have completely forgotten most but if I play back an old tape I immediately recognise my own style. No way I would listen to somebody else’s complex composition and think I had composed and performed it myself. ‘Dawn of an Era’ would have been really innovative sequenced music in 1977. A landmark in anybodys career.
We all know Geoff Downes is a respected musician, capable of composing interesting music. Why he would chose to use another musicians composition, without acknowledgement, is baffling.
Excellent episode. I can’t hear the creative “heist” myself but some members of Yes would definitely have known all about PFM.
Generational differences throw up interesting splits in awareness. Other than Maiden I had little or no interest in 80s rock after Dio left Sabbath and Heart were pushed into the mainstream so I have missed out on a lot though what I have heard in terms of the interface between Prog and FM radio doesn’t interest me all that much.
Being that little bit older I was lucky enough to come on board with Yes around about six months after Yessongs came out so just before Tales.
I would have been 12 / 13 and for my cohort of young progressive music snobs PFM were a pretty big act. In terms of being a live draw they were probably on a par with VdGG and Gentle Giant in the mid 70s.
They mainly played the larger venues on the UK college and city hall circuit but they were on the Whistle Test a bunch of times and I have a memory of them headlining a couple of shows at the Rainbow about six months apart (capacity apx 3000 seats) which would put them on a par with the likes of Focus, Golden Earring and maybe even Tangerine Dream in the early Virgin era. IIRC they were (like Gentle Giant) even bigger in the US. The only difference between them and the two Dutch giants would have been the lack of a pop hit.
I was too young to go see them in that period. My first gig wasn’t until Jan of 75 (Greenslade and Rare Bird) and my second was Yes at QPR. Though I made up for that about ten years ago when they played the O2 Academy in Islington and they were really quite excellent.
Anyway …. I would highly recommend the first three Italian language albums, especially on the rather beautiful paper sleeve Japanese cd reissues that came out around 20 years ago. Chocolate Kings was not their best album though probably the most forcefully marketed in the UK. By that time, with a new Gabriel-esque singer on board they sounded a lot more like Foxtrot era Genesis than ELP or Yes.
Anyway … Italian Prog of that era is an absolute goldmine of great progressive music. Even more so than Germany in many ways despite the later’s clear lead in terms of electronic music and more experimental groove based bands like Can and Agitation Free. Spain too had their share especially the early Triana records.
At very least these artists can offer you a some fantastic musical palette cleansers before settling down to a 3000th listen to Close To The Edge. And for me there is something about Prog in a foreign language that gets me around the abject awfulness of most of the genre’s lyricists! These bands could also teach some of our leading contemporary Prog something about arrangement and melody.
Last thing – a quick Kevin question. How do I pre-order the Tales book? Am I missing something obvious. Can’t find a link anywhere. Do I need to be a YMP Patreon person to do that? It is not on Burning Shed as far as I can see. Feel free to e mail me a link if you have a minute. Thanks!
Hi Ian and many thanks for the detailed message. On the Tales book, the private presale is over. It was only available to people on the e-newsletter over at https://yesmusicbooks.com The public presale will be via Burning Shed but I can’t set it up until I have a definite release date for the book – or a price for that matter. I am hoping it will be starting this month. Stay tuned!
Thanks for the reply Kevin. Not to worry but Is that “TOO CLOSE TO THE EDGE?” or is there another one. I have been on *that* list since November 2023 ish.
Gates perhaps “borrows” a 7-note riff from PFM, but the arrangement and overall songs are quite different, this PFM piece is certainly closer to King Crimson than Yes…speaking of King Crimson check out the new Rick Wakeman podcast where he explains that the main riff from Heart of the Sunrise was written by Chris Squire, who was inspired by 21st Century Schizoid Man, and they are quite similar if you listen to the middle section of the latter. Jimmy Page’s “borrowing” is more blatant but copyright law has mostly been interpreted so that you can’t copyright a chord progression. PFM is definitely worth listening to, they have a great variety of styles and orchestrations, however, Mark is correct when he says that they sound like a lot of bits that have been patched together rather than deftly arranged. Genesis’ Supper’s Ready is likewise patched together. This is the band members’ own admission, although the melodies are in general much more memorable than those of PFM.
Very interesting and great episode guys! I listened to the PFM piece before listening to your episode and then again afterwards. On my initial listen the bass riff absolutely jumped out at me as the riff that starts at 10:20 of Gates, so much so that I felt disappointed that Squire might have lifted it. I also heard similar atmospheres to Gates, particularly around the keyboard sounds. But in the second half of the song, the keyboards totally take on an ELP flavor as in Tarkus, Trilogy, and a bit of Pictures at an Exhibition. I then listened to the podcast episode. It’s really interesting the way different people hear things differently. Between you guys and other listeners, it was really a mixed bag. Then I listened to the PFM piece again and went back to that section of Gates. My opinion didn’t change from my original listen. But aside from the similarity of the bass riff, the PFM piece certainly is not Gates. I’d be really curious to find out whether Yes and PFM had any contact with each other around that time that might possibly explain the overlap. Having said that, I’m really impressed with the PFM piece. I never heard of them but want to check out more of their stuff, so thanks for bringing them to my attention.
Contact? Quite possibly given that Yes used the ELP / Manticore rehearsal facility in Fulham at around the same time as Greg Lake was signing PFM to their label and PFM played their first major UK show in the same ABC cinema building the same spring.
Even setting that coincidence / evidence aside, Yes would certainly have been aware of PFM in 73/74 given the amount of support the band got in the UK. The Italians didn’t get to play the Rainbow twice within less than a year without a lot of label heft behind them and that would have represented commercial and creative competition, at least in the UK. Their @ The BBC box set features two In Concert radio broadcasts and three Whistle Test appearances between 74 and 76. We all watched and listened to the same programmes back then (because that is all there was apart from Nicky Horne and his regional equivalents on local commercial stations). Everyone with a passing interest in progressive music knew who PFM and Tangerine Dream and Can and Focus and Golden Earring were.
Despite the language barriers etc it was also probably easier for European bands (Dutch German Italian in particular not to mention Aphrodite’s Child from Greece and Tea from Switzerland among many others) to get a fair hearing hear in the mid 70s than at any time since.
Vertigo, Richard Branson’s Virgin and Andrew Lauder’s United Artists all gave significant support to a series of bands who were just as much innovators with their own musical traditions and technological advances to add to the progressive melting pot. That rather than the 80s / 90s thing where European rock bands were more likely to be copying Anglo-American AOR / Metal archetypes (Europe, Scorpions, MSG etc).
This also all makes me wonder if Flavio Premoli was ever considered for the Yes keyboard chair on their way to settling on Patrick Moraz?
Anyway …. if there are any traces of the Italians’ music in Relayer / Gates I would put it down to creative osmosis. Hearing something in passing and a phrase or two from it turning up in one’s own practice routine of improvisations will be a familiar thing to most musicians. If there is a reference then I doubt it is more than that.
Greetings Kevin & Mark:
QUESTION TO CONSIDER: Did the fellow Yes listener who sent this email unintentionally mention this PFM song instead of some other? I know Gates very thoroughly and there is absolutely no basis for the thought of Yes borrowing material from it. Both bands were drawing from, and contributing to, the emerging vocabulary of prog rock.
The emailer has sent us on a “wild goose chase,” unintentionally, perhaps.
But of course I was glad to learn about PFM and hear their work!
All the best,
Greg
Been a PFM fan for years and there certainly are Gates like riffs all over Generale and if you can not hear that, come on! As for YES lifting it, no I doubt that was the case but all is fair in Love War and music.
There are Generale-like riffs all over many pieces of music, Gates included. No insult is intended toward PFM from me – I like what I’ve heard and will keep listening!
But I stand with Mark and others in saying there’s no basis for “disappointment” in Yes’s level of originality here either. I know what I’m hearing. This is why I’ve called it a wild goose chase.
I am familiar with PFM having featured them on my radio show ‘Topographic Tunes’ back in 2016. As for the ‘lifting’ of their work into Gates…
Total nonsense!
Love the pod! Keep up the good work 🙂
I remember hearing PFM on Alan Freeman’s saturday afternoon rock show back in the mid 70’s. I thought they were more like ELP, I don’t think they sound like Yes, though there are some elements of production which have some resemblance to Relayer.