The Yes Album

The Yes Album is the record where Yes stopped being a promising covers-and-originals band and became Yes. It is their first album of entirely original material, the first with Steve Howe on guitar, and the last with Tony Kaye at the keyboards until 1983.

The short version

Released by Atlantic on 19 February 1971 in Britain and a month later in America, The Yes Album is the third Yes studio album. The band wrote and rehearsed it through mid-1970 at a farmhouse at Romansleigh in Devon, then recorded at Advision Studios in London in the autumn with Eddy Offord as engineer and co-producer. Six pieces, all written in-house, and a line-up of Jon Anderson, Chris Squire, Steve Howe, Tony Kaye and Bill Bruford. On 23 November 1970, driving back from a show at Plymouth Guildhall, the band were in a head-on collision at Basingstoke; Kaye played the next few dates, and posed for the sleeve photograph, with his foot in plaster.

Where the second album stumbles

The two albums before this one had leaned on other people’s songs. Peter Banks was out and Steve Howe was in, and with him came a guitarist who could move between electric lead, acoustic finger-picking and country flat-picking inside a single arrangement. That range is the reason the writing on this album opens out the way it does — the band could suddenly build pieces around a guitar that changed character every few bars. It was also the record Atlantic needed: two commercial failures in a row had left the deal in doubt. The band spent the middle of 1970 away from London writing, which is why the material hangs together the way it does — these are pieces built in a room over months, not assembled in a studio on a deadline.

The sound

This is where the recognisable Yes architecture arrives: long pieces assembled from distinct sections rather than verses and choruses, Squire’s bass carrying melody instead of just root notes, Bruford playing across the beat, and Anderson’s high tenor stacked into harmony with Squire and Howe. Kaye stays with Hammond organ and piano and uses the Moog sparingly, which gives the record a warmer, more band-like texture than the keyboard-orchestral Yes that followed. Critics have long treated it as the moment the group found its voice. What is striking in hindsight is how much of it is guitar music: Howe is the loudest new idea on the record, and the arrangements keep clearing space for him.

Reading up on British prog? The books go deeper →

The songs

‘Yours Is No Disgrace’ opens the album across nearly ten minutes and was issued as a single in Europe that June. ‘Clap’ is Howe alone on acoustic guitar, recorded live at the Lyceum Theatre in London on 17 July 1970 — the only live recording on the record, and the track whose title the sleeve renders as ‘The Clap’. ‘I’ve Seen All Good People’ is the two-part piece whose first half, ‘Your Move’, became the American single and the band’s first taste of radio there. ‘Starship Trooper’ is the other long piece, in three named sections, and it closes on the guitar figure that has ended Yes concerts for fifty years. ‘A Venture’ is the short one, and ‘Perpetual Change’ ends the album with the band playing two different pieces of music at once.

Reception and legacy

The album broke Yes commercially on both sides of the Atlantic and gave them their first American touring momentum. It is also the last Yes album with Tony Kaye for over a decade: during rehearsals for the next record his reluctance to take on the newer electronic keyboards led to his exit, and Rick Wakeman replaced him. Reviewers writing about the classic Yes run almost always start here rather than with the two albums before it.

The verdict

Start here if you want to hear a band arriving. It is the least ornate of the classic-era Yes albums and, for a lot of listeners, the most immediately likeable — the songs are long but they move, and the harmony singing carries you through the joins. If you already know Fragile and Close to the Edge, this is the record that explains how they became possible.

Browse the bookshelf in the footer →