Steve Howe is on the cover of this album. Steve Howe does not play on this album. Peter Banks does, and Banks was fired before it came out — largely because he did not want the orchestra that is all over it — so when Atlantic needed a new sleeve for America they used a band photograph, and the band by then contained Howe. He is in the promotional films too, miming to a guitarist he had replaced. It is the strangest artefact in the Yes catalogue and there is a lovely record underneath it.

The short version

Time and a Word is Yes’s second studio album, released in Britain on 24 July 1970 and in America that November on Atlantic. The line-up is Jon Anderson on vocals, Peter Banks on guitar, Chris Squire on bass, Tony Kaye on keyboards, Bill Bruford on drums, with a small orchestra of brass and string session players on most of the tracks. Tony Colton produced. It was recorded at Advision between December 1969 and February 1970, in gaps between gigs while the band toured relentlessly. Like the debut, it mixes originals with covers of pop, jazz and folk songs. Two singles came off it, the title track and Sweet Dreams. It was the first Yes record to reach the British album chart.

Peter Banks

Banks was the guitarist on the first two Yes albums and central to the thing that made Yes Yes — the episodic, stop-on-a-dime arrangements and the shifting instrumental textures that became the band’s signature. Danny Baker of the NME once called him the architect of progressive music, and the description is not indulgent. He did not want an orchestra on this album, and said so, and the tension between him and the rest of the group grew through the sessions. During the British tour of April 1970, before the record was even in the shops, they fired him and brought in Steve Howe. Banks went on to found Flash. He belongs to an odd category of musician: the ones whose ideas built a huge band and who were gone before the band got huge. Yes would spend the next four years proving him right about almost everything except the strings.

The sound

A young band with big ideas and no settled identity, which is exactly what makes it worth hearing. The close harmonies, Kaye’s Hammond and Squire’s melodic bass are all in place from the debut; what is new is the orchestra, and it is genuinely divisive. At its best it lifts the material into something grand and slightly overwhelming; at its worst it sits on top of the band rather than inside it, and buries the guitar, which is precisely what Banks feared. Bruford is already remarkable. Anderson is already Anderson. The arrangements reach for a scale the songs cannot always support, and the covers sit oddly beside the originals. But this is the first Yes album that sounds like it wants something, and the next one got it.

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The songs

No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed opens with a cinematic orchestral flourish and is thrilling — the clearest sign of what the strings could do when they worked. Then follows, and later became one of the tracks the band kept in circulation. Everydays is the long, slow, jazz-inflected one, and it is where Banks and Bruford get room to be strange together. Sweet Dreams was the single and is the poppiest thing here. The Prophet is the most ambitious piece, all shifting sections and orchestral swells, and points directly at what Yes would do in 1971. Clear Days is a brief, delicate curiosity for voice and strings. Astral Traveller is the one the fans love, and Banks is superb on it. And the title track closes the album with a gospel-adjacent lift that some people will tell you is the most beautiful melody this band ever wrote.

Reception and legacy

Mixed at the time, and history has been kind to it in a specific way: not as a great Yes album but as a snapshot of a young, unsettled Yes before the Prog Godhood arrived, which is a thing worth having. It got them onto the British album chart for the first time, which mattered more than the reviews did, though the band were still one commercial failure away from being dropped. The Banks story has dominated it ever since, and the American sleeve is the joke that will not die. Howe was on the cover, in the promo films, and nowhere on the tapes. Six months later he was playing on The Yes Album and the argument about the orchestra was over — until Yes hired one again in 2001, and once more in 2021.

The verdict

For people who already know this band, and much better than its reputation as a warm-up. Astral Traveller first, for Banks. Then the title track, which is genuinely lovely. Then No Opportunity Necessary, for the orchestral rush. Then The Prophet, which is the album pointing at its own future. The Yes Album is where the band you know begins, and Fragile is where they arrive. Skip this and you miss the sound of five people arguing their way towards something, and you miss the guitarist who drew the map and never got to walk it.

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