In 1977, the year punk was supposed to have killed all of this, Yes went to number one in Britain for the first time in their lives. They did it from Switzerland, with Rick Wakeman back after three years away, five songs instead of a concept, a church organ in Vevey, and a cover so unlike them that Rolling Stone later filed it among the fifty worst album sleeves ever made. When they arrived in Montreux the studio was still occupied — Emerson, Lake and Palmer had run over.

The short version

Going for the One is Yes’s eighth studio album, released on 15 July 1977 on Atlantic. It is the first they produced entirely themselves. Rick Wakeman returns, replacing Patrick Moraz; the line-up is Jon Anderson on vocals and harp, Steve Howe on guitars and pedal steel, Chris Squire on bass, Wakeman on piano, keyboards and church organ, Alan White on drums and tuned percussion. Recorded at Mountain Studios in Montreux from late 1976, engineered by John Timperley with David Richards — Eddy Offord, their man since 1970, had stepped away. Five tracks. Hipgnosis did the sleeve, keeping Roger Dean’s logo. It went to number 1 in Britain and 8 in America, and Wonderous Stories reached number 7, still their biggest UK hit.

Montreux

The British tax regime of the mid-seventies sent a lot of bands abroad and Yes were among them, though they could not agree where to go — united, according to their own account, mainly in not wanting Moraz’s Switzerland, which is exactly where they ended up. Emerson, Lake and Palmer were meant to have vacated Mountain Studios and had not, so Yes spent weeks in a rehearsal room nearby. Moraz was gone by then. The band said his melodic ideas were being rejected and cited language difficulties; Moraz believed manager Brian Lane had engineered the lucrative return of another client, and said only that some people had not played fair while accepting the decision was the whole band’s; Anderson thought sudden stardom had gone to his head. He is thanked in the credits. Lane first asked Wakeman back merely as a well-paid session man. Wakeman heard a tape of two new songs, came, and stayed — because, he said, Yes were writing songs again.

The sound

Bright, airy and startlingly direct after Tales from Topographic Oceans and Relayer. The songs are songs again, four of them under eight minutes with no unifying concept, and the band sound like people enjoying themselves. Wakeman’s return brings a completely different palette: he largely abandons the Mellotron and Minimoog that defined him and reaches instead for piano, Polymoog and a real church organ, which is the single most striking sound on the record. Howe opens the album on slide guitar with a raw, near-country swagger nobody expected from this band. Squire and White are locked and driving. The production is shiny and spacious — too much so for some ears — and the whole thing is closer to Fragile than to anything they had done in five years, which was the point.

Reading up on British prog? The books go deeper →

The songs

Going for the One is punchy, almost a singalong, driven by Howe’s slide, and Anderson uses it to gently mock his own cosmic mind, which after Topographic Oceans counts as a public service. Turn of the Century is the loveliest thing here: a sculptor loses his wife in winter, carves her likeness, and the statue comes to life — Pygmalion by way of La boheme — and Anderson gives it one of his warmest performances over Wakeman’s piano. Parallels is Squire’s, reworked from a piece on his solo album Fish Out of Water, and it is enormous: cathedral organ, crashing percussion, rock guitar, and good enough that the band later opened concerts with it. Wonderous Stories is three and a half minutes of pure shimmer and their biggest British single. And Awaken closes at fifteen and a half minutes: born when Anderson heard Howe playing a chord sequence over and over in a hotel, shaped by his reading of Calvin Miller and a Rembrandt biography, with harp, choir, White’s tuned percussion, and Wakeman’s pipe organ at its centre.

Reception and legacy

Mostly warm reviews and an unexpected commercial triumph — number one in Britain at the height of punk, which is not what anybody had scripted for Yes in 1977. Critics welcomed the return to accessible writing, one calling the closing moments of Awaken a kind of music-making already almost lost, and AllMusic has since called the album perhaps the most overlooked thing in the catalogue and something close to a proper sequel to Fragile. Anderson considers Awaken the finest thing Yes ever recorded and has said it is their most complete composition. The sleeve is another matter: Hipgnosis gave them skyscrapers and a naked man seen from behind, and Rolling Stone later put it on a list of the fifty worst covers of all time. Tormato followed and flopped, and the classic line-up came apart. Plenty of people call this the last album of the classic era.

The verdict

Essential, and the easiest late-period Yes album to love. Awaken first, all fifteen minutes, and stay for the organ; the man who sang it thinks it is the best thing they did and he may be right. Then Parallels, loud. Then Turn of the Century, which is the most human three-quarters of an hour this band ever spent. Then Wonderous Stories, which is simply beautiful. Close to the Edge is where you begin and Fragile is next. But this is the record where five people who had nearly disappeared into their own ambition came back down, wrote actual songs, and went to number one while everyone else was busy announcing their funeral.

Browse the bookshelf in the footer →