1998
Label: Victor - VICP-60440~41 • Format: 2x, CD Compilation, Promo • Country: Japan • Genre: Electronic, Rock, Pop, Classical • Style: Chanson, Pop Rock, Prog Rock, Modern Classical, Soft Rock, Classic Rock

Half the tracks are from the "House of Blues" live CD, then we Friends And Relatives (CD) the title track from the "Open Your Eyes" album which I have never heard but, judging by this track, it appears deserving of the low opinion that most Yes fans have of it. So, all in all a rather strange mixture. If you want a compilation of Yes classics, then there are several better than this. The only selling point for me is the brilliant symphonic version of Gates which, as I said, is not on my version of "Magnification".

I'll give this 2 stars overall for the excellent packaging and of course the music is good, although hardly their best work. This is rather a strange compilation, and certainly not the "Anthology" it purports to be. The album smacks of a record label concocting a mixture of the Yes tracks to which they own the rights, and attempting to present them as some sort of career spanning summary. The only reason they can get some way towards this is because some of the source albums are live recordings, which include classic material.

The reality is though that these versions come from more recent live collections such as "Live from the House of Blues", "Yes- symphonic" and "Keys to ascension 2". On the plus side, this means that we are treated to classics such as "Close to the edge", "The gates of Delirium" and "And you and I". The down side is, we have them already! The studio tracks come from the later albums "The Excerpts From Tales From Topographic Oceans - Yes, "Magnification", Friends And Relatives (CD), and "Open your eyes".

If you are looking for a reason to buy this album, which is admittedly usually to be found at a rock bottom price, it is for the relatively rare Steve Howe pieces "Excerpts from Tales from Topographic Oceans" and "To be over", although these can be found on his solo albums and on other compilations.

As long as you are prepared to take the "Anthology" tag with a huge pinch of salt, this is not a bad way of discovering Yes if you are new to their music. Don't read too much into the newer studio tracks though. It claims to be an ultimate, superior, amazing, must-have, career-spanning anthology of Yes's career.

The songs are good for sure, but I would advise you to buy them on their respective albums and get the lot, rather than this very random compliation with spelling mistakes and a vague running time which simply reads "over 2 hours" I expect all you Yes fans are scraming at this point - not a good one to start with. The band wanted to make a big statement here worldwide.

We had this whole story, you know? I wanted to create music that had length and breadth and adventure that would carry the audience through this experience. Howe remembers a slightly more cautious reception. If the starting point of Tales… had come about when the paths of Yes and King Crimson had accidentally crossed at a party, the next stage in the story found Yes indebted to another part of the prog spectrum: Emerson Lake And Palmer and their Manticore Studios, based in an old converted cinema in Fulham.

Over several weeks in the summer ofoccupying the main stage at the rehearsal complex, they got to grips with fragments, sketches and outlines. In some respects, this was business as usual for the group. Countless times in their history, Yes had sewn together different musical elements. Never the easiest of jobs, the arrival of Wakeman inwho understood the nuts and bolts of the music, had improved the pace with which loose ends and threads might be put to use or dispatched.

Nailing one track can be hard enough. Trying to map out four, each lasting the side of an album, was enough to give even the most enthusiastic in the band pause for thought.

The logistics of creating a piece that would go through several distinct transformations over 20 minutes was a formidable prospect even for a group with Close To The Edge under their belt.

He readily admits he was frequently overbearing during the writing and rehearsals, chivvying his bandmates along, trying to keep people focused. In rehearsal I tended to know exactly where we were going, to a point.

I knew there were going to be some solos from Steve, and in the first movement there were solos from Rick, and in the second movement. I had such great faith in doing it. That faith was something shared by Howe. It was tough going, he admits, but there was a sense that there lay an unprecedented opportunity before the group, provided they were able to keep their nerve.

We just knew we had a big landscape we could explore. Side one set the scene so much. It was showing that we wanted to use some themes but use them in different ways. It was quite plain what we were doing. We could really stretch out and no less so than on side three, when most of the Friends And Relatives (CD) is a stretch-out of some mad, really quite wacky ideas — some quite Stravinsky, some quite folky.

With Leaves Of Green you get back to the roots of our music. To close, we had to do something that was going to be bigger than big. We felt that with what we had constructed we had a beautiful song, Nous Sommes Du Soleiland there was a use of theme again that we did nicely I think. Anderson recalls being eager to get started as early as possible because they had so much to get through, though not everyone in the group shared that particular body clock. There was some trial and error initially.

It was a collection of lots of pieces of music that we had carrying the story. We had to find a way of joining the jigsaw puzzle together to make it work. With much of that puzzle now in place, albeit somewhat loosely, Yes transferred to Morgan Studios in Willesden. Its urban location, on a busy road with heavy traffic, was about as far away from the countryside idyll Jon Anderson had originally envisaged for the recording as you could get.

And that lack of bucolic charm? Well, Rick Wakeman had the answer. Then he brought some palm trees in. As an indicator of how strange things had become, White also remembers a shower cubicle complete with tiles being built inside the studio in order to try to replicate the sound Anderson heard when he was singing in the shower at home.

Ask any musician what their ambition was, the chances are the opportunity to make a record would be pretty high on the list. All the players in Yes had been there and done that several times over. As seasoned and successful professionals, there was no naivety about what was involved.

Yet this time it was different. Every day, as each of them drove from home to the studio, the distance between what Anderson and Howe had outlined and the reality of what was going onto tape gnawed at their confidence.

Chris Squire recalled in that despite the cardboard cows and DIY plumbing, there was little Excerpts From Tales From Topographic Oceans - Yes the way of levity. Journeying deeper Excerpts From Tales From Topographic Oceans - Yes the making of the album, he and Anderson were bumping heads. It took a lot of Band-Aids and careful surgery in the harmony and embellishment department to make it into something.

However, changes in the personal and social interactions between the band took their toll in the confines of Morgan. As the construction of the vast musical edifice continued, the personal harmony prevalent on other albums was now rather elusive. Speaking inco-producer Eddy Offord commented on the rift that opened up during the recording. He never touched pot. But there was perhaps another, more significant factor. As Tales … slowly progressed during the summer and early autumn, Wakeman, when not supplying keyboards to Black Sabbath, who were working in the adjacent studio, was also busy scoring his next solo project, Journey To The Centre Of The Earth.

Anderson, believing that these extracurricular activities were distracting and preventing Wakeman from contributing to the full extent as he had done on previous recordings, was in little doubt as to what the priority should have been.

For his part, Wakeman had genuine misgivings about the general direction of the material. Marshalling both music and esoteric concepts into a series of cohesive suites required a kind of commitment that was beyond their usual experience, says Howe.

That some were struggling was, of course, a cause for concern but, he argues, the way around that was to overcome the doubt by diving in.

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