“I’m a creative lunatic!”

“The past,” according to the famous LP Hartley quote, “is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”

Or maybe Mr Hartley just didn’t have the technology at his disposal. In the 21st century, history isn’t so out of reach that you can’t pick up the thread of ideas you had nearly 30 years ago, dust them off and weave them into something that sounds like it was produced yesterday. And if filmmakers can get World War I footage and carefully resurrect it so it appears to have been shot last week, then music producers can do the same with demos from the turn of the 1990s.

That’s one of the approaches taken by Jon Anderson on his new solo album, . The album includes material based around ideas old and new that the former Yes frontman has had in cold storage from various points since then. They include tracks co-written and played on by Alan White and the late Chris Squire, shortly after the short-lived ABWH project was merged back into the Yes fold at the start of 1991. They were rescued via the curious technique of “baking”, whereby brittle,