We Make Believe
In any divorce, of course, those involved are bound to wonder if there was anyone else influencing the split. And when Prog speaks to Steve Howe, he’s unwilling (or possibly unable – can you put an exact date to everything you were doing 30 years ago?) to put a strict timeline on when he first got the call from his former bandmate.
“Jon [Anderson] called and asked, ‘Have you got any songs?’ Well, as it happened I had six songs, on cassette. So he came round – I hadn’t seen Jon for years, you know, but we just kind of connected. And obviously the fact he came to me made me think – rightly so – that he wasn’t enjoying work he was doing with other guys, that was the way it was heading.”
“I just got in touch with each guy and said, ‘Can I come over, say hello and we’ll talk about music?’”
Jon Anderson
“I’m not sure,” Anderson tells Prog over the phone from California when we ask about exactly when Big Generatorera Yes ended and ABWH began. “I just know that at that time I wanted to make new music. I have ideas all the time and it just happened I bumped into somebody that managed that situation and I just got in touch with each guy and said, ‘Can I come over, say hello and we’ll talk about music?’ The idea was just do something you feel good about – the kind of Yes that you think it should be. That kind of thing.”
The timing was pretty good, because just as Anderson was newly free of pressing professional commitments, Howe and Wakeman didn’t have any obvious reason to resist a high-profile new project.
Howe’s GTR project with Steve Hackett had lost momentum after the latter left, while Wakeman, who had departed Yes along with Anderson at the turn of the 80s, was busy enough producing Christian-themed ambient albums such as 1986’s Country Airs and 1987’s and , but inevitably they ended up rather ghettoised within the genres of ‘New Age’ and religious music. Bill Bruford had begun the 80s back in the King Crimson fold but had become increasingly interested in improvisational jazz-oriented sounds augmented by emerging electronic technology. After touring small clubs with his new quartet, Earthworks, it’s understandable that he’d be open to trying something a little higher profile that could help finance smaller passion projects like Earthworks while also offering the prospect of doing something artistically worthwhile.
