STEVE HOWE
Steve Howe is one of those people to whom photographs no longer do justice. Approaching his seventy-third birthday, the polite, engaging English gentleman Classic Rock meets today in the restaurant of a London hotel is far removed from the cadaverous, wispy-haired figure of his publicity shots. He’s still scarecrow-thin and ghost-grey-skinned, but alert and warm in person. A lifetime of being one of the (many) leading lights in Yes, a group whose music never knowingly stooped for the merely catchy when opulent melodrama and maze-like intricacies were always within reach, has left Howe sitting atop the mountain, in terms of reputation, fame and guitar-artistry. Although it’s the decades of first vegetarianism, then devotion to macrobiotics and long-form transcendental meditation, you feel, that has given him his ageless aura.
He began playing guitar at 12, playing in school bands, joined his semi-pro group, The Syndicats at 17, released his first single, a cover of Chuck Berry’s Maybellene, at 18, and joined The In-Crowd, who had just had a minor chart hit with a version of Otis Redding’s That’s How Strong My Love Is, just a few months later.
When The In-Crowd transmogrified into Tomorrow – now recalled as one of the proto-psychedelic Brit-rockers of the acid-rained Summer of Love – he glimpsed the future. “I was ready to really show the world, to improvise.”
He has continued to demonstrate that ability ever since, mainly through the prism of Yes, but also, unexpectedly at the time, via the power balladry of Asia, GTR, ABWH and any number of solo albums, one-off collaborations and attendant musical wizardry. Later this year he tours again with Yes, revisiting their 1974 album Relayer, although only Howe and drummer Alan White from the current line-up played on it. He also has solo shows planned for the autumn, a new book, All My Yesterdays, out in April, and a solo album, titled Love Is, “fifty-fifty instrumental and songs” released at the same time.
Tomorrow, which you formed with singer Keith West, who was about to become famous in his own right as singer of Grocer Jack (Excerpt From A Teenage Opera), came along just when albums had become more important than singles. Experimentation, expanding the idea of pop music. It wasn’t just Tomorrow, it was Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Jimi Hendrix, all led by The Beatles. How self-conscious of that were you at the time?
Yes, with Tomorrow we were in the center of it all, and we loved that. We were
