Quiet pleAse!
Being a huge Yes fan, I eagerly unwrapped my CD and Blu-ray of Yes featuring ARW: Live At The Apollo as soon as they arrived last Friday and I couldn’t wait to immerse myself in a couple of hours of classic Yes.
The first thing that hit me was the impeccable quality of the Blu-ray. The picture quality and audio were fantastic, the musicianship first rate and the band really look like they are having fun. Jon Anderson’s voice is just astounding, and with Trevor Rabin and Lee Pomeroy backing him up, I think it has to be one of the strongest line-ups vocally that they have ever had.
So everything was in order for me to sit back and enjoy. Well, not quite! I started to notice that the crowd’s cheering and applause was becoming intrusive and occurring more and more in places and in ways that were unnatural for a British audience. I don’t understand the reasoning behind this, but more importantly, it’s not an honest representation of that Yes concert which was in Britain. In my 45 years of attending gigs, it has been my experience in general that we don’t have to whoop and holler in any musical space like they tend to do in the US for example, which leads me to wonder if the concert has been produced with the fact that the US is the largest market!
On a lesser note, but annoying to me, is that they have edited out Lee Pomeroy’s bass solo on The Fish. I know Lee is a huge Chris Squire fan and I think the solo paid homage to Chris while showing what a great musician Lee is. It would have been an excellent way to show he is a part of the band, as would the inclusion of Louis Molino’s drum solo/ intro to
Lift Me Up if that too had been included!
I know these may seem like minor issues, and overall I think both the CD and Blu-ray are a fantastic record of a band that are still performing at the highest level. I just don’t need a canned audience to make me realise the fact.