Jon Anderson
The former Yes singer returns with a surprise, star-studded solo album.
“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, 1000 Hands: Chapter One. 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, deteriorated tapes can be made playable again (albeit only once) in low-temperature ovens, and their contents transferred to a digital format.
As for the other notable names who played on 1000 Hands, well, the album got its name for a reason. Look on the official website, www.jonanderson1000hands.com, and you’ll find a scrolling credits list that looks more suited to a star-studded Hollywood movie.
“I wanted to invite as many people as possible to perform on these songs,” Anderson explained on a Facebook post last year, and he got his wish. As well as Squire and White, Steve Howe can be heard on the
“Writing songs activates me, wakes me up. Because I get very dormant surrounded by materialism and things like that.”
album. Steve Morse, Rick Derringer and Pat Travers also contribute guitar, Billy Cobham and Carmine Appice play drums, Chick Corea and Journey’s Jonathan Cain add keyboards, Ian Anderson contributes instantly recognisable flute and Anderson’s one-time duo partner JeanLuc Ponty is on violin. Further cameos come from Toto’s Bobby Kimball on backing vocals and legendary funk horn section Tower Of Power.
But the main architect of the record is undoubtedly producer Michael Franklin, who, while putting the album together last year, proceeded to suggest even more lower-profile but no less able invitees to the party. “Every couple of weeks there’d be somebody else,” Anderson recalls. “Like Zap Mama, these amazing women from Belgium, who I first saw back in the early 90s. I couldn’t believe how good they were, and now all of a sudden here they are singing on the album – it’s was like my birthday every day, with special guests showing up all the time.”
Of course, the definition of a camel is a horse designed by committee, and around the same time the earliest of the songs on 1000 Hands was being demoed, Anderson was just getting involved in his own notorious example of too many cooks spoiling a musical broth. He dates back his demos with Squire and White to sessions at Big Bear Studios with producer Brian Chatton in 1991, referred to as the ‘Uzlot’ sessions, and that would be the time when his fruitful reconnection with his former Yes bandmates, ABWH, was mutating into an ill-advised oversized incarnation of Yes, the eight-piece cut-andshut vehicle responsible for the relatively unloved 1991 album Union.
Or… has he got his dates wrong? In our conversation he refers to having a tour to do with Japanese ambient pioneer Kitaro as one of the reasons he didn’t complete his work on the demos, and that took
place in summer 1992, which would shift the timeline for the sessions with Squire and White to the spring of that year rather than in the midst of ABWH’s controversial merger with YesWest, following inconclusive French studio sessions with Bruford, Wakeman and Howe in the summer of 1990. The eventual shortcomings of Union have since been blamed by producer Jonathan Elias on a lack of available songs. If Squire and White were demoing with Anderson in early ’91, why didn’t those songs end up being put up for recording by Yes at the time? And given that ABWH had been served with lawsuit by Yes only 18 months previously, not to mention Squire’s disparaging comments about the ABWH album (“I didn’t really enjoy the music they were making… it was an odd thing, really.”), had that ill feeling already dissipated?
“I don’t remember,” says Anderson. “But musicians are like a family. You can get upset with each other once in a while but you’re family. Chris and I were like brothers – he was the yin and I was the yang. He was Darth Vader and I was Obi-Wan Kenobi!”
There seems little danger of 1000 Hands getting the thumbs down from Anderson fans. It manages an unlikely feat: combining the broad melodic strokes of latter-day Yes with long-form song suites and the spiritually charged lyrics of a die-hard child of the 60s.
Twice In A Lifetime, one of three tracks on the album deriving from the 1991 demos, along with First Born Leaders and Come Up, now has violin- and accordion-streaked opening bars that introduce Anderson crooning, ‘Twice upon a lifetime was a mystic and a singer, who sang too many songs of love, lost faith in her belief.’
Harpsichord-style keyboard flourishes then decorate a flintier turn in his lyrical flow: ‘Planes fly in with food and love to save the starving millions, while planes fly in to feed the hungry guns of disbelief.’
“It’s just asking a simple question,” he says. “Why can we not share the world? Planes flying in to feed the starving one day, then they’re flying in the next day to deliver the bombs. What the hell are we doing? Everybody feels this way, except those one percenters who seem to have everything organised to build war machines.
“The idea of not being able to share oneness on this planet has been with me since beginning the 60s. But in past 30 years we’ve become a little bit, ‘Oh, okay.’ I think in the next few years we’re going to be going through another big change, and change is good,”
And change is happening, it seems. But in the age of Donald Trump and Brexit, you suspect it’s not the kind of change Anderson had in mind. Now permanently based in California after many nomadic years, how does he view what’s going on in his adopted country?
“It doesn’t get much weirder, to be honest. I’m an American citizen, so they can’t throw me out.
But I don’t want to say anything, I’ll just be feeding that world of… very silly, very Monty Python.”
Okay. So did he get a chance to vote in the Brexit referendum?
“No. And I’m still confused – it seems to me like a bunch of bankers asking each other, ‘How much money can we make? Why are the Germans making so much money?’ Guys! Haven’t we been here before? Come on! You know, work harder, play harder, be more creative.”
We’re not sure where that leaves our hero on the spectrum of opinions across our troubled islands, but maybe he doesn’t either.
Those aren’t the only direct-sounding statements you’ll hear on this album. An ear-pricking line from First Born Leaders blends unlikely instrumentation such as steel drums as it concludes: ‘Everybody wants what they cannot have.’
“You bet. It’s more true now than ever,” he says.
A more typically oblique Anderson lyric can be found on the nine-minute Activate, a song guest flautist Ian Anderson described to Record Collector as “a long, epic song... very much in the progressive rock tradition”.
“Chris and I were like brothers –
he was the yin and I was the yang. He was Darth Vader and
I was Obi-Wan Kenobi!”
The key line is, ‘The answer to the proposition 35-42 – everything within the law begins and ends with you.’ And in contrast to his old approach of leaving his more puzzling statements open to interpretation, Anderson is happy to explain:
“It comes from something you see a lot in America, when they want you to vote for people you’ll see a lot of cars in someone’s garden from local government candidates saying: ‘proposition 32 – say no! Proposition 61 – say yes!’ But that line in the song is just saying we are all unique and we’re all connected throughout this world. And writing songs activates me, wakes me up. Because I get very dormant surrounded by materialism and things like that. There’s nothing wrong with it but if you become nothing but materialism and nothing but boozing… you become empty, I think. Unless you go and watch a football match and life changes, so… hey, it was great to see the games this weekend, wasn’t it? Some great games in England recently. I watch a lot of Spanish football as well…”
Hang on, the subject seems to have taken a sharp turn leftwards. “Did you see Ajax last night? Unbelievable! I’m a Barcelona guy, but I also like Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid. And also I like Man United, Liverpool, Newcastle… and of course Accrington Stanley!”
Prog thinks we’ve digressed considerably, but maybe that stream of consciousness is a reflection of a man who is still, at heart, a hippie dreamer, yet also a man from the north of England who is also an avowed internationalist, who speaks with an accent floating somewhere between Los Padres and Lancashire and who describes his home as “very quiet, in the hills, much like Accrington, surrounded by hills and woodland… but the weather is better.”
As befits such a multi-faceted man, 1000 Hands is an unashamedly eclectic listen. Come Up is another expansive journey that begins with loungey cascades of jazz piano (aided by some sterling work from Corea, Cobham and Ponty) before being joined by steel drums – a combination that surely shouldn’t work but does – then later, a full-on hands-to-heaven gospel chorus from Zap Mama, while Anderson offers the kind of lines that you’d fully expect to hear on a record 45 years ago: ‘Some come to tempt you with visions of the Eastern world, some come to tempt you with their own reality/only you can break the rule of contemplation, these words are purely loved in speculation.’
We find this on the same album as some disarmingly straightforward songwriting. Makes Me Happy is reggae-tinged, horn-spattered sunshine pop, then I Found Myself is particularly striking, a sweet acoustic paean laced with sweet flourishes of violin and backing vocals from the inspiration of the song – Anderson’s wife Jane. “It’s about finding yourself when you find your true soulmate, it’s like a dream come true,” he says. It should of course be unbearably saccharine, but once again the gamble pays off.
Live shows are planned, with UK dates “hopefully” added later this year. But all the while, he reckons new material is constantly being created.
“I’m working on something now that’s probably over two hours long,” he says. “Because it’s a story. A story within a story, and I’m doing about four of them at the same time. I’ve been working on that for
15 or so years.”
You wonder if, like the Uzlot sessions, it might end up semipermanently on the backburner, but that’s the way Jon Anderson has always done things. While we’re on the phone, he has to pause to open the front door to someone with whom he’s demoing tracks in his home studio. At 74, retirement doesn’t seem an option.
“I never stop,” he admits. “I’m so busy writing songs and create new projects. I’ve got about a dozen projects on the go. It’s what I do. I’m a creative lunatic!”
And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
1000 Hands: Chapter One is out now and available from www.jonanderson1000hands.com.