Steve Howe
“Iwas eight years old, and walked into a record store that was playing this music that I thought was just magical. I nervously asked at the counter of the store: ‘What is this record that’s playing?’ And the guy said to me very solemnly: ‘The Yes Album.’ That really was my first glancing encounter with Steve Howe. Later on, when the first single edit of Roundabout was newly released and getting a lot of airplay, I suppose I was nine or 10. It was absolutely startling. It just leaped out of my cheesy little transistor radio.
“Later on I became a fully fledged Yes fan. I started digging into their music, with headphones on. For me as a budding guitarist, Howe was beyond my comprehension. I’d never heard anybody who could do what he did.
“Sonicallym The Yes Album is Technicolor in a way that no other Yes album is. Maybe it was because he was new to the band and really eager to display all aspects of what he could bring to the table. Every song is practically a small masterpiece of different guitar and studio techniques, employed to bring out the best of which each of those approaches could offer. You have the nasty slashing tone of the entrance to the record, swiftly moving into the legato approach of first guitar melody of Yours Is No Disgrace, and then the fluttering high arpeggios. Even before the first vocal has come in you’ve got three distinct attitudes. That album is a statement of intent.
“At a time when the progressive genre was still very fluid, Howe established a rule that ‘anything goes’. He brought everything that influenced him to the table – fingerpicking, shredding, stereo-mind-fucks. It’s not there to impress. It all just sounds like this is precisely what the song happens to need at the time.
“For somebody who was starving for music and wanting to travel to another planet, Steve Howe provided that for me more than any other guitar player in the studio back then. What’s beautiful about it is that none of it sounds laboured. It sounds effortless and fun. His joyfulness as a player really comes through.
“For anyone who was interested in playing guitar, you have to pay homage to what Steve Howe was about. Nobody else you could point to as a supposed ‘guitar hero’ was bringing in what he is doing.” SS