COVER STORIES

How Roger Dean entered the world of Yes and changed it forever…

“Phil Carson, the then-boss of Atlantic Records in England, introduced me to the band at Advision Studios. I went there with my massively decorated copy of Parsifal illustrated by Willy Pogany. The illustrations, decorations and the text were very intense. I said to the band it would be fantastic to have this magical story in this sort of form. Of course, we couldn’t put out an album that was like an old book but there’s a little attempt at that in printing on the brown paper on the inside and having that booklet within it. So it was the faintest of faintest shadows of how it might have been.

“The gatefold cover I saw as a story, a fantasy. It wasn’t symbolic of anything. It was part of a story within a story, a creation myth. The idea of it being a glimpse of an epic narrative was there from the beginning. We see [that on] the covers of Close To The Edge and the paintings on Yessongs, and others that revisit that world.

“I hadn’t heard any of the music on Fragile before starting on it because I usually finish the cover long before the music is done. That’s the way the logistics of print works. I had to finish before

“They’d already just done The Yes Album and I was completely blown away with Würm from Starship Trooper which is amazing.”

the band, so I never got to listen to the album they were making. But they’d already just done The Yes Album and I was completely blown away with Würm from Starship Trooper which is amazing.

“Rick Wakeman and I started working with Yes at about the same time. He knew when they’d be recording or on tour because he was with the band. But I wasn’t. There’d be a period of perhaps six or nine months between delivering Fragile and talking to them about Close To The Edge. In that time I was doing other things but hoping I’d work with them again because the music was fantastic.

“I designed a Yes logo after I’d finished Fragile. Nobody asked me to do it. No one had logos in those days but I did it because I thought I could. But I had no idea, no realistic expectation, that they would ask me to do another sleeve. It wasn’t a given that I would. So the logo was kind of done in midair as it were, with the hope that they would ask me. And they did.

“I saw Bill Bruford, bless him, in a BBC interview years later talking about the cover to Fragile, saying that I’d misunderstood the brief because they’d had this idea of having the cover look like a flight case with the ‘Fragile’ stickers all over it. I never misunderstood – I just thought we could do better. [Laughs.]”

See www.rogerdean.com for more information.