FLY FROM HERE

A band who can sustain a career successfully for over 40 years hardly need the likes of me to bang on about their new album, but I'm going to because Fly From Here is a return to form.

One of my favourite Yes albums is Drama. Released in 1980, it was rhythm-based, solid, no filler, great songs. While it featured regular Yes members Steve Howe, Chris Squire and Alan White, it was the first album without Jon Anderson on vocals, and Rick Wakeman had just departed too. Again. Yes lore tells us that a lot of the old and, presumably by 1980, smelly fans didn't like the fact that Anderson and Wakeman were replaced by Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes - also known as Buggles, who had just dented the charts with their massive hit Video Killed The Radio Star.

For listeners who could get past preconceptions, Drama sat nicely alongside the best of Yes. Sadly, after just one album, the line-up went their separate ways, to be replaced by another fantastic, very different Yes who hit the big time with Owner Of A Lonely Heart. (You've heard of that one, right?)

While Yes continued to morph and produce some great music, a part of me was sad that the Drama line-up did not get a chance to follow up their unique take on Yes, and that this album was never played live. I met the band briefly over a decade ago, and asked Chris Squire and Alan White why this was so: they shrugged, pointed a thumb in the general direction of...someone else...and said, "it's not up to us."

By the time 2011 came round, Yes hadn't put out a studio album in 10 years. Then suddenly they announced a new one and - Holy Zarquon! - it was only the flippin' Drama line-up back from the grave, with fab new boy Benoit David on vocals!

"Ah, hang on a minute," say you. "It's not the Drama line-up without Trevor Horn, is it?"
"Well, not strictly, no," say I, "but did I mention that Horn produced the album, co-wrote 7 tracks and is credited with additional backing vocals and keyboards?"


So what's Fly From Here like? It has the slightly melancholy edge that typifies parts of Drama and some of the best Buggles stuff, but elsewhere soars like Yes at their most optimistic. It has noisy proggy bits that send the wife scurrying out of the room, and girl friendly acoustic bits too. It's better than any of the tripe the 'classic' Yes line-up put out in their mid-90's Keys To Ascension period (actually, Tripe would have been a better title than Keys To Ascension), and while Yes hit a high in 1994 with Talk and produced a few juicy moments on The Ladder in 1999, Fly From Here is easily their best album since the 80s. So there, hippies.  The production is perhaps not what you might expect from Trevor Horn, who is sometimes wrongly associated only with the Fairlight and sample-heavy stuff he put out in the 1980s (see Art of Noise, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, ABC and yes, Yes, amongst several others). On Fly From Here he rejected that approach and manages to get Yes to sound as natural as they did on their early 70s albums, but with a fresh coat of polish.

The title track Fly From Here dates back to the Drama sessions, but the band never recorded it until now. If you've heard the crappy live version on the (say it quietly) In A Word boxed set, or the demo hidden away on a Buggles reissue, forget 'em. The song has matured and even gets a proper stretchy Yes treatment, having been mangled into a 24 minute epic.