Review: Yes – Drama (1980)

Drama is the tenth studio album by Yes, formed in 1969.

In the late 1970s, Yes was still very popular as a concert attraction, but especially after the release of the 1978 album Tormato, the band’s record sales were declining. This began to be problematic as Yes was burning through money like crazy, both in the studio and in the band members’ private lives. And some were burning through it even more than others; Jon Anderson, for example, had a habit of taking expensive vacations with his family, nannies, and other staff in attendance. Everything was charged to Yes’s joint account, of course. This caused bad blood, especially with guitarist Steve Howe, who lived relatively frugally (if you ignore his collection of over a hundred guitars) by rock star standards.

On the creative side, too, the band members’ energy flows were no longer in sync. After Tormato, Yes traveled to Paris to work on their next album under the guidance of Roy Thomas Baker, who had produced Queen. Apparently, the record company encouraged this move, as Atlantic probably saw dollar signs when they thought that this producer, known for his many hits, would lead Yes to a new heights with more commercial material. Some of the band members already had bad feelings about Baker, and there was general ridicule, especially of the clunky drum sounds Baker had ”conjured up” for the band The Cars. ”Haha, Alan, that’s what your drums are going to sound like!”

The early predictions were right. Working with Baker, who was known for partying hard, didn’t work out (of course, some of the Yes members had also gotten into bad habits at this point…), but things weren’t so great among the band members either. There were strong disagreements about the direction of Yes’s music, and the band split into two camps. Anderson had become friends with keyboardist Rick Wakeman, and they wanted to make lighter, more folky music, while bassist Chris Squire, drummer Alan White, and guitarist Howe preferred a rockier sound. However, the five of them gritted their teeth and tried to put together the album they had promised to the record company. The end results of these sessions have since been released as bonus tracks on the reissues of the albums Tormato and Drama, and although it is always a shame to judge unfinished work, the material does not seem particularly impressive. The quality of the compositions is perhaps also reflected in the fact that very few of these demos were ever revived later on. A few songs did end up on Anderson and Wakeman’s solo albums.

The final straw, however, came when White broke his leg rollerblading at a disco (the golden 70s!) in December. The sessions, which had begun in October and were already proving expensive, had to be suspended. When the band returned to the studio in February, the atmosphere within the band was worse than ever. Musical differences combined with Anderson’s extravagant lifestyle (although according to manager Brian Lane, Anderson was willing to pay everything back from the next tour’s earnings) eventually escalated into such a serious conflict that Anderson left the band. Wakeman soon followed suit. Baker disappeared from the scene, and the remaining trio returned to England to demo material as an instrumental trio.

Read also: Yes: The Quest (2021)

While the Yes trio was battling its challenges, a musical duo was about to start recording in the studio next door. The duo known as The Buggles, consisting of vocalist/bassist Trevor Horn and keyboardist Geoff Downes, had just started working on the follow-up to their successful album The Age Of Plastic, released in early 1980. Coincidentally, Yes’s manager Lane had recently started managing The Buggles. Lane asked Horn and Downes to offer some songs to his struggling clients. Horn and Downes were both Yes fans and came up with the song ”We Can Fly From Here,” which was originally intended for their own album but seemed suitable for Yes. Squire was interested in the song and invited the Buggles to his home to discuss it further.

At this point, the Buggles boys were blissfully unaware that Anderson and Wakeman had jumped ship and that the whole band was actually adrift. Squire noticed that Horn’s singing voice sounded a lot like Anderson’s and that Downes was a pretty good keyboard player… The wheels started turning in the bass virtuoso’s head: wait a minute, here’s the solution to both our vocalist and keyboard problems. And before long, Horn and Downes were invited to join Yes rehearsals to work on ”We Can Fly From Here.” Soon after, Squire was already persuading the duo to join Yes.

Horn, in particular, was hesitant about the offer. Anderson’s shoes were certainly big to fill. However, the opportunity was too good to pass up, and when Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegun also gave the green light to the Yes-Buggles merger, it was a done deal. Sign on the dotted line and get to work! The new Yes album would be made with Horn and Downes. At the same time, the next album was given a tight deadline, as the band had already booked an extensive tour before Anderson and Wakeman left, and they wanted the album to be released before that.

Yes had three months to make their next album. For the average rock band, that’s a reasonable amount of time, but Yes was used to taking their time and putting a lot of effort into their albums. Yes’s old producer guru, Eddie Offord, who had gone his separate ways after Relayer, was hired to produce the album. However, the collaboration with Offord no longer worked as well as it had in the good old days. Rumors point to serious substance abuse problems. Offord was let go soon after the initial demo recordings. In the end, the production credits were given to Yes as a whole, and Offord was credited with producing the ”backing tracks.”

The matter has not been documented in great detail, but it is likely that the future super-producer Trevor Horn took over the main production duties after this. Despite its relatively fast production schedule, the album, titled Drama, sounds really good. And at least several notches better than Yes’s previous two albums. Along with Horn, credit should also go to the young and talented recording engineers Hugh Padgham, Gary Langan, and Julian Mendelsohn. Padgham went on to become one of the hottest engineers/producers of the 1980s, working on albums by Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins, among others. Langan and Mendelsohn became Horn’s trusted technicians as his own producing career took off.

”We Can Fly From Here,” the song that kicked off the collaboration between Yes and Buggles, never made it onto Drama because, in the end, there wasn’t enough time to finish it due to a tight schedule. The song was played on the tour that followed Drama, and decades later, Horn was lured back to Yes with the promise that he would finally get to finish the song. On Horn-produced album Fly From Here, released in 2011, ”We Can Fly From Here” became a suite that took up half the album. Horn returned to the material a few years later, remixing the album and re-singing most of the songs (the original vocalist was Canadian Benoit David). This new (and, in my opinion, definitive) version of the album was released in 2018 under the title Fly From Here – The Return Trip.

Read also:

The revamped Yes returns with Drama’s first track, a ten-minute mini-epic that had served the band so well in the past (e.g., ”Starship Trooper,” ”Heart Of The Sunrise,” ”Siberian Khatru,” etc.). The album opener ”Machine Messiah” is the longest Yes song since ”Awaken” from Going For The One (1977).

”Machine Messiah” kicks off with a menacing electronic buzz that swells and swells, turning into heavy power chords and creating a moment that sounds almost more like early Black Sabbath than Yes. Steve Howe’s guitar sounds exceptionally heavy. Downes conjures up magnificent textural sounds from his synthesizers, and soon the music becomes more relaxed, almost pop-like, moving in the same twilight zone between prog, hard rock, and pop as Rush did on their album Permanent Waves, released the same year.

After an instrumental intro, ”Machine Messiah” introduces Yes fans to the band’s new vocalist, who initially sings quietly over the sparse instrumentation as the song slowly builds tension. However, it soon becomes apparent that Horn is also capable of singing loud and high. His voice is somewhat reminiscent of Jon Anderson, but at the same time it is distinctive enough that there is no uncomfortable Anderson clone effect. Throughout Drama, Horn is supported by Squire’s vocals, who sings with him in unison at times and also does effective work on the backing vocals.

”Machine Messiah” features some really punchy playing from the whole band. The song represents the heavier Yes sound that has occasionally surfaced on the band’s previous albums (e.g., ”Gates Of Delirium” from Relayer), but which has never manifested itself in such a coherent form in a single composition. The song has numerous great moments, one of the most impressive being the dialogue between Downess’ synthesizers and Squire’s bass guitar around the four-minute mark, which transitions into Howe’s metal-tinged electric guitar solo.

As I mentioned earlier, at times ”Machine Messiah” sounds like a fusion of Yes and Black Sabbath, but its cold and metallic pseudo-futuristic atmosphere also reminds me of Emerson Lake & Palmer’s techno-dystopia ”Karn Evil 9” from the album Brain Salad Surgery. The lyrics have an interesting cyberpunk vibe, where technological progress turns into a nightmare. Overall, however, the lyrics remain somewhat cryptic, but in a positive way. Like many of Yes’s best lyrics, their deliberate vagueness evokes images and questions, but doesn’t necessarily provide any answers. And that’s perfectly fine. The last lines of the lyrics are particularly enigmatic:

Hold me, machine Messiah
And show me
The strength of your singular eye

Is the ”machine messiah” such a current threat, with artificial intelligence reaching technological singularity and enslaving humanity, or could it be a more mundane defeat: humans have become slaves to the screen (whether it be television, computers, or cell phones), and its ”singular eye” is sucking us in?

”Machine Messiah” shows one possible and potentially successful direction the band could have taken. Yes could have turned to heavier music in the wake of the heavy metal boom of the 1980s and started a prog metal revolution years before bands like Queensrÿche and Dream Theater actually did. However, knowing the tastes of this and other members of Yes, this alternative reality is highly unlikely, even considering the endless multiverse, but it is nevertheless delightful that Drama gave us a glimpse of that direction in the form of ”Machine Messiah.”

The second track on the album is completely different from ”Machine Messiah.” ”White Car” is just over a minute interlude, with instrumentation consisting solely of the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, which was the latest thing at the time and was given a prominent role that same year on Kate Bush’s Never For Ever and Peter Gabriel’s third album. The lyrics of ”White Car,” with its stylish, cinematic and pseudo-orchestral percussion (the synthetic snare drums sound great), were inspired by Gary Numan, whom Horn saw driving his Corvette Stingray with his face painted white.

I see a man in a white car
Move like a ghost on the skyline
Take all your dreams
And you throw them away
Man in a white car

Horn’s lyrics and melancholic singing style once again succeed in creating powerful images, and there is something unusually stirring in the few lines of ”White Car.”

The miniature-like ”White Car” feels like the intro to some grand epic that never quite materializes. In the context of the album as a whole, however, ”White Car” works quite well as a brief interlude, as the next track is once again quite intense.

“Does It Really Happen?” kicks off with a bang and showcases the best of Drama. The band plays with agility and muscle, and the song has a delightful number of progressive twists and turns. On the other hand, it also has a really catchy (and quite complex!) chorus that I, at least, enjoy singing along to (badly, very badly). Among the song’s many delicious moments, I’d like to mention the a cappella section where the aforementioned intricate chorus is sung without accompaniment and the very successful transition from a sudden stop to a false ending. In addition to synthesizers, Downess also plays the Hammond organ on the song, which brings back flashbacks to Yes’s history from The Yes Album and even further back.

”Does It Really Happen?” was a song that Howe, White, and Squire had already worked on extensively before Buggles joined the band, and apparently most of the composition was written by Squire and its origins date before the Going For The One sessions. However, the middle section of the song was developed together with Horn and Downes. Early version of the song was also later released as ”Everybody’s Song” on the remaster of Tormato.

”Does It Really Happen?” is bursting with energy, and Yes with the Buggles have managed to cook up the perfect combination of prog, new wave, and pure pop. It’s a fantastic song and, in my opinion, the absolute highlight of Drama.

The next track, ”Into The Lens,” was originally a Buggles song that was given a more complex and rocking arrangement suitable for Yes. The original Buggles arrangement can be heard on the Bugges album Adventures In Modern Recording, released in late 1981, under the title ”I Am Camera.”

”Into The Lens,” which starts with a lively stop-start unison rhythm, features perhaps Horn’s most successful vocal performance on Drama, as well as the slightly amusing refrain ”I aaaam camera, i aaaam camera, camera camera.” Howe’s sharp-sounding electric guitar is also impressive on this track. Howe is on fire throughout the album and gets to shine as a soloist here and there now that he no longer has to fight for space with Wakeman, who hogged it on previous albums. Downes is stylistically more of a textural player than a wild soloist, but he is also a strong rhythm player, and on Dramatic he is clearly more interested in serving the music than his own ego. In my opinion, Drama features Downes’ most stylish playing of his entire career, both in terms of sound and technique. Howe and Downes are an excellent duo on Drama.

Squire and White also shine on Drama, and the extremely tight and precise rhythms of “Into The Lens” are a real showpiece for White in particular. Also White is presented in the best possible light on Drama, and the album features some of the most energetic playing of his career alongside Relayer. And if ”Does It Really Happen?” made you sing along (although Horn’s staccato vocals are also addictive in this song), then ”Into The Lens” will get your feet tapping! White’s drums sound really good throughout the album, and credit for that must go to Offord, who recorded them under his direction in the same Townhouse Studios ”stone room” where Phil Collins’ famous drum sound for ”In The Air Tonight” was recorded a little later.

The penultimate track on the album, ”Run Through The Light,” had already been demoed during the failed Paris sessions with Anderson, and that unfinished version ended up on Drama’s 2004 reissue under the name ”Dancing Through The Light.” The version polished to perfection on the Drama album easily beats the rather crude ”Dancing Through the Light.”

“Run Through The Light” is the lightest track on the album and perhaps also the one with the clearest new wave vibe. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had sought inspiration from The Police. Horn’s slightly strange (in a positive way!) vocal performance is impressive, and he once again receives effective backing from Squire.

Surprisingly, Horn ended up playing the song’s 6/4 bass line on his fretless bass. Apparently, it was originally a spontaneous experiment that Squire liked, and for one reason or another, he pressured his vocalist to finish the job. Horn struggled with the bass pattern in the studio for 12 hours, but it sounds great in the final version. Squire himself plays the clavinet on ”Run Through The Light” (which is basically an electrically amplified clavichord, a keyboard instrument that preceded the piano and was developed in the 14th century).

The album ends impressively and energetically with ”Tempus Fugit,” a song that Howe, Squire, and White had worked on as a trio before Downes and Horn joined the band. The song’s title is probably one of the most well-known Latin phrases and, of course, means ”time flies.” A slightly less well-known fact is that in Yes’s case, the song’s title refers to Chris Squire’s chronic tardiness. The members of Yes got used to, or if not used to, then at least had to repeatedly wait for their perpetually late bassist. This particularly infuriated drummer Bill Bruford, and it is probably not wrong to assume that this played at least some part in the drummer’s decision to leave Yes after Close To The Edge and join Robert Fripp’s King Crimson.

Despite his tardiness, Squire is once again the man of the hour on Tempus Fugit, and the undisputed star of the song, as his nimble bass line is one of the finest of his career. It manages to carry the important counter-melody of the composition while kicking the whole thing forward rhythmically in a wonderful way. ”Tempus Fugit” rushes forward at a hectic pace, seductively deadly, bringing to mind the black panthers hunting on the cover of Drama. I wouldn’t be surprised if Roger Dean’s panther illustration was originally inspired by Squire’s bass pattern (the lyrics actually refer to leopards)! Squire himself has called ”Tempus Fugit” Yes’s punk song, which is quite an exaggeration, but there is certainly a clear new wave vibe to it. Maybe even a hint of ska? Howe also plays reggae-esque riffs for a moment, so it’s quite a fusion of different genres.

Tempus Fugit was also used to try and create a kind of theme song for Yes, as the lyrics, sung through a vocoder, suggest that the answer to everything is ”yes.”

In the north sky, time flies fast to the morning
The cold of the dawn, it meant nothing to us
You were keeping your best situation, an answer to yes
And the moment I see you
It’s so good to be near you
And the feeling you give me
Makes me want to be with you
From the moment you tell me
Yes
If you could see all the roads I have travelled
Towards some unusable last equilibrium
Run like an athlete and die like a dead beaten speed freak
An answer to all of your answers to yes

Read also: Yes: Mirror To The Sky (2023)

Contrary to what most people thought, the new Yes did way better than expected without Anderson, one of the original members. Drama is awesome from start to finish and one of Yes’s best albums. Rarely does one hear 36 minutes as captivating, melodic, intricate, and energetic as the one that Drama offers us. I first heard the album in the 90s and have loved it ever since, but it was initially met with a rather confused reception from Yes fans who were confronted with a radically changed lineup. Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman, who had been elevated to near-god status, were gone, and in their place was the synth-pop duo Buggles. ”What the hell?” was probably a pretty common reaction. However, the album received a relatively positive reception from the music press, and it seems that its popularity among Yes fans has only grown over the decades, although it still has its detractors.

Drama also sold reasonably well, reaching number two on the UK album chart and the top 20 in the US. Yes’s new quintet was already planning their next album, but the band didn’t fare as well live. Trevor Horn was not used to long, heavy tours, and his voice really suffered with the songs originally sung by Anderson, especially as the key was not lowered despite his requests. Some fans reacted quite negatively to Horn, especially during the UK tour, which put him under even more pressure. In the end, Horn drew his own conclusions and decided to leave the job of musician to become a producer. The remaining four members no longer felt passionate enough about reviving Yes. Finally, in March 1981, it was announced that Yes had ceased operations.

Yes stumbled with Tormatto and plunged straight into disaster with the Paris sessions that followed, but with Drama, the band returned as a renewed and confident team that seemed, for a moment, to be blowing with the famous wind of unity. It is unfortunate that the Drama lineup never got to build on the foundation laid by their excellent debut album, and the album and the lineup were doomed to remain a curiosity in Yes’s complex history (although Fly From Here was, in a way, a Drama reunion). Yes returned three years later, dramatically revamped. This time, they were honed into a streamlined pop machine. Drama, for its part, prepared Yes (and their fans) for a new era, bringing elements of new rock forms to the band’s classic progressive rock sound, while also introducing a healthy dose of natural pop spirit to the mix.

Best tracks: ”Machine Messiah”, ”Does It Really Happen?”, Into The Lens”, ”Tempus Fugit”

Rating: 5 out of 5.
Author: JANNE YLIRUUSI

Tracks

  1. ”Machine Messiah” 10:18
  2. ”White Car” 1:18
  3. ”Does It Really Happen?” 6:27
  4. ”Into the Lens” 8:31
  5. ”Run Through the Light” 4:41
  6. ”Tempus Fugit” 5:12

Yes:

Geoff Downes: keyboards, vocoder Trevor Horn: vocals, fretless bass guitar (5) Steve Howe: guitars, mandolin (5), backing vocals Chris Squire: bass guitar, backing vocals, piano (5) Alan White: drums, percussion, backing vocals

Producer: Yes
Label: Atlantic

Jätä kommentti

Website Built with WordPress.com.

Ylös ↑