Credit: Rhino Entertainment
Sat 29 August 2026 2:00, UK
Yes is one of the biggest bands within the complicated world of prog rock.
Simply put, prog is a genre that you just can’t define. Imagine regular, mainstream rock, and now imagine that same style of mainstream rock but attach different genres, time signatures and narratives to it in order to push the sound to limits that people prior didn’t know existed. A lot of their albums were well and truly laced with different approaches to music that a lot of acts would struggle to ever fully get a hold of.
How do you even begin to write a song, or even an album, when your approach to songwriting is so vast and exciting? Well, when Jerry Garcia spoke about how the Grateful Dead were able to capture such a great live sound, he said that there was no logic to it, and there was instead just a feeling that different members of the band were able to latch onto. You have to imagine that there was something similar going on within Yes.
Jon Anderson once spoke about how exciting it was when the band were able to tap into a great sound and essentially bring it to audiences around the world. When people were willing to sit around and listen to 20-minute prog rock masterpieces, he knew that the band had quite clearly tapped into something masterful.
“These are really epic pieces of music that would hold 20,000 people in the balance,” he said, “We were playing in front of big audiences in arenas through the 1970s, and people would just sit there and listen for 20 minutes each time, and feel the energy at the end of the piece. We were so convinced about the music, we played it like it was a symphony, and then we finished the piece totally exhausted. And the audience would erupt for about five minutes.”
Of course, you can’t just rely on magic all the time; there needs to be a little bit more to it than that. Every album, even the most complex, needs to have some sort of jumping-off point, an initial foundation that the rest of an LP can be built on top of. This varied from record to record, but when it came to the creation of the band’s 1977 album Going For The One, the song ‘Turn of the Century’ was a massively influential part of the process.
When Steve Howe was talking about the creation of the song, he said that the sound, how layered it is, and the lyrics were all very definitive for the band at the time and helped lead to the creation of what eventually became a pretty iconic album for them.
Further reading: From The Vault
“We went through a real vortex to find a way of presenting that song the way it is now, and it’s so magical,” said Howe, “It was really deep, the music had to work. It draws on the soft side of Yes, like ‘And You And I’ and ‘Wonderous Stories’, and it was astounding.”
He continued, “Jon had written lyrics about a sculptor [Roan], and so there was a furthering of the connection in there. It was really interesting project, and that song really did feel like a project. ‘Turn of the Century’ is central to Going For The One.”
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