Contents

Introduction

For more than fifty years, for the most part, whenever YES have played live, there has been that special moment, that instant when reality hits home: ‘here we go, the gig is starting, it’s YES music time!’ This, to those well versed in all things YES in concert, is the wonderful start of the introductory music. This is when the tingling sensations start, the anticipation increases, the ears prick up even more and the excitement grows as your whole body becomes alive. You take more notice at the smiling fans all around you, thumbs up begin, the comforting intro has started, the magic has begun, and the smiles get bigger.

At the start of their long career, for at least for the first three years or so, a YES show would have no grand introduction music, it would be pretty much the same as anyone else’s really. YES would have just walked on to a simple, ‘here’s YES!’, or ‘Welcome the new up and coming YES’, ‘The new band from London: YES’ or something similar. Either being a support act or just not yet powerful enough to run the whole show yet, YES where still finding their way.

Fast forward a few years and venture to see a YES show in the early to mid – 1970’s, with all its subtle attention to detail, the fan would be sitting patiently for the show to start, the opening music would begin. The Finale part of Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, the excerpt would be drifting through the speaker system, and you knew the world was ok. On average with some exceptions the intro music of any sort would last about two minutes, stretching to near three minutes now and again. The exception was on a few tours when the pre-show music had gentle swaths of electronica music by Vangelis and Wendy Carlos, before the Stravinsky’s Firebird classical piece began and before the point of curtain up and the band walking on stage.

Although the YES fan would eventually go on to accept anything else being played, reluctantly I feel, it would be Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite piece of music that would signal YES as much as say Roger Dean’s classic YES logo and artwork, all intertwined to create a YES world.

For a YES fan, a YES concert would usually start long before the official show start time, as fans meet up and chat for hours before about the old days, the current line-up, and the future of YES. But when that glorious moment arrives, when the arena’s lights go down, the curtain goes up, lights ablaze with YES often playing along a few bars of the pre-show music, tuning up and joining in with the classical splendour, all else is forgotten. Then of course our musical heroes burst into life in that millisecond of the first notes. Some of the shows had an actual curtain raise up, memorable to me was the multi–ruffled version, brightly lit for the Going for the One tour in 1977.

Throughout YES’s more than 50 years of using an introduction piece of music, Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite was always the number one choice for all concerned, the band and the fans. YES did however, deviate in their choices a good number of times over the following decades of different line-ups and musical styles. The second most used introduction music piece was the uplifting Benjamin Britten’s – Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. This became almost as synonymous to a YES show as the Firebird Suite.

The main reason for writing about these important pieces of music is that these original special albums are now in my possession, so whether we should call them pre–show, introduction or opening music albums, then as such the opportunity to cover them hasn’t been there before in the history of YES. It is fair to say though, looking at the combined 50 years of shows for YES, ABWH and YES/ARW, having an introduction piece of music is still now as important as it was back in the early days.

The following guide is not meant to be a definitive list, but it is a deeply informative overview of those used, with this research I believe I have captured most, but maybe not all, so if there are some oddities missed, and I am sure some fascinating ones can be found and added by fans and tour managers of old and new, these can be added at a later date. Now this unique record collection has come to light of course, with the actual records used to hand, I can now add more detail about these iconic opening pieces of music and the vinyl used.

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