Music Arcades: Yes: 90125

Saturday morning and I'm trying to live blog this while still in my pyjamas, with the Boy to my right. He's just hiccuped his way all through Owner of a Lonely Heart. It sounds like most of the band did too. Myself, I'm reliving the disappointment of a quarter of a century ago.

At school my friend Jim had been a fan of Yes, but also of some music that even I considered beyond the pale, including Kansas and this godawful South African guitarist called Trevor Rabin (his name alone conjures images of a manic terrier). So you can imagine my chagrin, and Jim's smugness, when it was announced that the latter had joined Yes.

I still think Rabin's playing is totally mismatched to any of the elements of Yesmusic that I enjoyed. As a Jon Anderson fan, I think I prefer the album before this one, which didn't have him on, so crass is the whole ethos of 90125. It certainly doesn't suit Anderson's voice at all (though admittedly the same could be said of the music on some of Anderson's solo albums).

On my 19th birthday Jim and Charles and I went to see this version of Yes play at Wembley Arena. I remember two things about the concert: the terrible sound, which from our seats in the upper tiers was bouncing off the back wall to create a booming echo; and a clueless piece of copy editing in the official programme where Jon Anderson was quoted as saying "I never formerly left Yes", when he clearly meant "I never formally left Yes". Oh, and I noticed that Chris Squire's bass roadie was called Richard Davis, so I wondered to myself, "That can't be the same Richard Davis that played bass on Astral Weeks, can it?" (I don't think it can.) Can't remember a thing about the music (though google found me a set list, which includes, ominously, "Kaye/Rabin solos").

I feared that that might be the only chance I'd get to see Yes live, but happily the endless reunions meant that I got to see the proper Yes (Howe-no-Rabin) nearly two decades later at Sheffield City Hall. I never bought, or even heard, another Yes album after this one, though.