Music Arcades: Yes: Yessongs

Ah, the nostalgia of the triple live album! Bollocks, right? Throw out the middle disc of this one, for a start. It's got all those dreadful showing-off solo pieces. At least Rick Wakeman seems to know inside that, even when essaying Handel's Messiah, he's just an old-fashioned Music Hall entertainer. But Chris Squire is evidently a stranger to humility, and The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus) is beyond the pale in its self-regarding pomp. Actually I could probably ditch Sides 2 and 5 as well, and just have the beginning and end — the songs from The Yes Album are my favourites. The performances are good, too — maybe not pristine, but all the better for sounding live, un-manicured and even a little urgent.

There was a time when I would listen to all of the album (not in one sitting, mind; I was busy even then) with the headphones on and nothing else to do with my eyes than pore over the inner sleeves. No, not the Roger Dean hormonoscapes that young Wikipedians have rendered and described so assiduously, but the polythene-lined paper inners that WEA have used as advertising space for a bewildering assortment of their 'product'. Many's the time I would try to conjure in my mind's ear what Al Jarreau's All Fly Home, Jean-Luc Ponty's Cosmic Messenger, Firefall's Elan or even Leif Garrett's Feel the Need might sound like — all the time with my real ear absorbing Starship Trooper. My, what an age ago that seems. I can't imagine I've played this album since 1982 at the very latest.

Finally, here's a Christmas Eve thought for you. You haven't heard me sing, have you? Not unless you were upstairs in the Queen's Head, Islington, on 10 December 2003, or round at Lucy's brother's house with the karaoke machine last Christmas. It's not pretty, and I don't inflict it on anyone, because I don't need reminding of that fact — thank you, end of story. But at the end of Heart of the Sunrise, I had the Boy on my lap and had a stab at the final "SHARP-DISTANCE How can the sun with its arms all around me…" section. His face lit up with the most beatific and awestruck — indeed, Jon-Andersonesque — smile. I wondered if it was just coincidence, so I tried it again (even though the needle was up, Yes had packed up and gone home). Same result. That was two or three days ago now, and it's worked a few more times since. If it still has the same effect in fourteen years, I'll buy you a beer. Festive spirit and all that.