Yes guitarist Steve Howe looks back on 10 tracks recorded outside of his main band, with everyone from Queen to Lou Reed
We got on really well with Joe, maybe a bit too well at times. He used to come onto me. He was more trouble on the follow-up records that were licensed to EMI. And, of course, he never paid anybody. Nobody ever got royalties. I guess he thought he was the genius of the thing and he’d keep all the royalties. Of course, we were supposed to get paid. I don’t think we ever did, hence EMI returned the tapes to me, being the only real long-term performer in that group.
We listened to it and went, “Well, this is good. This is really hot.” It gave us renewed enthusiasm since we had new material right near the end of our work that elevated our feelings and beliefs about where we were going. This was cited as the first single. It was immediately obvious that it was a decent song and had a good attitude about it. I tracked up all these guitars through different amps while I was doing it, so there’s masses of guitars overlaid on the power chord stuff.
I was making the GTR record at the time and I took a lot of reference from where Trevor was going. It wasn’t anywhere Geoff [Downes] was going [when he produced the GTR record]. They were two different places. GTR was going very stadium rock, but Trevor was picking up on the new Eighties sound, which he helped develop and I was hot to trot on. For me, it was a piece of frivolous fun.
We had a lot on offer though. In my ears, though, it was over-produced. It had way too much. Strangely enough, when we presented it to Arista … [] they actually wanted more reverb. I’m getting slightly hysterical here because it was so funny. When I heard that on this track and that track they want more reverb, I don’t think I was happy. It was ridiculous. There were about 10 reverb units on every song. [But that was a joyous time. At that point, GTR were feeling a bit Asia-esque.
They had a Gibson Chet Atkins guitar, which was a solid Spanish guitar. That is what Brian [May] had used on it. I used one of his and over a couple of hours in the late afternoon, we took a few takes, took a break, took another take. It really was just improvisation. That’s what they wanted. They didn’t want any structural type of functions that I could do.
As much as I think that William Shatner is fun and all that — I know he’s good friend of [Yes bassist] Billy Sherwood — but that is rude. To credit me and not have me on there is just about the nastiest you can do. It’s not a good thing to do.Jon contacted me and was like, “Want to play on this song?” I said, “Yeah, yeah. Send it to me.” He did. There were some spaces on it where I decided to play. I did some Spanish guitar.
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