The History of Yes Pt. 2- 1980 to 2021 w/Henry Potts & Aymeric Leroy

[Sean]

Hey men,
I just finished part 1 and enjoyed it enormously. The three of you had a real breadth of knowledge. Fascinating stuff. Really looking forward to the next part.

Kavus! I'm really glad you are enjoying it!

[bondegezou]

Hey men,
I just finished part 1 and enjoyed it enormously. The three of you had a real breadth of knowledge. Fascinating stuff. Really looking forward to the next part.

Thanks, Kavus. On an unrelated note, I have these two friends who are into indie music, grew up as big Blur and Suede fans, who disparage prog, and they started going on about this new album involving Steve Davis and some guy from The Cardiacs and how great it is. Obviously I messaged back to tell them they've become prog heads.

Henry

[Kavus Torabi]

Thanks, Kavus. On an unrelated note, I have these two friends who are into indie music, grew up as big Blur and Suede fans, who disparage prog, and they started going on about this new album involving Steve Davis and some guy from The Cardiacs and how great it is. Obviously I messaged back to tell them they've become prog heads.

Henry

Ha! There’s no going back now.

[Frumious B]

Thanks, Kavus. On an unrelated note, I have these two friends who are into indie music, grew up as big Blur and Suede fans, who disparage prog, and they started going on about this new album involving Steve Davis and some guy from The Cardiacs and how great it is. Obviously I messaged back to tell them they've become prog heads.

Henry

Blur is my favorite 90s band bar none. I also love the first three Suede albums plus the Sci-Fi Lullabies b-sides compilation. I figure a lot of prog grew out of the 60s British Invasion and the 90s Britpop bands reached back to the British Invasion and also to 70s figures like Bowie and Marc Bolan so prog and Britpop might not sound the same on the surface, but they share much more DNA than some might say (“...we will find a briiiiiiighter dayyy...”). A Blur song like “This is a Low” and large chunks of Suede’s Dog Man Star could readily pass for proto-prog psychedelia in the same general vicinity as early Pink Floyd. Then, of course, Radiohead did OK Computer which got tagged with comparisons to Dark Side of the Moon instantly. So feed your friends more suggestions.

[bondegezou]

Blur is my favorite 90s band bar none. I also love the first three Suede albums plus the Sci-Fi Lullabies b-sides compilation. I figure a lot of prog grew out of the 60s British Invasion and the 90s Britpop bands reached back to the British Invasion and also to 70s figures like Bowie and Marc Bolan so prog and Britpop might not sound the same on the surface, but they share much more DNA than some might say (“...we will find a briiiiiiighter dayyy...”). A Blur song like “This is a Low” and large chunks of Suede’s Dog Man Star could readily pass for proto-prog psychedelia in the same general vicinity as early Pink Floyd. Then, of course, Radiohead did OK Computer which got tagged with comparisons to Dark Side of the Moon instantly. So feed your friends more suggestions.

Yes, there's plenty of common threads in the music from The Beatles, to Bowie and '70s prog, to '90s music and beyond. But there's also, at least in the UK, a dominant culture, that defines what is fashionable, that sees prog as a dead end, rightly killed off by punk. It doesn't matter what truth is, growing up, fans of Blue and Suede absolutely could not say anything nice about prog.

There have always been strands of prog that were "cool" and acts that saw beyond these stereotypes, as of course with The Cardiacs, but there's a generation with these ingrained views. Or there were. These days, the people in charge are now the generation who were listening to concept albums in 1970s. In many ways, '70s rock of all forms has a cultural dominance... well, with grown-ups. I don't know what the kids today are listening to! One of those "I'm old now" moments was hearing MØ (of "Lean One" fame) talk about how she was influenced by the classics, like The Spice Girls.

Henry

[Frumious B]

Yes, there's plenty of common threads in the music from The Beatles, to Bowie and '70s prog, to '90s music and beyond. But there's also, at least in the UK, a dominant culture, that defines what is fashionable, that sees prog as a dead end, rightly killed off by punk. It doesn't matter what truth is, growing up, fans of Blue and Suede absolutely could not say anything nice about prog.

There have always been strands of prog that were "cool" and acts that saw beyond these stereotypes, as of course with The Cardiacs, but there's a generation with these ingrained views. Or there were. These days, the people in charge are now the generation who were listening to concept albums in 1970s. In many ways, '70s rock of all forms has a cultural dominance... well, with grown-ups. I don't know what the kids today are listening to! One of those "I'm old now" moments was hearing MØ (of "Lean One" fame) talk about how she was influenced by the classics, like The Spice Girls.

Henry

It’s funny because I was getting increasingly heavily into sixties and early seventies music, much of it from the UK, in the late eighties and early nineties. When grunge came along I hated it at first, except for Smashing Pumpkins who really weren’t grunge at all. I saw it largely as dank, dreary music by people in flannel shirts who could barely even play guitar. However, I took to Blur instantly the first time I heard them, less than two years after seeing Yes on the Union tour, because I was able to draw that line from Ray Davies and Syd Barrett, who I all ready knew and enjoyed, to Damon Albarn. So I was digging deeper into the older music I hadn’t heard yet, including a great deal of prog, and a huge fan of Britpop at the same time.

But I remember high school during the era when you could pretty much tell what bands people liked by what they were wearing. The girl who looked like Ally Sheedy from The Breakfast Club was probably into The Smiths, The Cure, Siouxsie, Depeche Mode and New Order. The dude in a tie dye and madras pants probably liked Grateful Dead and Bob Marley. There were even different dress codes for hair metal and heavy metal. Maybe it was the same over there? Much of what I “know” about 1980s teen culture in the UK came from watching episodes of The Young Ones on MTV so probably not an accurate picture at all.

The punk vs prog thing seems so ridiculous in the context of now. I enjoy both. And then you have John Lydon who went, in less than a decade, from the Sex Pistols to recording with Steve Vai who also played with Zappa, David Lee Roth and Whitesnake. If you can link a band widely regarded as definitive standard bearers of punk to Whitesnake so easily then it just seems obvious to me that those kind of musical barriers don’t and shouldn’t matter.