Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Alan White & Rick Wakeman
YesSpeak
traces the band roots back to London, 1968, when vocalist Jon Anderson met up
with bass guitarist Chris Squire as the former worked in a bar and the latter
was performing at the Marquee Club with his band, "Mabel Greer's Toy Shop".
Anderson joined along with the other band members Peter Banks and Tony Kaye
and they had to decide on better songs and a much more memorable name. The
prog-rock gods were born...
Each of the 10 sections in this documentary run for 15-20 minutes and
the first is entitled, Sacred Ground, highlighting where each
of the band members like to chill out when not performing together. Jon
Anderson is interviewed in his California home, Chris Squire is
seen on holiday in Ibiza with his family, Steve Howe remains true to the UK
in his Devon home, later detailing why he likes to ensure his Gibson E175 guitar
has a plane seat all to itself, Alan White fell in love with Lake Washington, Seattle
early on in his career and comments on his glass drumkit in a nearby music
museum; and finally Rick Wakeman, who embarked on a 40-date solo tour
between the US and Europe, and was interviewed in Tenerife. He jokes about his
various illness during his life such as heart attacks, plurisy and wonders how
many other parts are left to drop off him, and how many of his nine lives he
has left.
Full Circle charts the band's beginnings and skims through various
aspects of how they got things together, while There's Always Been A Yes
charts their frequent membership changes and that however people come and go
from the line-up, nothing will stop the band from performing one way or another.
Following the individual Spotlight on... sections, On the Road
takes a brief look at how things go when they're setting up for a gig and
where they went on the tour, while Yes Music concludes with more of
the same about Yes and their music, right up until the tour's end.
The band on stage.
While two of my 'Yes' friends, Kev Fletcher and Gary Thorogood
are au fait with the 70s era of the band, I first came across them in 1983
with their '90215' output such as "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and "Leave
It", mostly later playing a tape of 1987's Big Generator album
until it could nearly play no more (that's a lie, the tape's fine :),
going to see the 1991 Union tour with Kev at the Birmingham NEC, where
they had a rotating stage, and now everything's brought up to date with this
2-disc boxset.
YesSpeak is lengthy at just over 3 hours long, but it's still succinct
enough to be intriguing for anyone wanting to get to know the necessary
info about the band and, essentially, it's very accessible for them to get into
while still being of great interest for their hardcore fanbase. However, Roger
Daltrey's OTT narration can get a bit grating at times.
What would've been ideal, since we get to see clips from their tour, is to
have included a disc or two extra of the full concert. You'll get to hear
excerpts of the songs during YesSpeak, but that would have been the icing on
the cake.
The 2003 'best of' compilation,
the underrated Big Generator album and 1991's Union collaboration.
The documentary is presented in 16:9 anamorphic widescreen and looks great
most of the time, particularly in the recent live footage, but interview clips
can look less spectacular having been shot on a camcorder it appears, sometimes
in too much close-up. Also, during the first section only, the picture has
been shoved slightly too much to the left and for those with a lack of overscan
on their TV, they'll see the very right-hand edge of the image that's not meant
to be seen and it's very obvious.
Sound is available in both Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1, the latter being
my preference, but while there's no question that the live footage pieces are
note-perfect, there's too much volume from them during certain interview clips
as they drown out the speech completely. I ended up putting the French subtitles
on, as I have a basic understanding of that, and it helped to work out what
was being said.
It would be wrong to define the singular extra as the only piece of supplementary
material since it's not that kind of DVD. It's a compliment to all of what you've
seen already. It's a 127-minute Live Audio Set taken from the 35th
anniversary gigs along with stills. The combination of music and stills make
for a low bitrate that enables them to fit onto the disc, and also makes up to
a degree for there not being a separate disc of the concert itself.
The cover also mentions a free YesSpeak poster, but on opening up you find you
need to visit
YesPosters.com
and even that site doesn't work at the time of writing this review.
The menus blend in well with the theme of the disc, with subtle music playing
And You And I at first, before settling on a static logo in silence.
There are subtitles in French, German, Italian and Spanish. Erm... why not in
English?! They would've been a help at the start where the opening music drowns
out the speech!
Only ten chapters though, as previously mentioned. Would've been nice to split
these up too given their length.
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
