The Gonzo Daily: Geoff Downes of YES

Monday, 21 March 2016

Geoff Downes of YES

In April progressive rock titans YES will embark upon a 10 date UK tour.

YES will be treating to their fans to an airing of their classic albums Drama and Fragile in full, in addition to tracks from throughout their career which has spanned almost fifty years. National Rock Review recently caught up with the band’s legendary keyboard player Geoff Downes to talk about their forthcoming tour, the possibility of a new Asia album and his plans for the rest of 2016.

NRR: Thank you for taking the time to speak to us here at National Rock Review, we really appreciate it.

So you are about to embark upon a UK tour with YES starting in April, where the band are going to be playing their seminal albums Fragile and Drama in full. Are you looking forward to hitting the road across the UK once again?

Downes: We are actually. I think it’s an interesting concept that we’ve been doing for the last few years of playing albums in their entirety and I think it seems to go down very well with the fans of the band because they kind of get to hear the albums as they were originally conceived. You know in today’s kind of music scene where people just sort of cherry pick tracks from their albums and that kind of thing, I think it’s quite nice that people do get to hear them in the way they were originally conceived.

NRR: So what made you decide that now, after such a long time it was the right time to revisit those two specific albums?

Downes: Well I think that both albums have got a kind of significant part in YES’s evolution you know. The Fragile album was a defining album because that brought in Wakeman to the proceedings. I think you know YES took on a whole new chapter at that point, they got into much more in-depth tracks and they had some huge sort of tracks with a lot of different dynamics in them. That album is something that we actually did in the States last year but it’s not something that we’ve done for some time though, not in the UK.

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