Yesstories - Beginnings

B E G I N N I N G S

PETER (1994): Lonnie Donnegan was the first person who really turned me on to music. Basically the premise of skiffle was that anyone could play it. You had to know three chords, a minimum of five. It was a steal of southern blues with a bit of Huddie Ledbetter and a bit of Woody Guthrie thrown in to keep the white folks happy. And this guy Lonnie Donnegan was successful and had a number one record. My parents would buy these records for me and I would play these things like crazy. I got started playing guitar at a very young age, I was probably seven or eight. I got a very cheap guitar my parents bought me, it probably cost about five pounds, ten pounds. And I would practice all the time. I spent most of my time until my early teens listening to these records and learning to play, instead of hanging out with the other kids. I joined my first band at sixteen and went on from there.

BILL, (1994): I don't really remember a whole lot of sex, drugs and rock n' roll, really. I'm always one of these guys who never notices. I hated rooming with anybody. Sometimes I had to room with Tony Kaye and that was awful. At the end of the whole day of working with people you want some privacy. We used to drink an awful lot of alcohol. There was a club here in London called the Speakeasy that the band's manager (Roy Flynn) was managing as well. The Speakeasy stayed open late, until two or three in the morning. So you could pretty much play a gig in England within a hundred-and-fifty mile radius and still make it back to the Speakeasy at about two o'clock. And we'd drink huge amounts of scotch and coke, which is a ghastly sweet drink...And now people don't drink nearly as much, for good reason. We're all a little wiser.

I do remember the whole thing as being very argumentative, hot-blooded...a permanent state of friction between Jon and Chris, Chris and me, me and Jon. A permanent state of argument, really. We were from totally different social backgrounds. This is what is very hard for an American to understand, but we could have been five guys from Mars. I mean I'd never met anyone like Jon Anderson in my life! I couldn't understand physically what he was saying, he had a very strange accent from the north of England. He speaks in strange sentences that nobody can understand. It was chaos...

It was a very exciting time. Time was just going very, very fast. We just lived for the band,. We all lived in the same house, or most of us did. And as far as I can make out we were confined to the property, because at twenty-four hours' notice we'd have to do a gig somewhere. So you couldn't leave the building for more than twelve hours in case a gig came through...We used to be like firemen, living in a firehouse...with a greasy pole and when the bell rang you did a concert.

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