THE EXTRAORDINARY YES

YES HAS LONG BEEN REGARDED BY MANY AS THE PRE-EMINENT BAND IN PROGRESSIVE ROCK MUSIC. HERE APRIL CAZNA SPEAKS TO ALAN FARLEY, THE AUTHOR OF THE LATEST BOOK ABOUT YES TITLED "THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF YES"


WHAT WAS THE BACKGROUND TO YOU WRITING "THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF YES"?
The strange thing is that I initially had no intention of writing a book about Yes. It started out as an idea to write a magazine article and then developed into an internet project called "Yesology" before evolving into a book. What drew me in was my growing frustration with the music business and the media in placing too much emphasis on pop stars and fashion and not enough on musical creativity. As a creative musical force, Yes would blow the current crop of pop stars right off the stage and into the back alley. Yet Yes only scores a fraction of the mainstream media attention that the pop stars do. Especially after you see Yes give a great show, it becomes very tiresome when the mainstream media virtually ignore the band in favor of the latest pop star whose musical abilities are often dubious. And half the time when there is a story about Yes, it’s cynical and obviously put together by somebody who knows little about the band. I thought that there was a very positive story to be told about Yes and in a nutshell, that’s really what "The Extraordinary World Of Yes" is about.

WHAT WAS "YESOLOGY"?
"Yesology" was an attempt to do something different and to stir up some extra interest in Yes music. It was an internet-based college course that was run through the web site of the College of Southern Idaho in America. It was an idea that I developed with Gary Lauer who I met at a Yes concert in Henderson, Nevada and who was an Associate Professor at the College. When "Yesology" was launched in late 2003, it was covered by the prime time television news in four states of America and the reports included footage of Yes performing on stage. It was also covered by commercial radio and by the likes of Billboard in America, Classic Rock magazine in England and by rock music websites around the world in several different languages. The official Yes website YesWorld had it as a news item for six months. The Rock Detector website, which is known as the largest rock music database, said the "Yesology" course was the most worthy of all the activities to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Yes. And then on the other side of the coin, some people wondered whether it was genuine but it most certainly was. We'd prepared 700 pages of material for "Yesology" and it was a genuine community education course fully approved by the College of Southern Idaho.


HOW DID THE TITLE FOR "THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF YES" COME ABOUT?
That's a good question. The book was originally going to be called "Yesology" but Gary and I didn't quite agree on how to present it as a joint project. It was also a question of devoting the time to writing it and ultimately it seemed fair to give the book a different title seeing that it was going to be my solo effort. I remembered Jon Anderson describing Yes music as being a completely different world, so the book quite naturally became "The Extraordinary World Of Yes". The material came directly from the research that I put together for "Yesology" and because I’d already done so much work, I felt it really deserved to find a more permanent home than just sort of floating there in cyberspace as part of an online course. So I set about re-writing it to make it more suitable for publication and in fact, "The Extraordinary World Of Yes" is the modified and refined version of the material that "Yesology" was based on.

WHAT APPROACH DID YOU TAKE IN WRITING "THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF YES"?
The content originated from the need to have a suitable book or body of information on which to base the "Yesology" course. It wasn't that there hadn't already been good books published about Yes but rather that there were certain problems with using them. For instance, the only book that really dealt with the lyrics of Yes went out of print years ago and the lyrics were obviously much too important to ignore. Some books didn't cover the complete career of Yes while others did a good job on the history of the band but didn’t go into much detail about the music. Sometimes it was a question of style being right and we didn't want anything esoteric because it had to be easily read by the average music fan, even if they knew little or nothing about Yes. The challenge was to bring together all of the most significant things about Yes over the entire career of the band and in writing it, I thought a lot about people who are yet to fully experience Yes music. It wasn't just a case of finding all of the material on a book shelf somewhere or on the internet, it mainly meant going right back to the source material starting in 1968 which was a huge task. I've presented "The Extraordinary World Of Yes" in a very logical format that's different to other books about Yes and it covers some aspects about Yes not usually covered. It's designed to be a convenient reference source that's very reader-friendly.


"THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF YES" OBVIOUSLY GOES BEYOND JUST TELLING THE HISTORY OF THE BAND.
That's right. I was very mindful that there's always been a certain type of critic who's missed the point about Yes music and has always had something negative to say. It generally seems to happen because Yes music is different to most rock music and it's more complex. No one says that everyone has to like Yes but those critics haven't even begun to explain the qualities in Yes music that have kept the interest of a world wide audience for now almost 40 years. Sometimes the comments of those critics have been a cheap shot because someone thinks it makes good copy but it's also a lack of knowledge and that was one reason for writing "The Extraordinary World Of Yes". I've based the book very much on the facts and in the chapter discussing Yes music alone, I've used more than 300 references including a lot of quotes from the various band members. The idea was to let the members of Yes tell the story about the music as much as possible. Where I've been critical, it's constructive criticism.

YOU ADDED A PERSONAL TOUCH TO THE BOOK WHEN YOU SPOKE ABOUT YOUR OWN EXPERIENCES.
That was the most difficult part to write because you don't want it to sound twee when you start talking about yourself. The thing was that before, during and even after writing "The Extraordinary World Of Yes", there were some very strange coincidences and I mentioned some of them in the book. It seemed very appropriate because Yes music is always hinting at the extraordinary. The addendum is that I went to London in 2005 for a holiday and just happened to arrive the day after the 7/7 terrorist bombings. It was obviously a very tense time, especially staying in a hotel only a block away from where one of the bombings took place. I remember walking across Covent Garden in the middle of the day and it was very surreal because there was hardly a person to be seen whereas normally there would have been hundreds. I thought about what I'd written in "The Extraordinary World Of Yes" and in particular Jon Anderson's comments from 1972 about "Close To The Edge". Jon talked about the hypocrisy of people doing battle for their religious beliefs and how that towering church organ in "Close To The Edge" symbolized the destruction of religious differences. I'd said in the book that it was a profound statement, particularly because I was thinking about present day terrorism largely stemming from religious extremism. It certainly doesn't get much more profound than when you arrive in a city to find that so many people have been killed and injured by terrorist bombs only one day earlier. Now when Jon wrote the lyrics he was thinking about the IRA but more than thirty years later its Al Qaeda and thanks to the way "Close To The Edge" was done, it remains just as relevant today.

I UNDERSTAND THAT YOU DECIDED TO SELF-PUBLISH?
Yes. I contacted one major publisher and it was obvious that they had little interest in anything to do with progressive rock music. Add to that the long, drawn out process in dealing with most traditional publishers and I simply decided to do it myself. For similar reasons, I decided not to have the book endorsed. I could see that there could be long delays and I didn't want the complications.


HAVE YOU HAD ANY FEEDBACK FROM YES?
I presented early draft copies of the book to both Yes and Roger Dean (the Yes album cover artist) when they were in Australia in 2003. When Roger found out that it was part of a course about Yes called "Yesology", he laughed and said: "You guys must be crazy!" He was obviously surprised and I took some comfort from that because after the amazing artwork he's done, I figured Roger must be fairly difficult to surprise. Actually Roger was very curious to know more about it and he even expressed interest in doing a cover for it but I explained to him it was going to be a self-published project and it might blow the budget. Roger was kind enough to call me a couple of days later and he told me that several members of Yes had been reading the book and that Jon Anderson’s wife Jane had been reading sections of it to the band, so it was very satisfying to know that it had actually been read by Yes. During the first leg of Yes’s 2004 American tour I met up with Jon Anderson and he gave me some feedback which was very useful because I still hadn't completed the final draft at that stage. He was very encouraging and Jon’s parting words to me were: "Keep spreading the word about Yes". In a sentence, that's exactly why "Yesology" came about and why I wrote "The Extraordinary World Of Yes". It was intended to be a book that you could give to anyone to explain what Yes was about.

HOW DO YOU FEEL NOW THAT "THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF YES" IS FINISHED?
To be honest, it was a lot more work than what I’d originally intended. With "The Extraordinary World Of Yes" and "Yesology" combined, I’d written and/or edited 1000 pages about Yes in a period of 18 months. But I'm very pleased with how the book turned out and the sales have met my expectations. It stayed in the top twenty percent of book sales on Amazon for more than twelve months and the costs of production have been covered which was the goal from that perspective. I've received some very positive feedback from all kinds of people and that's been great.

GOOD LUCK WITH THE BOOK!
Thank you!



Interview by APRIL CAZNA, April 2006

Photographs by ALAN FARLEY

"THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF YES" by ALAN FARLEY is available from http://www.amazon.com

Visit ALAN FARLEY's website at http://www.farley.ozefamily.com