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Tuesday, April 21, 1998 Brighton, United Kingdom Brighton Dome 2,000 capacity 24 years, 5 months and 10 days ago
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Peter Parsons I was luck enough to see our heroes last night in Brighton. The set was as per the last few nights, no surprises. John dedicated part of the show to Roger Dean who, Jon said "was in the audience with his family" (I think that Dean lives in Brighton). A great show, thoroughly enjoyed it, especially ROSG. Jon missed the cue on Starship Trooper "You and you may ..... follow" and bowed in apology while Steve laughed. Thankfully the rest of the band, and the entire audience knew the song better ! Simon Barrow Yes were definitely in fine form on England's south coast last night: no set-list surprises, but a performance of considerable vitality and fluidity. With just two more dates on the '98 European tour, one senses that they are beginning to feel 'demob happy'. Steve arrived for the set-up early in the afternoon, apparently. The rest of the band turned up for the latter part of the sound check from 5.30pm onwards for an 8pm start. Since I live in Brighton, I decided to pop down a little early to see what was going on. Stage Door hanging is not really my style, but after 24 years of devotion to this particular (lost?) cause, you gotta do what you gotta do. The Dome theatre, for those who wish to know these things, is ten minutes away from the sea - a smallish venue seating around 2000. It has an extraordinary history as an annex to (and one-time stable for) the Pavilion, a Royal fantasy palace in mock Indian style built and developed by the Prince Regent in the latter half of the last century - it looks like a mini version of the Taj Mahal on the outside, and the design is primarily Chinoise inside. It ought to be irredeemably tasteless, but it mostly works quite well. (Is there an analogy here, I wonder?) Anyway, Jon popped out for a chat with seven or eight of us by the aforementioned stage door. He was pretty relaxed (I suspect it was the tea) and was in the midst of growing what looks suspiciously like a goatee. He remarked on the attractiveness of the Pavilion, which faces the Dome across a small ornamental garden, while he signed my ticket. I assumed the role of unofficial photographer for Lou and Tish, who also managed to be snapped with Steve and Billy. Sherwood arrived with Squire and White in a taxi at about 6.30pm. The schedule seemed pretty relaxed. The end is nigh.... Steve Howe endured a marathon signing session for someone who seemed to have brought most of his record collection along for autographic purposes - a copy of the famous bootleg album 'The Affirmery' was adorned with a resounding "bollocks" just to the left of Jon's picture on the back. Make of that what you will, dear AMYers... As for the concert itself - well, I was fortunate enough to be in the second row of the stalls, dead centre. The sound and energy is so high from that kind of range that perceptions become rather impressionistic. The performance was technically tight, most of the time, but also stylistically loose and good-humoured. A positive combination. Actually, Steve fluffed the beginning of 'Diary of a Man Who Vanished', Chris (unusually) dropped half a bar somewhere in 'The Revealing', and Jon, amusingly, completely lost the crucial "follow..." thread in 'Starship Trooper'. Smiles all round. It didn't seem to matter in the overall scheme of things... JA finally appears to have learned the lyrics of FTB, btw - perhaps at the expense of a further plummet in his dress sense ;-) How could you begin to describe those flowery silk pants. And the sandals _with socks_. My oh my.... the bravery of it all. Meanwhile, the between-song patter gets easier and more relaxed each night. Jon's initial mistake in welcoming people to the Pavilion, rather than the Dome, was well exploited later on ("great to be able to play that for you... at the Dome", after AYAI). Steve tactfully omitted to mention that the band were last in Brighton on the Drama tour. But many of us remembered, judging from the age span of the audience. RSoG was particularly strong, I thought. Someone mentioned to me that Howe had been annoyed by Squire's inclusion of a few purposefully humourous dissonant bass notes during the Sheffield performance. This time Chris played it fairly straight, though I noticed that he and Billy were doubling a variant staccato rhythm in the quiet passage which precedes the climactic synth cadenza near the end. Even so, it's evident that Anderson/Howe treat this piece with a great deal more reverence tha
before 'America' transcribed by: Geoff Dunn Jon Anderson:Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much. Welcome to, ahh, Tuesday night at The Pavilion, is that what it is? Is it Tuesday night? Another Pavilion? Oh, we better move then. I thought we were playing over there. It's not, it's The Dome? I should have known it was The Dome, and I coulda got 'ome. Really nice of you to come out. Here's a song by Paul Simon, the great Paul Simon, who wrote lots of songs with that guy Garfunkel. And this is a song he wrote way back when and it's a song all about the finding of the true America, the true American dream. So, the song, of course, is called 'America'. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, goodnight. before 'Open Your Eyes' transcribed by: Geoff Dunn Jon Anderson:Steve Howe on guitar! Thank you so much. Thank you very much. It's great to be here at the Dome and, ahh, what else can I say? Brighton, you see. I used to come down here many times and, ahh, I'd like to introduce you to a really good guy, who is now in the group, he's been working with the group on two or three albums we've been doing and last year started writing with everybody and of course we said "you've got to join the band and come out on tour" and stuff like that. And he's a really great guy, his name is Mr. Billy Sherwood! Billy! And here's one of the songs that he started writing with Chris and then we all joined in with ideas, and it's a wonderful song. It's from the new album, it is the title of the new album. It's in your shops now, at your local Tesco, as we found out yesterday, and it's a song called 'Open Your Eyes'. before 'And You And I' transcribed by: Geoff Dunn Jon Anderson:Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bowing is great you know. Actually we were, we were practicing ahh, the bow, so we could get on, like ahh 'Thank Your Lucky Stars', but it's finished. I really like the Teletubbies, it's strange. See? I just love them, they're here and with us all the time. I think they'll be here for a long time. Again! There was a time when we used to have an engineer, his name was Eddie Offord. Does anybody remember him? He was a great guy and he used to ahh, at four o'clock in the afternoons, when we were recording in London, he used to make the tea. See, that was a big thing. And ahh, he used to make the tea, he used to roll it up in paper, like that, so... Earl Grey! Chamomile! You can imagine. So we wrote this song in that sort of state of mind and the future is coming, it's beautiful and everything is going to be great. But here we are, we're nearly in the twenty first century and still enjoying making this kind of music and we have you to thank for your contribution. And ahh, I have a little dedication here, because I know Roger Dean is here with his family and he helped us along the track [???]. So, this song is for Roger and all the work he's done for us. And it's got ahh, the actual song started when Steve started doing his sounds in the corner of the studio. I said "Eddie, quick, put the tape recorder on now, because it sounds really good". before 'Mood For A Day' transcribed by: Geoff Dunn Jon Anderson:Chris Squire on bass guitar! Wooh! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. The Dome! It's always wonderful to be able to leave you in the capable hands, and fingers, and the guitar style of the maestro of the guitar, Mr. Steve Howe! before 'Clap' transcribed by: Geoff Dunn Steve Howe:Alright, thank you very much! It's nice to be back in The Dome. In fact we haven't played here before, so ahh, it's nice to be back in Brighton anyway and ahh, amongst friends and things. That was called 'Diary of a Man Who Vanished' and ahh, before that of course, I wrote that tune for my wife, Janet - 'Mood For A Day'. So, I hope you liked that. I'm going to ahh, do another tune now and it's going to be for my friends, Curtis and Daniel here tonight, and I'd like to wish them very, very, very good luck in the future. And for you coming down tonight, tonight 'Clap'! before 'From The Balcony' transcribed by: Geoff Dunn Jon Anderson:Steve Howe! We'd like to continue with a duet. That's like two of us, you see, two of us. This is a song that's on the new album and it was written as a duet, for two people. That's me and ahh, this other guy. I used to play, I used to play guitar just like that. I really could, honest. It was a dream, but it was really good. The guitar kept getting bigger and bigger, it was like, oh. So here's the song that we ahh, wrote together, and ahh, actually I think it was ahh, ten years earlier that we actually wrote something together, so it was sort of like "Oh, let's do more of this". So we're doing a lot of writing as we travel around the globe, getting ready for the next project. So this is a song called 'From The Balcony'. before 'Wonderous Stories' transcribed by: Geoff Dunn Jon Anderson:Thank you! Thank you so much. Thank you. Big hug! And so there we were in Switzerland, as the story goes, and we were making an album. And I'd wake up in the mornings and ahh, outside my window, I was living in one of these sort of cuckoo clock chalet sort of places, it was lovely. Just outside my window I'd hear this every morning and I'd see these little tiny cows running around, very fast. There was about thirty of them, there they go. It sounds like a sheep. Yeah, it's a bit of a big cow, they weren't that big. Have we not got a tiny cow? No, I don't suppose we do. Thank you. So, I wrote this song and went down to the studio and we all joined in and made it into a record. It's called 'Wonderous Stories'. before 'Khoroshev Solo' transcribed by: Geoff Dunn Jon Anderson:Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. As ahh, most of you know, a little bit about Yes and how over the years we've gone through so many changes, and ahh, we've been like a soap opera sometimes, but we go through changes all the time in life, so why not, as a group. And ahh, last year was no different. We had to find a really good keyboard player, and I'd been traveling around with a cassette in my bag, that somebody had given to me three months earlier and I decided to listen to the cassette. We needed a keyboard player, so I put the cassette on, and ahh, this beautiful piano music came out and ahh, I rang up the guy, here he is. He's all the way from Moscow, a real Yes fan as you can hear and also a great musician, and he's really a fine guy. His name is Igor Khoroshev! before 'Owner Of A Lonely Heart' transcribed by: Geoff Dunn Jon Anderson:The grand master of the bass guitar, Mr. Chris Squire! Chris Squire! And on the drums, the amazing, the original action man, Mr. Alan White! And on the blue tongue, we have, sorry. Alan White, he's so quiet. You get him behind the drums and it's crazy. No, really, he's a very quiet guy. You are. You are! before 'I've Seen All Good People' transcribed by: Geoff Dunn Jon Anderson:Thank you so much. Thank you. That's ahh, twenty-five years ago we wrote that song, 'Revealing' and ahh, it's such a pleasure to be able to play it again at this time of the century, it's really amazing. Thank you very much for listening, we appreciate it very, very much, we really do. We'd like to again thank you all for coming along to The Dome, Brighton, you know and ahh, that's a funny sound, that's like maybe the ocean is trying to get in. And ahh, we want you to sing along, we'd love you to sing along with us now, this song. And ahh, we'd like to thank our really, really wonderful road crew, because this is the end of our European tour, we've got two more, two more gigs to go and these guys have been amazing. We've traveled all over Europe, far and away and it's been amazing. So I'd like to hear appreciation for the lighting and sound crew, they're great guys, they really are. And there's one of them now. And ahh, a little dedication to Stuart and Chris who are ex sort of ahh, road crew, they've traveled with us many, many times over the years and ahh, great friends. And this song is for you guys. You've got to sing and dance in the middle. We need you all to do the Brighton boogie in the middle of the song, okay? |
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Yes (1998)
04/21/1998 Brighton, United Kingdom
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Live At The Brighton Dome ´98
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