I'm just catching up with blog emails and comments whilst listening to the album 'Tales from Topographic Oceans' by the one and only Yes [did I hear any Noooooo's!], so this post about them can still be considered official blog business!
So, Albums, deffo once the most important thing in my life. I suppose by buying them every week as a young teenager I used to 'collect' LP's as a matter of course - I still have a lot of them, now a vintage 'collection'!
Its hard to put into words how much 'Tales from Topographic Oceans' meant to me. I have a few ultra special LP's and this is one of them, which I return to over and over. Like a slice of Battenberg it never fails to cheer me up.
I first heard Tales in the early Seventies when I was a young teenager, It was either on my bedroom stereo or the house music centre in the lounge. The album may have even belonged to one of my older brothers and my older Sister may have had a hand in my Yessing as she's first introduced me to them through the equally magnificent Yes Album.
Being a double album with a brilliant gatefold sleeve illustrated by Roger Dean - a cover I attempted to copy with felt pens, which I still have somewhere! - its has four sides, two on each record. This is important with double albums, because Sides 1 and 2 were often played the most and 3 and 4 less so, remaining elusive grooves at the rear of the sleeve..
This is just how it was with Tales. I absolutely adored Side 1, the mood-altering Revealing Science of God and still do. Side 2, The Remembering is well, very memorable, Side 3, the Ancient, when I got that far, was a discordant mellotronic mess I wasn't keen on but Side 4, Ritual, made up for it and returned to them to their Yessy best. On 3 or 4 there is a fabulous Steve Howe acoustic madrigal, which is like a medieval sunburst and I loved it. But it was and is always The Revealing Science of God that means so much to me, taking me back to those monkey booted bomber jacketed days when prog rock and long hair were the sole reasons for existence!
OK, I know Tales from Topographic Oceans had and has its critics, the oft-quoted mohican moan about bloated excess and the 'no wonder Punk had to happen, just listen to Tales' tirade but prog was massive in the early Seventies. Tales went to number 1 and the cover art has been revered as one of the best, if not THE best cover art of all. Yes were young musicians of the highest quality and skill. Steve Howe was probably one of the best guitarists that ever picked up a guitar, never mind the soaring abilities of Anderson, Squire and Wakeman.
As a teenager I wasn't first and foremost a progger. Having first teeny-bopped to David Cassidy, The Osmonds, Mud, Bay City Rollers and K-Tel's 24 greatest hits, I crashed into adolescence idolising Bowie, Elton John and Marc Bolan, before discovering heavy rock one day and turning forever monstrous. The new Gods were Budgie, Purple, Sabbath and Rush. These were riveted with other riff masters like Skynyrd and Frampton and gaunt and garish agents of urban New York like Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Talking Heads. Prog rock came along during all this feast and was a different chapter of my cookbook. Yes was that chapter's moogy main course.
Tales has finished now but I'll be playing it again soon for sure hoping for the Science of God to reveal itself once more.
Is it an album you like?
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