‘Relayer’ At 50: How Yes Battled Their Way Into Jazz Rock

“When I wrote it, we were getting into the last throes of the Vietnam War,” Anderson told Melody Maker in 1980. “The theme of war, that was the driving force, and there was a lot of hot metal flying about.” Sure enough, White’s blitzkrieg of abrasive drumming during the song’s battle sequence cuts through the listener like bayonets through a gizzard. “We’d go through the car scrap yard, and find springs and pieces of metal,” White recalled in an interview with Martin Popoff. “So some of the percussion on that is actually us playing pieces of cars in the studio, making big clanking noises.”

“The music got very crazy,” Anderson observed. “It’s like a void, and out of this void rises this form which controls war, and it’s like a demonic form. The devil, if you like.” As foes are dispensed with and blood seeps into the soil, the song’s spine-tingling conclusion – Anderson’s elegiac Soon – finds each warrior pleading with God to cleanse them of the evil they have perpetrated. “We’re asking the Divine to show some light in this world,” Anderson explained of the song, “as we need a reason to be here.”

If The Gates Of Delirium was the outward manifestation of conflict on the battlefield, Sound Chaser, the song that opens the album’s second half, is an inward expression of how war’s aftermath ravages the soul. Entering the fray with a Mahavishnu Orchestra-style jazz fusion sound, Moraz’s flamboyant keyboard trills quickly tangle with Squire’s hectic bass guitar. “Patrick added quite a flair to the album generally,” Howe told Prog magazine, “but it was very noticeable on Sound Chaser. That was the most crazy, OTT number where we all had to think on our feet every single second of the track.”

Howe’s nimble fretwork made it sound as though his fingers had been possessed by the demonic spirit of a swivel-eyed flamenco string-slinger. And then, after a sudden burst of tribal chanting, Moraz rips through a wild keyboard solo, inciting a skirmish between Howe’s guitar, Squire’s bass and White’s drums that finds each musician tussling for dominance. “I find songs like Sound Chaser very exciting,” White later said in the book Time And A Word: The Yes Story. “Nobody was doing anything quite like that at the time.”

The release: “That’s what you hear when you put that record on: Yes having fun”

Released in the UK on 28 November 1974, Yes’ seventh studio album, Relayer, peaked at No.4 in the group’s homeland before going on to hit No.5 in the US, with many fans praising it as the band’s heaviest and most experimental offering yet. Years later, Alan White spoke particularly fondly of the record. “An album doesn’t sound good unless you’re having fun,” he said. “And that’s what you hear when you put that record on: Yes having fun.”

Reflecting the devastation brought on by war, Relayer’s stone-grey artwork – featuring a serpent lurking in the dark – perfectly evokes the album’s lyrical themes of good versus evil. Explaining his decision to draw it in pencil instead of using his usual watercolours, designer Roger Dean later said, “My intention was to produce a giant ‘gothic’ cave. A sort of fortified city for military monks.” Bringing to mind the Dwarvish mountain forts of JRR Tolkien’s Middle-Earth as well as monastic depictions of horse-riding knights embarking upon a medieval crusade, Relayer boasts one of the best Yes album covers ever created.

Throughout its 40 minutes, Relayer found Yes drawing upon jazzier textures, thanks to the input of Patrick Moraz. Steve Howe has described the album’s closing track, To Be Over, as one of his favourites, citing it as “one of the most beautiful things we did that wasn’t actually a slow song”. Reflecting on the dreamy sitar that slowly ushers listeners towards a steel-guitar-led epiphany (“Think it over, time will heal your fear”), Howe added, “It’s mellow, soft and gentle, but it’s also quite bouncy, and I like that quality.”

Just weeks before releasing the album in the US, Yes began a tour of North America that would lay the groundwork for their historic 1976 show at Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, where they played to an audience of 130,000 people. Having plumbed the abyss of warring souls, the group were now reaping the spoils of victory.

The legacy: “It was a quest, it was a mission, it was a concept”

Going on to sell more than 500,000 copies in the US alone, Relayer remains fondly regarded as one of the best Yes albums of all time. Conceptually daring, its portrayal of a war-torn hellscape offers an unflinching picture of human suffering, enhanced by Yes’ angular spin on proggy dissonance. For all this, however, Relayer was an accessible – if still challenging – work whose ambitious songs mixed the spiritual themes of Jon Anderson’s lyrics with the inventive instrumentation of his bandmates.

“We were very close to the edge of jazz rock,” Moraz later said in an interview with Something Else!, “and over time it might have taken us maybe much further.” Sadly, however, Relayer marked the keyboardist’s sole appearance on a Yes studio record, leaving fans with the tantalising thought of the group taking jazz-rock into the mainstream.

“It’s a very stylistically definitive record,” Howe later said of Relayer. “It was a quest, it was a mission, it was a concept.” And that, in the end, sums up the album’s legacy. Just like a group of sword-wielding horsemen galloping into a war zone, Yes collided with ideas much bigger than themselves, and harnessed them into something profound and transcendent.

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