Tormato

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Tormato
Studio album by Yes

Publication
(s)

20th August 1978

Label (s) Atlantic Records

Format (s)

LP, CD

Genre (s)

Progressive rock

Title (number)

8th

running time

41:13

occupation

production

Yes

Studio (s)

Advision Studios, London

chronology
Going for the One
(1977) 		Tormato Drama
(1980)
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Tormato is an album by the music group Yes . In the tenth year of the band's existence, they released the eleventh work as the ninth studio album.

Emergence

For the first time since Fragile and Close to the Edge , Going for the One and Tormato , two consecutive Yes albums by the same line-up, were recorded.
The album was recorded after the end of the Going for the One tour from December 1977 to June 1978 in Micky Most's studio in St. John's Wood and in London's Advision Studios. While Rick Wakeman had voted again for Switzerland , where he now lived for tax reasons, this time Steve Howe and Chris Squire prevailed with the proposal to record the album in England .

Since Eddie Offord was no longer available due to his excessive drug use, the band produced itself again. In the typical Yes way of working, in which different variants were first recorded, which were then assembled into a final song version, fierce arguments were among them predetermined for the members. Every musician was afraid of being mixed into the background by the others. Howe and Wakeman in particular fought for every single note. The positive mood that had determined the work on the previous album Going for the One no longer emerged and many ideas for the album were lost on the editing table. Nevertheless, not a single band member was able to prevail, and so to this day everyone involved is dissatisfied with the result.

The originally planned album name was Yes Tor . Gate is an old English word for hill , mountain . Yes Tor is a mountain near Okehampton in Devon , England. When the band was dissatisfied with the album cover, Hipgnosis designer Aubrey Powell came up with the idea of spicing it up with a tomato toss. This resulted in the album name Tormato .

Track list

  1. Future Times / Rejoice (Anderson / Howe / Squire / Wakeman / White) - 6:45
    1. Future Times (Anderson / Howe / Squire / Wakeman / White)
    2. Rejoice (Anderson)
  2. Don't Kill the Whale (Anderson / Squire) - 3:56
  3. Madrigal (Anderson / Wakeman) - 2:23
  4. Release, Release (Anderson / White / Squire) - 5:46
  5. Arriving UFO (Anderson / Howe / Wakeman) - 6:03
  6. Circus of Heaven (Anderson) - 4:29
  7. Onward (Squire) - 4:02
  8. On the Silent Wings of Freedom (Anderson / Squire) - 7:47

Tormato was remastered in 2003 and re-released by Rhino Records with the following bonus tracks:

  1. Abilene (Howe) - 4:02
  2. Money (Squire / Anderson / White / Wakeman) - 3:15
  3. Picasso (Anderson) - 2:12
  4. Some are Born (Anderson) - 5:42
  5. You Can Be Saved (Squire) - 4:20
  6. High (Howe) - 4:30
  7. Days ( Demo , Anderson) - 1:00
  8. Countryside (Anderson / Howe / Squire / White) - 3:11
  9. Everybody's Song (Early demo recording of Does It Really Happen?; Anderson / Howe / Squire / White) - 6:48
  10. Onward (orchestral recording) - 3:06

Remarks

  • Madrigal and Onward were orchestrated by Andrew Pryce Jackman, keyboardist for Squire's 1960s band The Syn .
  • An early version of Arriving UFO was called Railway 14 .
  • The Steve Howe composition Abilene was the B-side of the single Don't Kill the Whale (August 1978) and can also be heard on YesYears. Anderson, however, helped Howe with the lyrics.
  • Money is a rock 'n' roll piece mixed with satirical text voiced by Rick Wakeman. Wakeman imitates Denis Healey , Labor Party's Chancellor of the Exchequer 1974-79, who angered many English rock musicians in the 1970s with a massive tax hike for the higher-income earners. A version without the spoken text exists but has never been released. Money first appeared on YesYears.
  • Picasso , which can also be heard briefly on the YesYears video, is a song about the painter Pablo Picasso and is now part of Jon Anderson's musical Chagall about the painter Marc Chagall .
  • Some Are Born and Days later appeared on Jon Anderson's second solo album, Song of Seven .
  • Also high was for Tormato not used. It was played under the title Sketches in the Sun by Steve Howe during many Asian concerts and can be heard for the first time on the GTR album.
  • Countryside appears as an instrumental called Corkscrew on Steve Howe's solo album Turbulence . Another version called Resistance Day can be found on his rarity album Homebrew 2 .
  • Everybody's Song is an early version of Does It Really Happen? , which ultimately appeared on Drama (1980). The recording is most likely from the time between Relayer and Going for the One and was probably made with keyboardist and Wakeman predecessor Patrick Moraz .
  • A second version of Onward is on the album as a hidden track: The Orchestration (with Chris Squire's bass parts). This is believed to be a tribute to Andrew Pryce Jackman, who passed away in 2003

Single releases

  • Don't kill the whale / Abilene

Abilene is a title that did not appear on a studio album. It was the fourth and final release of such a piece by Yes, ignoring Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe . The single reached number 35 in the English charts.

Cover

The Fantasy Artists Roger Dean did not work well with this album for Yes. There had been an argument between him and Jon Anderson, and Steve Howe, who was still friends with Dean, could not prevail with his suggestion to go back to the ancestral Dean covers. Only for the follow-up album Drama , in which Anderson did not participate, Dean was hired again.

As with the previous Going for the One , the album was again designed by Hipgnosis . The cover developed by designer Aubrey “Po” Powell shows a man in a suit with two drumsticks on the front. The classic logo designed by Dean appear together with the album title as on the previous album. The back shows a group photo, all in sunglasses and bomber jackets, on a hill in Regent's Park, London . Since Chris Squire had forgotten his jacket at home on the day of the photo shoot, he wore that of road manager Jim Halley, the name "Chris" was added to the picture afterwards.

Review

Tormato takes up the concept of the previous album Going for the One : shorter pieces, more catchy melodies and lyrics. With the exception of Awaken , both albums are therefore quite similar. If the heterogeneity of the pieces on Going for the One is not yet so noticeable because of the longtrack Awaken , which dominated this album, this is all the more the case on Tormato as more songs can be heard here and no single piece is in the foreground. The song material is not bad in the eyes of the band members, however , like the band's earlier albums , Tormato does not work as a complete work, because the individual ideas are too heterogeneous: One suite is followed by a pop protest song, this is a renaissance piece and an up-tempo rocker . On the second page there is another pop song about a (at the time current) science fiction topic, a children's song that integrates circus music , a ballad and a classic progressive rock piece.

The success of the album was accordingly not of the usual order of magnitude. Above all, critics criticized the lack of longer pieces, as had been common on the four previous albums since Close to the Edge . The longest piece by Tormato , On the Silent Wings of Freedom , only lasts eight minutes, while the long tracks typical of Yes lasted 15-22 minutes. On the other hand, shorter songs on this album also have a multi-part structure (e.g. the suite Future Times / Rejoice or Release, Release ).

The main problem was the lyrics. If Anderson's escape poetry in the early 70s corresponded to the hippie zeitgeist, now, in the light of the realism that the Vietnam War and the oil crisis made clearer again, her naivety was all the more evident. The children's song Circus of Heaven and the contemplative madrigal did not go down well with many fans, and even a title like Arriving UFO , which was the then current science fiction theme (the films Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had appeared shortly before ), with his pictures inspired from the 1960s aimed at contemporary dystopias such as Escape into the 23rd Century or the "Used Universe" realism of films such as Star Wars or Alien - The uncanny creature from a strange world far past.

Rick Wakeman's keyboard sound is often described as too artificial and flashy. On Tormato, instead of Minimoog and Mellotron, Wakeman used the new, polyphonic Polymoog synthesizer and the (but economically unsuccessful) Birotron that he helped to develop . Due to technical difficulties and more successful new developments, but also because of the rejection of the new sounds by fans and critics, Tormato was the only Yes album on which Wakeman used these two instruments.

As with the previous album, the recordings suffer from the fact that there was no producer and the band was responsible for mixing the album itself.

Concerts

The concerts presented a completely different picture. Yes were in their tenth year of existence with a revolving stage, which stood in the middle of the still sold out halls. For the tenth anniversary of the band Yes played on five consecutive days (October 24-28, 1978) in London's Wembley Arena in front of 12,000 enthusiastic fans.

On the Tormato tour (August 28, 1978 - June 30, 1979) all concerts began with Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra or with music from the film Uncanny Encounters of the Third Kind . Mostly Siberian Khatru , Heart Of The Sunrise , Starship Trooper , Awaken , I've Seen All Good People and Roundabout , sometimes And You And I were played . From the current album Future Times / Rejoice , Circus of Heaven and Don't Kill The Whale always, Madrigal , Arriving UFO , Release, Release and On The Silent Wings Of Freedom were sometimes played. There was also a solo for Wakeman and Howe, Alan White built a drum solo into Arriving UFO or Release, Release .

For the tenth anniversary, the band played a medley consisting of Time And A Word / Long Distance Runaround / Survival / The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus) / Perpetual Change / Soon , which received mixed reactions from the fans. It was released on the compilation The Word Is Live .

Live in Philadelphia 1979

In 1996, Live in Philadelphia 1979 was a recording of a concert on June 21, 1979 on video , later on laser disc and in 1998 on DVD . It is a recording of a television station from the Spectrum Arena in Philadelphia in front of 19,000 viewers.

The revolving stage and the lighting conditions or the light show turned out to be a great challenge for the cameras: In the semi-darkness of the concert, the musicians could only be captured in focus for a few moments, as they were constantly moving towards or away from the camera or from you other band member were covered. The picture is therefore often out of focus and cannot be compared with today's productions. However, it is the only authorized concert with a revolving stage recorded with professional equipment and thus an interesting document of the times.

Title list of the DVD :
  1. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
  2. Siberian Khatru
  3. Circus of Heaven
  4. Starship Trooper
  5. Drum Solo ( Arriving UFO )
  6. Leaves of Green ( The Ancient )
  7. I've Seen All Good People
  8. Roundabout

The concert was cut for the recording. The full set list was:

  1. Close Encounters of The Third Kind
  2. Siberian Khatru
  3. Heart of the Sunrise
  4. Future Times / Rejoice
  5. Circus of Heaven
  6. Time And a Word / Long Distance Runaround / Survival / The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus) / Perpetual Change / Soon (Medley)
  7. Clap
  8. Arriving UFO
  9. And you and I
  10. Starship Trooper
  11. Wakeman solo
  12. Awaken
  13. Leaves of Green
  14. Tour song
  15. I've Seen All Good People
  16. Roundabout

The first edition of the video was immediately withdrawn because it was found to be incorrect. There are minute-long black gaps between the songs, the original space for advertising by the television stations. You had forgotten to remove the blank spaces from the master tape. Only the second edition showed a continuous concert. The two conditions are difficult to distinguish from the outside.

Work on the follow-up album

At the end of 1979, after the Tormato tour , Yes met with producer Roy Thomas Baker in Paris to record a new album. Paris, which is halfway between Switzerland (Rick Wakeman's residence at the time) and England , the home of the other band members, was a compromise because of its location, not a preferred candidate for the recordings. The Paris Sessions in November 1979 didn't go well either, the song material was only second class. The band split into two camps for musical reasons: Anderson and Wakeman on the one hand, Howe, Squire and White on the other. Roy Thomas Baker failed to bring the five musicians back together and so work came to a halt when Alan White broke his ankle. Anderson and Wakeman, who were both also working on solo projects at the time, then left the band.

live

Live recordings of the tracks on Tormato can be heard on The Word Is Live , Yesshows and Keys to Ascension .

Sources and web links

  • Reviews of Tormato on the baby blue pages
  • http://members.aol.com/yesfamily/tree/coverstories.html (English website with explanations of Yes' album covers) (offline)