Jon Anderson’s 2019 solo album, 1000 Hands: Chapter One, featured rescued material dreamt up 30 years earlier with Yes bandmates, along with a stellar supporting cast. That year, as the world appeared to spin ever more strangely, Prog asked how the hippy dreamer still fitted in. His thoughts, as ever, were intriguing.
If filmmakers can take World War I footage and resurrect it so it appears to have been shot last week, then music producers can do the same with demos from the turn of the 1990s. You can pick up a thread of ideas you had nearly 30 years ago, dust them off and weave them into something that sounds like it was produced yesterday.
That’s one of the approaches taken by Jon Anderson on his new solo album, 1000 Hands: Chapter One. It contains material based around ideas old and new that the former Yes frontman kept in his vault, and among those are tracks co-written and played on by Alan White and Chris Squire, shortly after the short-lived ABWH project was merged back into the Yes fold at the start of 1991.
They were rescued via the curious technique of baking, whereby brittle, deteriorated tapes can be made playable again – albeit only once – in low-temperature ovens, and their contents transferred to a digital format.
The album got its name for a reason; there’s a scrolling list of artistic credits that looks more suited to a star-studded Hollywood movie. “I wanted to invite as many people as possible to perform on these songs,” Anderson explained on a Facebook post last year – and he got his wish.
As well as Squire and White, you’ll hear guitarists Steve Howe, Steve Morse, Rick Derringer and Pat Travers. Billy Cobham and Carmine Appice play drums, Chick Corea and Journey’s Jonathan Cain add keyboards, Ian Anderson contributes instantly-recognisable flute; and Anderson’s one-time duo partner Jean-Luc Ponty is on violin.
Further cameos come from Toto’s Bobby Kimball on backing vocals and legendary funk horn section Tower Of Power. The chief architect is undoubtedly producer Michael Franklin, who, while putting the album together last year, suggested even more lower-profile but no less able invitees to the party.
“Every couple of weeks there’d be somebody else,” Anderson recalls. “Like Zap Mama, these amazing women from Belgium, who I first saw back in the early 90s. I couldn’t believe how good they were, and now all of a sudden here they are singing on the album. It was like my birthday every day, with special guests showing up all the time.”
Planes flying in to feed the starving one day, then flying in the next day to deliver the bombs. What are we doing?
While the risk of a too-many-cooks situation was averted, Anderson recalls getting involved in a musical broth disaster when the oldest songs on 1000 Hands were being demoed. He dates his work with Squire and White to sessions at Big Bear Studios with producer Brian Chatton in 1991, referred to as the Uzlot sessions. His fruitful reconnection with his former bandmates as ABWH was mutating into an ill-advised oversized incarnation of Yes, the eight-piece cut-and-shut vehicle responsible for the relatively unloved 1991 album Union.
Or has he got his dates wrong? He refers to a tour with Japanese ambient pioneer Kitaro as one of the reasons he didn’t complete his the demos, and that took place in summer 1992, which would shift the timeline for the sessions with Squire and White to the spring of that year rather than the Union merger. Producer Jonathan Elias blamed the shortcomings of that album on a lack of songs; but if demoing was going on in early ’91, why didn’t those songs end up being put up for Yes?
“I don’t remember,” says Anderson. “But musicians are like a family. You can get upset with each other once in a while but you’re family. Chris and I were like brothers – he was the yin and I was the yang. He was Darth Vader and I was Obi-Wan Kenobi!”
There’s little danger of 1000 Hands getting the thumbs-down from Anderson fans. It manages an unlikely feat: combining the broad melodic strokes of latter-day Yes with longform song suites and the spiritually-charged lyrics of a diehard child of the 60s.
Twice In A Lifetime – one of three tracks deriving from the 1991 demos, along with First Born Leaders and Come Up – now has violin and accordion in the opening bars before Anderson croons, ‘Twice upon a lifetime was a mystic and a singer, who sang too many songs of love, lost faith in her belief.’ Soon harpsichord-style flourishes decorate a flintier turn in his lyrical flow: ‘Planes fly in with food and love to save the starving millions, while planes fly in to feed the hungry guns of disbelief.’
“It’s just asking a simple question,” he says. “Why can we not share the world? Planes flying in to feed the starving one day, then they’re flying in the next day to deliver the bombs. What the hell are we doing? Everybody feels this way – except those one percenters who seem to have everything organised to build war machines.
I don’t want to say anything; I’d just be feeding a very silly world that’s very Monty Python
“The idea of not being able to share oneness on this planet has been with me since the beginning of the 60s. But in the past 30 years we’ve become a little bit, ‘Oh, okay.’ I think in the next few years we’re going to be going through another big change – and change is good.”
And change is happening, it seems. But in the age of Donald Trump and Brexit, you suspect it’s not the kind of change Anderson had in mind. Now permanently based in California after many nomadic years, how does he view what’s going on in his adopted country? “It doesn’t get much weirder, to be honest. I’m an American citizen, so they can’t throw me out. But I don’t want to say anything; I’d just be feeding a very silly world that’s very Monty Python.”
Did he vote in the Brexit referendum? “No. And I’m still confused – it seems to me like a bunch of bankers asking each other, ‘How much money can we make? Why are the Germans making so much money?’ Guys, haven’t we been here before? Come on! You know, work harder, play harder, be more creative.” We’re not sure where that leaves our hero on the spectrum of opinions across our troubled islands, but maybe he’s not sure either.
![Jon Anderson - First Born Leaders [OFFICIAL AUDIO] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/rwquQjjakYk/maxresdefault.jpg)
Those aren’t the only direct-sounding statements you’ll hear on this album. An ear-pricking line from First Born Leaders blends unlikely instrumentation such as steel drums as it concludes: ‘Everybody wants what they cannot have.’ “You bet. It’s more true now than ever,” he says.
A more typically oblique lyric can be found on the nine-minute Activate, a song guest flautist Ian Anderson described as “a long, epic song... very much in the progressive rock tradition.” The key line is, ‘The answer to the proposition 35-42 – everything within the law begins and ends with you.’
In contrast to his old approach of leaving his more puzzling statements open to interpretation, Anderson is happy to explain: “It comes from something you see in America. You’ll see a lot of cards in gardens from local government candidates saying: ‘Proposition 32 – say no! Proposition 61 – say yes!’ That line in the song is just saying we’re all unique and we’re all connected throughout this world.
If you become nothing but materialist and do nothing but boozing, you become empty
“And writing songs activates me; wakes me up. I get very dormant surrounded by materialism and things like that. There’s nothing wrong with it; but if you become nothing but materialist and do nothing but boozing, you become empty, I think. Unless you go and watch a football match and life changes… Hey, it was great to see the games this weekend, wasn’t it? Some great games in England recently. I watch a lot of Spanish football as well...”
The subject takes a sharp turn. Prog thinks we’ve digressed considerably, but maybe that stream of consciousness is a reflection of a man who is still, at heart, a hippie dreamer; yet also an avowed internationalist, who speaks with an accent floating somewhere between Los Padres and Lancashire, and who describes his current home as “very quiet, much like Accrington, surrounded by hills and woodland... but the weather is better.”
As befits such a multi-faceted man, 1000 Hands is an unashamedly eclectic listen. Come Up is another expansive journey that begins with loungey cascades of jazz piano – aided by some sterling work from Corea, Cobham and Ponty – before being joined by steel drums; a combination that surely shouldn’t work, but does.
Later there’s a full-on hands-to-Heaven gospel chorus from Zap Mama, while Anderson offers the kind of lines that you’d expect to hear 45 years ago: ‘Some come to tempt you with visions of the Eastern world, some come to tempt you with their own reality/only you can break the rule of contemplation, these words are purely loved in speculation.’
We find that thought on the same album as some disarmingly straightforward songwriting. Makes Me Happy is reggae-tinged, horn-spattered sunshine pop, then I Found Myself is particularly striking: a sweet acoustic paean laced with flourishes of violin and backing vocals from the inspiration of the song – Anderson’s wife Jane.
“It’s about finding yourself when you find your true soulmate; it’s like a dream come true,” he says. It should of course be unbearably saccharine, but once again the gamble pays off.
I never stop… I’ve got about a dozen projects on the go. It’s what I do
Live shows are planned, but meanwhile new material is constantly being created.“I’m working on something now that’s probably over two hours long,” he says. “It’s a story within a story, and I’m doing about four of them at the same time. I’ve been working on that for 15 or so years.”
You wonder if, like the ‘Uzlot’ sessions, it might end up semi-permanently on the backburner, but that’s the way Anderson has always done things. While we’re on the phone, pauses to open the door; in comes someone he’s demoing tracks with in his home studio.
At 74, retirement doesn’t seem an option. “I never stop,” he admits. “I’m so busy writing songs and create new projects. I’ve got about a dozen projects on the go. It’s what I do. I’m a creative lunatic!”
We wouldn’t have it any other way.
