Rock & metal

Yes

A major name in British progressive rock, Yes are among the very first artists to have worked at Mountain Studios, shortly after it opened. The band recorded “Going for the One” there, released in 1977, the album that marked keyboard player Rick Wakeman’s return to the line-up. On stage, only one appearance is known, on 14 July 2003 at the Auditorium Stravinski.

View on the map

Yes: six months in Montreux and an organ in Vevey

The first album made outside the United Kingdom

Yes arrived at Mountain Studios in October 1976 and stayed until April 1977. Six months for one album, and the first time the band had worked outside the United Kingdom.

The stay began with an upheaval. During rehearsals, keyboard player Patrick Moraz left the band. Rick Wakeman, who had walked away three years earlier after the disagreements around “Tales from Topographic Oceans”, came back to take his place. So it was in Montreux that a reunion awaited since 1973 finally happened.

The cover of “Going for the One” (1977), the album recorded at Mountain Studios in Montreux.© Atlantic Records

“Awaken”: it had to be a real church organ

“Going for the One” breaks with the previous concept albums: the songs are shorter and more direct. Except one. “Awaken” runs fifteen minutes and closes the record.

For that piece, Rick Wakeman did not want a studio organ. He needed a church instrument, with the volume of air and the reverberation that come with it. So the band went down to the Temple Saint-Martin de Vevey, whose organ was linked up to Mountain Studios for the duration of the recording. Wakeman also wrote the choral arrangements of the piece.

The result ranks among the peaks of progressive rock, and it carries in its scale the acoustics of a church in the Vaud. The Riviera left a second trace on the record: inside the sleeve is a photograph of the Île de Peilz, offshore from Villeneuve, the only natural island in Lake Geneva.

The 2003 return, on the festival stage

More than a quarter of a century after recording “Going for the One” at Mountain Studios, Yes returned to Montreux, this time to take the stage. On 14 July 2003 the band played the Auditorium Stravinski, the main hall of the Montreux Jazz Festival, in its most famous line-up: Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Rick Wakeman, Chris Squire and Alan White.

The concert ranged across the whole repertoire, from recent pieces off “Magnification” to the classics “And You and I” and “Heart of the Sunrise”, revisited the fifteen minutes of “Awaken”, then closed on “Roundabout”. Recorded that night, it was released as “Yes, Live at Montreux 2003”.