ABWH - Close to the Edge (Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA. 1989)

What’s left to say about this classic of the genre? Much ink has been spilled trying to get to the essence of why it works so well, compositionally and structurally. Somehow the musicians and engineer / mid-wife Eddie Offord were all wide awake during it’s gestation and birth at Advision Studios in London that June in 1972. We were tuned in. So many small, tiny coincidences had brought we particular people to that studio at that time to make that record. You almost felt that the outcome was beyond one person’s - or indeed the group’s – control. For anyone interested I devoted some pages on the music’s creation, viewed from my perspective, in my 2009 autobiography, so I won’t cover that ground again here. It took a while to make, though. There was a rumour flying about that Simon and Garfunkel had taken three months to make ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’, a huge slice of time in those days. Naturally, in an age of competitive excess, Yes tried hard to take a bit longer. We probably succeeded, but I’ve be