Yes had been doing the album-tour-album-tour cycle pretty intensely for several years, and had finished the first leg of their Relayer tour when they decided to take some time off in early 1975.
There were no deep conflicts in the band or anything dramatic behind their decision. They were smart enough to recognise that they needed a break, and agreed that a time-out and some time apart might do them all good.
At the same time, several of the members were keen to spend that break producing solo albums. This had been a talking point in the band, and in typical Yes fashion, this snowballed into all of them basically agreeing to take time off for each member to record a solo album. Even the ones who hadn’t really contemplated doing a solo album ended up doing a solo album.
Who knows if Rick Wakeman’s solo album success factored into the solo album decision, directly or indirectly. Wakeman had left Yes in 1974, and his following solo album Journey To the Centre of the Earth had gone straight to #1. The last Yes album… had not. This certainly did not pass unnoticed. There was likely a curiosity there that needed to be explored.
The resulting Yes solo albums from 1975 are often collectively referred to as Yessolos, which was also the name of a promotional LP that Atlantic sent out to radio stations with two track from each of the solo albums. But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves…
Chris Squire looked back at his musical beginnings as he started work on his album. One of the first things he did was to contact Andrew Pryce Jackman, a childhood friend whom he’d met when they both started out singing in church choirs as young boys, practicing harmonies and arrangements. This was the start of them both thinking about music in an advanced way, and they both used that knowledge in their careers later on. Before Squire moved on to Yes, he and Jackman had also played together in The Syn.
Jackman had gone on to a career as a keyboardist/composer/classical arranger, and he would become a vital collaborator for the project. He agreed to assist with the album’s conception, arrangements, and orchestration, and was involved in pretty much every aspect of the recordings. Over the course of their collaboration Jackman also contributed significantly to the writing. Squire offered to give him co-writing credits, but Jackman declined.
Fish Out of Water was recorded in the spring and summer of 1975. Two studios would be used: primarily Chris Squire’s home studio New Pipers in Surrey, where Yes had also recorded Relayer the previous year, with Morgan Studios in London being used to record the orchestra.
Some of the musicians Squire hired for the project were former Yes drummer Bill Bruford, then-Yes keyboardist Patrick Moraz, King Crimson saxophonist Mel Collins and Canterbury scene flautist Jimmy Hastings. Andrew Jackman, played all the keyboards not performed by Moraz (excepting the cathedral pipe organ performed by Barry Rose) and orchestrated the material.
Lyrically, the song has an abstract flair similar to Squire’s main band, but they are still pointing in a more specific direction. The song is about being open to all the good things in life that could be happening to you. Being closed to those opportunities means you lose out. Being open, and figuratively holding out your hands towards them, make them more likely to happen. The song is encouraging in nature, although at times abstract enough to almost disguise it.
You can feel it coming with the morning light
And you know the feeling’s gonna make you feel alright
Almost close enough to hold out your handSpan the distance, store resistance
To attack is to retreat
All you’ve got to do is hold out your handFor the treasures of the universe are lying at your feet
You can hide it, lose it, but it’s always found
Writing the lyrics and composing the music was done by Squire, almost certainly with input from Jackman due to the way that the song was written. “The song was originally written from the keyboards,” Squire said in an interview on the album’s 2007 Deluxe Edition DVD, “so the chords were developed first. I developed the bass line from the chord structure, and then later the vocals and the melody. I tend to always work like that on solo things. I tend to do the music first, and then vocal and lyric afterwards.”
When ideas for all the songs were completed, Squire and Jackman sat down to organize the tracks and put together arrangements, giving the songs their final form.
“Andrew was going to be the arranger on the record,” Squire said. “We discussed that we wanted to make basically a pretty orchestral, big-sounding album. Andrew was very keen on doing that. He’d spent a lot of his life training in orchestration, and so it was an exciting project for both of us. We spent a couple of months doing the writing and then we moved into the studio. Bill Bruford showed up, and Gregory Chapman – Andrew’s younger brother – who was the engineer on the album. Nigel Looby who was my assistant on the road as well was assisting in the studio.”
That nucleus of the solo band promptly recorded the backing tracks. Squire was on bass (obviously), Andrew Jackman on keyboards, with Bill Bruford drumming.
A decision was made to not necessarily put guitars on the album. There are some segments on the album where guitars can be found, primarily on Silent Calling, but for the most part they are not used on the album. All the songs were piano-based in the writing, and the focus was to retain some of those arrangements and augment with orchestras and keyboards providing a lot of the texture.
Squire had also always played the bass guitar as a lead instrument, and on this album the bass would take a step forward and comfortably fill that role – especially on songs like Hold Out Your Hand which is a groove-driven song with a very strong, melodic bass-line. The Rickenbacker bass sound that Squire used on Hold Out Your Hand was particularly fuzzy and powerful, similar to Jack Bruce’s sound in Cream. It does a lot to give the song its groove-driven sound. Squire had used that particular sound before on Ritual and other parts of the Topographic Oceans album.
The backing tracks were recorded at Squire’s New Pipers studio in the basement of his house in Virginia Water in Surrey. At that point they had done a good job of organizing the tracks, leaving room for some planned additions and overdubs. Hold Out Your Hand has a special one planned in particular: a genuine church pipe organ!
Those already familiar with Hold Out Your Hand will know that the intro and selected passages feature prominent pieces played on a pipe organ – namely the one in St Paul’s Cathedral. This part was played by cathedral organist Barry Rose, who was a very important figure in the lives of both Squire and Jackman: their mentor and choir master in their younger days.
Including the church organ, as well as Barry Rose himself, was important to both Squire and Jackman. Squire said: “When Andrew Jackman and I were both young, we had been in the church choir along with his younger brother Gregory, in Northwest London, St Andrew’s Church Kingsbury. We met up with Barry Rose, who taught us all to sing as lads.”
As soon as they had finished the backing tracks, one of the first things Squire and Jackman did was to reach out to Barry Rose to see if they could persuade their old choir mentor into performing on the album. Thankfully, he said yes. Squire said, “We wanted to ask him if he wanted to play on our rock record, even though he had never done anything like that in his life before. And of course we wanted him to play it on the organ of St Paul’s Cathedral. He was up for it, so we went in very late one night, and I remember that listening to the fallback from one tape recorder and Andrew was conducting Barry playing.”
The organ continues throughout the song, creating a very original sound and reflecting Squire and Jackman’s experiences together as church choristers. The recording was however not entirely without problems. Pipe organs have a natural delay from the point when a key is pressed until you hear the sound, which is not a problem when you sing along with it in church, but a different challenge when you try to conduct someone as part of a band recording.
Jackman ended up having to anticipate the music by several beats while conducting Rose. “Barry wasn’t wearing headphones,” Squire remembered. “Andrew was. And Andrew had to think about three beats ahead, because by the time the organ spoke and it was recorded, it came back much later than the actual physical act of pressing the keys. And so we took it back to the studio and turned out very well, and with a bit of fiddling around we got everything to go in sync.”
The session was very atmospheric. It had to happen at night, when nothing else was going on in the church. The place was dimly lit, casting long shadows as the organ sounds echoed through the dark, vast, magnificent stone halls. It was something Chris Squire never forgot: “If you can picture yourself around 1am in the morning, sitting between the choir stools in St. Paul’s cathedral, mainly in darkness with a little bit of light on… which was a little spooky, but you know, I’d spent time there singing in the choir of St. Paul’s on holiday.”
With the pipe organ recordings in the can, it was time to capture the orchestra! The orchestral parts were fully arranged and conducted by Andrew Jackman, and they managed to secure the services of the London Symphony Orchestra, who covered all their parts for all five songs in just a few hours. Chris Squire was certainly impressed: “I was amazed as I sat there in the studio and they played everything that was required of them within a three hour period, which I thought was remarkable that they could get the notes right that quickly, but that’s the LSO! I guess that’s what they do every day. I think even some of them enjoyed it, haha! Back in those days symphony players weren’t all that fond of rock’n’roll. But some of them were!”
In lieu of a guitar, the song features a very cool bass solo which in turn leads into a pipe organ solo by Barry Rose. As mentioned previously, getting the organ in sync with the track took some fiddling around back in the studio to get the timing right. This was in the days before computers and digital recording so it was quite a job.
The vocal has some echo effects, which was a new opportunity to play around with. Squire remembers: “Back in those days, digital effects had really just been developed, and I think I had one of the very first Eventide digital delay units, and an Eventide phaser. I think those were the only two effects we had in those days, but we overused them real well!”
The song has no independent ending, instead going through a transition which takes it into the next track You By My Side. This is a ballad which sees Chris Squire aiming for a Graham Nash-type vocal melody and sound. He was a big fan of CSN and was trying to include some of that overall feel and sound on that song.
When Fish Out of Water was released on 21 November 1975, the album reached an impressive #25 in the UK album charts, eventually earning Squire a silver disc for sold units. It also made a decent #69 in the US – all in all a very respectable debut for the bass player. The album was well received by critics and fans.
To promote the album, a promotional film was made where Hold Out Your Hand and You By My Side were performed back-to-back, which was prominently featured on The Old Grey Whistle Test TV show. The band lip-synced to the album versions of the songs, with Bill Bruford, Patrick Moraz and Andrew Jackman all appearing on their respective instruments in front of a small orchestra and against a white background. The orchestra was composed of players from the London Symphony Orchestra, who were on their way to record for another project. Squire could only afford them for a short amount of their time (roughly half an hour, which cost £3,000).
A stand-alone edit of Hold Out Your Hand was produced, which obviously called for the song to end before it moves into the next track. This was achieved with a simple fade-out during the transitional phase. Atlantic used it on a promotional album titled Yessolos, containing two songs from each of the new Yes solo albums. It was never officially released, just sent to radio stations to help promote the albums featured. Fish Out of Water was represented by Hold Out Your Hand and Lucky Seven.
As everybody returned to Yes from their respective solo projects, they spent part of 1976 going out on a North American tour where everybody’s solo albums were represented with one track. Hold Out Your Hand represented Fish Out of Water, with Squire singing the lead vocal, usually to very enthusiastic audiences. A reviewer from Circus magazine wrote: “Some ten thousand people responded to the Squire tune with a standing ovation.”
Squire often started to prepare pieces for another solo album, but consistently found himself utilizing the material he came up with in Yes, as well as in band projects with Billy Sherwood and Steve Hackett. He had hoped to reunite with Jackman and work on one more project together, but such plans ended following Jackman’s death in 2003.
The loss of his friend made Squire nostalgic about his musical past again, and was what prompted him to start work on what turned out to be the second solo album under his own name in 2007. Once again he looked back at his choir days for inspiration, this time to released an album of Christmas songs, cheekily entitled Chris Squire’s Swiss Choir.
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