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Interview with Steve Howe
By George Roldan and Rick Woodward
P4Y: Hello. Steve Howe
STEVE: Speaking.
P4Y: Mr. Howe, how are you? My
name is George Roldan and I'm from Prog4you.com.
STEVE: Okay.
P4Y: And I also have with me on
the line Rick Woodward, one of my associates.
RICK: Hi Steve.
STEVE: Hi.
RICK: It's a pleasure, sir. I'm a
big Yes fan from way back, but I'm sure that you've heard that a few times before?
STEVE: Yes.
P4Y: We were sent by Chipster
Entertainment to do an interview with you.
STEVE: That's right.
P4Y: How are you today?
STEVE: Okay.
P4Y: It's early morning there, I
take it?
STEVE: Yeah. It's half past 10.
P4Y: It's a little past 1:30 here
on the east coast. We're talking to you here out of Philadelphia.
STEVE: Right.
P4Y: Well, if you know anything
about our website, we're a fledgling website called Prog4you.com and we deal
specifically with progressive rock.
STEVE: Good.
P4Y: And that's why we're here
today.
STEVE: Yeah.
P4Y: We want to ask you some
questions about the brand new album that you have out with InsideOut Records, Skyline.
STEVE: Right.
P4Y: And that's basically what we
want to talk about today. Steve, considering your first song Skyline, where did you
take that magnificent rainbow shot for the cover of Skyline?
 STEVE: In Vancouver on top of the Armory Studio. We were working with colleagues on the record and I was shooting pictures just by chance one day and then
a storm came and that was one of about seven or eight pictures that I took that day
of that particular weird skyline with a double rainbow; very dark.
P4Y: Were you looking for this or
did this happen to come by chance? I mean this is not something that you set
yourself up to do.
STEVE: Well, photography is
something that I build into my time, you know. If I got a camera ready, you know,
I might get some good shots, so very often I do have a camera. But I mean it's not
something that I can always do. I love taking pictures. It started with just
taking my family pictures and then eventually I started taking countryside and
obscure pictures.
P4Y: It
turned out to be quite nice, actually. And on your latest creation, Skyline, I
notice that you have a keyboardist by the name of Paul Sutin.
STEVE: Paul Sutin.
P4Y: Right. How did you meet him
and how did you decide to have him play on your album?
 STEVE: Well, we've been collaborating for a few years. We first met when he was
doing a record in the late 80's, and it was called Seraphin, (1988) and I did a bit of a guesting
on that. And then we collaborated in the 90's on an album called Voyagers,
(1995) which
was a real joint record between both of us. And, you know, we were getting on quite
well, so we started to work on some more tracks about three years ago, and I just --
I just sensed that this was the kind of mood that I wanted. You can't always
predict what mood you are going to get, if you know what you get when you work with
certain people. But it's a great indication, you know. I went along with
the idea that Paul was the right guy for this record. And he's on eight of the
tracks and I do four myself, so he's a free-wheeling sort of collaborator/writer,
does his mini keyboards and percussion stuff, and just a good friend as well. So it
just means that when I go to Geneva, and WorldCom Music is a great environment and
it's a very helpful situation to have somewhere to cope sometimes, when either of you have exhausted your
possibilities in one place.
P4Y: And what qualities did you like to make sure went
into one of your Steve Howe compositions on this album?
STEVE: Well, I mean the
quality I was looking for is a relaxed melodic, and not heavy in the rhythm sense, a
very light sort of flavoring of rhythm, more than the old ship building air drums
and things. I just went and I tried to make a moodier sort
of laid back record that I could.
P4Y: Yes. It's one of those for
me, it would be a Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon sit down, have some tea and listen to this music. It's quite comforting, actually.
RICK: Steve, how did the titles for the tracks on Skyline come about? Does the
idea come to you as you are playing?
 STEVE: Well, not usually. Titles are like lyrics; they are a bit of work you do
later on, and some of the titles -- I don't think any of titles were originally
there, and they weren't really. Pretty much all of those titles were cleaned up as
we went along. And Paul would give me a completely free hand on the things we
collaborated on, and I would see fit to, you know, complete the cycle by being as
industrious as I can and doing all of those things that are like the loose ends on
an album, and if it's your album, you do those yourself. That's a lot of fun; a
lot of pleasure. I get a lot of pleasure doing titles. I don't really know why,
but I like the idea, I like the idea that I can design or foresee or aid track
setting quality by giving it a title that sort of sums it up. Meridian Strings, I
think, was one of the first tracks, you know, I remember titling on this album.
Some of the other ones, just sometimes they do just literally come about gradually,
particularly something like Small Acts of Human Kindness. I'd been around a few
other titles, but other than lack of general direction, until I took those words to
that tune and then I had a look back. So it's just really a wonderful moment when
you -- like Secret Arrow. Paul kind of went, ahh yeah, that's cool, you know.
They just come; they are little gifts from up above; you think that really fits,
just getting the feeling that it fits. Simplification was a send up of
Magnification, but I was having a bit of a fun with the complexity of Magnification
as a record for Yes to make was pretty enormous and it took a few -- everything
took a bit of a bashing doing that record. So I thought, you know, Simplification
is just one guitar primarily until the steel guitars join in later at the end. Basically,
it's about as simple as you can get.
P4Y: Steve, you also played bass on Skyline. Did you have to work on that, or did
you pick it up easily since every guitarist thinks he can also be a bass player?
STEVE: Yeah, well, I've been dabbling with my bass parts since 1975 really. When I
did Beginnings some bass players said to me, you are a bit guitaristic,
meaning, that you think like a guitarist on a bass. Sometimes I found it
very cohesive making; it makes a cohesive front when you have whole bank of
guitars. And I always played bass, so this was by no means my first excursion into
it. But having said that, some of the bass parts were originally on a keyboard that
Paul had started to invent. So I had a really good starting off point with things
like Avenue De Bel Air and Camera Obscura. There was already a bass part in
existence that I wanted to make human, take away from mini par and the mid sound as
well, which I didn't like at all. So I wanted a bass guitar. You can't do much
better than have a real instrument playing guitar. So I took it apart and colored it
just a little. Like, for instance, on Avenue De Bel Air, I made it a little more
racey, moved it around an octave sometimes, just slightly reinvented it.
But other tracks like Acts of Human Kindness are not so really busy in the bass, you
know. They are more simple.
P4Y: Do you feel that your music can be utilized to reach people and give them a
more positive perspective?
 STEVE: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, one hopes your music has some value and does
something for somebody. I guess with the kind of audiences that we had as a
collective entity we've had a sort of branch effect where members like John and I
have gone off and done our own records. It's kind of cornered part of that market,
a part of that direction. And yeah, of course, you know, if we can bring a
little pleasure and show a little expansion. Because, I think, you know, Yes records
come and go and they have their own meter. And my own sort of creativity, as
far as doing solo albums, has kind of upped the ante since the 90's, and I don't
feel obliged to do one every year. But if I can every one to two years I will
try and get my energy around that and believe that I'm not just a member of Yes; I'm
a guitarist who has a certain destiny of collaborating with other people outside of
Yes and also ability to play on my own, which I featured on Natural Timbre. And my solo shows where I walk out on the stage on my own and do a
whole lot of stuff mixing from, you know, acoustic, country picking to
semi-classical guitar and also electric; I stick a bit of rock 'n roll in there too
if I can.
P4Y: Expanding on that a bit, Steve, do you feel that you are able to expand
your boundaries and improvisational work on your solo works more than, say, with Yes,
Asia or GTR?
STEVE: Well, I mean yes, opportunities to do improvisation are very important to me
and, you know, they are very exciting, but of course I can create more on my own, and
certainly within Skyline, it was a vehicle for improvisation. All of my music is to
some extent. And this one was to a slightly larger extent and that pleases me
because I feel that as a player that that's a very important part of my work. It's
not just all of my writing is improvisation in itself, but rather more formularized
and structured than, say, when you have a structure. Then you say well, I don't
know what I'm going to do here, but I'll think of something, and you don't actually
think of something, you just play something, and then you keep playing until you
like what you hear.
P4Y: Right. That was my next question. How did the songs from this new album take form then?
 STEVE: Well, in two different ways, really. The ones that are, are if I got a
finished album or a promo album. But on the finished album, obviously, you've got
to see the writing. You can see how much Paul's involvement is in certain tracks
and other ones just written by me. The ones written by me, I construct those and do
them in the same way that I've written all of my music. There is not really a
formula to write my music. It's really at different times I get more organized
about writing music. And now with mini discs, there is a lot of enablement to
really get
organized; to get ideas, put maybe 120 ideas on one mini disc, and actually write
about them in a book. So you know exactly whether it's a fast rift, up tempo,
rock, jazzy, smooth. You give them little titles. In that way you start a catalog
of sort of material. But when I write with Paul, I tend to go over to Geneva and
we'll sit around and we'll see if he's got a tape he wants to play me or whether
we've got a structure already that's up and running that he doesn't know what to do
with or he'd like me to take on. So sometimes the collaborations with Paul are
slightly different, where he'll initiate them much like I do on my stuff. But then
he'll want me to make decisions on it and come up, furthering of the idea, so in a
way he writes half of the idea but the rest of it is sort of unknown territory. So
I invent that territory and I take the tune on. That means as a writer I'm not always
writing from the ground up, which I like doing, but it does balance my writing,
working with somebody. A lot of writers do this. All of the people have their own
ideas and then we collaborate; that's how Steve Hackett and I write, will write, on
the GTR album. Surely, we wrote it together, but a lot of it was putting ideas
together that we already had and it's that union of agreement, of seeing the same
pictures and same potential and saying, if you put that chord with this idea, what
do you think? And the other guys go, yeah. It's those moments that you realize
that's how much fun writing is. Further down the line things can get harder and
trickier and ideas can come and go, but the initial stages, it's very beautiful that
you've really got this collaboration actually happening in front of your eyes.
P4Y: Being a self taught guitarist, I've always been amazed that you mastered so
many different styles of playing. Did you start out by imitating other guitarists'
work or basically doing your own thing from the beginning? And, did you teach
yourself also to read music?
 STEVE: Well, I mean my learning curve was that, yeah, I mimic other guitarists.
But attempting to take something from other guitarists was a reasonably natural
thing for me to do. I thought that's all I can do. And I listened to people and
friends and I discussed whether we could really do two things at once or whether
it was a recording. Much like you see in Les Paul coming along with dazzling recordings. We didn't
know whether that was the same kind of animal. But he certainly wasn't. And the
revelations about different guitarists was a constant flow in my life
between friends I knew and my own research. I was determined to find
obscure guitarists and finding out about guitarists I'd heard of but hadn't yet
heard, getting record collections. Yeah, I was in awe with other guitarists, but the
first thing I wanted to do was learn something to play. The first guy, I guess, was
people like Hank Marvin from the Shadows who was reasonably easy to take his ideas.
They were straightforward ideas, pure ideas, you know. There weren't too many
surprises in there. But then again, it was a new challenge for me to do that. But
after that, I started on more adventurous music, and I wanted to play, be able to
play music in different styles. And this helped me formulate what I guess is my own
story; that is a cross breed of all of styles. In the 70's when I started
searching out different instruments, looking for different sounds, it all brought me
back to realize that I had the sound that I wanted. I was getting the sort of
personality, some personality, into my path, and it was really just a question of
taking influences. And when I say that, it doesn't mean to say that these are some
of the issues that I'm influenced by. It's kind of a slightly hazardous area
because you could be saying, I'm so influenced by this person and I actually play like
this. And I'll see what one is doing with an influence, saying that I would like to
be influenced, I hope to take on something. So in a way, it's a lot about what colors you
show and how much you can be an interpreter. I think being a writer is slightly
like being an interpreter; you have some ideas, you know, emotionally. They are
your own ideas but they might be quite influenced again by other people you enjoy.
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