Many years ago I bought this bootleg vinyl at a record fair. It was a live recording of Yes at Wembley Arena during their 1978 Tormato tour. This was in an era of very limited access to music other than official album releases, tours and the occasional television appearance depending on the music so obviously Yes were not exactly mainstream.

That said! This was actually taken from a BBC recording of the show so the quality is, by bootleg standards remarkably good. What I didn’t realise at the time was that Time and a Word and Don’t Kill the Whale featured on this album were also on the official Yesshows, the band’s second live album.

Yesshows is a compilation of tracks from their shows in London, Rotterdam, Frankfurt and Detroit so this was still worth having and in particular for the great album artwork by the artist Rodney Matthews who was commissioned to paint it in 1975 by Big O Posters. So they pinched that as well!! Matthews was a very well known artist in the field of fantasy art, his posters sold in huge numbers and his art featured on albums by Asia, Rick Wakeman, Nazareth and Magnum as well as featuring in Michael Moorcock’s Elric series.

This tour featured their best known lineup (Bruford fans are free to contest) and featured tracks from their final album together. Tormato is an entirely forgettable album and a hugely disappointing follow-up to their masterpiece Going for the One. But live it was a different story, each member of this band was at the top of their respective instruments, particularly Wakeman so this album does not disappoint.

I actually own/ed very few bootlegs, I am not sure if that was through guilt or that I spent what little money I had on official releases , perhaps a combination of the two. But most were not great quality and appealed only to those die hard fans desperate for any new material by their favourite artist. I am reminded of the time Neil Young walked into a record store in America and bought a bootleg of his own concert! He was filmed challenging the shop worker who then put him on the phone to the owner. Young was, quite rightly, annoyed at others profiteering from his workers but God knows he’s made up for it in recent years releasing any number of old live recordings.

With the arrival of the smartphone and the trend now at concerts to stand there holding your phone to make a crappy recording you won’t ever do anything with rather than actually enjoy the experience in the moment, bootlegs are a thing of the past in most quarters which is no bad thing. Artists earn less than ever for their work thanks to streaming so a wrong has been, to some degree put right.

We have come a long way since the days of smuggling a bulky cassette recorder into a concert to make an awful bootleg. Now there are endless photos and videos and it begs the question does anyone actually go to a concert for the immersive experience anymore? Somehow I doubt it.

See also Yessongs