Top 60 Chris Squire Quotes

Not many people know this, but when Yes first started doing club dates back in 1968, ’69, we did a few tracks from ‘The Magic Garden’ album in our set. We just loved the harmonies that the 5th Dimension had as well.

Yes’s whole career was never really planned in any sort of way. It’s always sad when a member leaves, but it’s exciting when someone new comes in, and that regenerates the freshness of the band.

There’s always the joy of the performance and fine-tuning new interpretations. Over the years, we’ve all grown as musicians, so obviously there is a lot of subtlety that wasn’t there in the first place.

Back in the day, the album was king in many ways. And, of course, we were very tied in with the birth of FM/college radio in the States, and what we were doing suited the format of those young radio stations.

I think what the story of Yes has been is we’ve wandered in and out of different styles over the years.

I was working in a music store in London, and this particular place happened to be the importers for Rickenbacker guitars into England. So I started seeing these basses coming in.

The other guys and myself have agreed that Billy Sherwood will do an excellent job of covering my parts, and the show as a whole will deliver the same Yes experience that our fans have come to expect over the years.

People are used to us being onstage for a while.

Steve Hackett is a very underrated writer and actually a very good singer.

Yes is what I like doing more than anything else. Somewhere along the way, as people came and went, it fell to me to kind of keep it going and oversee the spirit of the enterprise, as it were.

We’ve never been to Israel. I’d like to play in Israel.

I’ve been called the journeyman. It’s really more by default than it is by design.

I would work with Trevor Horn any day of the week. I have a great relationship with him.

Over the years, Yes actually made 20 albums of original studio material.

I’ve always been a great believer that you have to keep producing new things in order to keep life interesting – not only for ourselves, but for the audience as well. That’s really always been our principle and way of working.

I like working with modern sounds in the studio as much as I’m happy to work with a basic rock n’ roll format.

I have never played anything live – except for a few special occasions – from ‘Fish Out of Water.’

I like the Foo Fighters a lot – apart from them being friends of mine as well. They’re definitely a fantastic live act to see: so much energy and possibly even bigger in Europe than they are in the U.S., and that’s great.

Jon Anderson and I, we really liked a lot of classical music, and we wanted to get some orchestral arrangements going on ‘Time And A Word.’

I thought, ‘Wow, if we could have a career that was five or six years long, that would be fantastic.’ And, of course, never even thinking it would still be something I’d be doing in 45 years.

Touring is a tough business.

The fact I’ve been in every lineup of Yes has been more by default than design.

Philly has always been one of our favorite towns to play in, and the fans have been very loyal and very supportive over the years.

Everyone enjoys downtime at home, I’m sure, for various reasons, but I find the whole system of being out there and doing shows for people – the more of it you do, in fact the more energizing it is, for me individually.

I wouldn’t object to working with any former member of Yes, really.

We started Yes as a vehicle to develop everyone’s individual styles.

I think the first three Rickenbacker basses were imported around 1964. Pete Quaife, the bassist for The Kinks, bought one. Then John Entwistle from The Who bought one. As for the third one, I asked the manager of the store if I could get an employee discount. He said I could, and so I picked up that one.

Pull the good out of it and not worry about the drawbacks.

I guess I’ve become very accustomed to playing in the 7/4, which is something we’ve done quite a lot.

The band will be going along, and somebody or another will say, ‘I want to go off and do a solo career.’… They come back, and other people come in.

Strangely enough, ‘I’ve Seen All Good People’ is, I think, the second most played Yes song on American radio after ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart.’ And then I think ‘Roundabout’ is third.

‘90125’ was our biggest-selling album worldwide.

Persistence is a pretty important part of making it in this business, which, in retrospect, is the easy part. Maintaining a profile is the difficult part of the job. Somehow or another, I muddled through that system and somehow am around to still enjoy playing for people.

Because of all the various people who’ve come in and out and brought along ideas, I’ve been on a learning curve throughout all these years. Of course, everyone that’s been involved has influenced me as well. And I’m grateful for that.

Being called a ‘music legend’ is a very funny thing. It’s nice to know that my work has been appreciated and that people have given me that status. On a personal level, however, I can’t think about it too much. It means a lot… but then it doesn’t.

Steve Howe met Paul Simon and said that Paul was very approving of our version of ‘America.’

Rick Wakeman and Jon Anderson have rejoined and gone off again and rejoined, but I’ve been there the whole time, and even though Alan White is the ‘new’ drummer, he has been there since 1972, so he also deserves the credit for being around for 20 years.

It’s not beyond the possibility that there still could be a YES in 200 years’ time… of course with different members, unless the medical profession comes up with something extraordinary.

I learned to do a few tricks that other people hadn’t done before. I developed that trebly bass thing a little further.

‘Onward’ was a song I wrote in Montreux, in Switzerland, when we were there camping out for the whole winter. In the summer, Montreux is a really, really big summertime-touristy, full-of-life kind of place. In the winter, it closes down.

On our studio album ‘Fly From Here’ in 2011, we spent a year and a half promoting that around the world.

The great thing about Yes is that it has always been flexible.

We did do the whole of the live suite from ‘Fly From Here,’ and that was very enjoyable to do. In fact, that is actually our longest piece of music, I think, that we’d ever done.

In many ways, I think about the possibility that there could still be a Yes in 100 or 200 years from now, just like a live symphony orchestra.

I hope, after I’m gone, there will still be a Yes.

I’ve had to replace parts in the basses when they’ve gotten old or worn out, so everything isn’t absolutely original.

In many ways I think ‘Fly From Here’ is a return to classic Yes; people seem to have been really enjoying it, integrated into the set along with the old material.

I really believe that the aliens are us from the future. It seems to me a very plausible reason that explains a lot of phenomena as opposed to green men with one eye from outer space.

We’ve done very different Yes albums – 11 bars, 13. I think we had something that had 17/4 in it. It’s just like anything – the more you do it, the more you have to do it.

I think partly the problem with Yes – and I’ve had this discussion with people from the Hall of Fame in the past – is that it’s going to be difficult to decide how many of the members of Yes you’re gonna put in it and how many you’re not because of the extensive membership of the band through the years.

The way Yes works is when we have a new member come in, as in Jon Davison, it’s appropriate that we see what differences we can get out of a new contributing member in order to keep Yes interesting.

‘Drama’ was put together quickly; there were a lot of intense, 16-hour days. Despite the pressure, it was a lot of fun, and the end result was an album I’m very proud of.

The Seventies were just an interesting time for us because we were building the brand of the name but also varying the style of the music on each of the albums we did. Very creative time of us.

All movies, when they’re about the music business, tend to have a bit of a wide latitude in terms of how things really were.

With how huge Yes was, especially in the ’70s and ’80s, as a touring band and actually playing at the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia to 130,000 people, which is the biggest-paying show ever in rock history, you would think we’d done enough for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A nightmare is two bassists on stage.

I was a big Who fan when I was 15, 16 years old, and I used to go watch them play at the Marquee Club in London as often as I could.

Look how far the human race has come in terms of air and space travel in the last hundred years. So in the next couple of thousand years, you’ve got to believe that we’re going to be able to do all kinds of amazing things.

Usually, when we go out, it’s because we made a new studio album, and that becomes the focus of the tour throughout the world for a year or so.

‘Close to the Edge’ is the album where we first attempted to do the extra-long-form piece of music, having one song taking up the whole side of a piece of vinyl.