Steve Howe, guitarist and songwriter with Yes, talks to Jason Barnard about highlights from his legendary musical career.
Photo credit: Eric Schwab
One of the key reasons we are here today is to talk about your new album with The Steve Howe Trio New Frontier. How does New Frontier compare with your previous Steve Howe Trio albums?
Well, way back in 2008 we recorded The Haunted Melody and basically that was a selection of the kind of music that inspired us to get together in the first place which was Jimmy Smith, Kenny Burrell and some of my tunes – some alter tunes from Yes, even. So we kind of saw ourselves as arrangers, you know, take an idea, see how we do it, and keep it in that kind of jazzy, swingy sort of feel. But after all the touring and the live album Travelling we kind of felt that what we wanted to do was to show some development and growth for the band and therefore we thought we’d cut out any jazz standards and just keep it original music. So that’s what we did. We compiled all these different tunes and we set about arranging and recording them. Basically it’s another way we can use the band and use the talents within it so that we don’t kind of hark, too much, onto our… well, we’d love to admit that we love jazz but there again we want to play our own kind of music and I think that’s what that is. It’s more of the Trio’s own kind of music now.
It does seem to have more of that… There’s still a jazz element but there’s also a more proggy edge.
Yes.
Tracks like ‘Left to Chance’.
Yeah. Yeah. Very much. I’m glad you spotted that. That’s really kind of where we saw the branch which was easy to step over to is that kind of music that…. it’s hard to define what it is but it has our own original writings in it.
The Steve Howe Trio (Left to right: Dylan Howe, Steve Howe and Ross Stanley)
On the album there’s some of your own tracks like ‘Left to Chance’ but you’ve also written with Ross and your son Dylan.
Yeah.
How did the writing process compare in all those different scenarios?
Well, basically, I kind of threw out a conglomerate of ideas. I think there were six or seven ideas that I said, ‘Can we work these out?’, ‘Is this some starting places?’ and as we went through that course Ross said, ‘Oh, I’ve got this thing going here. What do you think about this as an intro or whatever?’ So we started to kind of grow the music so it wasn’t just, wasn’t just the way I’d originally… Well, it was never going to be the way I’d originally completed it. I didn’t want that. But it showed more opportunities for them to write as well as the other person that you haven’t mentioned yet, which is Bill Bruford. Do you want me to carry on with that? Basically, Bill gave me some tunes years and years ago. They gathered a bit of dust but in this writing period with the Trio I played a couple of these tunes to the guys and they went, ‘Oh wow. This is great. Let’s arrange this.’
So, again, we developed them and I suppose I, in particular, being one of the main single line players, kind of took those ideas on and developed them to which Bill wanted to share in the credit with me because he felt I had kind of brought them back into the frame by development.
The tracks that you’ve done with Bill are older tracks? Does that include material like ‘Gilded Splinter’?
Well, I mean, music in a way often gets buried. Some good stuff gets buried along the way. I don’t think there was a way Bill and I could have done those tunes earlier than this, strangely enough. I didn’t have a vehicle and Bill had kind of left them with me and they’d just sort of sat there. I’d messed – I’d doodled with them. But once the Trio got hold of them we were able to bring the melodies into line with the other things we were doing. So that’s how I’d explain that.
So which of the material from New Frontier are you most pleased with in terms of the outcome?
That’s a tough one. For different reasons you like the different tracks. I like the happy approach of ‘Fair Weather Friend’ but ‘The Changing Same’…
That was with Bill wasn’t it?
…was a development of that idea with Bill. But mainly the writing with the band helped me to explore what I didn’t think of in the first place which is those ingredients… so it’s really quite tough. I don’t know I have a favourite all round. I guess I like ‘Zodiac’ quite a lot just because it has a little bit more of The Haunted Melody feel. You know, so it’s a little bit more… But the tune is for me adopt the jazz styling in the cooler structure and also in the melody, so I like ‘Zodiac’.
So The Steve Howe Trio is a great way of taking one element of your influences, you know – a more jazz feel – and representing that today?
Yeah. But I think we didn’t feel… We didn’t want to feel that we were limited…
No.
… to stay hard-lined into this jazz thing. Having a name like Trio obviously does imply what is, very honestly, The Haunted Melody’s plot. I think now we’re a trio of a different ilk because we’ve moved across into the prog and rock thing quite comfortably without losing the roots at the soul of the band.
But across your career there’s different influences on your guitar playing that have come out including a song like ‘Clap’. Wasn’t it Chet Atkins who was a formative influence on you?
That’s right. Chet was a huge, huge influence because at the time when I was getting into all the guitar instrumentals and the great guitarists that preceded us particularly the Charlie Christian era, sort of post Charlie Christian – the Kenny Burrells and Tal Farlows – but basically Chet’s influence was very, very strong. But what it’s allowed me to do, and I think partly through my solo guitar performances and solo guitar tunes, that I stretched out really what music I could attempt to resolve quite nicely with these influences that I’ve had so strong. I saw Wes Montgomery when I was 16 or 17 so basically I saw him in person and that was really commanding for me to see somebody who was so happy. He was a very happy performer, smiled a lot, and basically blistered on the guitar. And Albert Lee and many other guitarists – Steve Morse, I could go on, Martin Taylor. I could almost not [chuckles] stop mentioning more guitarists who’ve pushed me on that little bit further when I’ve heard them and thought, ‘Wow. OK. I can do something like this.’ Or I’ve taken something from them, just in their enthusiasm.
I saw The Foo Fighters last night at Reading. I mean, that band, you know they really put the energy in. And I think there are different ways of doing that. When I thought about if you watch Yes and you watch Foo Fighters it’s a completely different world. I’m proud of what Yes do and the way we play, the sort of discipline and the frameworks we’re in. But a band like Foo Fighters is great fun and it’s great to see their energy. So I think the influences I took from the British guitarists Mick Green [Johnny Kidd and The Pirates / Billy J. Kramer with The Dakotas] and also Brian Griffiths [The Big Three] and particularly Albert Lee, before he really went country, was that there was a British style of guitar and I’m going to follow that. I’m going to be part of that. Brian May, you know, Eric Clapton. We could go on all day. We have a wealth of guitar inspirers in this country and I’m very proud to be even a small part of that.
In recent years I’ve spoken to Twink and Mark Wirtz. Obviously one of the bands you were in prior to Yes was Tomorrow. I’ve read that Roger McGuinn was an influence on you at the time. Is that true?
Yeah. Particularly Keith and I, well I mean I think Twink as well. By the time we were at Tomorrow, The Byrds were one of the most admired bands that there was around at that time from America. You had Buffalo Springfield. Crosby, Still and Nash were coming. But in a way The Byrds had such a sound, the 12-string, the Roger McGuinn thing and Tomorrow did play ‘Why’ which was just a simple song that we took from them. But we did admire them and we would have liked to emulate them but we had a different experience. As you say Mark was our producer. We just didn’t get that album finished in 1967 [chuckles] and it should have come out. But ‘My White Bicycle’ made enough of a …. was noticed enough to help the band be what it was which was a great opening act for [Pink] Floyd and Jimi Hendrix and Vanilla Fudge or The Move or Traffic even. We played with all the great bands of the time and we loved being there. Obviously, if we’d had that album out and we’d maybe had more of that material like ‘Revolution’ and ‘My White Bicycle’, it would have been even better.
And of course a few years later you joined Yes. It seemed, certainly when you joined for The Yes Album, and obviously Bill was part of that, that was a time when everyone was throwing ideas in rather than writing solo?
Absolutely. Yeah. I think we’d all been learning the craft of writing with other people and increasing our strengths through arrangement and enjoyment of music from sharing it with each other and being excited about hearing something from Jon [Anderson] or Chris [Squire] and going ‘Oh! Wow! Let’s play that. How are we going to play that?’ and it was a terrific learning curve and most probably out of my experiences in the ’60s, which was quite a lot of stuff, but once I got to The Yes Album I kind of really got on an adventure, partly of having a new guitar and playing and buying, not necessarily newly made, but each album featured, for a while, a different guitar. Relayer had the Telecaster, The Yes Album was the 175 [Gibson ES-175] which is really my classic guitar that I’ve never stopped playing. And it came out on – it’s used on all the albums I make because there are times when that’s the only guitar I can play.
On that album is ‘Yours Is No Disgrace’ and there’s that very famous guitar solo. It seemed such an ambitious time for you and the group.
I like the way you say that. Yeah. It was. I did used to remember Bill saying ‘I wish I knew what you were going to overdub there. I would have played differently.’ But, in fact, even I didn’t always know what I was going to overdub. But, no, that solo has got all the makings of shape and arrangement and a bit of melody. There’s enough melody to say well there’s a melody but often it isn’t. Often it’s improvisation, other times it’s the use of an effect like the wah-wah and basically that was a very colourful solo. Not dissimilar to ‘Siberian Khatru’ in a way where I start on the steel, I go to the guitar and in a way I was developing those kind of guitar solos where they weren’t fixed in one place. Here’s a guitar break. OK. He plays and then it ends and the song carries on. What I wanted was a guitar solo that started, went places, visited a few other stops, freely collecting things and then ends. So, I think that was a more complete… and it comes from the desire to arrange but also the desire to arrange that I can improvise and that’s basically quite a good example is ‘Yours Is No Disgrace’ of course.
By the time of Fragile did you feel that your confidence as a writer had increased because obviously there’s the song ‘Roundabout’ that you did with Jon. Were you more confident given you’d had more time in the band?
Absolutely. I guess I started song writing quite early on with The Syndicats. So the first B-side [‘True To Me’] was written by Steve Howe and Tom Ladd but I wasn’t that confident and I knew there was a craft to learn and by that time Yes were an open book, they were open to stuff and basically Fragile ventured to be even more… I don’t know what that word is, kind of the sound had to be… have something minimal about it even though it was quite busy. So even though Chris, on ‘Roundabout’, was playing furiously, somehow there was a calmness in that music that allowed his riff in the verses to be right and then we got, like, down to it. ‘Roundabout’ has a nice gettin’ down to it chorus where it’s kind of like a bit like grassroots rock that anything else. We should have always… If you look at Tormato – there’s very much less of that on Tormato of that kind of, well, Yes rock out. A bit like we did on ‘South Side of the Sky’ [from Fragile]. A bit like we did on other albums but at that time we were really good at that. And, obviously, Bill being in the group was an absolute gem.
One of the albums that is many people’s favourites is Close to the Edge. Tracks like ‘And You and I’. One of the elements I think it was the eclipse of ‘And You and I’ featured pedal steel and that’s a guitar that keeps coming up across your career.
Well thanks for mentioning it. I adore the steel. At that point it was just what we might call Hawaiian steel or a lap steel. It’s only when I got to ‘To Be Over’ from Relayer that I actually ventured onto the pedal steel. It’s more intricate and it’s more for melodic sounds. Great for chordal work as well. From Fragile onwards and Close to the Edge onwards particularly, I started to introduce the steel guitar in a kind of… well a very unusual sort of way. I was learning. I’d played a little bit of steel in the ’60s but once I started collecting and I found the Fender steel that I liked so much for its bright clear sparkly sound, then that’s what started to appear as it does on, as you say, on ‘And You and I’ and that developed quite a lot on stage but also on ‘Khatru’ in those kind of moments where I could do that. So, yeah, I’m happily always, when somebody says ‘If you’ve got a steel idea’ or ‘What about if you played it on the steel?’ You know, I’m there. Often I think, ‘I’ll play that on the steel’ enough times but I’ve got tracks like ‘The Collector’ from my album Quantum Guitar which is, besides a rhythm guitar, is all steel and pedal steel so basically I love steels.
It started with Speedy West who was a steel guitarist in his own right back in the ’50s with Jimmy Bryant on guitar. Basically they were the super hot pickers on a lot of early Tennessee Ernie [Ford] / [Tex] Williams hillbilly kind of music. But then I discovered that this influence even got to Bill Haley. I guess I heard steels really a lot when you heard Bill Haley. He had a guy who just kind of went ‘deeyong’ every so now and again. But it was so dynamic. I want to have that dynamism. What I’ve always been doing is like for instance on my 175 I don’t do a lot of bending and I don’t go crazy on it. I play the guitar. You know, I’m a guitarist. I have these other things that you can only do on steels or whether it’s a Portuguese guitar or acoustics. When you want a Spanish you have to play a Spanish because otherwise you haven’t got that emotive sort of almost desperately melancholy sound. So I like the guitar family as an array of textures. I don’t play the mandolin much but I do love playing bass even though I often get other people to play bass as well because I think that’s really, really great. Moving across the family of guitars would sum me up. If somebody said that’s what Steve did, I think I’d be happy with that description. [chuckles]
And you mentioned the range of guitars that you’ve played. One of the most famous guitar solos that you did was with Queen on ‘Innuendo’ and that amazing flamenco guitar solo. How did you get involved on that?
Yeah. Yeah. I love talking about this. I was in a cafe in Montreux. I’d been working with my friend Paul Sutin in Geneva and I think I’d driven there and I was in a cafe – a guy went by and he looks at me and goes ‘Steve!’ You know, he comes in and goes, ‘We’re just down the road in the studio.’ Of course I knew the studio as it was where we’d made Going for the One and so I said, ‘The guys are in the studio? Oh great! Come in.’ By the time I’d got there they’d schemed up something so ‘Hi Steve. Sit down…’ Freddie was great – and Brian [May] and Dave Richards, the engineer at the time. So, basically, we were sitting there and they said, ‘We want to play you the album.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got time. Play me the album.’ But they saved ‘Innuendo’ until the end. So they played ‘Innuendo’ and when it finished they said, ‘You know that middle bit was… what Brian was doing?’ I said, ‘Yeah. Lovely, lovely, lovely.’ They said, ‘Well we want you to play on that.’ ‘What’s that? You don’t need anything else,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it there?’ ‘No, no, no. What we hear is a bit of Paco de Lucia.’ ‘Well, look, I’m a normal guy – I’m not Paco de Lucia.’ ‘But you can go there. You can improvise.’
So basically that’s what happened. They set me up to just sort of just improvise across the beautiful structure that Brian May had played. But what happened was they turned and there were three guitars, called Gibson Chet Atkins models and they’re a Spanish guitar, the first ever solid body Spanish guitar. So they have a very unique sound. It’s kind of nicely plonky. It’s not like your classical sound but wow it’s great for playing single lines on. So they said, ‘Choose one of those, plug you in, and off you go’. So, we did a few takes and we didn’t really know what was there. Freddie said, ‘Let’s go to dinner.’ We went to dinner. ‘Don’t go to Mexico. They threw bottles at us.’ I said, ‘Really? I haven’t been there yet.’ So we come back from dinner and he says, ‘Well, let’s comp this.’ So basically we listen to two or three takes and just created the best version of those bits. So, I left really on an up. This was great. Playing with Queen? Give me a break, this was fantastic. So, when it came out, I got a thank-you letter and a credit and I was in heaven. Great.
That’s brilliant. And just to close, I wondered if… as this is an audio podcast, I wondered if there’s a track that you’d like to have as the final track? A track that’s maybe not appreciated. One of my favourites is ‘Sketches in the Sun’ [originally on the eponymous GTR album] but you may have another. Is there a particular favourite that you feel should get an airing?
What – from all of my solo career?!?
Yeah.
Well that’s a lovely, lovely question. Let me think for a second. I’m very, very fond of – it might be unusual but I think I mentioned it earlier. I don’t know. ‘The Collector’ from Quantum Guitar. Quantum Guitar and Spectrum are mostly when Dylan and I just really do big collaborations on masses of tracks and we get there. I mean, it’s a pretty little track. You know, but for me, like you mentioned the steel guitar, this is all over steel guitar, this is loads of them and a few other little effects but I like ‘The Collector’.
Well, brilliant! Let’s close on that and all the best, Steve, with the release of your new album with The Steve Howe Trio New Frontier. It’s been a delight to listen to that album and talk about a selection of tracks from your career and most importantly to you. So thank-you so much.
Well thank-you Jason. You’ve been very sweet and nice to talk to you and thank-you very much. Thank-you.
The Steve Howe Trio’s new album New Frontier will be released by Esoteric Antenna on 27 September 2019 and is available on CD and 180g vinyl formats.
A podcast version of this interview is available here.
Additional research and interview transcript provided by Nigel Davis.
