Flash
In The Can

In 1971, guitarist Peter Banks was kicked out of Yes due to serious drug problems and thus issues of reliability and performance. He was the one who found the name for the band and actively contributed to its assembly, playing on the first two decent but somewhat anonymous albums without personal infamy or praise, with a measured and not very brilliant style.

To replace him, Yes relied on Steve Howe and certainly did not regret it: with the following 'The Yes Album,' the greater talent of the new guitarist immediately shone, greatly accelerating the technical maturation process of his bandmates and the focus of the Yes project, with the quality and personality of the music experiencing an imperious surge that effectively and definitively propelled the band to take off.

Banks did not lose heart and reorganized, finding new musicians and a different but still swift and simple name for a new band: Flash, indeed. When the first Flash album was ready (late 1971), Yes had already gotten rid of the 'normal' keyboardist Tony Kaye, replacing him with the 'super' Rick Wakeman. Good old Kaye can be found lending a hand to Banks in the debut album (self-titled "Flash"), however, remaining as an external musician with secondary tasks. Banks evidently wanted to do everything with guitars, favoring a type of more spare and swinging progressive rock, far from the elephantine pseudo-symphonic structures towards which his former bandmates were running (and eventually getting somewhat bogged down in). When this second album came out the following year, there was no longer a trace of Tony Kaye. Flash was therefore a quartet with a classic structure: singer, guitarist, bassist, and drummer.

To do things right in an instrumental trio, lacking a second guitar as well as keyboards, it is essential that the rhythm section is tough, and Banks found people who were more than capable: Mike Hough was a commendable drummer, with agile and creative style, jazz-based, typical of people like Bill Bruford (Yes) or Phil Collins (Genesis): a fine musician, deserving of far better fortunes than those he encountered (who knows where he is now?). For the role of bassist, Banks hired a perfect clone of Yes's virtuoso Chris Squire, a certain Ray Bennett: the same dry and resolute tone on the instrument, the same brilliant and unpredictable solo excursions, a central and foundational role in the overall mix. Like Squire, Bennett also fulfilled the role of backup vocalist with occasional solo outings, however, in this case lacking the great qualities of his reference musician both in terms of timbre (his being very nasal and poor) and especially harmonic imagination in choirs (the peculiarity of the Yes sound owes much to the arranging capabilities of former choir singer Squire, a master at inventing fourths, sixths, ninths, and elevenths in abundance to impeccably harmonize the solo singing of his partner Jon Anderson).

The weak point of the group was precisely the lead voice: Colin Carter did passably well with a high and resonant timbre, nonetheless lacking charisma and charm. Even of this musician, traces were lost after the Flash experience, with fewer regrets certainly compared to the two rhythm section comrades. And the music then? A gritty and brilliant rock/progressive with jazz nuances, 'spare' as mentioned thanks to the absence of keyboards and Banks' preference for clean, slightly distorted timbres. The guitarist extensively leveraged the opportunity to overdub himself to surround the solid and agile progress of bass and drums with guitars coming from all over, with a studied and diversified tone thanks to the intensive use of wah-wah pedal, Leslie effect, reverb, etc. Flash's discography includes only three albums, recorded between 1971 and 1973 before the group was stripped of further opportunities by the record industry due to the usual insufficiency of sales. The most well-known and widespread album is the first, the best is the third ("Out Of Our Hands") but I chose this second work because it contains their masterpiece "Lifetime." It is a ten-minute-long piece located at the beginning of the work, signed by singer Carter but dominated by Banks, who here redeems himself greatly and definitively from the anonymous performances offered with Yes, remaining at the forefront from the first to the last second with his many guitars in action, both rhythm and especially solo. His jazz background allows him to pleasantly swing amid the folds of the song and in the generous solo curtains entrusted to him, even granting himself a 'diminished' solo towards the center of the piece (it is a very exotic harmonic scale where all notes are strictly distanced by a tone and a half), not exactly something everyone can grasp, as anyone who makes music with a certain application can understand. Truly a great song, successful and captivating, engaging and diverse in its various sections in the manner of suites, an example of dry and agile progressive that would have deserved greater fortune in those years, as an alternative to the pompous harmonic castles and hyper-romantic atmospheres exhibited successfully by other contemporaneous colleagues.

It is nice to listen to or re-listen to albums like these today, recorded freely, completely devoid of pressures towards commerciality, towards producing a 'single' and such pleasantries. Times when creativity and self-indulgence paid off (at least for a certain number of albums?), and so the Flash could afford in this endeavor suites longer than eleven minutes ("Black and White") alongside brief drum and percussion solos ("Stop That Banging", less than two fantastic minutes by Hough). The only concession to the market, the cover!