Flash
Out Of Our Hands

On the seventh of March this year, the sixty-five-year-old British guitarist Peter Banks died of a heart attack at his home on the outskirts of London. Many fans of the progressive band Yes know who he was, but I believe only a minority of them associate him with the right degree of esteem, due to the fact that his guitar, featured on the first two albums of the group, was treated very poorly in the mixing, indeed it can be well said to have been sabotaged in the second one "Time And A Word".

In the band put together by Peter following his replacement with Steve Howe in Yes, this band called Flash, the guitarist instead went on to great success, redeeming himself bravely. I will then take it upon myself to say a few words about him, relying on this third and final release (1973) of the quartet in which he was a great protagonist.

Banks was the one who coined the name Yes among other things, giving his best and building a good reputation with valid live performances, only to gradually become demotivated and step back, overshadowed by the despotic character of frontman Jon Anderson. His clean style, with a jazzy swing and not at all pretentious, did not pair well with bandmates full of a desire to overdo it, layering parts upon parts and loading music and lyrics with increasingly esoteric and pompous concepts.

With the quartet of Flash (without a main keyboardist) Peter managed to pick up where the early Yes left off: still progressive music, articulated and super arranged but fluid and "light", seeking groove rather than grandeur, without classical tendencies or grandiloquence, especially without flaunting philosophically new age lyrics. He was helped by an excellent drummer named Mike Hough, with much more swing than ex-bandmate Bill Bruford, let's say in the manner of Phil Collins, and even more a powerful and melodic bassist with a style identical to that of Chris Squire, named Ray Bennett, finally a frontman without the pure and piercing timbre of the much-criticized Jon Anderson, but at least more available and humble, such as Colin Carter.

The absence of keyboards is compensated by Banks arranging his instrument through numerous overdubs. The guitar, almost always distorted and affected with extreme moderation, pops up everywhere in the sound spectrum with a myriad of interventions and counterpoints... the rhythm section keeps the course steady. All three instrumentalists play really well, creative and cohesive, only Carter's voice is anything but epochal, but the style and timbre are very personal and thus fully characterize the group.

The best album of the three is probably the second "In The Can," thanks to the masterpiece opening "Lifetime," ten truly fiery minutes, but this "Out Of Our Hands" also holds its own well. It takes a while to get going, with the first three tracks being short and somewhat bland; things begin to rise with the moderate jazz inserts of the fourth track "Man Of Honour" and then definitively soar with a compact series of mini-suites with imaginative titles ("The Bishop," "Psychosync," "Manhattan Mornings") each more beautiful than the last, with Bennett's gnarly bass creating rhythm and melody together and Banks' thousand little guitars embellishing everywhere.

Final note for the cover, a modest creation by Hipgnosis, the London graphic studio then very much in vogue thanks to celebrated work for Pink Floyd, Genesis, ELP, Black Sabbath, Yes, Led Zeppelin, and many others. The cover of "Houses Of The Holy" by Zeppelin is partially recycled on the occasion: in the middle of an original, but chromatically ineffective landscape made of hand backs (hills), fingers (trees), and some breasts (huts), emerges a pair of the same blond dolls that had been much more effectively immortalized a few months earlier climbing the magnificent Giant's Causeway cliffs in Northern Ireland.