1981. No Yes

In January 1981, with the Drama tour at an end, Yes met at Steve Howe's house in Hampstead. Reports of this meeting vary, couched in diplomacy. Howe suggests that there was a mutual split, with Horn intending to work on the next Buggles album and Squire and White announcing plans to form a bandwith Jimmy Page following the dissolution of Led Zeppelin. In his own autobiography, however, Horn suggests that he was effectively fired. Howe reports that he and Downes were left holding the band's name and had no will to continue. Manager Brian Lane, who took some of the blame for the band's most recent issues, lost Yes, and Yes lost their contract with Atlantic by default. Lane would hang around as defacto manager of the band members except Horn, for a while at least, and would reap the rewards when he managed Asia to worldwide success in 1982. Yes were effectively over as a band and would stay that way for the next two and a half years.

Page was part of the same rock star community as Squire, living in Berkshire, while Squire lived in Virginia Water in Surrey, and had cooked up plans to form a band with Squire following a Christmas party the previous year. Given how early in 1981 the Yes meeting happened, it's highly unlikely that the collaboration with Page - and White's participation - was solidified at that point.

Indeed, in an interview with Squire's friend Dave Lawson by Page biographer Martin Power in his book No Quarter: The Three Lives Of Jimmy Page, it is confirmed that following the perceived failure of the Drama tour, Squire had lost his mojo for some weeks. 'He'd got into a certain [unrevealed] substance and was only getting up at three in the afternoon', reports Lawson.

Gradually, Lawson, Squire and then White began working up some songs at Squire's house New Pipers, with no specific plan in mind. By February, the (seemingly) casual plan that Squire and Page had formulated the year before developed when Page joined the project, working mainly on songs written by Squire, with some riffs by the guitarist. Indeed, the few months that White and Squire rehearsed with Page as part of XYZ are the stuff of legend. Page was initially enthusiastic, and the trio produced several demos. Within months, however, the relationship began to fall apart, scuppered by both musical and managerial disagreements. Initially, Page had cleaned up his somewhat hedonistic act, shocked by the loss of both Zeppelin drummer John Bonham and Robert Plant's son. But gradually, he began to fall back into old habits. Furthermore, neither Lane nor Peter Grant, Zeppelin's manager, could agree on any sort of managerial or financial policy, and the relationship fell apart.

While XYZ never recorded an album, it's clear that the two former Yes men had music in mind that was a little more contemporary in tone, even compared to the energetic prog of Drama. While some pieces from those rehearsals would wind up on later Yes albums, the Squire song 'Telephone Secrets', which never found a home with Yes, shows a band combining musical chops with commercial aspirations. This would become the template for their new band, Cinema.

At a loose end once more, Squire and White recorded a Christmas single, 'Run With The Fox', released towards the end of 1981, something of an unsung classic in the Yuletide sing-along genre, but entered 1982 at another loose end.

Meanwhile, in the early part of 1981, a boyishly good-looking South African guitarist called Trevor Rabin was also at something at a crossroads. Rabin, who was from a liberal family, had grown up in the Apartheid era. He told the author:

I was acutely aware of everything that was happening in South Africa. It was a really strange time, but when I was growing up, there was a real effort to make things feel normal, even though there was a huge amount of segregation. These things were especially noticeable because my father was very liberal-leaning and my family was very involved in the anti-Apartheid struggle. My uncle was Sir Sydney Kentridge, who was Nelson Mandela's lawyer and prosecuted on behalf of Steve Biko's family, and one of my first bands was called Freedom's Children. I wrote a political song called 'State Of Fear', which didn't make me very popular, as you might guess. When I first moved to London, I had a call from Peter Gabriel. I thought, 'Oh wow, I didn't think things would happen this quickly.' But, in fact, he wanted to ask about my other uncle, Donald Woods, who wrote the book Cry Freedom about his escape from South Africa.

In the same interview, Rabin discussed his musical influences. Although he was no stranger to progressive rock, he came from a different musical background to Steve Howe, and being a generation later, his heroes came from a different tradition to the older guitarist:

Amongst the white South Africans, American music wasn't very big. We believed that the real rock music came from Britain. For me, my first influences were Led Zeppelin and Cream and I always looked upon Jimi Hendrix as being English because that's where he first broke as a star. But I was also really into jazz. My Dad was the leader of the Johannesburg Symphony, and because of that background, I could read music before I could read English. But, of course, I was a kid, so I wanted to go off to play rugby. I just wasn't allowed until I'd done an hour's piano practice!

Rabin had originally been in the talented band Rabbitt, who had found fame in their native South Africa, but after two albums, he realised that moving to London might provide a bigger audience for his music. He describes his motivations:

The political situation was a big part of it, but as much as anything, it was because we were a big fish in a small pond - our success was limited to South Africa and Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe]. I wanted to stretch myself and try something else. The band were nervous about that, so I went alone.

Rabin signed to Chrysalis, who reissued his eponymous first solo album, and two others - Face To Face and the grittier Wolf. The latter, despite session work from the likes of Simon Phillips and Jack Bruce, failed to make much impression, with Rabin perhaps not quite heavy enough to appeal to fans of the nascent New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, despite his obvious talent. Rabin was dropped by Chrysalis, although he still had some irons in the fire, producing albums by hard rock band Wild Horses and Manfred Mann's Earth Band.

Undaunted, Rabin started looking for another solo deal but was soon approached by John Kalodner. Kalodner was the first A&R executive at Geffen Records, the label set up by former Asylum executive David Geffen in 1980. The first album the label released was The Wanderer by Donna Summer, but it struck gold (indeed platinum) when Double Fantasy by John Lennon and Yoko Ono went stratospheric following Lennon's murder in December 1980. The label was on the hunt for fresh talent and, in particular, looking for promising, if unsung, all-rounders. Rabin fit that bill perfectly, as indeed did another of Kalodner's proteges.

Rabin explains:

Around the same time I was producing Manfred Mann's Earth Band, I met John Kalodner. Geffen had only just started out, and they were in the process of signing people like Elton John and Donna Summer. Kalodner asked me if I had any material, and I said I was writing for another album, but Chrysalis had dropped me. Suddenly, I'm in the back of a car with David Geffen, signing a development contract. It was quite a shock. My wife and I were settled in Stanmore (in Middlesex, near London), and the next thing we knew, we were in California!

Rabin moved into a house in Los Angeles and has lived in The City Of Angels ever since.

Rabin set out to write new material and produced, during those months in 1981, the bare bones of much that would later appear on 90125. However, all was not well in the relationship between Rabin and Geffen. Rabin found that he was being encouraged to team up with other musicians with whom he had very little in common and no chemistry. The final straw came when he flew to London to play with Asia (featuring, of course, John Wetton, along with Steve Howe and Geoff Downes).

Rabin wasn't keen:

I was told that if I didn't do that, I'd be dropped. I decided to give it a go because I was quite friendly with John and Carl. I flew to London apprehensively and we had a few rehearsals, but when I flew back to the US, I told them I wasn't doing it. There's a clip on YouTube of me singing one of the songs that turned up on the first Asia album, and you can tell from the performance that I'm not singing with much zest. So, Ed Rosenblatt, the head of finance at Geffen, called me and nonchalantly told me that I was dropped. I felt a kind of release because I felt possessive about all the material I'd written, and I didn't want it to go to the wrong place.

It was an uncertain time for Rabin. But he has a few other irons in the fire.

I started sending out demo tapes, and they were rejected. I've still got the letter from Clive Davis at Arista saying that 'while we feel your voice has top 40 appeal, we feel your song ('Owner Of A Lonely Heart') is too left field for the marketplace today'.

There was talk of a...