Bands that changed my life part 5 (in no particular order): Yes. Sometimes an album exists entirely encapsulated within a piece of space-time; you can’t listen to the music without remembering the time and place. This album is forever fixed in Durban at the end of 1986 for me. We’d just been repressed in high-school for 5 years, down-trodden by military wannabes, sociopaths, sadists, the neurotic, the obsessive, the deranged and the down-right criminally insane. And that was just the people I hung out with, you should have seen the teachers.

Our first taste of real adult freedom was our matric rage. The Golden Mile on Durban beach-front with great friends, enough money for booze, the infrequent meal and pub and club entry fees. Smuggler’s Inn, the London Town Pub, Father’s Moustache. And Bimbos, of course. It was an astonishing holiday, soon to become a theme repeated yearly in Cape Town, but always bigger better harder and faster. This one was the first though, and it was already a time of great excess, not infrequent felonies, and time spent with brilliant friends. O, and truly excellent music. Drama was played a lot. If anyone can remind me what else we played for those 10 days, I’d be keen to hear about it.

This album has no Rick Wakeman on keyboards and no Jon Anderson on vocals, so it’s like wtf? Instead it has the lead singer from The Buggles (“Video killed the Radio Star”), so it really is like WT actual F! But I love it. It’s harder, less flowery than most early Yes, and very, very intense. It’s even got a Black Sabbath feel sometimes. That’s not to say I don’t like the other stuff – the Anderson / Howe / Squire / Wakeman / Bruford Yes. I do love it, and I wish I’d seen the concert below, in the comments. But when I was travelling from Howick to Jozi recently, and I had a car with Bluetooth, and pretty much access to the entire catalogue of all the world’s music on my phone, the album I put on wasn’t Fragile, or Close to the Edge, it was Drama.

The lyrics are really great too. Like all superb poetry, it’s more about a feeling you get from the words, than making perfect sense out of them.

Run down a street
Where the glass shows
That summer has gone
Age, in the doorways
Resenting the pace of the dawn.
All of them standing in line
All of them waiting for time.
From time, the great healer,
The machine-Messiah
Is born.
Cables that carry the life
To the cities we build
Threads that link diamonds of life
To the satanic mills
Ah, to see in every way
That we feel it every
Day, and know that
Maybe we'll change
Offered the chance
To finally unlearn our lessons
And alter our stance.
Friends make their way into systems of chance
(Reply- friends make their way of escape into systems of chance)
Escape to freedom I need to be there
Waiting and watching, the tables are turning
I'm waiting and watching
I need to be there.
I care to see them walk away
And, to be there when they say
They will return.
Machine, Messiah
The mindless
Search for a higher
Controller
Take me to the fire
And hold me
Show me the strength of your
Singular eye.
History dictating symptoms of ruling romance
Claws at the shores of the water upon which we dance
All of us standing in line
All of us waiting for time
To feel it, all the way
And to be there when they
Say they know that
Maybe we'll change
Offered the chance
To finally unlearn our lessons
And alter our stance.
Machine, machine Messiah.
Take me into the fire
Hold me, machine Messiah
And show me
The strength of your singular eye.