If the music of Yes marked the zenith of prog-rock’s vaulting ambition, founder member Chris Squire was both the group’s reliable bulwark and embodied its progressive impetus. The only ever-present member of the band from 1968 until 2015, his virtuoso bass lines did not simply provide a rhythmic pulse behind the more prominent guitars of Steve Howe and synthezisers of Rick Wakeman, but added integral contours of melody and counterpoint that marked a new style of playing the instrument.
The complexities of the group’s music allied to mystical lyrics, epic triple albums in gatefold sleeves with fantastical cover art, outlandish stage outfits, lightshows and clouds of dry ice, all helped Yes to become the most enduring prog-rock exponents. While contemporaries of similar ilk, such as King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer fell by the wayside, Yes endured, due in considerable part to Squire’s dedication and perseverance.
On one occasion, Squire and the lead high-pitched lead singer, Jon Anderson, were involved in a legal battle over the use of the band’s name, but their two breakaway groups were then reunited.
Tall and handsome, Squire looked the part as he enjoyed the rockstar lifestyle with his wife Nikki, living in a thatched mansion in Surrey with a Bentley (numberplated “CS1”) parked in the driveway.
Such glamour counted for nothing when punk rock arrived in the late Seventies and bands such as Yes lost all credibility overnight. The band soon disbanded and in 1980 Squire formed Cinema with Yes drummer Alan White. Struggling to record an album, their producer Trevor Horn recalled: “At first no one was prepared to put up the money for the record. People treated him [Squire] like dirt. No one returned his phone calls. It was funny to watch him driving his Bentley around full of dents because he couldn’t afford to mend them.”
Eventually Yes re-formed and their 1983 album 90125 became the biggest seller of their career, outstripping even early genre-defining landmarks such as The Yes Album, Fragile, Close to the Edge and Tales from Topographic Oceans.
Gentle and easy-going, Squire was known to friends and colleagues as “Fish”; the nickname was earned after he flooded a hotel bathroom in Oslo on an early Yes tour. One of the band’s early lucky breaks came in 1968 when the notoriously unreliable Sly Stone failed to show for a performance at the then fashionable London nightspot, Blaises: “I remember being in bed. It was around midnight. I get this phone call and the manager of the club came on: ‘Hey, I know you guys just live around the corner and it’ll take you five minutes to get here. Can you come down and do a set?’ Of course the place is packed with people to see Sly for his first-ever London appearance.”
He claimed to have developed his unique style of playing as the result of a bad trip on LSD which landed him in hospital and turned him into a recluse.
“I hibernated in an apartment in Kensington for a year, just playing bass. That was a big learning curve for me. It’s weird, how a bad trip turned out to be a good thing in the long run.”
He never took LSD again, but cocaine took a hold in the 1970s when Yes were introduced to the drug by an American band whose consumption was legendary. “We were strictly a hash band at the beginning but I got involved in cocaine. Blame the Eagles,” he said.
Squire co-wrote much of the group’s music, including signature pieces such as Yours Is No Disgrace, I’ve Seen All Good People, Starship Trooper and Heart of the Sunrise. He left the lyrics to Anderson, whose tendency to come up with such fantastical lines as “Dawn of light lying between a silence and sold sources chased amid fusions of wonder in moments hardly seen forgotten” was the cause of widespread mockery. Asked if he knew what Anderson was singing about, Squire once admitted, “Many times I think he (Anderson) was asking himself the same question.”
A lifetime vegetarian, he was married for 15 years to the singer Nikki Squire, whom he met at the Speakeasy club in London in 1971, and who went on to form the band Esquire. He became stepfather to her daughter Carmen, who works as a singer and voiceover artist, and the couple had two further children, Chandrika Squire Penchoen, a DJ, and Camille Squire, who works in computing. In 1993 he married the actress Melissa Morgan, with whom he had a son, Cameron, who was born in 2000, but the marriage did not last. He lived with his third wife, Scotland, in Phoenix, Arizona, with their daughter, Xilan, in recent years. He was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2015.
Christopher Russell Edward Squire was born in 1948 in London, the son of a cab driver. As a boy he sang in choirs in church and at Haberdashers’ Aske’s school. His life was shaped in a single moment in 1963 when a school friend told him: “You’ve got big hands and you’re tall, you should play the bass.”
He joined his first professional group, the Syn, in 1965 and three years later formed Mabel Greer’s Toyshop, which evolved into Yes with a line-up that included Anderson, guitarist Peter Banks, the keyboard player Tony Kaye and drummer Bill Bruford. The group’s breakthrough came in 1971 with The Yes Album and Squire went on to record 21 albums with the band, the most recent being Heaven & Earth last year.
He always dismissed accusations that the group’s music was overblown, saying that he saw only imagination and boldness in daring to expand the boundaries of pop music from the three-minute song into complex suites of music lasting 20 minutes and more.
Chris Squire, musician, was born on March 4, 1948. He died on June 27, 2015, aged 67