Chris Squire photographed in London in 1979.
Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images
The late Yes bassist Chris Squire’s first solo album, Fish Out Of Water, featured just five tracks. But an upcoming box set fleshes out the story considerably.
The multi-disc collection, due out April 27, includes a variety of bonus tracks, including single versions of the original album’s “Lucky Seven” and “Silently Falling,” and a pair of early ’80s songs Squire recorded with Yes drummer Alan White — “Run With The Fox” and “Return Of The Fox,” the latter a lively, cheerful, keyboard-led instrumental co-written by former King Crimson member Peter Sinfield that’s premiering below. The two were released as a rare single during October of 1981 and quickly went out of print.
“We were in between periods of Yes, when the band wasn’t fully operational, ” White recalls to Billboard, “and Chris had an idea about making a Christmas single. I said, ‘Yeah, that’s a great idea,’ so we went to Chris’ studio and we developed it. We did some rhythmic changes and it turned out pretty damn good, and then we put an orchestra on it, which really enhanced it a lot. A lot of people love that song.”
The two “Fox” songs were recorded around the same time Squire and White were jamming with Jimmy Page in the proposed band XYZ and just before they formed the group Cinema, which morphed into a reformation of Yes during 1982. “Chris and I were looking at each other going, ‘I guess we aren’t in Yes. What do we do now?’,” White remembers. “So that’s what was occupying our time to a degree, until we sussed it out and kind of became Yes again.”
White — who also released a solo album, Ramshackled, at the same time in 1975 — has warm memories of Fish Out Of Water. “Y’know what — I like it,” he says. “He had (original Yes drummer) Bill Bruford play on it, which I enjoy because I think Chris wanted to get a bit more experience playing with him again, which was fine with me. It turned out really well.” Yes, in fact, performed the song “Hold Out Your Hand” during its 1976 tour, and White says there was no competition between the solo albums each of the band members released that year. “Everybody was just in a period of time when we had projects that we’d put aside for a while,” he explains. “We just wanted to get them out of our system, as it were.”
The limited edition Fish Out Of Water box includes both the original and a new stereo mix of the album, the bonus tracks, a vinyl LP, a pair of 7-inch singles and DVD audio and visual discs, the latter including a 2006 interview with Squire, a promotional film and more.
Squire, who was the last original member still in Yes, passed away during June of 2015 at the age of 67 from cancer. An asteroid was named after him during April of 2016, while Yes was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a year later.