I was pretty much ordered to go and play with Steve Howe, Carl Palmer, Geoff Downes and John Wetton. I was told that if I didn’t, I’d be dropped”: Trevor Rabin’s challenging road to Yes

Whether you think Trevor Rabin was the man who ruined Yes or the lifeline that saved the band from oblivion in the 1980s, there’s no denying his virtuosity or his ability to write a decent tune. But the South African has always been a far more interesting and stylistically varied musician than he’s given credit for.

Born in Johannesburg in 1954, Rabin grew up in a liberal, musical household during the apartheid era and learned classical piano from the age of six. Taking up the guitar six years later, it soon became his obsession. Rabin first pursued a career as a session musician in South Africa and then formed the successful band Rabbitt in the early 70s. A move to London towards the end of the decade saw him sign to Chrysalis and release three solo albums in a hard rock/AOR style before moving briefly into production work with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band and Thin Lizzy offshoot Wild Horses.

A sudden relocation to LA on a songwriting development deal with Geffen led to short-lived rehearsals with Asia, followed by the formation of Cinema with Alan White, Chris Squire and Tony Kaye, which morphed into a new version of Yes when Jon Anderson joined in 1983. This collaboration produced the hit album 90125 and the US No.1 single Owner Of A Lonely Heart, while Rabin’s good looks and guitar heroics helped win the band a legion of new followers.

Yes remained the mainstay of his career until 1995 via three further albums: the problematic Big Generator in 1987; the controversial Union in 1991, which saw Rabin, Squire and White’s Yes join forces with Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe; and finally the underrated Talk in 1994. Between Yes projects, an excellent solo album, Can’t Look Away, was released in 1989.

Moving on from Yes in the mid-90s, a chance meeting with movie star Steven Seagal led to a brand-new career in movie and TV soundtracks. These have mainly defined Rabin’s subsequent career path, with high-profile commissions including a fruitful collaboration with producer Jerry Bruckheimer via National Treasure, Enemy Of The State and Gone In 60 Seconds.

However, Rabin’s career as a rock musician was not yet at an end, with the well-received all-instrumental solo album Jacaranda released in 2012. Rabin also returned to live performance with Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman in ARW, playing Yes material live during 2017 and 2018.

Sadly, ARW failed to release any new music, but Rabin’s creative juices were once again flowing in the direction of songwriting. It’s led to his most recent project, the new album Rio, his first solo vocal record since Can’t Look Away. When Prog catches up with him, it’s early in the day at his California home, but the multi- instrumentalist – still looking remarkably youthful at 69 – is alert, enthusiastic and friendly.

You grew up in South Africa during the apartheid years. What was life like, and how did that impact your musical upbringing?

I was acutely aware of everything that was happening. 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 is 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 he wanted to ask about my other uncle, Donald Woods, who wrote the book Cry Freedom about his escape from South Africa.

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 [Godfrey] 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!

Your first band, Rabbitt, were a massive success in South Africa. How did that come about?

When I was about 14, I hadn’t been playing guitar long, and I got together with some local guys. The three of us – guitar, bass and drums – were the essence of the band, and eventually, we got a fourth member to bring vocal harmonies and keyboards. Later, I fell into a lot of sessions, and one of the producers that I became friendly with was [South African songwriter and producer] Patric van Blerk, who decided to take a chance on the band.

You have to remember that at that time, nobody in South Africa was doing original music, so we had to play at really seedy clubs because I didn’t want to do covers. We did a nine-month residency in one particular club and our reputation grew and grew, so, in the end, we had to get the material down on tape. We made the first album, Boys Will Be Boys! in one week with a great engineer, Julian Laxton, who really understood the band. It’s why that album still sounds so good today.

Given how successful Rabbitt were, what made you try your luck in the UK?

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.

That move to London was in the very late 1970s, just as the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was gaining steam. Did you feel like a part of it?

Yes, at least partly. I started out doing four tracks with a band called Export, and I almost worked with Def Leppard and Michael Schenker. I also ended up producing Wild Horses, so I was quite heavily involved in it around that time. I also hung out with Phil Lynott a lot. I loved him.

After you recorded your first solo album, Beginnings, in South Africa, you got signed to Chrysalis and recorded Face To Face and Wolf. You released the box set of your solo stuff a while ago, but individually they’re hard to get. Do you feel there’s still a market for them?

Sure. Funnily enough, a friend of mine recently told me how hard they were to get. I’m just a bit of a procrastinator, so I haven’t really kept on top of that. I really need to do that, so watch this space!

After those albums, you moved to the US. How did that come about?

It came out of the blue. I really liked working with Chrysalis on those albums I recorded in the UK, but around the same time I was producing Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, I met John Kalodner, who was an executive for Geffen. Geffen had only just started out, and they were in the process of signing people like Elton John and Donna Summer. John 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], and the next thing we knew, we were in California!

I carried on writing, but John decided he wanted to put me with some different people. Some of those guys weren’t a great fit, but one project involved John Wetton, and I got on quite well with him. That project petered out, but as I was taking a bit longer to produce songs than Geffen hoped, I think they got a bit impatient, and I was pretty much ordered to go and play with another band that were rehearsing in London. This turned out to be with Steve Howe, Carl Palmer, Geoff Downes and John Wetton. I was told that if I didn’t do it, I’d be dropped. I decided to give it a go as 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 USA, 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.

So, the Geffen deal ended but you were still in California. It must have been an uncertain time. What happened next?

I started sending out demo tapes. The irony is that I sent out all this material that was going to end up on 90125, like Owner Of A Lonely Heart and Changes and they were rejected. I’ve still got the letter from Clive Davis of Arista saying, “While we feel your voice has Top 40 appeal, we feel [Owner Of A Lonely Heart] is too left-field for the marketplace today.”

There was talk of a band with myself, Keith Emerson, Cozy Powell and Jack Bruce. I already knew Jack through Cream and because he’d played on my album, Wolf. I loved Keith, too, but that idea didn’t move forward for a while. Then Ron Fair, a fantastic A&R guy at RCA, offered me a deal, so I had the option of that, the band with Keith and Jack, or the possibility of a band with Chris Squire and Alan White via Phil Carson at Atlantic, who had also heard the demos.

In the end, Phil Carson – who’s a pretty persuasive guy – called me up and said, “Come on, stop fucking around,” so the next thing I knew, I was in a sushi restaurant in Shepherd’s Bush with Chris and Alan. We had a play together, and while it didn’t sound particularly good, it just felt right. To this day, I really miss Chris and Alan; the three-piece juggernaut, as I used to call us. I just loved playing with them.

You ended up back in London once again with Chris and Alan. How did Tony Kaye come on board?

When we started playing at John Henrys, this big rehearsal studio in Islington, Chris suggested Tony. I didn’t know him, but Chris said that he was a ‘meat and potato’ keyboard player, a real Hammond guy. He said, “I think he’ll be right for the band because you’re a little fancy!”

Eventually, Atlantic came to see us and ended up signing us. Next, we had to think about a producer. Chris asked me how I felt about Trevor Horn producing the band. I was really apprehensive, and Tony Kaye wasn’t into the idea at all, but in the end, I just decided to get my head down and do what I could to make the album work.

What was your perspective on how Jon Anderson came on board, which led to Cinema becoming Yes?

We’d finished the album when Jon came back. All the overdubs were done, although Tony Kaye had left for a while, which forced me to do a lot of the keyboards. Atlantic said that even though they felt very secure about the record, why didn’t we get Jon Anderson in the band so we could call it Yes? So I said, “So, what you’re saying is you want to fire me as the singer?” I meant it semi tongue-in-cheek as I’ve never been too proud or jealous about being the singer in any band I’m in. That said, I’ve always felt that the album would have done really well without us calling the band Yes. How did you deal with having to play Yes songs on the road?

It didn’t start well. My wife and I went to Florida just before the tour, and I had an accident in a swimming pool when a woman came down a water slide and hit me, which led to my spleen having to be removed.

So the tour was delayed, and in the meantime, I’d barely played the guitar, and I certainly hadn’t played any of the older Yes stuff. I’d never really wanted to call the band Yes in the first place, so now I was stuck with playing some old Yes material in what I considered to be a new band. So Chris said, “You choose what you want to play, and if there are other songs we feel we have to play, we’ll talk about it.”

On the plane to Philadelphia, I came up with some ideas. Of course, my guitar style is totally different from Steve Howe and Peter Banks; I’d never even considered playing like those guys, so Chris just said, “Do it your way.” That made me feel warmer, and it made the tour much easier.

After the tour, you recorded a follow-up album. Big Generator was famously a difficult record to make, wasn’t it?

When an album comes out and it’s so successful and the process of making it has been so peculiar, you then realise that you have a bunch of guys that have never really worked together apart from being onstage. I didn’t really know Jon at all, but by this stage, Chris was like a brother to me, and that continued after I left the band. I loved Alan and Tony too.

For the next album, the record company – who had no idea what had gone down during the recording of 90125 – suggested Trevor Horn again. Tony said, “No way,” but it became clear that Trevor was going to do it – and that he wasn’t going to work well with Tony. He wanted me to do most of the keyboards again.

We had an offer to record the album at a castle in Italy, and I thought that was a good idea. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a party period, so very little was achieved. In terms of writing together, there was no cohesiveness whatsoever, and the atmosphere between certain people was very toxic.

I have to say that onstage, Tony Kaye was just perfect for the band. He couldn’t have been better. But in the studio, it wasn’t quite the same. At one point during Big Generator, he was in one room working while I was in another room, both playing keyboards. After their experience on 90125, the bad blood between Tony and Trevor was there from the start. Trevor and I would listen to Tony’s parts, and I wouldn’t always like what I was hearing, but I would be diplomatic because I didn’t want to be anti-Tony. It was all very delicate.

You moved back to London for a while, and then when Horn left the project, you ended up in Los Angeles. What happened?

To cut a long story short, a friend of mine from South Africa, Paul De Villiers, came in to help finish the recording in California, and in the end I went into Sunset Sound in LA and said, “Just leave me alone, and let me finish it.” It was the only option we had to get a completed album. But, actually, I really enjoyed working on the record on my own.

After Big Generator, you ended up recording another solo album, Can’t Look Away, with Bob Ezrin producing. Why did you pick that time for a solo project?

There was some disillusionment after Big Generator, for which I’d been a salvage producer, if anything, so I wanted to break out and do my own record. I had some things to say about South Africa that I felt guilty about not saying before. That’s what I was doing with songs like the title track and Sorrow (Your Heart). I was commenting on the political situation.

I toured that album and did a video for Something To Hold On To. It was nominated for a Grammy, but the director, Jeff Stein, should take all the credit. That track did really well. In fact, Elektra did a fine job with that album, but then I got sucked into the Union tour, and my solo career stalled for a while.

What is your view of the Union album?

I had written Miracle Of Life and Lift Me Up and, out of the blue, Clive Davis of Arista called me and asked, “Do you have any singles? We are doing an Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe album, and we need a couple more songs.” I sent him Lift Me Up and he wanted it. I said that I wasn’t giving it away but that I’d happily write something else for the band. But in the end, management got involved, we were offered this amazing tour, and I ended up handing in three songs for the album. I had nothing to do with it apart from that.

I didn’t hear the rest of Union at the time, and I had no input into the sequencing. I just mastered my songs and made sure they got to the right place at the right time.

After the Union tour, the band slimmed down to the 90125 line-up, and recorded Talk for Phil Carson’s Victory label. It feels like a more cohesive album than Big Generator. Was it?

Partially, I think. Jon and I did go to stay by the sea in Carmel in California and, for the first time, learned from each other as people and got on really well. We wrote some stuff together, most of which didn’t appear on the album. But the guys were really supportive of the new way we were recording it, to hard disk. Eventually, Phil Carson said, “I need a long song,” and that became Endless Dream. Talk was harmonious in a lot of ways because Jon and I became friends in the same way I already was with the rest of the band.

After Talk, you left the band and started your very long and fruitful career recording film soundtracks. But you returned to touring as Anderson, Rabin, Wakeman in 2017. How did that come about, and how did you feel about it becoming another Yes?

One of the pleasures of the Union tour was how well Rick Wakeman and I got on. When we did the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame performance in 2017, we hadn’t seen each other for a while, so the three of us discussed doing a tour together. So Brian Lane became our manager and offered us the tour. Working with Rick again was always on my bucket list, so I said, “I’m in.”

I felt the same about calling it Yes as I did with 90125. Neither Rick nor I thought it was necessary. It diminished the seriousness and impact of what we were trying to do, I think.

Does any of the material on your new album Rio stem from the ARW period?

Some of it, yes. There’s a bonus track on the album that came from that time, called Fragile. Although I had other material, I really thought this song would lend itself to ARW. We actually rehearsed it, and we were planning on playing it on tour, but we never even released it in the end.

There’s also a string piece I did at the end of the track Push that we used to open the ARW shows, alongside an orchestral version of Perpetual Change that I arranged.

Why did you pick now as the time to do your first vocal album since 1989’s Can’t Look Away?

I often use guitar in my film soundtracks, but I was playing it less and less on a day-to-day basis. Ultimately, I got to a point when I really wanted to break out and play, so I started practising properly again. This is why I put together my instrumental album, Jacaranda, which is all playing – there are no sequencers of any sort. So with Rio, I had the same thought, except I wanted to sing.

I decided there would be no tuning of the vocals. If a vocal performance didn’t work, I’d do it again. The same applies to the backing vocals on the album, but thankfully I’m very used to recording those, so I’m pretty quick. I was absolutely determined that everything would be played. After 50 films, I was sick and tired of the sonic manipulation that is inevitable in film scoring.

There’s a really high line at the start of the song Push from Rio that sounds like it’s something Jon Anderson might have sung.

My son said exactly the same thing – and pointed out how high I was singing. I said, “I can sing high, but in Yes, Jon sang like that, so I didn’t bother!” [Laughs.]

Rio is quite an intense listen – there are a huge number of genres on the album, sometimes within the same song. An example would be the three different sections of Tumbleweed. Was that intentional?

Some of the genre-bending was down to how I was feeling in that particular week. But you are right – I almost called the album Demographic Nightmare because I’m so interested in many different types of music. I wanted to do me, whatever that means, and visit all kinds of different places, while still basing it in prog rock, if you like. But I wanted to do some country and all kinds of other things. I do accept it might be demographically confusing.

What’s next for you? More soundtrack work? A tour? Another solo album?

I loved making this album. I needed it after so many years doing film scores. I just beg people to listen to it more than four times and give it time to get used to it. I’ve never done an album in my life where I haven’t been grateful that I got away with it without killing myself.

As to whether to tour it, it’s too early to say, and as for more soundtrack work, at the moment, the actors’ and writers’ strike is on, so there’s not a lot happening. But even without that, I just want to do whatever I can to support this album and then do another one when the time is right. That’s my priority and my passion.