In January 1981, with theDrama 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 bookNo Quarter: The Three Lives Of Jimmy Page, it is confirmed that following the perceived failure of theDrama 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 ofDrama. 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 ban
