Geoff Downes Marks Longest Yes Keyboardist Run as Band Prepares ‘Aurora’

Yes are finalising their new album Aurora, and Geoff Downes has now held the keyboardist chair longer than anyone in the band’s sixty-year history. Downes, who joined the current lineup in 2011, also played with Yes for a brief spell in 1980 after recording the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” His path to progressive rock institution was never a straight line.

The Buggles’ hit, co-written with Trevor Horn, became the first video ever played on MTV when the network launched in 1981. Its lyric about technology reshaping art forms now reads like an early warning about AI: “It took the credit for your second symphony / Rewritten by machine on new technology.” Downes got his start by answering a Melody Maker ad Horn placed, landing the gig out of forty keyboardists because he was the only one who brought a Moog synthesizer.

Before his permanent Yes return, Downes co-founded Asia in 1982 and co-wrote “Heat of the Moment,” another radio staple. Now, as Yes prepare Aurora, the keyboardist’s route from new wave novelty to prog-rock permanence feels less like a footnote than a story worth noticing on its own.