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When Yes convened in Paris in 1979 to record the follow-up to troubled record Tormato, late producer Roy Thomas Baker found five musicians at each other’s throats. Those “pub sessions” were to spell the end of the band’s classic line-up – again – for another 16 years, while a new line-up would release Drama in 1980.

Yes’ first collaboration with Queen, Journey and The Cars producer Roy Thomas Baker took place in Paris in 1979 – but the resulting recordings never saw the light of day, although many of those tracks later appeared on solo records, expanded reissues of Yes albums, or the 2002 In A Word box set.

But what happened at the end of the 70s in the French capital? Why did the recordings not amount to a finished release? And why did events there lead to the departure of Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman?

Baker recalls the initial excitement about the material presented by the band. “There was some great stuff,” he says.

Wakeman, however, has a very different view: of an outfit that was failing to keep up with outside musical change. “In 1979, the world of music was going through serious changes and Yes was not embracing them,” he recalls.

There are contradictory views of the city itself. “I find Paris excessively inspiring,” states Baker, although he accepts that they were too far from the centre. For Steve Howe, Paris was not conducive to a healthy, happy atmosphere, especially compared to Montreux in Switzerland where they recorded 1977’s Going For The One.

“Paris was a whole different reality – ‘reality’ being the operative word,” the guitarist says. “It wasn’t beautiful like Montreux. There was no fantasy here – it was not a place we could sit back and relax.”

After having to fight through traffic to get to the studio, things hardly improved. “There were definitely issues in terms of communication within the band,” says Baker.

Howe recalls Anderson playing harp instead of his usual guitar and so found it difficult to bounce ideas off him. He remembers the singer and keyboardist “had done some music together” that he and Chris Squire “were not that clear how to treat guitaristically.”

They were, he says, “very bouncy and very Rick in musical style, and a bit new; a new kind of thinking about Yes, because Jon usually wrote with Chris or me and now suddenly he was writing with Rick – which we weren’t against, but it was a different breed of music.”

Howe and Squire weren’t excited by Anderson and Wakeman’s ideas, and the feeling was evidently mutual: How vividly remembers a “farcical” situation involving Wakeman chucking peanuts at Alan White’s drum kit, so displeased was he with the state of affairs. “This was the kind of mayhem we were creating for ourselves,” says Howe.

Wakeman agrees that it was “not the happiest of times” for Yes. “It was completely the opposite to the feelings of the band a few years earlier when we recorded Going For The One, where everybody was driving down the same musical road,” he says. “In Paris, not only were we not on the same road but we were not even heading in the same direction!

“Jon and I had put some songs together during the previous tour and we felt they had great potential. Sadly, tht was not felt by Steve, Chris and Alan, and sessions in the studio were laborious and not pleasant at all.”

Baker acknowledges the factions within the band. “There were two camps. Trying to pull the whole thing together, I felt more like a referee than a producer.” Did he have to bang any heads together? “No,” he laughs, “they were doing it amongst themselves!”

The situation eventually became so difficult that Atlantic Records majordomo Ahmet Ertegun flew over from New York for a crisis meeting. Baker recalls: “His attitude was, ‘How the fuck do we get this back on track?’ Trying to get them in one room and get them to talk were two different things.”

By this point, Wakeman knew things had gone too far. As he puts it: “Not even Henry Kissinger could have resolved that mess.” Matters reached a sorry end just before Christmas, when drummer White broke his foot on a roller skate. Wakeman and Anderson took solace in spirits: “Jon and I met for a drink. Well, actually, it was a whole bottle of Calvados,” he laughs. “We both agreed this wasn’t the Yes we loved and believed in.

“I don’t mean the guys – I still have great respect and love Steve, Chris and Alan very much. as they’ve been a big part of my life. But I always refer to ‘Yes’ as the music. I always felt we were guardians of Yes’ music and should be treated with respect.

“Jon and I both felt it was slipping away and so it was time for us to slip away, too, and that’s exactly what we did.”

The final straw was that broken foot. “We had a drummer who couldn’t play,” Howe says. “That was the catastrophic moment when we said: ‘Let’s stop.’ I think there was a feeling we all wanted to stop anyway, because the session was going nowhere.

“It didn’t have the same bright feeling we’d had on Relayer or the sense of a reunion we had on Going For The One. There was no magic or chemistry between us and Roy Thomas Baker. It was just a write-off.

“We weren’t challenging Yes to go forward – we were finding a party line, a kind of music that was easy for us to do: sprightly and mellow and nothing like Drama would be.”

He believes they developed a new lease of life with the arrival of Buggles duo Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes for the band’s real 10th album. “Chris, Alan and I proved the point because when we got on to Drama, we made an album that really stung at you. It shouted and it had attitude.

“We didn’t have any attitude in Paris, apart from, ‘Where’s the next bottle of wine?’ or ‘Should we drive a Rolls Royce or a Bentley?’ All decisions that had fuck-all to do with music.”

Were they galvanised by punk on Drama? “There might have been a subconscious awareness of what was going on,” Howe concedes, adding that the record “was more aggressive and heavier than some of the things we’d done.”

Following the events in France, Wakeman recalls, “The studio was cancelled and everybody went their separate ways. I spent a few more days in Paris walking my German Shepherd before going home to Switzerland to contemplate a future I wasn’t expecting.

“Yes had already lost its guarantee of selling hundreds of thousands of records, the record company didn’t know what to do with the band and we still had more egos than the entire Premier League footballers put together.”

Not that he believes the experience was a waste of time. “Not for me! My father always drummed into me to learn from things that haven’t gone to plan, and I did learn a lot about myself.”

For Howe, the Paris sessions haven’t quite acquired the status of legend à la The Beach Boys’ Smile, nor does he have much stomach for piecing together the finished tracks to make something approaching a complete album. But he doesn’t have any regrets.

“I’m not morbidly sad about it,” he says. “We had a good run and did some great things. That wasn’t one of them.”

With hindsight, it’s easy to see why 1994 is considered both a landmark year for popular music, and a transitional one. The tragic death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain on April 5 that year represented a horrific reality check for the grunge/alternative rock community’s fairytale takeover of mainstream culture, although the release of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral and Manic Street Preachers‘ harrowing third album The Holy Bible proved that there was still plenty of darkness and nihilism for rock to mine.

Into the void left by a scene in mourning, came BritPop in the UK and pop-punk in the US, with emerging stars Oasis, Blur, Weezer and Green Day all releasing landmark albums that year full of life affirming, happy-go-lucky positivity. The after effects of the second ‘Summer of Love’ saw acid house and techno co-opted into big pop chart hits, even as the highly controversial Criminal Justice Bill sought to destroy it as a counter culture movement, ushering in the rise of superstar DJs. Hip-hop too was undergoing a transformation, with the unflinching socio-political commentary of early gansta drowned out and dragged into the charts by the previous year’s Cristal-popping, game-changing Dr. Dre album The Chronic.

But, even in an era where the mainstream reached out to embraced the freaks, the outsiders and the underdogs, Portishead stood apart, the Bristol trio gaining a reputation as enigmatic, shadowy mavericks, even as their debut album Dummy ushered in the first significant commercial interest in the oddly lo-fi mash up of classic soul, jazz, cutting edge samples and gothic noir that would become known globally as trip-hop. With Beth Gibbons’ vocals seemingly beamed in from another world, it sounded like nothing else on earth. And for one young American musician, its impact was truly life-changing.

“Beth Gibbons was one of my greatest vocal and musical inspirations,” Evanescence vocalist Amy Lee told The Guardian. “In the 90s when I was a young teen really feeling music I loved Portishead, Massive Attack and the whole trip-hop vibe. It was dark and cool, really different.”

Portishead emerged from a fecund Bristol music scene which took pride in its independence from, and disinterest in, mainstream industry trends and hype.

In the late 80’s, club nights in the city began to feature artists and DJs including Tackhead and The Wild Bunch, the latter collective featuring three members of what would become Massive Attack, who were experimenting with mixing hip-hop breakbeats with early jazz recordings. This would become known initially as ‘The Bristol Sound.’

Having moved to the town of Portishead, 8 miles west of Bristol, as a young boy, Geoff Barrow found himself caught up in the movement after landing his first job as a studio hand at Coach House Studios. He worked as an assistant on Massive Attack’s debut album Blue Lines, and, having played in a few bands of his own, decided he wanted to record his own compositions based on the new sound from the surrounding area. Using the spare time he had in the studio; he began to craft what would become the songs on Dummy.

The project began to gain momentum when Barrows met vocalist Beth Gibbons on a coffee break at a 1991 Enterprise Allowance course, set up to give support to young people looking to set up their own business. The pair began to work on music together, recording a version of It Could Be Sweet as their first song. Local jazz guitarist Adrian Utley, who was in the Coach House recording parts for a different project, happened to hear the song being played in an adjacent studio.

“I remember somebody opening the door upstairs and me hearing It Could Be Sweet,” Utley told The Guardian. “I was all, ‘Fuck me, what is that?’ Just hearing the sub-bass and Beth’s voice – it was unbelievable. Like a whole new world that was really exciting and vital.”

Utley and Barrow immediately hit it off, and the guitarist joined the fold, asking Barrow to teach him everything he knew about sampling and production. In return, Utley would play unique parts on the Portishead project, creating a musical Frankenstein’s monster, where classic jazz and soul samples (everyone from Isaac Hayes to The Weather Report were utilised) would coalesce with Utley’s own guitar, bass, organ and theremin tracks, and Gibbons distinctive folk and rock-influenced vocals.

It took three years to get the album right – the process involved analogue recording of Utley and Barrow’s original musical parts, then transferring them to vinyl, and finally sampling them for the finished project – but upon release Dummy was more than worth the wait.

Debut single Numb, released ahead of the album, didn’t dent the charts, but second single Sour Times, broke into the UK top 15, and even made it to number 63 on the US Billboard singles chart. Although a couple of Mo-Wax Records releases, and Massive Attack, had enjoyed a measure of commercial success, there was nothing as dark, melancholic, chilling or threatening in their work as the gothic chime that accompanied Gibbons whispered, pained vocal on Sour Times. At once captivating and completely alien, to hear it was to experience similar emotions to those Utley felt upon hearing It Could Be Sweet.

Much like the music on the record, the success of Dummy was something of a slow burn. Released on August 22, 1994, it slowly crept up the UK charts, and by January 1995 it had reached number three, kept from the top spot by Celine Dion and The Beautiful South, before eventually peaking at number 2.

Its success was helped by the release of third and final single Glory Box, another top 20 hit in the UK, and a song Portishead played live on Later… with Jools Holland. Their performance on that show is staggering: seeing the live line-up of the band, complete with guitar, bass, drums and a DJ, was unique enough, but Beth Gibbons’ delivery of the song – eyes clenched tight, gripping onto the mic as her remarkable voice flows from her, part Patti Smith, part Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis – can still make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up today.

Dummy would go on to win the 1995 Mercury Music Prize, beating off competition from Oasis, Supergrass, Tricky, Leftfield, PJ Harvey and many other hugely respected and eclectic artists. The Bristol Sound now had a superstar album, a figurehead and a definitive name; trip-hop, coined in a 1994 Mixmag article focusing more on The Chemical Brothers and DJ Shadow.

“I don’t think with 10 albums of the year you should just judge one album,” shrugged a clearly overwhelmed Barrow in the press conference after the Mercury Prize ceremony. “there could be a bloke sat at home on his organ recording something that is better than any of this stuff. People injected all of their emotions into albums this year… I just expected a free piss up!”

Barrow may not have realised it at the time, but Dummy would go on to be one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the next three decades. It still sounds fantastic. From the second a loose, clean guitar is joined by scratches, drum loops and Gibbons haunted croon on opening track Mysterons, Dummy grabs you and won’t let go. From the alien march and Gibbons wail on Strangers, the Mos Def does Ghost Town stalk of Numb, the now iconic, heart-wrenching organ opening of Roads, a song that sounds like the aural definition of heartache, all the way through to Glory Box, a good shout for one of the greatest closing numbers on any album, Dummy remains a faultless piece of work.

In 2015, as a ‘thank you’ to an album that resonated so strongly with her, Amy Lee covered It’s a Fire, alongside U2’s With Or Without You, Led Zeppelin’s Going To California, and Chris Isaak’s Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing for her Recover, Vol. 1 EP.

“This song (and all of Dummy, actually) was a huge inspiration to me in my formative years,” she said at the time. “I listened to the song recently for the first time in a long time, and fell in love with it all over again. The lyrics are so powerful, they helped me through so much. It is my honour to do this little homemade homage to a group I have loved so much for so long.”