I first stumbled across the obscure progressive rock band Empire a decade ago; more on that moment of discovery below*. The point is, it was well into the 21st century before I first heard of the group, despite possessing a treasure trove of largely useless knowledge about the myriad roots and branches of the Yes family tree.
Guitarist Peter Banks was the first founding member of progressive rock pioneers Yes to depart the band back in 1970, replaced by Steve Howe prior to their breakthrough The Yes Album. Banks had been a major presence on the first two albums, Yes and Time And A Word, with his jazzy, frenetic guitar stylings and affection for adventurous shifts in tone and tempo providing ample fuel for the group’s creative engine.
After departing Yes, Banks co-founded Flash, which achieved modest success with its first two albums in 1972, before imploding during a 1973 concert tour. In the course of that same tour, Banks met singer Sidonie Jordan, and over the next year the pair solidified a partnership both musical and romantic. Banks’ next band, Empire, featured him and Jordan, now performing as Sydney Foxx, supported by a fresh cast of players: Jakob Magnusson (keys), John Giblin (bass), and Preston Ross-Heyman (drums). (A notable guest who hung around the sessions for Mark I, and played and sang a bit as well, was Phil Collins, who had played on Banks’ first solo album the previous year.)
Empire was an attempt to put Banks’ recent experiences with intra-band politics behind him by asserting a leadership role; he both produced this album and wrote all of the music, with Foxx penning the lyrics. As for how their efforts went over in the music marketplace, that’s a story in itself. The band’s debut Mark I saw its first commercial release by One Way Records in 1995, 21 years after it was recorded. After completing the album on spec, Banks and Foxx shopped it for months, but both this album and the two sequels they would go on to record failed to secure them a recording contract. As a result, 
Mark I languished unreleased for two decades.
The reasons why become apparent as soon as one hits “play.”
The musical component of Mark I is rangy early-’70s progressive rock, with Banks, Magnusson, Giblin and Ross-Heyman frequently channeling the energy and colorful virtuosity of those initial two Yes albums. Banks’ guitar playing is inventive, vibrant and full of pizzazz, with Magnusson’s keyboard work—frequently channeling Tony Kaye on Hammond—very much in sync. On bass, John Giblin shows the chops that would later land him gigs with Collins, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, while Ross-Heyman would go on to drum for acts including Ms. Bush and Atomic Rooster.
But one of these things is not like the others: Foxx, the group’s lead vocalist, who sounds like she’s in a different band altogether. For all of her sincere efforts, Foxx presents as a fish out of water, a nightclub singer with a love of musical theater struggling to fit into a fundamentally different musical environment. On those occasions when she cuts loose vocally—around the three quarters mark of “More Than Words,” for example—her melodramatic, vibrato-laden approach feels more suited for an off-Broadway production of Evita than a progressive rock album. In defiance of this seeming mismatch, Banks’ musical partnership with Foxx would persist through six years and three self-financed albums before they finally threw in the towel.
Here on Mark I, the results are what they are: an early-Yes-ish prog band with a fundamentally incompatible singer up front. The few strong moments—say, the instrumental opening to kickoff cut “Out Of Our Hands,” or the midsection of “Someone Who Cares,” a seven-minute space-blues grind—are quickly rendered awkward by Foxx’s approach to the material. And when things go fully upside down, as they do on the three-minute, transparent-stab-at-a-single “Hear My Voice On The Radio”—a bland lounge-pop song with Foxx fantasizing about stardom—there’s nothing left to do but shake your head.
By contrast, the 13-minute suite “Shooting Star” gives the band a chance to stretch out and explore a bit, as does nine-minute closing track “Sky At Night,” but there’s nowhere to hide when the clash of musical styles is this glaring. The lineup behind Banks and Foxx would shuffle over the following years as their supporting cast moved on to greener pastures, until the sun finally set on Empire in 1980.
Mark I ends up as an interesting artifact of its time. The music often feels rich with potential, but it’s not enough to rescue this album, which is for hardcore Yes family completists only. As for Mark II and Mark III, curiosity will likely get the better of me at some point, but for now, ah, I’m good.
#
* My second novel Never Break the Chain features an over-the-hill arena rock band that started out playing old-school prog before turning for the mainstream. A few elements of the band’s tumultuous backstory were inspired by Yes… which made it downright mind-boggling when I learned that the name I gave my fictional band—Empire—was in real life a little-known branch of the Yes family tree.