Close to the Edge

Anderson and Howe collected musical sketches in hotel rooms on the Fragile tour, but none of the pieces was finished. The band rehearsed in May 1972 in the basement of a dance school in Shepherd's Bush and returned to Advision in June. Eddy Offord, who engineered and co-produced, had the road crew build a large wooden stage in the studio so that the band would sound more live.

The sessions were hard. Bruford compared them to climbing Mount Everest and recalled that every instrument was up for democratic election. Howe disputed Chris Welch's Melody Maker account of the mood, saying the main tension was between Squire and Bruford. At one point the cleaning staff threw away the chosen take of a track, and it had to be recovered from the dustbins outside the studio.

The title track, written by Anderson and Howe, has four movements and is based on Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Anderson took ideas for it from Sibelius's sixth and seventh symphonies while reading Tolkien on the Fragile tour. Its opening is a tape loop of keyboards, flowing water and birdsong about 40 feet long, and Wakeman played the organ solo on the pipe organ of St Giles-without-Cripplegate in the Barbican. "And You and I" opens with Howe on Squire's Guild twelve-string, and his spoken "Okay" to Offord was kept on the record. On "Siberian Khatru" Wakeman plays a harpsichord solo and Howe plays sitar and pedal steel.

It reached number four in Britain, number three in the United States and number one in the Netherlands, and went Platinum in the US in 1998. Ian MacDonald wrote in the NME that the band were "not just close to the edge, they've gone right over it", while adding that on every level but the ordinary aesthetic one it was one of the most remarkable records pop had yet produced. Bruford left on 19 July 1972 to join King Crimson, and Alan White, who had played with John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, joined for the tour that began on 30 July. Rolling Stone's list of the 50 greatest prog rock albums placed the album at number five.