Where's the footage, Squire?

TO PARAPHRASE Peter Sellers in Being There, "I like to watch". Sometimes listening just isn't enough when it comes to this column, so every now and then I like to bung in the odd DVD as a means of showing that I can sometimes do two things at once. Three or indeed four if you count the snacking and supping which accompanied this little marathon session.

Now, I've never made any secret of my controversial admiration for prog behemoths Yes. Well, tell a lie, I went a bit quiet about it between 1977 and 2003. Anyway, since coming out of that particular closet - a really elaborate and mystical one, designed by Roger Dean - I've taken the subsequent brickbats on the chin, which may explain why I've grown a beard - to hide the bruising.

Liking Yes is indefensible as far as a lot of people are concerned, and I generally just agree with them and wait until they go away so that I can sneak home and listen to Heart Of The Sunrise again. I was as excited as any cardigan-wearing 45-year-old dadrock saddo could feasibly be - before medication - at the prospect of watching all five hours and 38 minutes of the Yes: Classic Artists two-disc DVD, but the experience was a curiously unsatisfying one.

Why? Well, I won't beat around anyone's bush - there just isn't enough supporting performance footage. The Yes story is told in great detail via new interviews with band members past and present (although original keyboardist Tony Kaye is oddly absent) and peripheral contributors such as early champion Chris Welch of the Melody Maker and legendary sleeve artist Roger Dean, but the endless parade of talking heads really needs breaking up.

You get frustratingly brief snippets of the mark one line-up on German TV in 1970 and the Jon Anderson/Chris Squire/Steve Howe/Rick Wakeman/Alan White line-up at the Rainbow in 1973, but the only extended footage is on the second disc in the set, and even then it largely consists of a camcorder-quality eavesdrop on the band rehearsing in New York's S.I.R Studios in 1996.

The appearance of promo films for Wondrous Stories, Tempus Fugit and Owner Of A Lonely Heart may be an added incentive for those who preferred the band when they were nowhere near their artistic peak, but the frustrating thing is knowing that there's so much great footage out there which is crying out to be sympathetically collated - the full Beat Club performances, the promo film for America, all of the Yesssongs material... Next time, hopefully.

Now, my love for brow-furrowing prog rock is matched only by my love for obscure French cinema - it's a laugh a minute round our gaff - so Optimum's Screen Icons: Alain Delon box set hits the spot like you wouldn't believe.

Delon managed to overcome being irritatingly handsome and secured a niche as an actor of rare subtlety with a glowering, magnetic screen presence. All five films contained herein - Un Flic, L'Eclisse, Plein Soleil, Traitment Du Choc and Flic Story - were made in Delon's 1960s/70s heyday, and all five are uniformly magnificent.

As this box set was mentioned in dispatches in the Echo recently I won't wang on - but I will say that the pick of the bunch is L'Eclisse from 1962, arguably the finest distillation of Michelangelo Antonioni's bleakly stylish worldview.

In Antonioni's eyes, the world is unfeeling and inscrutable, and relationships are inevitably doomed because everyone is too shallow and self-obsessed to care about anything to any significant degree.

Lovers Delon and Monica Vitti eventually can't even be bothered to turn up to meet each other, and the last 10 minutes of the film consists of shots of the empty junction which had previously been their meeting place - an audacious piece of cinema which is considerably more riveting and illuminating than it may sound.

It's back to the stereo for the last item under the microscope this week, namely the Human Spirit album by Blues Band bassist and mainstay Gary Fletcher.

Perhaps less celebrated than some of his more high-profile bandmates, Fletcher has nevertheless been quietly nurturing a rather profound songwriting talent for some years now, and the album is a low-key but absorbing triumph.

Using blues music as a jumping-off point, Fletcher deftly avoids any of the stylistic limitations to which the genre is often prone by keeping the melody quotient high and the lyrical content sincere. Like a more credible Mark Knopfler or a more animated J J Cale, this is rootsy fare with impeccably underplayed musicianship, at its most effective on emotive songs such as Solanski's Knife, about the surgeon who saved Fletcher's son's life.