Tony Banks – We had such a fantastic time as Genesis

In 2019, I had the privilege of speaking with Tony Banks who reflected on his time with Genesis and as a solo artist. As he turns 73 today I’m sharing the full interview here.

Hi Tony, we’re here to cover the excellent new release of “Banks Vaults” and that captures the range of your solo material from 1979 to 1995. What’s new about this release? I understand it’s been remastered.

Yes. We’ve remastered and, obviously, some of the tracks were also remixed. Some of the ones that I did for the compilation album I did a couple of years ago “A Chord Too Far” (released in 2015). It’s a bit different. Certainly the remastering is good. It’s always worth doing that because techniques are much better now than they used to be. Some of these albums are 20/25/30 years old. Probably a lot older actually. Forty years. I don’t know. Very old – so they need a bit of help.

For the first time it’s got a bonus DVD of promotional videos, which I don’t think have been seen.

No. Although I have to say these days I suppose the videos are all available YouTube-wise aren’t they? You can always find them. It’s nice to have them all there. There’re a couple of good ones in there. I’m not quite so sure about the one where I’m singing myself but the other ones are quite fun, particularly the later ones.

It’s a great opportunity to shine a light on your solo career and material that really deserves much of a wider airing these days.

Well, I’m very pleased you say that but, well I mean, yes, it’s a weird thing because the albums actually did worse in the order they were released. “A Curious Feeling” did OK and then the later ones sort of did nothing and, by the time you got to “Strictly Inc.” I doubt it made 100 copies. It was very difficult to get any interest at that particular point in time while the group was getting more and more popular. It’s just one of those things really. I think I never had a song, a single or something that made me stand out enough from the crowd in a way. I think the records, the music on them, is what it is. It’s as good as what I wrote for Genesis at the same time and some of those songs have become very well known – classics in a way. So, it would have been nice if things had gone a bit better but, looking back on it, I am very pleased to have done them. I loved making the records at the time and I was always pleased with them and I still am and I can listen to them again and most of it I’m happy with and I think I did a good job.

In the build-up to that period, a few years before “A Curious Feeling”, you were writing seemingly quite prolifically and many people describe “A Trick of the Tail” (the seventh Genesis studio album and the first following the departure of Peter Gabriel) as a “lost” Tony Banks album given that you with involved with all the tracks?

Well, yes, that’s a little unfair on the others. There were three or four tracks that I wrote pretty much on my own and then the others I contributed to – sometimes significant bits. Obviously Steve (Hackett) had just done his solo album so he was very dry of ideas. Peter (Gabriel) had gone and so I had a lot of material. I had actually considered even doing a solo album at that point really and then I thought I won’t, Genesis – we’re going to keep it going; we need all the stuff we can get. And I had a pretty good period of time with obviously things like “Mad Man Moon” and “Robbery, Assault And Battery” and stuff I’d been working on and so, when the group was there, we decided to do them. I mean my writing from this period, the late seventies, I was writing a lot of stuff and it came to me quite easily and I enjoyed it and I think I wrote some of my best stuff during that period.

Am I right there’s a bit of a link with “And Then There Were Three” in that there’s a track called “Undertow” that kind of has a tie with “A Curious Feeling” and that Genesis album?

Well, yes. Well, “Undertow” – originally I had an introduction to “Undertow” that included some of the elements that ended up in “From The Undertow” (chuckles) and I’d got quite a long introduction to “Burning Rope” and stuff and I think that the other two felt that I was outstaying my welcome a little bit so we decided to get rid of the introduction to “Undertow”, which didn’t worry me too much. Then when Mike (Rutherford) and I were asked to write the music to a film called “The Shout”, I had this piece. There was a sort of section in it which had slightly spooky chords that I thought could really suit the film well, so I took the introduction I had written for “Undertow” and turned it around and made what was just a link bit into the main bit and used the main bit as just a link and I liked the way it turned out. In the film “The Shout” it wasn’t used very prominently. I mean, it worked nicely in the film but it wasn’t prominent as all that so I thought, this was a good piece of music, I’d like to use it as a starting point for this solo album which was something I’d had planned for a while and that’s how it turned out.

And I’ve heard that you were writing, in the run up to “A Curious Feeling”, quite a lot with a drum machine, something that you’d successfully done with tracks like “Duchess” which was from “Duke”?

Yes. Well, all three of us got a drum machine originally, from Roland, the first ones off the press of this particular new machine they’d got and I used it at home really to write with. It never occurred to me to actually use the sounds on the record and I do regret that because when Phil (Collins) did his album – and, as a drummer he wasn’t really very excited by the drum machine originally – but then he ended up using it quite extensively in the background on the album “Face Value” for all his demos and everything and, when we were doing “Duke” he fiddled around with it while we were doing the song “Duchess” and we really liked the effect. I think “Duchess” was probably one of the first, certainly the first thing by any of us that ended up using the drum machine with such prominence and it had such a wonderful character about it. I think that what we found was that both when I was writing “A Curious Feeling” and, obviously, when we were writing as Genesis, the drum machine freed you up to do other things, particularly when we were a three-piece because it meant that Phil could sing rather than having to drum, which was quite an interesting thing and that did help a bit as well.

I must mention Kim Beacon, who is the singer on “A Curious Feeling”. His voice really shines through on songs like “Lucky Me”.

I really liked his voice. I chose him from tapes and I didn’t realise he was anything to do with Charisma (Tony Stratton-Smith’s UK record company who had also signed Genesis) at the time. He was singing with String Driven Thing part of the time. He just had a really good, quite versatile voice. It was a curious thing – because he’s no longer with us. I made the record and got close to him during the record and I never saw him afterwards, so he’s sort of become the character as portrayed in the story of the album which is kind of a strange thing. So he’s sort of become this slightly lonely lost figure which is probably not fair at all but I know no difference and that’s how I kind of see him. I thought he was really suited to the record. It was my first experience of working with someone other than Phil or Peter and he was very easy to work with.

For your next album “The Fugitive” you took the lead to sing on the material yourself, songs like “This Is Love” and I’ve heard that you kept the lyrics intentionally simple to make that easier for you?

Not just the lyrics. It’s more the melody lines, actually, in many ways, to keep them simple – and then the lyrics, yes. I keep the whole thing quite direct. When I first started it, I was singing along. I’d done a demo version of the song “Keep It Dark” where I’d sung to the others and I’d done the demo so they heard it. They said “It’s sounds all right. It’s not bad” so it gave me a bit of encouragement. I have this way of singing. My voice is basically quite pure and if I sing normally it’s a bit choirboy-ish, a bit like Al Stewart or someone like that – that kind of voice. I wanted a bit more aggression to it so I found this way of singing which required a slightly simpler melody and a simpler, more direct lyric. That seemed to help that. I’d wanted to sing on this record really because they’d been an identity problem on “A Curious Feeling”. Some people suggested I was the singer and I obviously wasn’t and it got a bit confusing so I thought I’ll try singing myself and see how it works out. It was fun to do. It taught me a lot about song writing and everything and I was pretty pleased with the result. It was good to do.

You did quite a number of soundtracks in the 1980s. I think the orchestral version of the main theme of “Wicked Lady” works really well and acts as a bridge to your current classical work?

Well it was, in a way. I’d kind of written this and when Michael Winner asked me to do the film and I played him this theme on the piano. He said that’s really lovely but he wanted an orchestral score and at that stage I’d never worked with an orchestra, he suggested this guy Christopher Palmer who was an experienced arranger – a film writer himself. He made this theme much better than it was when I played it and what was interesting about it was that the main version of the theme on the record is just the same piece of music played around nine times but it is always different and it doesn’t get boring. I find that, as a writer, I’m not very good at that. I’m not very good at repeating things. I like to do them a couple of times and go somewhere else. So it’s quite interesting having someone else saying “Well, no, this is really nice, we should make it work” and all these different arrangements he did of it, just in that period of three or four minutes I think worked really well. It made me very interested in the possibility of doing the orchestral music which I’ve come to do later. It was something that I felt, what had been a fairly simple theme, ended up sounding a lot better with the orchestra and everything and it was a good experience.

For your album “Bankstatement”, you worked with Steve Hillage?

Yeh, well Steve (chuckles), Steve is a one-off actually. We had good times and bad times. It worked out really well I think. He has a slightly different approach to music. He tries to think about how it’s actually working in terms of making certain all the beats are in exactly the right place and all the rest of it which is something I’ve never worried about too much but, anyhow, it produced a good result. The only problem I had with that album was that he was down to be the guitarist but he was going through a period when he didn’t really like to play guitar. I got him to play on a couple of tracks and the little bits he did were very nice but the guitar is slightly absent on that record I think. If I’d known he was going to be that – not to play that little I would have probably have got someone else in to help me out a bit.

You can hear him a little bit on “Queen of Darkness” though I think.

Yes. He played a little bit and got quite good towards the end I think. He slightly lost himself and actually started jamming along and it was quite good. Nice little bits in the song “Raincloud” – I think he played some little bits which were quite nice. You know, a lot of the tracks which could have done with a bit more of the old beef from the guitar didn’t really get them so that was a slight disappointment for me. I’m pleased with the album and Virgin Records, who were obviously responsible and my record company at the time, they loved the album and they thought it would do a lot. Of course, it didn’t unfortunately. It was an attempt to get away from being just a Tony Banks solo album to try and make it look more like a group. It had good singers – Alistair Gordon and Jayney Klimek – a nice little combination and a good drummer Geoff Dugmore. It was a fun thing to do.

And you worked with an arranger for vocalists on your next album “Still” especially people like Nik Kershaw with a very commercial track such as “I Wanna Change The Score”?

I thought that would, I mean I really thought that was going to be a hit, I have to say. It could have been a hit and listening to it even now I listen back to it and it fits very much in the period of time and everything. The only problem I had with that, a little bit, was that Nik, who was great to work with and we had a really good time, but he didn’t want to promote it. He’d gone a bit camera-shy at that point and didn’t want to do it. We had a few opportunities to play that on TV and stuff but had to turn them down. We did a video, obviously, but it didn’t get enough plays so it never quite took off unfortunately. Since it hadn’t worked with me singing and hadn’t work with having a group I thought I’d go for singers on a horses for courses type attitude and use different singers on different tracks and the opportunity of working with Nik – I’d really loved his fourth album called “The Works”, which is an album that didn’t do very well actually but it had a particular track on it called “Cowboys & Indians”. I thought it was a fantastic track and also wonderful drumming from Vinnie Colaiuta so I hired them both for my next solo album and Vinnie played on most of the album and obviously Nik sung on three or four songs. It was great. And of course I also had Fish obviously on that. He was someone who was in the same kind of zone as I was and that was entertaining as well. Although he ends up sounding a little bit like Peter Gabriel, he’s a very different type of personality. We had a lot of entertainment doing those. It was a good album I think. I look back on it and I think well, you know, that’s one that got away a bit really cos I think it had a chance.

For your final album in this set “Strictly Inc.”, tracks like “Charity Balls” have really interesting lyrics.

Well “Charity Balls”, of course, is quite relevant in fact. It could have been written about Jimmy Saville and quite a few other people as well, really. When I wrote it I was thinking more general – there was a bit of dodgy stuff going on in the (House of) Commons with people being bribed and you weren’t quite sure of what was going on. You know all these people kind of have… they must always be frightened of being found out. Jimmy Saville must have been frightened – not frightened – but he must have known that he would possibly be found out. In fact he wasn’t found out until after he’d died which was an extraordinary thing for him really. But it’s the fact that a lot of people in the public eye have a lot to hide. I’m sure Mr Johnson, our future Prime Minister, presumably, has quite a lot to hide. But there you go. That was the idea of the song. It was done tongue in cheek and I’d quite liked to have made more of that song, could have done a good video. I quite fancied the chorus done with press men dressed as pigs or something. I had an idea in my brain how it could work but we never got around to doing that because we never got the chance to put it out as a single. But it was a good thing.

In terms of the album, in general, I wanted to go back to trying to work with one person. I really liked Jack Hues’ voice. He’s very, sort of, similar – his taste in music was not that far from mine and he’s an intelligent chap and we had a lot of fun working on it. I wanted to do one – just let myself go a little bit on one track on this record so I had the song “Island In The Darkness” which is a 15-minute piece which I think echoes some of the early Genesis stuff and everything a bit. It had a theme that I thought could really work well as a big guitar solo and I got Daryl Stuermer in to do that. I think the result was a really good track but, at that particular stage in time, and has proved to be the case for many years since, long long form music is not really… it doesn’t get much of an outlet really any more. So the record, unfortunately the whole “Strictly Inc.” just didn’t do anything. I couldn’t even get a sort of, you know… I mean I said, if it sold 100 copies I’d be surprised.  So what’s really nice about this set is to open all those things out there again and give them another little chance, I’m not expecting big sales or anything. It’s just nice so that people who have liked what I’ve done with Genesis have the chance to hear these things and see what I was up to while everyone else was spending time at the top of the charts.

Just to close, I know we’ve talked quite a bit about your solo work, are there any tracks from the Genesis canon that you’ve written that you feel are underappreciated and want to shine a light on as well?

What, within the Genesis thing?

Yes.

Well, it’s a difficult thing really because the Genesis stuff always gets quite a lot of attention just because it’s on a Genesis album. You get certain songs like the “Afterglow”s and everything which have become very big stage songs so they get a lot of attention. I don’t really know. You have a song like “Many Too Many” was a song I felt perhaps… We did release it as a single and I think it had a chance to do a bit better but we’d had a big hit with “Follow You, Follow Me”. The trouble was with Genesis, the reason why we often didn’t score very well in charts was just that people used to go out and buy the album. They’d hear a single and say “that’s nice” but they’d go out and buy the album – there was no point in buying a single. Whereas I think a lot of people who are more singles acts tend to sell singles and then the album might sell on the back of that, with us when we put out all these things people tended to wait for the album and obviously we put out a second single, most people had already got it, so it didn’t really work for us in a way. If you think about the current climate where everything’s done on like Spotify and all the rest of it, streaming, we’d probably have done all right really because these tracks would have been streamed, I suppose, in a way, because there wasn’t the same commitment to have to go out and buy the things. I don’t know. Who knows? We had such a fantastic time as Genesis I don’t really have any problems. Most of the stuff I wrote for Genesis got reasonable attention. You can always think there’s one or two that got away but, in the main, they did great.

Fantastic. Well, all the best with the release of “Banks Vaults” and it’s great to talk to you, Tony, and shine a light on your solo career.

Well thanks a lot for that. That’s great.

Interview transcribed by Nigel Davis. A podcast version is available here.