palabras de tony banks sobre genesis

en esta revista dedicada a la gira de 1987 de genesis, que la compré en una feria del libro hace unos años (en concreto en la cuesta de moyano para los que seáis de madrid )...



...venía una entrevista a tony en la que hablaba de los albumes de genesis publicados hasta la fecha, es decir, hasta el invisible touch. no me preguntéis por qué no habló del wind and wuthering, para mí que fue un fallo del editor que se lo saltó, precisamente ese es un disco en el que tony intervino bastante...

en cualquier caso, aquí os lo transcribo, que tengáis una lectura entretenida.

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from genesis to revelation

we put out our first single from the album, the silent sun, which you review in the melody maker. it’s the only review i ever remember. it was such a big deal for us. richard mcphail, who was our roadie in those days, read the review out to us over the phone. you can imagine how my heart fell when i heard the first half of it when you were taking the piss put of jonathan king, but you said at the end, “by all that’s happy, a great hit”. and you were extremely wrong! it was a big miss. we did the whole album in a day. we got into the studio at 9 am and worked right through until midnight the following day with jonathan king producing.

we were very young and it was an amateur sort of approach but there are a couple of good songs and i think the album is quite good. it’s been endlessly re-packaged, but it sold nothing at the time. i haven’t listened to it for a while but i know it’s kind of simple, and of course we had never really played live. it was based on piano and acoustic guitar with other things overdubbed. then they put some string and brass arrangements on, which we had a hand in writing. it all became a bit lighter than was originally intended. my favourite track is probably in the wilderness, and peter’s voice sounded good on it, which probably came across more than anything else on that album. we were just out of the school, and it was fun for us. to be given a chance to make an album was amazing.

jonathan selected the tracks but we had a whole stack more. i still have the tapes at home of all sorts of songs that never made it onto the album, some of which are quite good.

we still se jonathan king. he introduced us at the milton keynes re-union show. he was very good for the band in the early days. if it hadn’t been for him, we wouldn’t have got going.


trespass

this was completely different. by this time, we had played live a bit and every song on the album had been performed on stage. we had a selection of at least twice as many songs as appeared on the album and the versions changed radically. the knife was seven minutes long. we had another song called going out to get you which was the same length. we cut out a whole section to make the album version of the knife. this started a whole new area of music. we were trying to do something different, that nobody else was doing at the time, which was extended pieces. procol harum has started doing things like that which showed us a longer form could be an interesting thing to try, but using acoustic instruments as well as electric stuff. it set us off on a new road. by this time, we were with charisma and we had got a drummer for the road because we had decided to go professional between these two albums. the original drummer didn’t want to do that, so we found john mayhew. i can’t say we were very pleased with the final results. we were always hyper critical, and weren’t terribly satisfied with the production, although we got on well with john anthony.

we didn’t really know what we were doing and kinda put too much on each track. we were let loose with 16 tracks having done the precious one on a four track machine! we’d have six guitars running at the same time, and the vocals were at times very quiet. nevertheless, there were a lot of good things on that album, and it started us on the direction we have carried on ever since.

the first album sold 649 copies by the end of the first year, while trespass sold 6,000 worldwide. so the second album did quite well and we got a certain amount of response “live”. we were building up a following around the country.


nursery cryme

by this time, we had lost anthony phillips, who was our original guitarist. he had decided to leave which was a sad blow for us as a group actually, but we decided we would carry on even though he’d left. we decided we would get a new drummer at the same time. we auditioned various people. we put an advert in melody maker and auditioned 15 drummers, all of whom were reasonably good, but phil was definitely the best. we played as a four piece for a while as we couldn’t find a guitarist. that’s why i started playing more than one instrument at the time. i had to play all the guitar parts of the trespass songs on a fuzz-toned electric piano! this taught me a lot and then just before we did nursery cryme, we found steve hackett. even with the two new members, the albums is surprisingly similar to the precious one.


foxtrot

this was a major leap forward. it was such a sweat to make this album. the first producer we had was called bob potter who charisma had brought in and he was with us for a few days and really didn’t like what we did at all! he particularly didn’t like the opening to watcher of the skies. he said: “we don’t need this, it’s awful”. it was uphill stuff, so we got rid of him. he was fine about it. he said: “i don’t like it, so i’m not going to do it”. we didn’t like what he was doing, so we were happy to get rid of him. so we got in david hitchc0ck. he wasn’t really right either, and didn’t know what was going on. we had to work around him all the time. he was a nice enough guy but in terms of sound we disagreed very strongly.

despite all that, the album produced some of the best things of all. we had just done the first bit of supper’s ready with the original engineer and then we did the last half with john burns as the engineer. suddenly there was power and excitement and i came out of the studio for the first time wanting to listen to something over and over again. supper’s ready was vastly better than anything we had done before. i was really pleased it got a lot of attention live.

in the studio, we found two bits of guitar were out of tune, so we had to slow one bit down, and that still irks me when i hear it now. it sounds awful! but there was watcher of the skies which became a classic live song eve before we recorded it. there was a mellotron introduction where we opened the whole show, which became our trademark.


selling england by the pound

we wrote the whole thing in one go over six weeks, then went in and recorded it, and it was quite a difficult recording session actually. the writing was difficult and we had some great moments and bad moments. it was hard to get things going. i know what i like was good and the second half of cinema show worked well. the simplicity of i know what i like, we hadn’t done since the early days. it had a nice feel and riff, and a strong chorus.

there was one track i didn’t want on the album and have never liked which was after the ordeal, an instrumental piece by steve.

i remember having a lot of arguments about that. i didn’t want it on. peter didn’t want it on. but unfortunately peter weakened because he didn’t want the end of cinema show on the album either. so we couldn’t agree amongst ourselves and put the whole lot on, and had a ridiculously long side. when we played the album to strat [tony stratton.smith], it was the only time when he didn’t seem that excited by what we had given him. he was worried by the fact it was so highly instrumental. he didn’t like it as much as the others. he tended to stay by us pretty much through everything, but he wasn’t too sure about that album. but, of course, it produced a minor hit single, i know what i like, which got to number three [sic] in the charts. it changed our status and we were able to headline tours. we had found our feet. this was a long process. we’re talking about 1973 now, four years after we had started and a lot of groups had come and gone by then! this did well for us on england but we weren’t doing anything in the states. and nothing much changed for us with the next album!


the lamb lies down on broadway

being a double album, this was much more difficult for people to promote and it was the only album to sell less than its predecessor. it didn’t do so well in england as selling england and it didn’t sell in america. we tried with singles off the album but couldn’t get any off the ground. i think we suffered from lack of radio play. i thought carpet crawlers had a good chance.

making this album.. started off great but turned into hell by the end really. and by the time we had finished the album we were so fed up with it, because it took so long to do. it took about five months to do and we were all ready fed up with it. but, on the other hand, i think the result was one of the strongest we had ever done. i think it ha really so many strong moments. it’s very flawed. lots of things wrong with it too. i’m not crazy about the story myself. it was just something to hang songs on, although the individual lyrics are great. i have listened to that album and it spawned a very important live show. we went into town with all the effects. it’s funny, people look back on that album and say it was a classic from the early days. they say it was the “golden age”. that got unanimous bad reviews at the time. nobody liked it and it went uniformly badly. it was a very ambitious album but, in the main, it went off okay. the lyrics were almost totally peter’s. he wrote the story and the lyrics which was a bone of contention at the time. we had internal problems with the group, so it wasn’t the happiest time for us.

a trick of the tail

both the previous albums weren’t that easy to make and this one was such a relief and breath of fresh air to us. peter gabriel had decided to leave. we had great fun writing and recording it, and every aspect was great fun. there was a lightening of the load, and we needed to streamline the band down to fewer members. obviously, we were very sad to see peter go because he was a very close friend, but something had to give somewhere. it has been proved it was good for peter and good for the band for him to leave at that point. it gave us a bit more room.


and then there were three

coming down from four to three members after steve left was uplifting and easy to cope with. we had a little more to make up in terms of the guitar playing and sound. mike had to spread himself more as a guitarist. looking back, most of this album was written by mike and i individually and we felt we were playing a bit as session guys on each other’s songs. follow you follow me was one of the few group written tracks on the album and it was pretty successful. there were some nice things like mike’s deep in the motherlode. it’s a bit like nursery cryme this album, it’s not one of my favourites. i can’t work out why. i listened to it the other day because we had it on compact disc. the best tracks were undertow, follow you follow me and say it’s alright joe.


duke

we had been through the punk era and everyone had predicted our downfall and yet and then there were three was by far away our biggest selling album, because follow you follow me had been a hit single. more people listened to us than ever before. our producer didn’t like the song but charisma told us to release it. funnily enough, punk rock helped us a lot because a lot of bands didn’t survive and it meant we had less competition in our area and i always thought we were better. this kind of confirmed it in a way. i always thought it was wrong for us to be lumped with other bands. we had technique and complexity but the basis of our songs has always been in melody and sound.

we never considered not carrying on whatever happened. fashions come and go, you know.

we had a long difficult tour in ’78 and this brought to a head phil’s marriage and by the end of the year, he was in pretty bad shape and had to sort it out. mike and i thought we’d do our solo albums and let phil get on with things. when it got to duke, i didn’t have as much material ready as usual, nor did mike. phil, meanwhile, had some time to write stuff. we listened to it and thought it would be nice to use on a genesis album.

there is no doubt the best tracks in duke were written as a group. the standout track is duchess, which was the first time we had used a drum machine on record. very simple, but a strong melody. turn it on again was great and proved to be a classic genesis song, and behind the lines, which was the first time we got into a funkier feel. please don’t ask was written by phil about his marriage. misunderstanding was treated more as a fifties kind of lyric, which we did a video for. the funny thing was turn it on again was a throwaway section used between two bits, and we played it all again twice in the studio, because it seemed so good. when we were making the album, phil was a bit sombre and we were used to him being our main joke provider, but it wasn’t a difficult album to make, and we were very pleased with the results. the sound wasn’t as good as it should have been and there was a great lack of bottom end.


abacab

this album saw some more radical changes. we decided to do mainly group written stuff as that had proved the strongest on the previous album. by this time, we had built ourselves a studio that wasn’t ready to move in when we did abacab. we rehearsed in the sitting room. meanwhile during this album, phil’s success started to break through, which took us all a bit by surprise. suddenly in the air tonight was 32 in the charts, next week someone said: “it’s number 4 in the charts!”. suddenly, he was a big star during the making of the new album. it didn’t affect our working relationship, after all it’s difficult to have illusions about someone you’ve known for fifteen years. with abacab, we did try and avoid what we thought of as genesis clichés, big chord sounds and a tambourine on the chorus! we wanted to avoid the big instrumental passages we’d had on the previous five albums. we tried some weird things we’ve never done before or since, the no reply at all type thing with horns. and who dunnit was a real one-off. we were only trying to please ourselves, by deciding we wanted to do things a new way. my favourite track was keep it dark, an odd track. we called it “odd” when we wrote it. we put the drums on a loop, and played against it. it had an hypnotic effect. having our own studio helped us quite a bit. there was time to try these things. there are a couple of tracks i could live without, but on the whole i’m pleased with it.


genesis

this carried on the idea from abacab of putting good things down on tape right away. things like mama were little more than a drum machine and a chord sequence. it had great atmosphere and didn’t need any more. it was mike rutherford’s drum machine pattern that set the whole thing in motion and it just sounded good. i played discords and spooky effects, and we strung it together in order, while phil improvised some vocals while we were doing all this. a few lines came to him… “can’t you see me mama...”. then we worked in a big climax to the song, bringing in the drums. the drum entry was a bit like in the air tonight but it seemed so right for the song, we didn’t fight it.

when I listen to the genesis album, i really love the first side. mama, that’s all and home by the sea are my favourite tracks. the second side is less exciting but there are some nice moments. i think mama is one of the strongest things we’ve ever been involved in. it was a different kind of instrumental feel for us. we just improvised for hours over the drum rhythm. then mike and i listened to it all and extracted the bits we liked, and then learned how to play them!


invisible touch

the latest album is always the favourite! but this is the favourite of all our albums. i said the second side of genesis wasn’t so good, but i don’t feel that way about this one. it’s very consistent and I’m so pleased it had such a good reaction in america. it went down well in england too, but the singles didn’t do so well. the album has been at number 5 in the chart after ten months. the only sad aspect is it came out at the same time as peter’s album, so we must have competed with each other in certain areas. also, you get endless comparisons, which is tedious. but it’s great peter’s album has done so well! genesis though is destined not to get awards, and we tend to get bad reviews all round. it’s something about the band. i don’t know what it is. i think people miss the point. but, then, i always tell people i hate the grateful dead, and i’ve only heard one number by them! in america, it’s only through the constant release of singles that people have started to say “this is really good. let’s go out and buy the album. i know I like three tracks already, let’s hear the rest”. you can’t listen to everything. every week, hundreds of albums are coming out. i listen to very few, and sometimes a year and a half after they are out. but once we’d finished this album, we really felt we had got something that would do well.

Gracias Chema por la abundante información aportada al foro sobre Genesis.
Sobre sus discos favoritos creo que ultimamente ha elegido Duke y W&W.Me parecen muy interesante los comentarios sobre Foxtrot.

Muchas gracias Chema por la información.
Este Banks ,parece mentira que sea el alma de Genesis.Desde luego coincido muy poco con lo que para él es lo mejor.Me da la sensación que le gusta mucho los sonidos comerciales.Creo que a nivel de gustos respecto a Genesis con quien más me identifico es con el abuelo Collins.(Siempre dijo que lo mejor de Genesis era Supper´s y The Lamb).

Coincido totalmente con los gustos del maestro Tony Banks discos, Wind and Wuthering y Duke son los que mas me gustan a mi también.
Wind and Wuthering es mágico y romantico y Duke es sencillamente espectacular.