Transcription by Debra L. Wentorf
Introducing 'Keyboard' readers to Tony Banks is a little like introducing the Ayatollah to Oliver North. Banks, one of the pioneers of the progressive rock movement, which brough electronic keyboards to the forefront of popular music during the early 70s, has been interviewed in our pages three times.
The first interview, which appeared in the Sept./Oct. '76 issue, coincided with the departure from Genesis of front man Peter Gabriel. When guitarist Steve Hackett followed suit in 1978, leaving Genesis a trio, Banks posed for our July '78 cover and spoke about the trials and satisfactions of filling an extra pair of shoes. Over the next few years, as the band's popularity increased steadily, Banks recorded two solo albums and began moonlighting as a film composer. He was about to begin work on Peter Hyam's sequel to the film '2001': A Space Odyssey_ when we spoke for the third time and shot another cover [Nov. '84]. By the time that issue's deadline rolled around, however, word arrived that Banks was no longer working on the project.
Five sold-out nights with Genesis at the Oakland, California, Coliseum provided the occasion for our latest conversation. With no less than five singles from their 16th album, 'Invisible Touch', dominating the airwaves, Genesis has arrived as a bona fide pop phenomenon. Furthermore, Banks' scores for _Quicksilver_ and _Lorca & the Outlaws_ have just appeared on records as _Soundtracks_ [Atlantic, 81680-1]. These twists of fate have taken him a long way from his roots in the progressive underground, Banks acknowledges, and he is philosophical about he and Genesis have been affected by them. This theme ran through the following discussion, intertwined with the perils of Hollywood, explanations of his unusual use of the Emulator II, complaints about the music press, and an analysis of the essential diffrence between Americans and the British.
The last time we spoke, it had just been determined that you would not be scoring _2010_.
That was a disappointment. I wrote masses of music for it, and the director just didn't seem to like what I was doing. I think the problem is that before you've got any pedigree, no one quite knows what you can do, so they're worried. He wanted to use someone who hadn't scored very many films, but when it came down to it, I don't think he could bear to trust me. If he had been using John Williams, who has obviously done it millions of times, whatever Williams came up with, he'd say, "That's great," even if he was doubtful at the time. But if I suggested something, he'd say, "Well, I don't know." It set me back, too, because after the last Genesis tour, _2010_ was the first thing I was going to do in the year and a half that we had set aside to do other things. Suddenly I had nothing to do for a few months, and I was very frustrated with that. After _2010_ fell through, I took the first film that came up, which was an English film called _Lorca and the Outlaws_. They had no money to pay me, but I just wanted to do something. It was such a low budget thing, there was no question of using a studio; I just did it all at home using a Fostex 16-track. Obviously you make some sacrifices in the sound, but I rather liked it. The _Soundtracks_ LP contains some of the music from that film.
The next film after that was _Quicksilver_. After _2010_ I was loathe to come back to Hollywood, I must admit. I felt that I was rather badly treated. When I came out to see _Quicksilver_, I said, "I went through all this with _2010_, I really don't want to go through it again." They were keen on everything, so it went much more smoothly. The only criticism I had with that film was that they wanted to use a lot of songs in it, and the number of songs they wanted became larger and larger because they were desperately searching for a hit single. I think soundtracks work much better of they don't have songs, unless the song is integral to the film. One of the songs that didn't appear in _Quicksilver_ I recorded with the English singer called Fish, who's with the band Marillion. I think the song would have worked great in the position I wrote for it, but they decided on a Georgio Moroder song--again, pedigree. Moroder writes hits. They used one of his songs with Roger Daltrey--once again, an established artist in America. They thought they'd got a sure-fire hit. They put it out as a single and it was a big flop, because it's a lousy song, and it didn't work well in the film either.
Your attitude toward using songs in a film is more like that of a veteran Hollywood composer than that of a pop musician.
I love classic scores like _Lawrence of Arabia_ and _The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly_, purely because the film is nothing without the music. I want to do the same job as those, in my own way. I'm not interested in rock music in films. I'm not saying it never works; in _Ghostbusters_ obviously it worked great, but in the main, songs just make a film disjointed. But who am I to argue? Hollywood's ethic is success at all costs. And it gets people into the cinemas, you know. English people work very differently. Although they like success, they always want to get it on their own terms. They refuse to compromise like that, which is perhaps why they're not doing as well as the Americans at this point in time. I go with that approach, trying to make the film as good as you possibly can, and not trying to commercialize it by having a hit single, or ten attempts at a hit single.
What approach did you take to the dramatic scoring in _Quicksilver_?
It's quite rhythmic, with synthesizers. It's about bicycle messengers in a big city, and they end up being involved with drug pushers, so there's quite a good dark side to it. It required a lot of movement with the bicycles, so it needed a rhythm for that. The darker characters had a more dramatic kind of music. The actual moods required are fairly conventional, though hopefully the ways I put them across are not totally conventional. One thing I like about films is that you don't have to do rhythm all the time. There's an obsession with rhythm these days. One can almost be a success because of one's rhythm feel, the drums and the bass, people stabbing around, you know--it doesn't really matter what chords you're using as long as you've got a very simple little hook. I don't find that particularly interesting. I'm more interested in harmony and atmosphere than in rhythm itself, though rhythm is a useful tool. With the films, though, I'm able to do timeless pieces, atmosphere things. The trouble is that those pieces are unpromotable apart from the film. You can't play them on the radio, so you have a limited audience for that kind of thing. But the main problem is trying to reach the audience that actually wants to hear it. That's a problem I have with all my music, in a way. Nowadays there's virtually no way to promote without a single, except for a hit film. And that's not an area that I fit in as naturally as some people.
Genesis of late has been oriented towards shorter, more melodic songs of the hit variety.
I don't think so. It's an illusion. I agree, there's a slightly stronger bias toward the straightforward stuff, and the straightforawrd stuff has a much higher profile than it used to. On _Invisible Touch_ you've got the "Domino" suite, which is 12 minutes long, and "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight", which is about nine minutes. Both are identifiably Genesis, the sort of thing that no one else does. If you add, say, "The Brazilian," which again is like no other group, you've got at least 50% of the album. There are songs like "Invisible Touch" and "Throwing It All Away," but we've always done those. It's just that we do them better now. With the songs, say, off _The Lamb Lies Down_, maybe they're lyrically more complex, but in terms of the songs themselves-- "Carpet Crawlers" or "Counting Out Time"--they're all attempts at the same kind of thing. Even our first album, _From Genesis to Revelation_, which goes back to 1969, was all short songs, all attempts at writing hit singles. And all failed. [laughs] Now we have an album where we've got shorter songs, and because we have an audience, we have hits. I think we just got better at it.
There's a short section in the middle of "Invisible Touch" where there's a perky synthesizer texture. How did you arrive at that?
You mean the sequenced part? Well, we wanted to keep the song very simple, but we thought it would be nice to shift gear there and go to a different key. So I said, "Let's play eight bars in this key and I'll do something on it afterwards," because it was on a rhythm machine and I could link up a sequencer later. So I recorded eight different sequencer parts, quite arbitrarily, in step time. A couple of things I actually wrote ahead of time, and on others I did it roughly--playing a chord and punching that in, and then another chord, and then a gap. The best one was the most random, which is the one that becomes the most prominent by the end of that section. I just faded them into the mix slowly, and brought the whole thing up at the end. By building on this one chord, it's almost like you've changed key when you come back into the song, when in fact you're back in the original key.
How do you deal with that part onstage?
Unfortunately, we had to change key to play it onstage, because of Phil's voice. It was a real drag, because I had to redo the sequence and I couldn't do it as well as I did on the album. I put it on the Emulator II in four sections of about two bars each. I just play four notes, and it builds up because I introduce more and more of one thing. If it were in the same key as the album, I could have recorded it straight off the 24-track onto the Emulator. If I hit the keys just a fraction late, or a fraction early, it can put me out of time--that's a little knife-edge I walk each night. But that's easier than doing it live with the sequencer, because then I'd have to link up the whole song, and start the sequencer at the right time.
Actually, I've been using the Emulator quite a lot. So many songs on the album evolved from using that machine. One thing I like to do is record the group improvising in the room. I'll switch on the Emulator and record whatever is happening for the full 17 seconds, and then listen back and see if anything interesting happened. I'll isolate the good bits. One of them became "The Brazilian"; that thing that goes all the way through was just random noise in the room. That riff just sounded great; it was just a matter of improvising on top of it and seeing what happened. You can have such fun with that thing. I used a car driving away as musical sound in the soundtrack of _Quicksilver_. No one quite knows what it is; it sounds like a filthy saxophone. You can actually incorporate it into a musical thing in a way that you never would have thought you could. It's just luck--I'm a great believer in chance. It's when you make mistakes that interesting things happen--well, not so much mistakes as letting yourself forget what you know. For instance, I used to write a lot of stuff on guitar, because I play very bad guitar. I never knew quite where I was on a guitar. Another thing you can do--it's sort of silly, but sometimes it produces something--is play the keyboard backwards. If you play what look like ordinary chord changes, C minor, F, G, but you do it backwards, it can come out quite interesting. When you've been playing as long as I have, you can't be surprised by anything the keyboard can do anymore. If you can surprise yourself, it helps. Another thing you can do with keyboards like the Emulator is to scramble the notes by splitting up the keyboard. Obviously, for live performance, this is a fantastic thing to be able to do.