Tony Banks goes for the bottom line on BANKSTATEMENT. Though it's easy to forget, there was a time when Genesis was an unabashingly underground band. They could be talked about in the same terms as relative unknowns like Henry Cow, Soft Machine, and Gong. Nearly two decades later, they're a staple of mainstream culture. They croon for Michelob, mug for British Airways and, every few years, summon forth a tide of singles seemingly preordained to saturate the airwaves and pack the stadiums. Did they change, or did we? Tony Banks, whose compelling keyboard textures and poignant chord changes have been trademarks of the Genesis sound since the beginning, maintains that it was us. The impression that the band changed to accommodate the marketplace, he stated rather flatly in Keyboard in 1987, is an "illusion." Bank's fourth solo album, Bankstatement, however, suggests otherwise-particularily coming, as it does, on the heels of a few trying experiences in Hollywood's film score mill. Brimming with hook-laden ballads and radio-bound rockers- and with just a hint here and there of old-fashioned progressive rock-the new album is an obvious bid for the kind of commercial viability that has eluded Banks' solo efforts since his first, 1979's A Curious Feeling. From the streamlined arrangements to the rear-cover face shot of Banks flanked by two photogenic vocalists, Bankstatement evinces the studied professionalism that, for better or worse, appears to be the sine qua non for success at the dawn of the '90s.
Beneath its well-crafted veneer, though, Bankstatement bears marks of the more adventurous facets of the artist's personality. Both "Thursday the 12th" with its apocalyptically descending theme and the strident "Big Man" evolved from Bank's fascination with found-object sampling. Experiments with his new sequencing software produced the album's most engaging track, "The Border." And, though Banks plays it down, his recruitement of former Gong guitarist Steve Hillage to co-produce the album makes for an intriguing footnote in the obituary of progressive rock.
Ted: Bankstatement's first single, "Throwback," has been out for a couple of months now. How has it been received?
Tony: It was liked, I think, by the people who heard it. But it's difficult to get the average radio station to take it seriously. I understand; they've got a stack of records a hundred high, so they have to make some selection simply on the basis of name and the cover photo. And there are certain areas in which I'll be seen as Phil Collin's sidekick, and not really worth the listen. Anyway, we couldn't seem to get enough airplay. The excuse was that it came out at the same time as the [Rolling] Stones [new album] and a lot of other heavy duty-stuff. But also, the format has become more rigid in the last few years. Airplay is quite restricted unless you fit snugly into one of the formats.
Ted: When we last spoke, you were composing for films. You didn't seem to be interested in making hit singles.
Tony: In my solo career, I've followed two strains. One is songwriting, for which I used to have a big outlet in Genesis. These days, Genesis writes more as a group, which means that I've got a lot of songs, which never see the light of day unless I do something else with them. The second strain, the instrumental work, is mainly involved with films. Now whether or not I can get the right film is a matter of chance. It's such a competitive world. There are an awful lot of people doing it and trying to get into it, and not having yet had a hit film. I don't start with any particular advantage. But the thing about films is that the music naturally follows the film. So although it's a good outlet for instumental music, you don't have the freedom you have in writing an instrumental album. I quite fancy doing that, but the problem there is that it's so difficult to promote-it's difficult enough promoting an album like Bankstatement, and it's even more difficult to promote an instrumental record. On this album, I've tried to shy away from the instrumental work and emphasize the songwriting.
Ted: Bankstatement doesn't really sound like a keyboard player's solo album.
Tony: I just happen to be a keyboard player. I never set myself up to be the kind of keyboard player people would take special notice of. I saw Keith Emerson back in the days of Nice and thought he was fantastic, but I was never aiming to be anything like that. I set out to be an accompanist, and I always felt that one could do much more interesting and original things than had been done up to that point. There were certain approaches that everyone who played keyboards to back singers used, and I thought there were a lot of other things you could do-simple things, like arpeggios, which hadn't really been used, and sustained chords, which became one of my trademarks during that period. And you could do quite intricate things, "Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" sort of stuff, that were actually quite complex but didn't get in the way of the vocal. The idea of doing solos never even occured to me. I was thinking in terms of writing, which is why I didn't improvise. I never claimed to be a great improviser. I can improvise well amongst the group, because it doesn't matter if I play a few bum notes. On this album, as I said, I tried to lay off the instrumental emphasis. I did what was best for each song, and if it didn't involve much that said "Keyboards!" to you, that was fine by me. There's more keyboard playing, obviously, on the soudtrack-type records, but they've gone by with even less attention paid to them than the other albums. I don't know that there's a great market of people out there who are desiring to hear Tony Banks play lots of keyboards.
Ted: Did you find yourself with enough songs for an album, or did you decide to make an album of songs and then get down to writing them?
Tony: I had some songs around, and I decided I was going to do a solo record, so I wrote quite a few more for it. I didn't write any lyrics; I tend not to write lyrics for a song until I know it's going to be recorded. Lyrics take a lot more discipline and effort, so I tend to put them off until I have a deadline; I didn't worry about the lyrics until I had the singers coming, at which point I had to finish them before they showed up! There's a certain point when you know you've got a song-it may not have a proper top line, it may not even be totally constructed, but you know you've got the elements that make up a song-and when I decide I'm going to make a record, that's when I start organizing myself and making it into a proper song.
Ted: You're songs are far more involved harmonically than most pop music these days.
Tony: I do tend to work in the chord area. I like using slightly unusual chord sequences and trying to make them come across as not so strange. If you go back to the Tamla/Motown era [during the '60s], they were great at using difficult chord sequences and making them sound very natural. "Reach Out, I'll Be There" [by the Four Tops] is the standard example because it's got bits in different keys all the time. The change into the verse is one of the most effective key changes in pop music, and yet it's a really unnatural one, in a way. The Beatles, obviously, were brilliant at that as well. Contemporary pop music tends to stick so much within the old chords, and I find that a little dull. There's such an emphasis on rhythm in pop music these days, and rhythm has never been such an important thing to me. I like rhythm as a tool in composition, but nowadays, the whole thing is drums. It doesn't matter what notes they play; it's irrelevant. That music is so alien to me. At the moment we're in an era where rhythm is king, and it's not the most easy era, perhaps, for me to be breaking through.
Ted: So you didn't simplify your compositional approach for this album?
Tony: What I probably did try to do was restrict my instrumental rambling. I feel uncomftorable putting a 15-minute track with a lot of instrumental diversions in it on a solo album, because until you've got a song on the radio, the instrumental things are irrelevant. I've done enough solo records by now to know that you don't get any attention until you get airplay. So perhaps I tended to write a little more concisely for this record. The only song I really drew myself back on was "The Border." THe original version was 12 munutes long, and most of the extra stuff was instrumental, so I decided to simplify it a bit. But I only make music to please myself. I just have to write whatever and hope that it will attract other people. Anybody's who writes music wants as many people as possible to hear it. That's what it's all about, isn't it? It's a nice feelilng. I get so spoiled by Genesis. You always hope for more.
Ted: It's surprising to hear that you held yourself back in composing "The Border." It sounds more like a personal statement than most of the other songs on the album. How did it evolve?
Tony: It started out as a piano piece without the vocal part or the countermelodies. That ended up as the sequenced sound that runs all of the way through it. It had other sections as well; it went into a much more serene instrumental passage, which is very strong, and which will be good on its own someday. I thought it would be quite fun to go back to an old style of playing, which I used to use on things like "The Lamb Lies Down," which invloves making the music sound twice as fast it actually is by alternating hands, with the hands on top of each other. Once you get into that, an awful lot of things sound good. The chords come out a bit strange. When you're playing block chords, you know exactly what you're playing. But when you're arpeggiating with both hands over and above each other, you get chord combinations you might have thought of otherwise. Then I thought to use the sequencer to make it more precise, to see what kind of effect that would have. This is the first album I've worked extensively with sequencers. I've always shied aeay from them, although, I've used them a bit with Genesis for bass lines and things like that. This time I used the sequencer as the main recording device, as a tape recorder, a lot of time without sequencing.
Ted: How many layers does the quantized part involve?
Tony: It's just one track, but because it was done with the sequencer, I was able to use a few of the sounds combined. It was nice to get a bit of inflection in the part, so that at times it doesn't sound quite as sequenced. And there's a bit of unquantized playing in there as well. But when you here something after playing it into a sequencer, you think, "That could be a bit more in time." That's the trouble with sequencers. There's a tendency to think, "It's got to sound better quantized, hasn't it?" So you quantize it, and then you think, "Well, now, I don't know that it does." And if you're a sensible person, you keep an unquantized version somewhere, though I don't think I did in this case. Having worked with sequencers quite a lot on this record, I'll be quite careful how I use them next time. "I'll think twice before I press that quantize button. What I think you should do is listen to the thing and say, "Most of it is sounding good, but there are a few bars here and there"-and just edit those bars.
There are certain things sequencers make you do. They make you repeat-it's so easy to lift a verse and do it a second time the same way. They make you maintain a constant tempo. Obviously, you can not do that, but the tendency is simply let it run. Sequencers are bery dangerous tools. The sequencer is obviously what caused the whole dance music revolution to become so big. You get this ridiculous precision and incredibly intricate rhythmic interplay. Anyone whose played with a sequencer will know how easy it is to so that. You just put down random beats on one track, quantize it, then put down random beats on another track, quantize that, do it ten more times, and play them all back together. Often it sounds great. A lot of people just do that, add a few things to make it slicker, and put it out. I don't find that very interesting, compositionally.
Ted: The music seems to be determined more by the instruments, or the process than by the composer.
Tony: Yeah. I'm surprised that people are still into it. I'd think there would come a point where they'd get bored. But then, I don't like to dance, so I don't really know what it is that makes people want to do that.
Ted: What sequencer did you use on Bankstatement?
Tony: Steinberg Pro-24 [Atari ST software]; I haven't tried the updated version, Cubase, yet. Pro-24 does have certain limitations, but it's a good system. I got it about a year and a half ago, while I was doing this record. One thing that I find magical is linking it up with a tape recorder for instruments that don't have MIDI, like the piano, and my old Synclavier, for which I couldn't MIDI without mortgaging my house. It's marvelous the way the sequencer will pick up at any point on the tape. And being able to run through different sounds in order to hear what everything sounds like in combination. I love it! In the past, I've gone into the studio with an eight-track tape from my home studio and transferred it to 24-track, but then I'm stuck with what I've already recorded. With the sequencer you can play around with sounds, form, tempos, keys, all sorts of things, even at the studio stage. When I'm doing a solo project, I need to have something at least to start with, so I can be in the control room while the drummer's drumming, and things like that. I'd like to do some songs next time around where I'm actually in the studio, playing with the drummer.
Ted: You didn't play any of the songs as a band?
Tony: No. The drummer played along with the sequencer. A lot of the time I would play my stuff again after the drums were recorded, to get it in sync with the drummer. A lot of the keyboard parts were just intended as guides anyway.
Ted: Just about every song has a sequenced, quantized rhythmic element, a tambourine or a hi-hat.
Tony: I would prefer to have two or three that didn't have that element. We've gotten in the habit of doing that with Genesis, too. It's an easy starting point. It's this ability that you have with click tracks and SMPTE and all the rest, to change things around after the original performance. I must admit, I'd like to get into just playing it straight. Having explored this area for the first time, I'd like to take it on-board as part of the tools and get back to playing a certain amount of stuff live.
Ted: "Thursday the 12th " sounds live.
Tony: It's sequenced, actually. Apart from the drums and bass, everything you're hearing is one pass on the [E-mu] Emulator II. I did a lot of sampling of wild bits and pieces from records and then fiddled about, found combinations of things that sounded good. You just take a bit of music and cut it up, play it on the keyboard backward and forward, and then arrange it on the keyboard so you have two octaves of one sound, a few notes of another sound, and so on, and then play on it and see what sounds good. I used much the same method to create "Big Man."
Ted: That's where the parallel harmony in that song comes from.
Tony: Yes. "Thursday the 12th" and "Big Man" are so far away from the original bits of music I was using. You just get little ideas from them and they end up being part of the final effect. It's a really interesting way of working. It's one of the reasons I like sampling instruments. Obviously, they're great for just getting good sounds, but also they suggest things to you that wouldn't have occured otherwise. Your'e not even sure what you're playing half the time.
Ted: "Thursday the 12th" sounds as if it might have come off an old Steve Hillage album.
Tony: Actually, it was written well before he arrived on the scene. I must plead ignorance of Steve Hillage. Of course, I know his name, but I've never been a great fan of popular music any time apart from the late '60, so the whole Steve Hillage era [the early to mid '70s] passed me by. I chose him purely on the strength of his recent productions. There was pressure on me from the record company to use a co-producer on this record. I heard his demo tape, and I felt that the way he made music sound was much the way I like music to sound.
Ted: What kind of pressure from the record company?
Tony: I think they were trying to look at it from my point of view. You see, "The Fugitive" was one of those sad things; I still reckon that it was a really good record. So I wondered, what can I do differently in order to produce something that people will bother to listen to? Well, the easiest thing, first of all, was not to sing it myself, to get real singers, people who can promote it a bit better than I, particularily when it comes to videos. And, although I wasn't so keen on it, the other thing would be to get someone to help oon the production end. The record company thought I should try it, so I said, "Okay." I'm a songwriter first and foremost; that's what I care about. As long as someone didn't come in and say, "You've got to cut that bit out," I was going to be happy. Really, I'd rather produce my own music. I know how I want it to sound. But I had a good working relationship with Steve. By the end of the album we'd worked out a way to work well together, and it worked out much better than I thought it would during the early stages. The problem, of course, is that the keyboard stuff was all done before I came into the studio, so I was going to spend the next few months listening to people play drums, bass, guitar, sax, and so on from behind the desk [mixing board]. Suddenly you've got two people where there's normally one. In the case of Genesis, there are three, but we've worked together so long that it's kind of like one person.
Ted: That raises the question of the "band" image that you've built into Bankstatement.
Tony: It's as much a band as, say, the Pet Shop Boys or Go West. It's the singers, really, that I look at as being the band. As soon as you're using other singers, their character becomes part of the album. I did an album a long time ago, "A Curious Feeling," which used another singer all the way through, and I credited it to myself, and I never thought that it was quite fair. The other thing is that there's a girl singer on the album, so you can't really call it "Tony Banks." I wanted people to perceive it as something slightly more than Tony Banks, as a collection of songs done with this particular group of people. It's a lineup that I would like to work with again, but I'll have to see how well the album does. If the album is a failure, there's no particular advantage in following it up. It's the songs that interest me, so I can do it another way next time if it's necessary.
Ted: Is there an element of career strategy in it as well?
Tony: There is an element of strategy. I'm just trying to get people to take the music seriously by giving it a different slant. Will this work? Will that work? So much of current music is presentation. It doesn't change the music; I could have called this anything. The one thing that I can't compromise is the music. I have very set ideas about what I want to do and how I want to do it. But when it comes to presentation, I don't care, really. Things like making a video: Do you do something that has integrity, or do you do something that you think is going to get played on MTV? Well, I've gone with something that I thought was totally in keeping with the song, and the result is that it doesn't get on MTV. So what do you do? Something like that is, as much as anything, an advertisement for the record. If I can promote the music better by doing the video differently than I would naturally, then as long as I feel comfortable with the result, I'm prepared to compromise.
Ted: A member of a successful pop group appears, from a career point of view, to be in a precarious position. A small-town piano player can play weddings, bar-mitzvahs, and lounges until he's ready to retire, but a star can't expect to remain a star for long. Do you feel you have to find a way to ensure your longevity?
Tony: Well, I don't know really. I'd like to have established myself outside of Genesis by the time we don't do another Genesis record. At this point, I don't know when that's going to be; we're planning to do another one in 1991. You do want to do that, because the public has a short memory, and once the group's gone, you've got even less chance of getting something going on a solo level. But that's not really the main thing. I write music all the time, and I'm in the great position of being able to release solo records. There's always two elements in this: There's the pleasure of making a record, and there's the pleasure of seeing it sell. The two aren't necessarily related. The best therapy for me, if this record doesn't happen, is to go in and start a new one. Obviously, it would be nice to have both.
Ted: How did you choose the other musicians?
Tony: I listened to lots of tapes. I heard about 20 or 30 girl singers and a few more male singers before I chose Jayney Klimek and Alstair Gordon. I must admit, I was looking for people who weren't too well known, and I wanted someone with a good range, particularily for the girl's voice-I needed that soft kind of voice, but with a bit more power as well. The instrumentalist are mostly session players in London.
Ted: Were the songs in which Jayney Klimek is featured written especially for her?
Tony: I had written the chords, but not the top line. One of the reasons that I kept those two for her was that I could pitch the melody lines in a way that would bring out the most from her voice. On "Queen of Darkness," for instance, I could easily have pitched the melody a fifth higher. Keeping it low gave her an edge, an aggression, a slightly evil twist that suited her voice quite well. Yet, when she sings high, she has a delicate, ethereal quality that I find attractive.
Ted: Are any of the piano sounds on the record made by a real piano?
Tony: Most of it is the Yamaha CP-70 [electric grand]. I enjoy playing it. And there's quite a bit of Roland MKS-20. It's good for sequenced things, because you obviously can't sequence the CP-70, but also it works really well for certain kinds of parts. On the extra track on the CD, "Diamonds Aren't So Hard," there's quite a bit of rather frantic piano which was done using the MKS-20. It's got a very precise, clipped sort of sound which fit right into that track. It's funny; people are always saying to me, "You've got to try this instrument. It's got a fantastic piano sound!" But, you know, that's the one sound I've got. A new string sound or a new vocal sound, okay, because I don't play in an orchestra or sing in a choir. The first sound on the Emulator III is a stereo grand piano, and I say, "Thank's very much, but I've got a stereo grand piano." That's the last thing I need, so I don't understand why so much of the time and effort go into it. As far as I know, nobody has yet provided a complete library of excellent orchestral sounds, with say ten good flute sounds, ten good bassoon sounds, and so on. That would be useful.
Ted: Is that why you decided to use real instruments for the brass part in "Throwback"?
Tony: Most of what you're hearing is actually keyboard, but I've augmented it with players, who duplicated the part. They added a bit more punch to it. At one point I thought they would replace the keyboard track, which I had just put down for the demo using an Emulator patch, but it sounded really good with the sample, so I decided to use the real instruments to give it more guts. Also, the chords are all sorts of car-horn chords, big chords, which seem to sound better on the keyboard. Putting the two together seemed to be the logical thing. Brass players play slightly differently than a keyboard player playing a brass sample. There were some slight contradictions between the two, so I had to redo some of the keyboard parts.
Ted: The sampled brass part doesn't become obvious until the fade.
Tony: The fade is the only place where it's actually on its own. You can tell that it isn't quite good enough on its own, but it has a certain attack that's quite good.
Ted: There's a striking absence of Roland D-50 and Korg M1 sounds on the album.
Tony: I've never played an M1, so that's why it's absent. I got a D-50 toward the end of the period when I was writing the songs. I thought it was a lovely instrument-those are great sounds-but I was aware immediately that the sounds are so good that they must have been used quite a few times by quite a few people. I used it for some of the ethereal sounds; on "Big Man," for example. I never got furthur than the presets on that instrument, because I'd only had it briefly. But I got one of those programmer things to go with it.
Ted: A D-50 editor programmer for your Atari?
Tony: No, the hardware unit [PG-1000] that Roland makes. I'm not much good at programming from the computer. And the person who invented the multifunction buttons should be shot! I much prefer having a button for each control. Otherwise, I get lost.
Ted: Do you use your computer for anything aside from sequencing?
Tony: I play games on it. I have the SynthWorks [Steinberg editor/librarian] program for the DX7, but I've never quite fathomed it. I've also got the scoring program that goes along with Pro-24, but I've found that every time I need notation, I can print straight from Pro-24. That's how I did the parts for the brass players on "Throwback."
Ted: What other instruments did you find useful for the record?
Tony: Well, I still use the Emulator and the DX7. I've got an EIII, but I haven't gotten as good with it as I am with the EII. It's not quite as easy to use, and I haven't found an opportunity to explore it yet. Also, I'm quite into these Kurzweil modules, the PX and the GX [1000 series]. I used the acoustic guitar sound from the GX a lot, especially on "That Night." There's a lot of the PX; I like the bell/string combination, which I used extensively on "The Border" in the countermelody that goes through it. The first time I plugged in the PX, I got a piano/string combination and wrote a song straightaway. To me, that's the sign of a good instrument-you write a song as soon as you have it. Just good sounds, you know? That was a problem with the Prophets. Most of the sounds that came with the instrument weren't that good, or at least they weren't the kind of sounds that I like, so I always ended up completely reprogramming all of the Prophets I ever bought before I could use them. Things like the D-50 and the Kurzweils are useful without my having to do anything, and that's nice. You don't always want to be fiddling around with the knobs.
Ted: You seem to have some favorite sounds that appear throughout the album.
Tony: Everyone has favorite sounds. Often when I'm writing, there are certain sounds that I'll start off with because I know the'll work. Then they sound so nice I stay with them.
Ted: It's necessary to have a palette of sounds that you're familiar with, and yet there's an entire universe of sounds available.
Tony: There's too much, really. In the old days, all I had was a Hammond L-100. You got every sound out of that you possibly could: You put it through fuzz-boxes and wah-wahs, you switched it on and off, you used one drawbar at a time, you abused it in every possible fashion to get every possible sound out of it. Now, you get instruments where if you use one tenth of one percent of the possibilities, you're doing pretty well. So you tend to have one or two favorite instruments that you're comfortable programming, and others that you just leave set to one or two sounds.
Ted: You don't seem to have gotten carried away with your new toys. The orchestrations are quite restrained.
Tony: I do tend to hold myself back a bit. There are different stages in the writing of a song. The first is when you've written it, using whatever instruments you've written it on. Then you so the initial embellishments, rhythm and bass, and then you fill it out a bit more. That usually takes you through to the stage where you're putting on vocals and things like that. And then there's a furthur stage where you're adding things to make that song build a bit, counterlines and things like that. It's at that stage that you have to be careful, because by the time you get three or four months into a project, you're usually fed up in some ways, and anything you do that's new sounds fantastic. If you don't watch out, you end up adding things until it's overly cluttered. We were definitely guilty of this in the early Genesis days.
Ted: What songs did Genesis take too far in that direction?
Tony: We always did it, in a way. Even before we got into the studio, we would overwork a track because we'd played it six weeks on end. "The Battle of Epping Forest," from Selling England by the Pound, is the one I always point to. It had so many good elements in it, but we overworked it to such an extent that it was a problem. The contrast to that was "Mama," where we actually recorded it in the first week of rehearsal. We thought, "We've got something really good here; let's not ruin it," so we put it down right away. So I try to get things to a stage where they sound good, and then leave them alone.
Ted: Has your attitude toward music changed between the inception of Genesis and the present?
Tony: When we first started-forgetting about Genesis to Revelation, because at that time we were still trying to sound like other people-we were very conscious about trying to do things that no one else had done. There were certain things that we would try out just to see if they would work. Ands the nature of the music industry at the time was such that you could try anything and people would give you a listen. We live in a totally different world now. Today, the more something sounds like something you've heard before, the more chance it has of becoming a hit. Also, there comes a point where you've tried these new things, and they start to get old in your eyes. You've done these long instrumentals, you've avoided repetition, you've done these interesing chord changes, and you start looking for a new area. In our case, it took the form of streamling, taking a simpler approach, which we started to do around the time of Duke. We found that the simpler approach was actually sounding better, and that taught me quite a lot that I've taken on-board with my own writing. There's a tendency to get a bit indulgent, and you've got to try to work out what it is that's the nub of a song, and not get quite so rambly. I like a bit of both, really-the rambly and the concise-but the rambly approach takes up time, and on an album you want to get in as much variety as you can, so if you've got ten separate songs, you'll probably end up with more variety than if you've only got five.
Ted: Your musical life is no longer a search for something new.
Tony: I never really worry about it-whether it's new or old, whether my solo record sounds like Genesis or not, all that. I just write a certain way. These things that appeal to me, certain kinds of chord changes and things, and I don't think that anyone else does them. I'm in my own little world. And I don't think that I've explored all of it yet.
-- End of interview --