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Hi folks,

Keeping up with the requests, here is latest installment of the interview
that Alan Hewitt did with Tony, which has appeared on the pages of The
Waiting Room magazine.  I should make two points here.  One:  The articles
that I have scanned and posted here represent only a small portion of the
material that comes out in each issue (that's right, ON PAPER) of TWR, I
strongly encourage anyone that likes these bits to subscribe.  If you need
information, e-mail me and I will send you the details.  Two:  Whoever
called Alan to rat on my terrible infractions here, get a clue, my name is
in the credits, I have been a steady contributor to TWR for over 2 years.
An apology would be nice, thank you.

Anyway, here is the latest installment in the TB interview pertaining to
the early days of Genesis.  Enjoy.\




    The A to Z  of Genesis
Tony Banks in conversation about Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot
INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY PETER MORTON, JONATHAN DANN & ALAN HEWITT AT THE FARM


How much of the material was written for Nursery Cryme before Steve joined?

Pretty much everything apart from The Musical Box, which was a hangover
from the days of Mike and Ant. It always was more Mike's thing as he used a
tuning on the twelve-string where the top three strings were all tuned to
F#- that's where the working title comes from. Ant certainly embellished
those parts and I always felt that Ant should have got a credit on that
song as part of the writing team. We then took it somewhere else and the
melody line at the end of the song was actually written at the time that
Mick Barnard was with the group so that was his contribution to the song.
That track has the influence of three guitarists on it. Everything else on
that album was in some sort of form by then. In fact on Fountain of
Salmacis the first main part was something that I wrote when I was at
University; I had that bit in the back of my brain for a long time as
something to use and it wasn't until we got things like the mellotron and
realized the things that it could do that it took shape. Most of the songs
were written during a rehearsal period, the majority of which was done down
at Tony Stratton-Smith's house in Crowborough. It wasn't a particularly
easy period as I remember, we were struggling a bit with some of the songs.
At that point Musical Box was a live success, we wrote Giant Hogweed and
that took over from The Knife as being the song to close the live set and
it worked pretty well. Fountain of Salmacis worked well, it was something
of a departure from the norm. There were a couple of rather weird songs on
that album - For Absent Friends, which I could live without, and Harlequin,
which was a bit embarrassing. I think the song is alright but the
performance is rather poor.


Who wroteHappy The Man? Did you think it made a good single?

I didn't have much to do with it really, I was sort of there if you know
what I mean! (laughter). I was happy with being a single, I quite liked it
actually. That was quite good fun to do. Once again, Mike had another
tuning on the guitar where everything was tuned to a chord and he played a
riff on that that sounded good. I played guitar along with him and we built
it from there. We had two or three songs like that, we had a song before
that called Grandma. That dates back to Ant's time with the group, it had a
folky feel to it. I really didn't have much to do with the writing of it I
have to say but it was a nice easy song to play live. I suppose it came as
a result of being on the road just too long with Lindisfarne (laughter), we
had to one song like that! It was also a nice contrast to the heavy intense
stuff.

Gradually as the albums progressed the tracks became longer until they
culminated with Supper's Ready. Were the band trying with this piece in
particular to create a rock symphony?

I don't think so. We didn't realize how long it was until we put it all
together. I said before that Stagnation * as the most significant track on
Trespass for me, then we did The Musical Box which was a development from
Stagnation. When we began work on Foxtrot we started writing a song that
sounded as if was going to become a similar number. So I had this idea that
in the middle of all the softer sounding parts that we should go straight
into Willow Farm, which was a song that Peter had written completely on his
own. So we did that and it sounded great. Then from that came the idea that
we could go on to the next sections, with the improvised 9/8 section, which
was just a jam which Mike, Phil and I put together. It came together in the
studio. I had a part at the beginning with just chords and a part at the
end with just chords. The part at the beginning I'd always seen with vocal
on it, the part at the end I'd just seen as being a big bank of harmonies.
Peter had all these Iyrics and when we were in the studio he started
singing over that last part. When he first did it I thought, "This is
wrong, this is my bit, I want my keyboard solo there!" (laughter). So I was
a bit against it but I soon realized that I sounded really good and we kept
it. The idea of reprising The Guaranteed eternal Sanctuary Man came with
that. The song didn't seem that long, we thought that  we'd written a track
that was perhaps a little longer than before but we didn't realize that it
was a long as it became until we finished recording it. It wasn't until we
finished recording it that we got to hear it all the way through, as it was
done in sections. We different engineers and producers for that album, and
some parts were done with one engineer and other sections with another.

Why were different producers involved with the album?

Charisma wanted us to have a hit so they thought they'd bring in Bob Potter
who had worked with Bob Johnson in America with people like Dylan and Simon
and Garfunkel. He'd also worked with Lindisfarne. Bob Potter had been his
engineer and Charisma thought that he could tighten things up a bit and
stop things getting too arty for their own good. He came in and we just
didn't see eye to eye at all. I did the introduction to Watcher of the
Skies and he said it was awful, he felt it sounded just like 2001. We were
playing the song live by that time and that part seemed to work well so
after a week he went. He was quite straight up about it, he said that he
felt we didn't see eye to eye. So Charisma scrambled about trying to find
someone and they came up with Dave Hitchcock. We changed engineer during
the course of the album as well as we weren't happy with the sound the guy
was getting. We realized when we got John Burns in as the engineer that we
could communicate with him, we were after the same sort of thing. It was
such a relief actually and we found ourselves bypassing Dave Hitchcock more
and more. Eventually it got to the stage where we almost didn't need him
there. It was quite a difficult album to make but when we finished it and
heard Supper's Ready all the way through we thought it was really great. We
played it to Richard (MacPhail) and he thought it was great, he was playing
in the van all the time. We thought we'd written something strong, we
hadn't performed it live at that point so the whole thing came about by
accident. There were little parts on there like the Apocalypse section
where the organ solo on that started off as a very tongue in cheek thing, I
thought I'd play like Keith Emerson to see what it sounds like. There were
little phrases in there that were supposed to be almost humorous in a way.
The other idea on that was to just keep the notes simple. Mike had a riff
which was very simple, and I said, "If you can keep just to the three notes
E, F sharp and B then I can do any chord I want on top of it". I could go
major, minor and all sorts of things. It was great fun actually as I could
go for the real dramatic stuff like a C major chord on top of that, which
sounds very tense and that was how it developed. I was very satisfied with
the result of that.

How do you look back on the song now?

It was a very important piece, it justified it's length which is quite
difficult to do sometimes. It was obviously a series of pieces but the
concept of the Iyric was good in the sense that it was completely over the
top, a fight between good and evil. I think on most levels it worked very
well, although it was perhaps something of a fluke - I have to say that.
There are one or two parts that in reality we shouldn't have stuck with if
we'd had the chance to review it but all the parts pretty much stand up,
they flow nicely from one to the other. In particular the reprise of
Sanctuary Man at the end was good. That was a part that I'd written at
University which I wrote on guitar. It has simple chords but they sound
nice on guitar. The idea of doing it at the end of the song with the
mellotron was something that never occurred to me but it sounded great.
There's some lovely guitar at the end there too. There are just lots of
little bits that came together.

Get 'Em Out By Friday was perhaps Genesis' first protest song. What
Inspired that?

The lyric was Peter's lyric.  As is the case with virtually all -- -v- _ .
written first. It was developed out of a riff that I had and it became a
bigger sort of jam. I think it was based on something he read in a paper
but I can't remember very much about that. With PAs in those days you could
never hear the voice so we actually performed one song on stage with no
Iyrics, Pete was just making noises! (laughter). He introduced it as a song
called I've Been Traveling All Night Long and no one noticed the
difference! It's a good Iyric, I like it a lot although I had nothing to do
with it at all.

Do you remember recording the In Concert show for the BBC at the Paris Studios?

No, I have to say I remember absolutely nothing about it at all!
(laughter).  I didn't know we did that one! The only thing that I remember
from that period was the Belgian TV show and that's because I've seen a
video of it recently, where we're playing in front of the white background.
I thought the sound on that was surprisingly good but I don't remember that
In Concert one I'm afraid.


And  that's where we leave it for another issue. Our thanks to Tony once
again for taking the time to talk to us.




 ...eyes that swivel 'round like smoke.
                                                                -Ivor Cutler

       -billbrink@mail.utexas.edu