Exhausted after a triumphant tour, Genesis' keyboards king needs a break - but not before talking to Karl Dallas
It would be nice, indeed, to work in a world where good news made the headlines. But there is news value in pain and aggro and splitting up and very little indeed in working together and reconciliation. Therefore I am happy to be able to tell you there is no news value in this article at all.
The rumour had gone round that some of the lads in Genesis were getting somewhat choked at the constant focus of attention on Peter Gabriel, seeing as how the band is very much of a co-operative effort, with each member contributing as much as the other.
The word went round, and as words will, it got to the ears of a news-hungry features editor, who dispatched your anxious scribe hot-foot to Tony Banks' new pad in Chiswick to check out whether the word be true.
I was happy to report that, even though it might dislodge his dark blue eye-sh ade a fraction further from the horizontal, there was much talk of racing Range Rovers across country between gigs, not much happy anticipation of the forthcoming visit to Germany (a country Tony's woman has no affection for whatsoever), but of jealousy, aggro, and angst very little trace at all.
Tempers
Of course, the lad could have been dissembling. But bear in mind that this was during a very brief rest-over in a tour that has been going on almost continually since last November, a time when tempers get a frayed. And Tony hasn't been backward in criticising aspects of the band's show he is out of sympathy with in the past: Gabriel's fox's head, for instance, brought out a bit of Banksian ire, I seem to recall.
On the tour, though, I thought he was very balanced: "Yeah, it's got a bit much. It would be nice if it could stop now. One gets very tired. There are some nights when you feel you just can't face it again. But then other nights it goes really very well, you enjoy playing, and it brings you back into it again.
"Our playing has been varied, but I think it has been more consistently good during this set than any other set we have done before. That's possibly because there's a bit of improvising in it and also because the whole thing was new at the beginning of this tour.
"There are about six improvised sections, but one, 'The Waiting Room', which is the second track on the third side, is about ten minutes long. Some nights it's great, some nights it's awful, which is nice really because it means there's a challenge to it.
"And when it does go well, it lifts you up for the rest of the set. When things go badly you concentrate upon thinking of tomorrow. But we always have a few things, old improvisatory things, that we can go into as a stand-by , if there's something not going well.
"On a tour like this it depends a bit on how much time you get to do other things. I always like doing as much as I can or going round the towns, the art galleries and things. We had a crazy thing in America where we went down the Grand Canyon on mules and it took us about ten hours, and the same evening we went up to Las Vegas.
"In the old days, we used to have more time between performances because they had to be arranged to suit the promoters rather than us, and we could drive around for days which was really nice.
"On this British tour we've been driving between gigs in Range Rovers, and we like to drive cross-country. You see a road indicated by a dotted line on the Ordnance Survey map and you aim for it. They often disappear in the middle of bogs and things. It gives you something else to think about and enjoy.
"In one field we got stuck and it took us two hours to get out. We ended up building a road for us to get out on in the Lake District somewhere. We used all these rocks, just about dismantled some poor guy's wall.
"Another time we got stuck and one of the guys had driven the Range Rover into a sort of a pond. We towed it out with the other Range Rover, using the seat belts from the car as a tow-rope. Generally, you've got to keep moving, because it gets very marshy, this time of the year especially.
Managed
"We've only been late for a gig once, when we were in Edinburgh and we had a day off between Liverpool and Edinburgh, but generally, we've managed."
All this cross-country idyllic stuff wasn't getting us any closer to, what shall I call it, the problems of interpersonal relationships has a nice quasi-Freudian ring to it, so I gulped and asked the question. Was there, how you say? Jealousy?
"I think there is sometimes a sort of jealousy," he admitted. (This is the stuff I've come for). "But as far as my own feelings go, I'm quite happy letting Peter be the figurehead of the band in the visual sense and also being the one people want to talk to mostly.
"It's natural that things should crystallise round him, because he's the one who wears the costumes, and masks and things."
Couldn't the rest of the band dress up, too, said I, thinking of Rick Wakeman's sequined cloak in his Yes days?
"Well, yes, it's an obvious thought but I've dismissed it for myself and I think the others have too, probably for the same reasons. I don't think I could carry it off. I don't in any sense claim to be any kind of actor. I can hide on stage behind my keyboards and I can play them and I don't think I can do much else.
"The other thing is that I have no time. I really do play all through the set. I'm always doing something.
"That was the main reason, really, why Peter started doing things. A lot of our songs have long instrumental passages and he was just standing there waving a tambourine or something. He thought he could do something better than that and he started trying to act out the numbers with his hands, a mime show. From that, he developed into using costumes and things."
So, no jealousy, right?
"The only thing I do object to is when they credit Peter with more than he actually does. I don't care who they want to talk to in the band, certainly he is the most colourful member, but when it comes to the writing of the music and lyrics and the stage presentation and everything, we all work on them together. It's a pity if Peter gets the total credit for that.
"It sort of evolves over long periods of time, our music. Sometimes you start off with bits you've had with you for three years, and you develop them as a group into much longer things.
"This last album, Peter wrote practically all the lyrics of that. I wrote the lyrics to one track. But normally, in the past, the lyrics have been split between all of us. And though this one was Peter's story, on the music we all worked together.
Finger
"We normally find that the best songs and the most popular ones tend to be the ones where it's very difficult t put your finger on who actually wrote it. All five of us were there.
"This particularly applies to a song like 'Supper's Ready', which is our most popular number, certainly before 'The Lamb Lies Down'. And it's very difficult to think, really, who wrote that at all, because we were all involved in it."
So after this tour ends, and the inevitable holiday, presumably they'll begin planning their new album. Or is that already a gleam in someone's eye?
"No, we never really think about albums in advance. We just get stuck into writing it and the thing develops from there. We never consciously say we are going to do this or we are going to do that.
"We didn't intend to do a double album at all. From most points of view it was the wrong time for a double album. We are only just starting to break through in America and a single album would have been a much easier thing for them to sell.
"But there was nothing much we could do about it. There just happened to be a double album. We never compromise, for record companies, or anyone else."
Except for each other, it would appear.