As a founder member and the keyboard player of Genesis, Tony Banks was at the forefront of the Prog Rock phenomenon in the early 1970s before the group enjoyed even greater success as a more standard pop band.
In 1998, however, he set about writing his first classical music work, Seven: A Suite for Orchestra, which was released on Naxos Records in 2004. Two further orchestral suites, Six Pieces for Orchestra (2012) and Five (2018) were also recorded on the same label, which on 13 September releases 7.6.5 – 18 Pieces for Orchestra, a box-set of all three. Ahead of the release, Banks took time to tell us about his love of composing, from the prog rock epics of his past to the orchestral works of today.
Throughout your Genesis career, did you always have it lurking somewhere inside you that you might want to write classical music too?
Not really, no! I learnt the piano as a child like many people do and quite enjoyed it. But then I got to the stage, at about 12 or 13 years old, where I started to lose interest in playing music that was written in front of me and I found that I could play by ear – I would listen to the radio, hear a song and be able to play it with ease. Being lazy, that was a much easier way of doing it!
Who were the groups who particularly caught your ear this way?
From 1963 or so, I got really interested into everything that was around in the pop music world. I was just fascinated by the way that chords and everything fitted together. I loved how imaginative some of these groups were, compared to the music of 1950s, which was built very much around two or three chord sequences. With the likes of the Beatles and the Kinks in the mid-1960s, they started to expand on that range while still making it sound very accessible, and I found that very interesting.
Listening to ‘Firth of Fifth’ on Selling England by the Pound (1973), and not least your keyboard intro, you hear how Genesis were among those expanding things even further. You shift keys a lot, for instance…
I’m no respecter of keys, I’m afraid – I quite like moving about! – and with my more recent orchestral pieces I’ve tended to drift around quite a lot. In the case of ‘Firth of Fifth’ in general, I had written three separate sections all in particular keys and it was a question of making them all work together. So, you had an introduction that started off in B flat major, a main section in B major and then an instrumental section in E minor.
You had to fluctuate a bit to get between the sections – plus, I wanted to revisit each one – so you had to work out how to do it. I always quite enjoyed that. Within the group, often when we put bits together we quite liked to stick to the original keys we’d written them in, and from then it was a case of working out a transition from one to the other. I was chief transition-maker, I suppose!
So how did you go about making those transitions?
A few diminished chords always helped a bit. You could do that, and then because the next bit was in a slightly different key it in fact somehow made it sound interesting. As long as it didn’t sound ugly, it could be very effective, as you suddenly had a new direction. Some of the people I liked listening to, such as the songwriters Holland-Dozier-Holland, were very good at doing that – in the Four Tops’ ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There’ there’s a really interesting key shift to the verses, even though the song itself is very simple.
The artistic freedom allowed by the Prog Rock style must have provided a lot of fun…
We enjoyed it, yes! We did all like the simpler pop music too, but realised that a lot of people were doing it and doing it very well. So, we wanted to see if we could go a bit further, and in the early 1970s there was a licence to do that and an audience for it.
We found that we liked to go from piece to piece, with the ultimate example being ‘Supper’s Ready’ (on Foxtrot, 1972), which is really a suite of seven pieces. Again, here it’s the transition that makes it so interesting – when Peter (Gabriel) says ‘A flower’, you go from this romantic little interlude to this very aggressive and rather ugly sound.
As for the lengthy solos, I always saw them as being instrumentals – I never really improvised on a record. I would write a melody, which could have been a sung melody sometimes, and then write around it accordingly. So that was a bit of fun, and then sometimes we would try out a few weird time signatures just for the hell of it – some work better than others.
Some people think that, with the solos and everything, the songs go on too long, but sometimes you need to go through all the changes to get where you ended up. I loved doing it. I like being long-winded, and we were given the licence to be that, so why not!
What did you make of your Prog Rock peers, in particular Emerson, Lake and Palmer, who were incorporating classical music pieces into their songs?
I loved what Keith Emerson did with The Nice. Their ‘Rondo’ – which is like the Dave Brubeck version but is originally based on Mozart – is a fantastic piece. I found Emerson, Lake and Palmer a bit too over-the-top, however, though their ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ was done really well. I wasn’t particularly into the classical-rock combination myself, and I don’t think it worked very often when something too classical was involved.
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The first Moody Blues album, Days of Future Passed, showed how things could be done, but the two elements were kept quite separate on that album. For my part, I liked creating an orchestral sound but wasn’t interested in incorporating what someone had already written into our songs.
But then, when we get to the turn of the 21st century, you embrace classical music completely by writing your own orchestral suites. When did you decide you wanted to do that?
I’d always loved classical music, so that was never an issue. When we got to the end of the Calling All Stations tour in 1998, I thought ‘What am I going to do?’ I could just stop, which is something I considered, or I could do something else completely.
I’d always wanted to do something with an orchestra, having had a brief experience when I did the soundtrack to Michael Winner’s The Wicked Lady in 1983. To be honest, Christopher Palmer, the composer I worked with on it, did a lot of the work on it in terms of orchestration, and I was amazed how he took what was quite a simple melody I’d written and, by arranging it in lots of different ways, made a very good piece of music from it.
I thought that was so interesting. At the back of my mind, I thought that was something that I’d like to give a go. I had one or two pieces kicking around already, and then on one occasion I was improvising using a string synthesizer and I wrote the piece that became Black Down, which I thought was really special. I wrote one or two further pieces to go with it and created a suite.
Did writing the suite Seven come easily to you?
I was very green. I went into the studio at Abbey Road to record it with an orchestra… and it sounded awful. I came to the end of it and thought ‘Forget that. I’m not going to carry on doing that.’ However, I was then encouraged by others to give it another go.
I went into the studio again, with a different conductor, Mike Dixon, and we tried to have a much better idea of what we wanted to do before we went in there – I’d spent the first recording trying to correct all the bum notes and convincing the orchestra how to play things. This time, it worked a lot better.
Two or three tracks didn’t quite come out as I’d hoped, but two or three worked really well, including Black Down, which is the one I was proudest of anyhow. I was very uplifted by that, and Seven: A Suite for Orchestra got some quite decent reviews, even by some of those more traditional critics who tend to disapprove of people in pop music getting involved in classical music.
So, what came next?
I didn’t know if I was going to do any more after that, but then when we did the Genesis tour in 2007, people kept asking each of us what we were going to do next. Phil [Collins] said he was going to do another solo album, and Mike [Rutherford] said he was planning more Mike and the Mechanics things, so I thought ‘I have to say something!’.
So, I said I was going to do another orchestral album, and sort of talked myself into it. Through a friend, I met the composer Paul Englishby, and alongside him I wrote another suite, called Six Pieces for Orchestra. This time, I introduced a couple of pieces where I was leading with an instrumental soloist, one with saxophone and another with violin – I wrote them on the keyboard, of course, but thanks to modern synthesizers you can hear how the track sounds on those instruments.
Those two pieces, ‘Siren’ and ‘Blade’ are the two strongest on the album, I’d say. The work got quite a lot of play on Classic FM, which was nice.
And then, in 2018, came Five…
Yes, and I wanted to make sure that my third piece was as much my character as possible. On the first two, I’d had an influence from the arrangers that had helped me, and I thought that on this occasion I’d do as much as I can myself.
I did a template recording completely recording at home and, while the conductor Nick Ingman then embellished here and there and made better sense of some things, what you hear on the album is pretty similar to my original demos. As a result, I probably ended up being more satisfied with this one than the previous two because it is closer to my heart.
The first piece of that suite, Prelude to a million years, was actually commissioned for and performed by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at the Cheltenham Music Festival. When the album was released, it actually went to No. 1 in the Classic FM charts, but was then knocked off the following week by Alan Titchmarsh reading poems. I think there’s something to learn from that, but I’m not sure what!
