Tony Banks on The Beatles’ most climactic song: “They broke a lot of the standard rules”
“I tended to like things that moved it away slightly from the standard sequences,” Tony Banks once said, delving into all of the reasons why he became drawn to the keyboard. As a founding member of Genesis, Banks brought everything he had learned into their sound, embellishing the power of simplicity while turning up the heat on nuance.
Prior to joining Genesis, however, Banks was immersing himself in various musical aficionados at boarding school. It wouldn’t be until he was working alongside Peter Gabriel and Mike Rutherford that he was truly able to put his learnings to work and establish his own sound and approach, extending on what many keyboard players had been doing for years: revolutionising prog rock.
While working on the album Trespass, for instance, Banks played an integral role in encouraging the band to expand outside of their well-established territory and stumble across greatness in areas they wouldn’t have otherwise entertained. As they endured various lineups and grew to new heights with the addition of names like Phil Collins, Banks addressed reinvention head-on, unafraid to explore the ways that change could yield inexplicable magic.
Although some would likely call this resilience, in Banks’ case, it seems more likely to compare it to the power of knowledgeability, as the keyboardist never failed to study throughout his entire career. In fact, considering the musician’s inherent passion for a certain Liverpudlian outfit called The Beatles, you could say he learned about perseverance from the best.
Once discussing his various influences, the musician claimed that The Beatles revolutionised the landscape with music that “slowly progressed from using the standard progressions to do more and more interesting things” and that their career-defining songs, like ‘I Am the Walrus’, “broke a lot of the standard rules of pop music”.
When it comes to songwriting, Banks also regards the band as one of the most important influences, noting the respectful camaraderie that they had with The Beach Boys, whose album Pet Sounds encouraged them to work to their full potential on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “Pop songs were fine but they tended to stay fairly small and it wasn’t until the late Sixties that people started to try and do more,” Banks explained, describing the way that both bands altered the music scene.
Although his appreciation for the Fab Four never waned, Banks also discussed the ways in which his approach differs and how Genesis wanted to innovate the space without creating something that had already been done. “We loved the Beatles and we loved all that stuff but we didn’t necessarily want to write another Beatles song,” he said, which could be a notable indicator of his prowess within the group: instead of reinventing the wheel, he sought out originality, no matter how daunting it seemed.
