"Also, we’d not had fantastic success live touring “As for Chester, the thing with having different drummers is that with some songs you don’t get the feel you had on the album, but other songs you get something better. It’s funny, you could write some very concise songs from that as well as more rambling pieces. Peter Grant was probably the first manager to really put his foot down and get money for the artist rather than it all going elsewhere, and I think Tony followed very much in his wake and proved to be very effective for us. I tended to be mainly in charge of the chords and harmony, then Phil would often just warble along on top while he was playing drums.
I had two or three pieces on the go at the time, and I decided to really develop this particular one, which eventually became the album’s opening track, “Prelude to a Million Years”. It’s curious, because people can be very rude about him, but I hardly know anybody who doesn’t like “In the Air Tonight”, particularly the drum riff.
But when they’re nasty about you, you just don’t want to know about it. That’s always the way. Having said that, I’ve seen concerts I loved by Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon… but I think in the live situation you hear things differently: it’s a one-off.”“Not very much, though I’m always writing this and that. I had to drop an octave in … I’m into compositions, so what I want to hear is the best possible version of that composition. When it looked like the band was finally on its uppers in the late Nineties, keyboardist Banks, who already had three solo albums to his credit, decided it was time to pursue his growing interest in TONY BANKS: Yes, I was asked to compose a piece by Meurig Bowen, who was the festival’s artistic director. And in "But at this stage we were still a niche group: to some extent in England as well. There’s a feeling that "And I feel people who liked early Genesis would enjoy much of it. So I know "And we slightly changed things like “Did I? He said it should be about 15 minutes long. Pe-ter!’ and we thought they wanted Mr Gabriel back. He always seems to be the butt end of so many jokes, which is a shame. In those days we didn’t have the facility to play a proper piano – in fact, everything then was compromised. Obviously when we’d first started (with Phil singing), he was a bit concerned when the odd person would shout, ‘Where’s Peter?’ and stuff. We didn’t have a proper grand piano to play live, so I tried to play it on this electric piano, but it had no touch sensitivity. Did our show for our fiver or whatever it was and that was it. They were sat right at the back, very self-consciously, not wanting to be there at all, so we invited them up to the front and introduced ourselves and said "hi". But even that was done with affection. He’d been a promoter and had done a couple of tours with us. Phil saw him in the street on the way to the studio and offered him a lift, and he said, ‘No, no, I’ll speak to you later’… and he’d left. We used to go to these blues nights on a Monday, and we got there and there were just two girls who’d come, obviously hoping to meet some boys. But you had to accept the fact that sometimes you’d play to very few people, I think our record was two people at a place in Beckenham, the Mistral Club. But by the end, with the last few Genesis albums, Mike, Phil Collins and I would go to the studio with nothing written at all. I don’t think many groups work like that, most groups have one or two key writers, but we didn’t, not at the end. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010 as a member of Genesis, Tony is one of the most respected songwriters and keyboardists in the world. We weren’t exactly having monster hits. Some things are better than the recorded versions, others not quite.