Mettler: I’ve always liked your sense of adventurousness as a composer, and I think that carried over with what you did on your first solo album, A Curious Feeling (1979). That one’s a particular favorite of mine, especially the surround-sound mix you and Nick Davis did of it on DVD [in the two-disc 2009 deluxe edition].
Banks: Oh, right, great. We were pleased with that. We felt the surround sound remixes did make it sound a lot better, so it was fun to do that.
Mettler: Was there any thought of doing surround for this box set, or would that have been too huge an undertaking?
Banks: Well, we’re talking about it. The record company that’s putting this out, Esoteric, they want to have all the albums done that way, so the plan is to do that. It just would have been too cumbersome for this box set.
We remixed quite a few tracks for the box set, and we did some of them in 5.1 as well, for possible future projects. We’ve done most of the next two albums — The Fugitive (1983) and Bankstatement (1989) — and they’re pretty much ready. The idea is to put them out in total with the 5.1 mixes, yeah.
Mettler: That’s great news. You must like hearing music in 5.1 yourself.
Banks: I think it’s fantastic. When we did the Genesis stuff in 5.1, I always thought my favorite moments were in the first half of “The Cinema Show” [from 1973’s Selling England by the Pound], where you have all of these guitars that you could just place all around you — just a wonderful sound effect. And you could have a lot of fun with the 5.1, which we did with the surround sound on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974).
There’s just something about the way you can space everything out and actually hear everything, all sorts of little bits and pieces that you’re able to find — and find room for them there in a way as well. Whereas in the old days, you had to live with it if something got stuck behind something else in a mix. You never really heard it, and now if you wanted to hear, say, a guitar part or something, you could finally hear it. So I think that’s worked out really well.
Mettler: And speaking of “The Cinema Show,” Selling England by the Pound is available in surround on High Fidelity Pure Audio Blu-ray, which is quite the listening experience. It was so compressed in the vinyl days, and this is one mix that seems to have been opened up a lot more in its higher-res form.
Banks: Well, you can do so much more with it now. When we used to do LPs, they were always over-length anyhow, so that meant everything had to be very compressed. Hopefully, that was improved when it came out on CD. But when we went back to do the remixes a few years ago, I feel the stereos are much better. When we got to the 5.1, we had the ability to position everything in a way where I think Genesis music does benefit from. There are other things going on that seem to work well with that kind of music.
Mettler: In the early part of the Genesis catalog, the 5.1 remix of a song like “Supper’s Ready” [from 1972’s Foxtrot] really brings out what you could do as a band, and it really captures the overall compositional excellence of the track.
Banks: Well, I think so. We spent a lot of time on it, really. And it’s a longish song, so it shows what you can do. It’s such a wonderful way to experience it, as you can immerse yourself in it much more in 5.1 than you can with the stereo.
Mettler: Did you and Nick do the solo box set remixes in 96/24, in hi-res audio form?
Banks: We were making the sound quality as good as possible, yes, because obviously the quality of Blu-ray is very high, and this is something you want to keep in the higher quality, you know? In the end, everyone will have everything existing in a digital form anyhow. (chuckles) At that point, your playback system will be the same as your cinema system, and everything will be in 5.1, actually, or some sort of quad-sound equivalent.
Mettler: That just might be where everything is going. When you went through the material, did you and Nick have a conversation about things like level-balancing when you were working with songs recorded with different gear from different eras?
Banks: We changed the mixes if we felt we had to, or to what we thought they should be. To some extent, as with the Genesis stuff and my own stuff as well, you don’t want to radically change it, unless there was something wrong with the original. You just want to make it sounds better, but like it did originally. That’s the aim, I think.
Sometimes you find an instrument or something that you’ll bring out a little more strongly. It’s the subtle things. When we did the original mixes on all these records, you did it how you wanted it, and that was how you wrote it and how you put it all together. You’re not trying to change it too radically.
But it’s amazing how much a difference you can make. On this box set, some tracks have advanced an awful long way. “The Border” and “Big Man,” which were both off Bankstatement, sound a helluva lot better now. It’s just the way the instruments combine that seems to be better.
Like I said, we have done 5.1 for some of these songs, and some of those do sound really good, I have to say. I’m looking forward to being able to put those out. There’s a song on The Fugitive called “By You” that has a cranky keyboard sweep throughout it, and in the middle, it gets more complicated, so you get to where these sounds are sort of playing against each other in the stereo. The positions in the stereo are different in the 5.1. It sounds fantastic, I think; you get these effects. I feel this sort of music lends itself to that sort of treatment.
Mettler: And the character of “Firth of Fifth” [on Selling England by the Pound] — we actually feel the sense of being in that space when you start that pure piano intro.
Banks: Well, it makes everything sound more natural where you wanted it to. At other times, like on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, we did play around a little bit more, putting voices out in the back and stuff — which are the sort of things that are fun to do, because you can effect more of a disturbing sort of feeling when you’ve got lots of different characters in a song. You just put them in different places and you doctor it to come out of your back ear. It’s quite nice, because it evokes different things. You have a bit of fun, but hopefully keep it musically effective as well.
Mettler: It’s not a gimmick if you get the sense of being in the middle of the recording or in the studio with the musicians. We feel we’re in the middle of a composition. One track I’m looking forward to hearing in surround is “An Island in the Darkness” [from 1995’s Strictly Inc.].
Banks: We haven’t done that one yet, but it obviously has a lot of potential because there’s so much going on there. I think it’s a song that recalls more of the early Genesis era. That was on a sort of album that didn’t really make any impression anywhere. (laughs) That song is pretty much unknown to everybody, so hopefully they’ll come across it in the box set, and perhaps inspire them to check things out a bit further. And that’s the sort of song that will sound tremendous in surround.
Mettler: Even something like “Thirty Three’s” [from The Fugitive] will be great in surround, because we’ll get the full character of your playing there even better in the high-res form, not in MP3.
Banks: Oh yeah, yeah! MP3s are not the best, as we know. That is one of the instrumental pieces we’ve done in 5.1 that exists now, and sounds really good. The other instrumental that sounds really good in 5.1 is “Redwing,” which is off the Soundtracks (1986) album. It’s one that comes at you from all over the place, and it’s really effective. But like I said, we just couldn’t do 5.1 for this box set, because it would have gotten too cumbersome.
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