Following the Dowland interview with Giuseppe Pantano for Miranda (the University of Toulouse multidisciplinary online journal) I was delighted to chat with the great Genesis scholar Mario Giammetti about Tony Banks at the other end of the lute song spectrum. Mario’s magazine Dusk is devoted to Genesis and is a rare example of a fan magazine still available in print format. It’s full of micro-information about the band and every musician associated with it. The main thrust of our conversation was about Tony Banks’ songs for the Amores Parados album, but I also sent Mario an extract from my memoir Finding a Voice. As things turned out, this appeared alongside the interview in a translation by Massimo Satta.

The print version is in Italian, but here is my English original of the extract from Finding a Voice:

My ensemble Red Byrd (active late eighties to c2010) believed that the point of singing the music of the past is to illuminate the present,  and when we had the opportunity to record for Tony Wilson’s Factory Records we decided to make this link even more palpable by sounding out rock musicians who might be willing to experiment beyond their comfort zone. Richard Wistreich and I were both getting uncomfortable with early music’s location in a Modernist aesthetic, and working with pop musicians offered a way out of the command structure of conventional contemporary classical music. The choice of who to ask was partly determined by who we had a realistic chance of contacting, but crucially by the knowledge that almost all modern pop music was predicated on a bass line and chords, which was exactly how the 17th century continuo worked (from, say, Monteverdi to Bach). The attempts by various rock musicians from Paul McCartney downwards to write ‘classical’ music were, with the notable exception of Frank Zappa, somewhat conservative and mis-judged. We didn’t want any of that: the 17th century paradigm was the one way in which our project was going to work.  

 I’d done some work with Stephen Stubbs’ recently-formed continuo ensemble Tragicomedia, which consisted of Steve on chitarrone, Andrew Lawrence-King on harp and Erin Headley on bass viol and lirone (a bit like a viol with a flat bridge that could play chords). They were improvising geniuses whose locus was the 17th century, when the composer-performer relationship was a lot more collaborative than our experience with living composers had been. We asked them to join us, alongside Linda Hirst and Douglas Nasrawi, for a project that would attempt to work in an area where pop and classical might overlap (in ways which we couldn’t then foretell). I knew from organist Chris Bowers-Broadbent (who’d worked with the Hilliard Ensemble on our Arvo Pärt  recordings) that Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones had written classical pieces, and I had always considered keyboard player Tony Banks a proto-classical composer since first encountering Genesis in the seventies. We decided to ask them both to write something for singers and a continuo band that could play baroque instruments or electric guitars (another ambition being to try Monteverdi on modern electric instruments). I had also wanted to do Frank Martin’s Poèmes de la Mort, which the Swiss composer had written for three voices and three electric guitars, having been seduced by the instrument in a New York bar in the late sixties. In his youth, Stephen Stubbs had played in a band which had once supported Chuck Berry but neither Andrew nor Erin played guitar or owned instruments. In the renaissance tradition of making music with whatever came to hand, and with a touching certainty that the project would work, Erin bought a guitar and Andrew a bass. I had no luck with Tony Banks till twenty years later, but to our great delight John Paul agreed to write something for our hybrid ensemble...

…Fast forward to the first decade of the 21st century, when I had a duo with Argentinian lutenist Ariel Abramovich.  Like me, Ariel was a Genesis fan, and he encouraged me to have another go at persuading Tony Banks to write a lute song. Although I’d relaxed my conventional technique as far as I could, I knew that no classically trained singer had ever sung a pop song without compromising their integrity. The difficulty is partly to do with singing vernacular texts as opposed to the formal poetic language and structure usually found in art song: ‘formal’ vocal technique goes with formal verse. The ‘crossover’ travesties of opera singers trying to sing pop songs had always made me squirm, nobody crossing over into anything but ending up in a socio-cultural limbo. As I was very familiar with Tony Banks’ sophisticated Genesis compositions I was confident that anything he wrote for us would not be out of place in programmes of 17th century lute song, so the way round the text problem would be to ask him to set some 17th century poetry. So – with some trepidation – I sent him Campion’s poem ‘Follow thy fair sun’, with links to Campion’s complete verse in case he didn’t like it. I deliberately didn’t point him in the direction of Campion’s songs, and I had no idea how he would respond – would he prefer to write his own lyrics as he would normally do? Would he send a score (as John Paul Jones had done with ‘Amores Pasados’) or, most likely, as before, would he not reply at all? Some weeks later Tony sent what he modestly described as a first attempt. I played the soundfiles – and by the end I could hardly breathe: I’d waited for this moment for more than twenty years and there it finally was – an exquisite piece with all the melodic contour and colour of his best Genesis work. Two more songs followed, both to Campion poems: ‘The Cypress Curtain of the Night’ and ‘Rose cheeked Laura’ (one that Campion didn’t actually set to music). It was the first time he’d set a pre-existing text (as opposed to writing his own or co-writing with a partner); you’d think he’d never worked any other way.

Ariel and I performed ‘Follow thy fair sun’ and ‘The cypress curtain’ many times in Europe and South America, and I also did them in the UK with Jacob Heringman playing lute. Ariel, Jake and I had recorded an album of Josquin Desprez with Swedish soprano Anna Maria Friman for ECM at St Gerold in the Austria Alps. As a quartet we developed a great rapport and I realised that we could arrange both John Paul Jones’ Amores Pasados and Tony Banks’ pieces for our line-up. Manfred Eicher then invited us to Rainbow Studios in Oslo to record them with Jan Erik Kongshaug.   Tony’s pieces were so elegantly constructed that they worked perfectly with two lutes. ‘Rose-cheeked Laura’ post-dated the recording (we have Anna singing it too), but various attempts to make another album have so far not materialised though we have  performed it all over Europe and audiences love it. All three songs exist at that nexus where the freedom of popular music meets the harmonic discipline and creativity of ‘classical’ music. They are in no sense ‘crossover’, but are simply of themselves