Posts Tagged ‘Tony Banks’

Happy Birthday Tony Banks and Quentin Tarantino!

Tuesday, March 27th, 2012

Two names that are not otherwise paired together.

Tony Banks, the keyboardist for Genesis (and, with Mike Rutherford, the only member through all the band’s lineups) is 62 today. In celebration, here’s a live version of “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”:

Director Tarantino turns 49 today, which gives me a chance to talk about his film Django Unchained, an antebellum slave revenge fantasy that looks like looks like a cross between Mandingo and, well, Kill Bill. No trailer yet, but since it’s Tarantino, we know won’t be screwed up by any of that annoying political correctness. Also, damn, look at that cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Kurt Russell, Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx, James Remar (Dexter’s dad), Don Johnson (in the “Designated John Travolta Career Resurrection Role”), Sacha Baron Cohen, and Leonardo DiCaprio as the bad guy.

I fully expect it to rock.

Supper’s Ready (or, Music for an Apocalypse)

Saturday, May 21st, 2011

Everyone else is doing it, might as well hop aboard the “I Don’t Believe In the Rapture, But Here Are Some Snarky Blog Posts” bandwagon. Which brings up the question of what music is best for an apocalypse.

Putting aside the blindingly obvious choice of REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I feel Fine),” my favorite apocalyptic song has always been Genesis’ 23-minute long art-rock epic “Supper’s Ready,” the ending of which is a pretty literal description of the rapture. Plus it lets me continue the recent Peter Gabriel trend.

So here’s not one, not two, but four full length complete lives versions of the song. Some of the videos are slideshows and the sound quality varies, but some of Steve Hackett’s swoops and slides still give me chills.

This one is a very rare live concert video of the entire song:

Finally, this is not the entire song, as it includes several different snippets of various songs, but it also features live concert footage and the end of the song:

As a bonus, here’s an animated Tony Banks describing how the song came together: