Tony Banks is a founding member of Genesis along with fellow Charterhouse pupils Mike Rutherford, Peter Gabriel and Anthony Phillips. After a few incarnations the band evolved further with the introduction of Phil Collins and Steve Hackett, replacing Phillips. Genesis became one of the major exponents of progressive rock music in the early Seventies. In 1975 Peter Gabriel left the band to pursue a solo career and Phil Collins replaced Gabriel as lead vocalist. Genesis went on to become one of the most commercially successful bands of the Eighties and Nineties with albums such as Duke and We Can’t Dance. Tony Banks has pioneered many unique keyboard and synthesiser sounds throughout his career. Music historian Wayne Studer referred to him as ‘the most tasteful keyboardist of prog rock’. Tony Banks has composed five solo albums: A Curious Feeling (1979), The Fugitive (1983), Bankstatement (1989), Still (1992) and Strictly Inc (1995). In addition to his solo albums Tony Banks also composed the soundtrack to The Shout (1978) (with Mike Rutherford) which starred Alan Bates, Lorca and the Outlaws (1984), and Quicksilver (1986) starring Kevin Bacon, the music from both these two latter films ending up on an album entitled Soundtracks (1986) with Toyah Willcox, Fish from Marillion and Jim Diamond. When Michael Winner invited Tony Banks to write the score to his film The Wicked Lady (1983), starring Faye Dunaway, it gave him the opportunity to work with an orchestra, which he had not experienced before. The arranger Christopher Palmer was brought in to orchestrate his piano-scored music. In 2004, as a result of that experience, Tony Banks was inspired to record and release his first orchestral album Seven – A Suite for Orchestra with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, for Naxos. Ivan March in his Gramophone review said of Seven: ‘A rock musician goes “classical” – with pleasing and often effective results…for Banks has a genuine melodic gift… The recording is good…acceptably spacious.’ Banks followed this with his second classical work, Six – Pieces for Orchestra and the third in this trilogy, Five.

In 2014 Tony Banks was commissioned to write a work for the 70th Cheltenham Music Festival, which was performed by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Maxime Tortelier. It was performed under the working title of Arpegg and is heard here in this set on Five under the title Prelude to a Million Years. In 2015 Tony Banks was also commissioned to write two songs for the Ex-Hilliard Ensemble tenor John Potter, Follow thy fair sun and The cypress curtain of the night, which were released on the ECM label.