Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks turns 70 today (March 27) their song “Invisible Touch” came together spontaneously in one studio session and it made it to number 1! During the mid-1980s the band tended to write songs by jamming in the studio, without anyone bringing in ideas in advance. He says their 1986 chart-topper “Invisible Touch” is a perfect example.
“It’s a very spontaneous thing. Mike was just doodling along on the guitar, playing a couple of chords, and then Phil immediately started singing “invisible touch,” just the phrase. So we just played this chorus over and over again, developed it a bit. And then, obviously, we were looking for other chords for the verse, and we tried to sort of keep it fairly quite quick and spontaneous, so we just between us worked on a melody line. We knew it should be really simple and we wanted to maintain that feel. The only thing we felt we needed was at some point to get away from the song. So we just said, ‘Okay, let’s do eight bars in a different key and then come back to the original key and it’ll sound like an up.”
