![\"THE](\"http:\/\/www.peterbanks.net\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/1973-11-29-Prospector-El-Paso-Flash-breakup.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nPhoto caption: FLASH FROM left to right: Colin Carter, Peter Banks, Ray Bennett, Mike Hough.<\/em><\/p>\n When Flash appeared in town with Three Dog Night Nov. 16, their appearance turned out to be their next-to-last gig, and their after-concert interview, their very last as the band.<\/p>\n After the taped talk, Colin Carter, vocalist, confidentially relayed plans for him and bassist, Ray Bennett (the two write the majority of Flash songs) to spilt [sic] from the band as soon as they all returned home to England the following week. A phone call on Sunday, the 18th, however, announced that guitarist Peter Banks had said he wouldn\u2019t finish the tour, so the band was broken up. Carter said then, \u201cWe wanted to do it properly; to finish the tour and complete our Flash duties first. There was, after all, only one more week to go. This is just another example of his irresponsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n AT THE TALK upstairs in the \u201cun-star-like\u201d dressing rooms of the Colesium [sic], Banks could be occasionally seen in the hallway with his red-headed girlfriend. The night\u2019s performance had found an impatient audience of Dog fans. The bass drum had given them its full limit of trouble. Banks played with an obvious loss of timing. Their sound wasn\u2019t near their recorded level, and their performance wasn\u2019t near their best. Carter, Bennett, and the drummer, Mike Hough, avoided much discussion of Banks, but did talk about their plans and ideas.<\/p>\n The planned album by Bennett and Carter will \u201cProbably have Bill Bruford on drums, an old friend who used to be in Yes, now in Kind Crimson [sic]. Hough said he had solo album ideas also, but it was \u201ca matter of opportunity and timing.\u201d<\/p>\n THE THREE discussed music as a band together still would. Carter viewed, \u201cPersonally as a vocalist, I feel as if the instrumental side dominates the vocal scene. As you can see, by the material we play, there are long instrumental passages which I think sometimes detract from the original song. I think that maybe our arrangements have been improving, but there\u2019s been a heavy leaning to the instrumental side which I fight.\u201d Bennett told his side. \u201cWhen you play your instrument you should play it collectively, it should set a form as a whole. There shouldn\u2019t be any particular instrument putting itself on a pedastal [sic], you know. It\u2019s the music that\u2019s important, which includes both vocal and instrumental. Hough added, \u201cI feel as if I have to knit everything together. Drummers used to always be left in the back and it wasn\u2019t until ten years ago that drummers were even recognized as musicians. The rest of the band\u2019s thing is purely tonal where mine is rhythmical.\u201d<\/p>\n ABOUT AUDIENCES, it was said, \u201cYou never know what they\u2019re going to be like. We were talking the other night about how fragmented people\u2019s tastes are. How you get the people who like rock and only rock and how some people turn up their noses at anything but classical. What kind of situation would occur if you advertised a particular concert in the rock media and did the same in a classical area without either knowing about the other half. They might love it, but it\u2019s just the fact that they won\u2019t listen to new things. Like when Dylan started doing gigs with the Band, people started yelling \u2018traitor, traitor.\u2019 There\u2019s no need to build fences around music.\u201d<\/p>\n THOUGH FLASH had been on the road for the last two years, Carter said \u201cwhen you travel a different place everyday, you see the airport, the hotel, and the gig, so you can\u2019t really say we\u2019ve seen all these places. Every Holiday Inn looks the same, so it\u2019s almost like being in the same place. Our roadies keep us entertained. They\u2019re great. On the way down here, Willie out [sic] on a [sic] American Airlines hostess uniform, rolled up his trousers and went down the aisle giving out magazines. We were hysterical. There\u2019s a hoard [sic] of personal jokes, one of which included whistling an imitation of the metal detector at the airport. Another came about from having viewed \u201cWar And Peace.\u201d They picked up the name of Andre, which they later changed to \u201cLaundry,\u201d for purposes of greeting each other. Or, they\u2019ll yell \u201cComraid [sic].\u201d Or they\u2019ll \u201cjust waffle about.\u201d<\/p>\n Obviously however, the good times did not make up for the inner conflicts within the band. What remains of Flash lies within their three albums, \u201cFlash,\u201d \u201cIn the Can\u201d and \u201cOut of Our Hands.\u201d What becomes of the new ex-Flash should even be better, especially through Carter and Bennett\u2019s new band.<\/p>\n The two have the go-ahead from the record company to go into the studio during the 1st week of January and do their album. After that, the three, along with some session musicians are planning to record one more Flash album, to be called \u201cFlashback,\u201d with the band arranging songs by other writers.<\/p>\n The Prospector (El Paso, Texas), 29 November 1973, printed page 18. No byline is printed on the Flash article; the \u201cBy Beth Jones\u201d line on the adjoining \u201cAt 33 1\/3\u201d column belongs to that column. Transcribed as printed; original spellings are retained and marked [sic]. Clipped from Newspapers.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" THE PROSPECTOR (El Paso, Texas) – November 29, 1973 \u2014FLASH<\/a>\u2014 Photo caption: FLASH<\/a> FROM left to right: Colin Carter<\/a>, Peter Banks, Ray Bennett<\/a>, Mike Hough<\/a>. When Flash<\/a> appeared…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":732,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1128","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.peterbanks.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.peterbanks.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.peterbanks.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.peterbanks.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.peterbanks.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1128"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.peterbanks.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1133,"href":"http:\/\/www.peterbanks.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1128\/revisions\/1133"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.peterbanks.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.peterbanks.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n