Bankie Banx: King of the Dune

“I met Bob Marley a couple of times. Bankie's kind of the Eastern Caribbean version of that to me.” – Jimmy Buffett

Bankie Banx: King of the Dune celebrates the colorful life of the Anguillian singer/songwriter known by many as “the Bob Dylan of the Caribbean.” Growing up on an undeveloped island where necessity often dictated life choices, young Clement Banks dared to dream of becoming a professional musician. He honed his skills playing in dance bands, voraciously soaking up everything from British top 40 and reggae to Rastafarianism and the anti-colonial Pan-Africanism of Walter Rodney. In 1978 he released his genre-defying first album Bankie Banx and his Roots & Herbs, and his breakout hit “Prince of Darkness” put both Bankie and Anguilla on the map. Jimmy Buffett and Bob Dylan sailed ashore to jam. Reggae Sunsplash booked the band in a lineup of Jamaica’s biggest artists. But Anguilla proved too small to sustain Bankie’s musical ambitions, and in 1984 he set off for new horizons.

After a decade of touring in Europe and the United States and resisting the music industry’s efforts to pigeonhole his sound, Bankie returned to his beloved Anguilla and created the Moonsplash music festival (now in its fourth decade) and the Dune Preserve, a beach bar and performance venue crafted from driftwood and repurposed objects where Bankie presides as pirate guru in a de facto autonomous zone. Done with the indignities of life on the road, Bankie now makes world class musicians and audiences come to him. With a joint in one hand, a whiskey in the other, and a thousand new ideas vying for immediate implementation, Bankie Banx continues to make music and (mostly) good trouble while enjoying a degree of self-determination and satisfaction most artists only dream of.