In Conversation With Colin: Steve Hackett

Genesis guitar legend Steve Hackett sat down with me for a chat as he prepared to take to the stage at Cardiff’s Utilita Arena on October 11th.

“Genesis was something incredibly special and for the early work of the band to get approval from John Lennon I think was a big feather in our cap”.

So says Steve Hackett, and his celebration of his past will continue full-bore this autumn as the former Genesis guitarist honours the 50th anniversary of the band’s masterpiece ‘The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway’.

Renowned for his intricate and timeless guitar playing, Hackett gained an international reputation after joining Genesis in 1971 alongside the classic line-up of Peter Gabriel, Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks and Phil Collins.

“Fire away with the questions,” Steve disarmingly says as he settles into a chair. “Whatever you want mate is alright by me,” he adds, breaking into a wry smile as he gets ready to talk about well, anything really.

Steve is a complex musician drawing influences from a wide variety of styles and melding them into stellar compositions, and with The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway Genesis arguably hit their highest creative peak, recording one of the best and most important double-albums and concepts of all time; it’s considered a major milestone in the field of Progressive Rock.

As for the tour itself, fans can expect a varied set-list that spans multiple eras of Steve’s career, from Genesis classics to his latest solo material. One of the highlights will be his fresh take on The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, which has been re-sequenced for the live performances, giving it a renewed structure while maintaining its narrative core.

“I’m not doing the album in its entirety, there’s so much on that album that is keyboard driven and lyrically intensive and there aren’t that many moments where I get to lead with the guitar,” Steve says. “With Selling England By The Pound it’s a very different proposition, and with Foxtrot there are lots of different moments of guitar extravaganzas so I’m choosing my moments very carefully.”

The upcoming tour also showcases material from Steve’s later solo career. “We start off with three tracks from the new album,” he explains.

“We start with the opening track on the album People Of The Smoke and then it’s Circo Inferno and These Passing Clouds. They are all intense in their own way with a large amount of instrumental work in each of those tracks and they work very well live. I’ve played them in the States and some parts of Europe and those songs are being received by an audience as if they were old favourites, so I seem to be hitting the right note with it.”

Master of the acoustic, nylon and electric guitars and using his legendary sustain and tapping technique, Hackett is unique in refraining from fluffier jazz leanings favoured by so many other veteran guitarists. His last album The Circus And The Nightwhale released earlier this year features his current touring band. “I suspect they grew up listening to Genesis so they know it backwards,” he says. “Just the rhythm section alone of Jonas Reingold and Craig Blundell are formidable, Jonas has this incredible sound on bass that just thunders, like a hundred tons of iron girders coming at you furiously fast but he’s an amazing jazzer as well. He can play Bach on bass, in fact I usually let him go off and play a Bach piece and he engages with the crowd, he’s an absolute star in his own right.”

The recording of the seminal 1974 album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway took place in Wales. “It was Glaspant Manor in Capel Iwan, but the idea was we were going to record at Headley Grange where Led Zeppelin had just moved out and we moved in,” Steve recalls. “I think in those days Phil Collins wanted to get the sound of the drums that was recorded at the bottom of the stairwell, and I think in those days they weren’t yet building stone rooms and using compressed ambient mics to get that canon-like effect. So Zep had this loudest drum sound on the planet at that time and of course we had all the shenanigans with the lead singer leaving the band then re-joining and that put us back a bit, and because we were working in separate rooms virtually, he (Peter Gabriel) was doing lyrics in one room and we were doing the lyrics in the other then we would convene and try to knit the two together and it was quite difficult to do that”.

This fraught working relationship within the band somehow developed into a double album. “If it had been a single we would have recorded at Headley but then the other place was suggested at Glaspant and that was still being built so we went from a derelict place that was once a haunted work house to another place that was not yet quite finished so the recording process was fraught with difficulties, and then eventually we finished it off in London at Island Studios. There were one or two hairy moments doing that album it wasn’t an easy one to bring to fruition”.

It was a bold move to release a double album at that time, with Steve still feeling very much the new boy in the band as did Phil Collins. “The tone of it was really being set by the guys that had grown up together at school, that was Mike (Rutherford), Tony (Banks) and Peter (Gabriel). So if Peter wanted to do a double album as his swansong with the band that was something I could hardly object to.

“One thing I do concur with the rest of the guys is that most of us seem to think that it would have been stronger if it had just been a single album. But if it had been a single album I doubt whether we would have come up with the same choice of songs”.

When the album was released the band embarked on a long gruelling tour of North America and Europe with laser light shows and famously Peter Gabriel’s multiple theatrical costume changes. “I had no problem with that, I was aware that we needed to put on a show,” Steve remembers. “When I first joined the band everyone was seated apart from Peter Gabriel, so it was left for him to be the show. We were like the pit orchestra and he had to be Nureyev meets Nijinsky”.

Peter Gabriel, showman that he was, would be dressed in his Magog batwings outfit, consisting of a long velvet black cape and giant triangular headpiece. “When you’ve got a frontman who is literally prepared to hang upside down and sing as he does even to this day dangerously, and prepared to crowd surf and all the rest then I’ve got great admiration and respect for that, but that’s for him, it’s not for me. My gymnastics are all on the fingers these days”. To emphasise the point Steve casually plays air guitar as he breaks into a knowing smile.

Toward the end of that 1975 tour Peter Gabriel announced to the other band members his intention to leave. “We were aware that Pete was going to leave,” admits Steve. “He said I’ll do the album and the tour but then I’m going to leave and I think that Tony Smith our manager at the time kept putting in extra dates so that Pete wouldn’t leave and we did nine months pretty much straight touring that album, we were pretty green by the end of it”, Steve reflects with a sigh.

“Pete very much believed in the album,” Steve continues. “He wanted it to be made into a film and even recently he wanted it to be made into a musical and I’m celebrating a good half of it”.

Colin Palmer