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| Steve Hackett image by Lee Millward |
In the five years that
have passed since my last interview with Steve Hackett, the iconic English
guitarist/composer has been on a nonstop flight of creativity that has taken
him, both literally and figuratively, to the far ends of the earth. With a
career spanning more than 50 years, Hackett’s imagination has cultivated a loyal global audience that eagerly looks forward to each album and each tour. Best known
for his innovative lead guitar work with the progressive rock pioneers, Genesis,
Hackett has spent the decades since his departure from the band in 1977
pursuing his muse, a quest which has proved insatiable and lifelong. Inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010 as a member of Genesis, Hackett
allows his music to speak for itself. However,
in conversation Hackett is revealed as a true Renaissance man of culture, a
quiet genius whose words reflect a deeply intelligent, profoundly spiritual
soul.
Catching up with Steve a
few days before he and his band headed across the Big Pond to begin their North
American tour, we talked at length about many things past, present, and future.
Grateful thanks to Steve for his time and his candor, and for gifting me with years of musical inspiration and wonder. Read on and enjoy!
Roy Abrams: Very psyched for your return to Long Island on March 8th at the NYCB Theatre at Westbury! This is going to be a special tour for you in that you’ll be performing Selling England by the Pound, the 1973 Genesis album you’ve referred to as your favorite from that group. Are there any new band personnel who are joining you this time around?
Steve Hackett:
Yeah, we have two new guys; Jonas
Reingold, on bass, from The
Flower Kings, and Craig Blundell on
drums, who most recently played with Steven
Wilson. It’s an extraordinary rhythm section. Apart from that, it’s pretty
much the same band as we had before. Nad Sylvan, the other Swede, is on vocals.
Roger King is on keyboards, Rob Townsend on woodwinds, brass, extra keyboard,
bits of percussion, and myself.
RA: What is it about Selling
England that makes it resonate so strongly with you?
SH: Well,
you know, I think it came out of left field. Back in the day, I don’t think
anyone realized how popular it was going to become. I think that’s the best
atmosphere and attitude to undertake an album. We didn’t realize that John
Lennon was going to say that we were one of the bands he was listening to at
that time. It also had an unlikely hit single in it, in the UK we had a single,
“I Know What I Like”
… again, an unlikely song, because we weren’t known at the time for doing short
songs. Everything tended to be epic length; the musical continuums were roguish
at the time. People were making albums as audio journeys and it was only really
in the 1980s that the idea of doing a collection of 10 short hit singles,
MTV-friendly, was starting to supplant the idea of the album as a force in
itself. But I think that the band’s playing took a quantum leap forward on this
one. (There were) lots of instrumental passages. I was very proud of its quirky
Englishness. It’s still my favorite Genesis album; I think it’s better written
than all of other ones. I’ve made a couple of changes to the solo stuff; I’m
doing (material from) Spectral
Mornings, and it’s the 40th anniversary this year of Defector,
so we’ll include some of those things.
RA: “I Know
What I Like” was a collaborative effort between you and Phil (Collins). The bonus track from the
album, “Déjà Vu,”
which you’ll be performing on this tour, marks the only occasion where you’ve
written with Peter Gabriel. Was there ever any discussion between the two
of you, post-Genesis, of working together again?
SH: I never
really tried to hit Pete up for that. I mean, we’ve helped each other, swapped
phone information and all that. We’re basically pals, but I think I’ve always
been aware that he wants to distance himself. There were very few occasions,
like in the early ‘80s, when we got together to do the Milton Keynes show, and
everyone was a part of that. (Other) creative collaborations … there was a band
reformation in 2005 but there just wasn’t enough common ground. From my end, I
was very much up for it. Everyone had achieved so much collectively and
individually, but the thing is, it takes a band to tango, to make that work. It
doesn’t always come easily, if it comes at all. I figure my job, or my
pleasure, if you like, is to take the early music from the classic period of
the band, when we were a five-piece, and honor that. I don’t mind if it’s a
song of mine, or a song of Mike’s,
or Tony’s, or Phil’s, or Pete’s;
it doesn’t really matter. The thing is, there’s a lot of great music there that
came out of a bunch of guys, all of whom were songwriters, and as much as any
band could share, we managed to share that.
RA: Your
fans truly span the globe, a fact I know firsthand through reviewing the web
analytics of our past published conversations, in 2014 and 2015. The only
continent that is as yet unrepresented is Antarctica! The same global reach applies to the diversity
of artists with whom you’ve worked in the recent past.
SH: [Laughs]
Well, that’s extraordinary! Yeah, the last couple of albums had 20 people on
them from all over the world. This time, we managed to incorporate India into
the mix. Sheema Mukherjee, she plays
wonderful sitar on “Shadow
and Flame,” so for the first time I was working with a real sitar virtuoso
rather than trying to do an impression of it myself. It’s my proudest album, I
think, as a convincing travelogue, a journey. I think that album doesn’t really
falter. That doesn’t mean to say that everyone’s going to love every track; I
loved every track, I loved everything about it. It had so much variety, so many
different genres. “Shadow and Flame” is based partly on my wife Jo’s experience
in India, where she described the Ganges, watching the dawn over the Ganges and
seeing wonderful things: candlelight gave way to daylight, but at the same time
with these beautiful visions of people bathing, there’s dead bodies floating
down the river (wrapped) in shrouds, so you get the sublime and the ghastly
side by side. I got to travel there with her many years later, and I saw the
most stunning things … and frightening things. It’s an extraordinary place of
extremes. Indian percussion (is great); it’s not just the tablas and the gentle
lilt of the talking drum, there’s (a lot) of unlikely stuff. It’s a fascinating
place, if you like to visit colorful places; the whole place is a riot of
color. (We visited) temples that were carved out of caves, and temples carved
out of monoliths! In other words, their idea of sculpture is, you take a
mountain, and you carve it into a building, you carve a herd of elephants! We
can’t possibly (duplicate it) with the technology of today, and they (achieved
this) at least a thousand years ago. For all sorts of reasons, it’s stunning,
it’s mind-blowing, and in a way, you can see the seeds of the ‘60s. You see the
seeds of Pop Art, all the colorful things that the 1960s were all about. You
see it on the temple ceilings, the walls, the figures, the detailed carvings on
the front of some of these places. It wouldn’t be out of place on Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
if you just stuck in a stray photo!
RA: You
recently said that it was very important to make albums with people from all
over the world. When did that perspective begin to solidify?
SH: I think
that the more I started to travel, not just on the rock and roll touring but
beyond that, to explore other places. In recent times we’ve been to India, to
Egypt, China, Ethiopia … you travel, you make friends—that’s what happens! And also my contact with the
Hungarian band, Djabe, who also work with
people from all over the world, so they introduced me to people from Africa,
Azerbaijan, (and) the United States. (Hungary) is a real melting pot, a
crossroads of Europe. It’s been extraordinary working live with (these people).
We didn’t start out with the idea of trying to build bridges between cultures,
it just happened naturally. In other words, the rise of right-wing politics and
nationalism seems designed to drive people apart; I think it’s an opposite
direction to the way I’ve been working recently. I feel that my albums
celebrate the best of whatever people are capable of; it doesn’t matter where
they’re from. I’m very happy to work with people all over the globe—the United States, the U.K., Iceland, Africa. If not
people from those places, certainly instruments from those places, which the
guys in the band have adopted and adapted to, so it’s a very wide church.
RA: Your
music can be viewed as world music in the highest possible relief.
SH: I certainly
try!
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| image by Tina Korhonen |
RA: We’ve
spoken before about the cinematic aspect of your writing. You’ve described your
work as “film for the ear,” adding that “it’s quite common for my music to have
a lot of drama, as it the case with most of the best music.” As you compose
these “audio films” is the process an entirely visceral one or is it a
combination of gut-level intuition and brain logic that informs your muse?
SH: It’s the
hardest thing to explain, because there isn’t really any formula for writing
songs. Music doesn’t appear on command. There’s a certain amount of waiting,
but I think that when an idea is in the air, if you can preserve it in some
kind of way, whether it’s some recording device or pen and paper, the main
thing is to get the idea down. I’ve got books of unfinished things; riffs,
songs, symphonies, all sorts of stuff. Often, I have to remind myself to go
back to rejects, pretty much in the same way that Genesis used to go back to
rejects, (to find that) this idea is pretty damn good, let’s run with the ball,
and until you actually start recording, you don’t really know how far it’s
going to go. The strengths and weaknesses of an idea show themselves once you
start baking the cake! You have all the ingredients; you think, this might make
a nice, big, glorious sponge (cake), but you don’t know how sweet it’s going to
be, how moist. So yeah, it’s pretty much like cooking a meal, in a way! It’s an
inexact art, and I’m very happy with that.
RA: With
regard to your live performance arrangements of the classic Genesis material,
aficionados will discern occasional slight variations in instrumentation or
song structure. While the majority of fans welcome this exploration, we both
know that there are devout purists who view any departure from the original
version as sacrilege. What is your philosophy regarding evolution versus
preservation of the original recordings?
SH: If you
look back at the early recordings and you contrast them with the live versions,
we’ll have a certain amount of evolution. It just has to be that way. It can’t
be cast in stone. With Genesis, we did tend to segue ideas, messing around
rather a lot. I try and do authentic versions; I try to be authentic to the
spirit of the song. For instance, if I’ve spent a long time getting a
particular guitar solo together, I’ll be thinking of it as not just an
instrumental part, but part of the writing of the song. If I play “The Musical Box” I play
exactly the same notes because it’s all about not being spontaneous. If
something is composed, and if you’re still proud of it, stick with it. But
then, at the end of something like “Supper’s Ready,” I’ll do
some of the existing phrases but then I’ll go off on a bender, maybe going on
for another couple of minutes, until I’ve had enough. I think you have to be
flexible. I think (on) “I Know What I Like,” which started out as a small
little tune, when we were doing it with Phil Collins (on vocals), it
facilitated some of his antics. When he was doing the tambourine dance, it
reduces the song to a virtual handclap, so that we’re accompanying the visual
on Phil’s terms. With my band, there’s no point in doing a tambourine dance or
trying to be Peter Gabriel, running around with a lawnmower onstage! What we
do is we have a sax solo that gets very jazzy, but then I go into a very
rocking guitar solo and start playing fast triplets so that it takes off like a rocket in a different kind of way, but then we bring it back
respectfully at the end. This stuff continues to evolve. Of course, the
diehards, they might want to go and see any one of a number of tribute bands
who faithfully reproduce everything we did, including the limitations of that
time, but techniques and technology improve and it makes it possible to have a
band of—dare I say—virtuosos, like my guys. It takes us off into
another direction, at the drop of a hat, I think it’s all the better for that,
and I think the audience usually suspends its disbelief. They pick up on the
interaction that goes on onstage between the various characters who are talking
to each other, and there’s genuine spontaneity there.
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| image by Lee Millward |
RA: In July, you’ll be publishing
your autobiography, A
Genesis in My Bed. Pardon the pun, but what was the genesis of the
project, and how did it come to fruition?
SH: I’d done a series of
interviews way back in the past with Alan Hewitt, and people were referring to
it as “my book” and I kept saying to people, well, actually it’s not my book;
it’s Alan’s
book, and I was the interviewee. Doing that is not quite the same as doing
a much more considered, in–depth thing, where you’re having to think about why
you did something, how you feel about it now. I wanted it to be more revealing,
and not just a complete collection of anecdotes. I didn’t think that was going
to do the ideas justice. I’ve really gone into the music in a big way, and I
hope people like that. There are the jokes and asides and all those other
things, and I’ve hope I’ve been fair about all the people I’ve once worked
with. I don’t think there’s anyone whose praises I didn’t sing. There might be
the odd criticism, but in the main, I’m overwhelmingly positive about everybody.
I might tweak the noses of a few, but, you know, that doesn’t matter. I think
it’s been fun doing it, and we are still at the stage of putting in some extra
things we haven’t thought about, so over the course of the next month or so,
we’ll add stuff. Jo will ask, what was it like meeting Mick Jagger or Paul
McCartney?
RA: What was it like?
SH: Extraordinary! Whenever
you get to meet people who’ve been a huge part of your early life, first of
all, you hope that they’re not going to behave like an absolute asshole, which
neither did, and they were both polite and talkative, which was lovely. I don’t
think the autobiography is a kind of “who’s who” of everything. Yes, you’ve got
a few people mentioned there, and some unlikely ones, too, but in the main it’s
trying to create a two-way mirror. If you were a fly on the wall and you saw
what I was like at three years old, you’d have an idea of some of it; struggles
at school and all that kind of stuff. That’s not all legendary by any means. I
want to be self-deprecating and send myself up and say, well, at one point, I
had stage fright and I saw a hypnotherapist to get me over it. I don’t have
that problem anymore. That’s the sort of stuff I’m revealing (in the book). I
want to give people hope and say, it can happen to anyone. Sir Laurence Olivier
had suddenly reached a point where (I haven’t mentioned this in my book) he
couldn’t look at any of the other actors; he didn’t want them to catch his eye.
He wanted them to look to the side, because for some reason (direct eye
contact) unnerved him. How is that possible for someone who was seen, to the world
of English acting, as lord and master? Even the greatest … Mick
Jagger was telling me at the time that he was tired … there was this whole
entourage, this whole circus around him, masses of people. It reminds me of a
story when I was in Japan for the first time, and Michael Jackson happened to
be staying in the hotel, and what a revelation that was! A hundred people
gathered at the lift entrance, and the camera light would be above this
seething mass of people, it was moved twenty-five yards to the left, and they
all moved back, and the lift doors opened, and they were gone. Talk about life
in a goldfish bowl! His life must have been like a mobile zoo. I don’t know how
you could exist like that, except on your own property, on your own terms, but
then it becomes a prison. I wouldn’t want that level of celebrity. I don’t
think I’d be able to handle it at all. I think I’d go around dressed as Groucho
Marx or something.
RA: Speaking of stage
fright, original Genesis guitarist Anthony
Phillips said that stage fright ultimately drove him from the band. When we
last spoke, you brought up the prospect of collaborating on an album together.
SH: Funnily enough, we
collaborated on two different projects. He was on one of my albums, I think it
was Out
of the Tunnel’s Mouth, he was on a couple of tracks on that, and then
we did something recently for an elephant charity called Harmony
for Elephants, and we did a track together. He provided a piano part and I
improvised all over it, then he did some twelve-string work on it. He and I get
on very well, and I’ve often said to him that if we’d been in the band at the
same time, I suspect it would have been just fine because we’d be fine with
each other’s ideas. He’s very democratic in his approach.
RA: Next year’s tour will
feature a complete performance of Seconds
Out—
SH: —That’s right, that’s
what we graduate to!
RA: That album marked your
point of departure from the band, and I’ve seen the Tony Banks interview where
he said that your guitar was mixed out. So, my question for you is: in addition
to anticipating the joy of rehearsing and performing this album, given the
circumstances behind its mixing and release, is there any additional sweetness,
if that’s the right word, in getting to set the record straight from a musical
perspective?
SH: When it comes to Seconds Out, the whole album was a case
of cherry picking across the whole of the band’s history, although the current
album at the time was Wind and
Wuthering. So, until we actually start working on that, I don’t know
exactly how that will shape up. But when it comes to Tony, he tends to
contradict himself. He tends to praise me on one hand [chuckles] and then
criticize. I hope I’ve been generous about him in my book, because I think he’s
one hell of a writer and a very fluent chordsmith, no doubt about it. There is
no sense of “getting even” … I know they do tend to say (that I’ve been mixed
out) but I can hear my guitar on it. I can hear my guitar more clearly on “The Carpet Crawlers”
than it was on the (original) record! So, there’s a little bit of creative
license, I think, with similar statements. Strange, obviously they called the
album Seconds Out, you know, I’m right
in the foreground of the album cover, although they asked Armando (Gallo) to darken it so I
look like a shadowy figure, so I kind of became the black sheep, somewhat.
Sometimes, I think that a band needs someone who’s prepared to say unpopular
things and try and drive it forward. It’s a shame that the band weren’t more
open at that time for everyone to have parallel solo careers. Once you start
growing, people start to have families, divorcing, and various things, you
can’t behave like you did when you were all kids together; it just doesn’t work
anymore. I have no regrets; I love the music, and I honor it politics-free.
That’s my take on Genesis now. I was hoping that Genesis might expand into a
band that behaved pretty much like The Beatles. In other words, the occasional
use of orchestra; I’ve done that myself. They’ve used the horn section from
Earth, Wind, and Fire, but I think there is a bit of a limitation after all
that time, I think it is important for there to be some evolution. But that’s
just my opinion; a departed band member shares his opinions with you.
RA: The concept of “the
music business” has essentially been supplanted by “the musicians’ business,” meaning that
musicians earn a living these days primarily by getting out there and reaching
their audiences directly through live performances. You recently said that you
still felt the need to record and would continue to do so, if only for an
audience of one; very much like classical musicians who wrote and performed for
individual patrons. What are your thoughts on the current state of affairs,
with particular emphasis on the freedom that you have come to experience by
managing all aspects of your career with just you and Jo at the helm?
SH: It’s a multi-faceted
question! I’d say that there was greater freedom in the 1960s and 1970s. In the
‘80s things were tightening up; things were becoming much more formatted, as I
said earlier, (with artists) doing a collection of MTV-friendly potential
singles. The magic of an album that at one time changed the world gets lost
somewhere, so the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. Now, I think in
terms of big business, there simply isn’t enough money in the record business
for it to contain anything but enthusiasts. Moguls have moved on to something
else. If you want to make tons of money, then go sell baked beans! Someone
who’s in the music business who has no love of it has got no place being there,
and I think unless you understand music, you aren’t really in with a chance.
For me, as a musician, it’s understanding the audience, but also taking them on
further than perhaps they intended to, (to) stretch their tolerance, but that’s
how music works, because at first everything seems strange. First of all, you
say, “This is strange.” Then suddenly it no longer becomes alien, it becomes
your friend. The other aspect you mentioned, in terms of self-management, is
with Jo, where basically we have a team. It means there’s no Fuhrer; it doesn’t
work like that. We just have a team that very often talks things over, saying,
“What do you think? This one’s a good idea; this one’s a no-brainer.” We have
an immediate understanding. We have a band that wants to work, wants to travel,
do as many shows as possible. Luckily, the albums are selling—the physical
product—very, very well in an era where everyone’s saying, that’s all over, CDs
are over. Well, I like CDs because I like to have a package, and I also like
the size of vinyl records because you’ve got … let’s put it this way. The album
sleeve (cover) is the best possible advert for a record you could possibly
have. The size of the original album sleeve, 12” by 12”, whatever it was, was a
piece of artwork or an incredible photograph that you could stick on your wall.
Remember those days? I personally love the quality of sound of CDs but we like
to release in all formats to keep everyone happy; to keep the vinyl
fundamentalists (happy) and the audiophiles, you’ve got to address them too,
plus make things available for download. If there’s a new format, I’ll go for
it.
RA: As a musician, I have
worlds of respect for you, for everything that you’ve brought to the table for
decades. As I look at it, you’re a shining example of how to do it, how to keep
the fun intact, how to keep your integrity intact. I think for any aspiring musician
who wants to learn how to address all the avenues of their career with
integrity, with creativity, and with heart, they can look to you and your
career.
SH: Thank you very much!
It’s very nice of you to say so! I’m sure you share that with your own input to
music as well. It’s a natural childbirth every time, isn’t it? That’s how we
keep it coming.
© Roy Abrams 2020
