The BIG Über Rock Interview: Steve Hackett

Written by DJ Astrocreep
Saturday, 13 October 2018 04:40

In the final of my most recent London trips, I managed to catch up with Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett, just ahead of his orchestral tour, to talk about the tour, his new album projects and strange musical requests…

I started by asking him about how the tour came about…

It’s really been a dream to tour with an orchestra and we’re doing it in this country. Sometimes I have played with orchestras in other parts of the world but this is the 1st time I will be touring with an orchestra so rock band plus orchestra so there will be many thoughts on the subject.

The show mainly centres on classic Genesis stuff from, I think of it as from the period of 1973 which to me seems like yesterday to me, in many ways, because at that time John Lennon said Genesis was one of the bands he was listening to. We had just had an album called ‘Selling England By The Pound’ which I was very proud of and I thought “wow you know, John Lennon likes us’. At that time I felt that it was classic material. We were doing the best of that album plus the best of ‘Foxtrot’ and ‘Nursery Cryme’ and at that time I felt we were the best band around because I was such a fan of the songs that we were doing, the stuff that the other guys were coming up with, the writing was very ambitious. Someone said today, they were talking about progressive (songs), that was both eccentric and intellectual. So I suppose you know it challenges your intelligence, but in it’s own quirky way, so I’m very proud of it. I’m more confident about it now than I ever was at the time because it’s proved itself and it’s still around. Guys like myself are finding that we can fill venues that we might have struggled to do a while back, like in the Albert Hall and Royal Festival Hall and The Palladium and to be able to do more than one thing. So I guess it’s the material that’s proved itself; but I still get a huge buzz out of doing stuff that’s that varied.

You’ve done something similar before in Iceland, did that maybe give you the spur towards this?

Well I did, [the] stuff went very well in Iceland. They’d worked with Jon Anderson… there was one thing that was a fabulous arrangement of a YES song. You know, normally when you get orchestras working with bands and it’s an add-on, you get that thing of “does it make sense?” But the orchestral arrangements that they’ve done they went with Jon’s voice. He’s never sounded better. That sounds really like the classical music it deserves to be, you know, the best of both worlds. So I agreed to work with them, and now I’m using the charts that they did of the Genesis stuff to take forward with me and also the stuff that the Canadian conductor Bradley Thachuk, who worked with the Buffalo Philharmonic, is on the other half of it. There’s some solo stuff involved with that. When you hear it all going at once, it’s quite an extraordinary big sound.

You’ve played some of the venues before. Were they recommended to you, if you haven’t played them before?

The one that I haven’t played under my own name is The Royal Festival Hall but I’ve guested in it. I guested with Elizabeth Fraser who sings with Massive Attack. You know her history:Thompson Twins and various things you know. She’s been involved with endless film scores and she worked with my old pal Peter Gabriel, with ‘The Story of Ovo’, I believe, ‘Lord of the Rings’… she’s very very modest. She asked me to do a thing which was just nylon guitar and voice so I did a kind of flamenco-y backing for her to do something with, really melodic but I’ve never really done Royal Festival under my own name. I’ve done the Queen Elizabeth a few times both with Genesis and The London General Orchestra, strangely enough, doing Vivaldi and I’ve done it a few times myself with both rock band and acoustic shows there, but this time it’s the 1st time doing the Royal Festival so it’s a lovely hall and I’m looking forward to it tremendously.

What have the logistics been like because obviously, a 41-piece orchestra is not the easiest to organise for…

Yeah well I was asking that of Helen (Fitzgerald) who’s the cellist but also the fixer for that band, she puts it together. She said, well “yeah we’ll travel under our own steam, they all have a coach”. We’ll be making the usual arrangements for the band: we’ll meet up, basically, we rehearse probably mercilessly for the first couple of days. Once we’re sure we have everything right, it will hopefully ease up a bit and that will be something won’t it?

It’s not every day that you get to work with an orchestra but I hope to make personal friends with them all. The time I worked with the Royal Philharmonic the first time – I’m name dropping the Royal Philharmonic *laughs* – I made surewhen we were doing a thing called ‘A Midsummers Night Dream’, I tried to meet everyone, shake their hand. Many years ago people were saying how lovely Cliff Richard was to work with, because he acknowledges everyone; he wants to meet them all, he realises that they all have their part to play and in that way, he’s very modest perhaps. So, if there’s time, you know it’s good to meet people.

Of course, we’ll all be very busy doing our own bit and it might not be possible from day one or the word go, but I like to know how they’re doing and how do they feel about it. Can they hear themselves? Is the band too loud? Invariably you’ve got a rock band and an orchestra and they can always just say, “well we’re struggling to hear our own intonation and all that”: I guess that’s the downside of playing an acoustic instrument alongside electric instruments. But hopefully we won’t be too loud on stage so that what they will come through. Sometimes if I’m working with an orchestra, I will deliberately play a little quieter than usual, so that it’s the sound mixer up front who’s dictating my volume and I’m trying to create a little room so that the orchestra can poke through that. You know, you don’t have to be Godzilla to make an impression.

Are you planning to have a set list or will it be a revolving set?

I think with the orchestra it will be pretty much the same thing every night. We have to have it fixed because everyone’s working off score sheets so it’s not like we can suddenly turn round and say Let’s go and play Bye Bye Johnny. It’s something that has to be honed and the scores have to be known. We will be a lot more familiar with that than the orchestra. They’ll be faced with the dots on the night, you know, so it’s much much tougher for them. but they are trained to do that.

There was talk beforehand you might have a special guest for a certain song?

Well it’s a funny thing. It’s funny I bumped into a whole bunch of people last night at the Prog Awards in London, The Globe Theatre, Shakespeare’s The Globe Theatre. Underneath The Globe, there’s a place called The Underglobe where Progressive Magazine had their get together and I saw tons of pals there, so I thought one, in particular, I might invite but because I’ve been involved in finishing off an album. I haven’t been able to get on the blower to people to go chasing up things, it’s been extremely hectic of late so I might be a bit remiss with that. I think in many ways the star of the show is, well it’s the music really, isn’t it? It’s not, it’s not me, It’s the music, It’s everyone in the team. That’s the important thing. We’ve got a huge team, all working together doing something that’s, it’s a one-off but we’re going to do it eight times.

Was there anything you originally had in mind to include, but for whatever reasons not been able to?

Well there’s one thing I wanted to do but then I ended up saying to them “look do you think that you would be able to do this or just maybe squeeze it in?” It’s all a case of the (orchestral) charts. So, I think we’ll be doing the full-length version of ‘The Shadow of the Hierophant’, which basically always did have orchestral aspirations and it’s a crescendo really, but I originally wrote it on Mellotron strings

Is that the Mellotron 2?

Originally it was, we had the Mellotron Mk 2 with Genesis. But then we had the smaller version, it had three sounds on it and I wrote it on the strings setting. It later became known as the Novotron, but then Mellotron got the rights back. It was Streetly Electronics who basically came up with it. I’m told it was three women in a bedroom on the east coast of America, I believe it was New York in 1953 who made up that those Mellotron string tapes. Even today we still use a bit of that when we’re doing stuff that we want. If we want the strings to be really searing and almost like an alien interpretation of what would Martian drink sound like, it would be the Mellotron. We use other things of course, but for once it won’t be a case of tonnes of strings samples, it’ll be the real thing. It’s hugely exciting to work with orchestras, a rare privilege and a new album I’ve done has got lots of, lots of orchestral stuff on, so I’m thrilled to work with them. It’s lovely to work with that many people. It’s like throwing a big party isn’t it, most of which is going on stage.

You said about the new album, you’ve got another release, the ‘Broken Skies Outspread Wings’ boxset, coming out before that as well…

Yeah, that’s right. That’s a sort of mid-period boxset of things that I did really, I think it’s starting in 1984 really, with ‘Til We Have Faces’. Back in ‘86, there was a largely unreleased album I did with special guests, Brian May, Bonnie Tyler, Chris Thompson to mention a few. Nick Magnus, my brother and then of course you know we had ‘To Watch The Storms’, ‘Wild Orchids’… We’ve taken a number of those albums and cherry-picked across them to do surround sound versions of what you once got in stereo. I’ve put my own trumpet in.

It sounds spectacular because we were starting to use upwards of 200 tracks and you can’t possibly hear all that detail in stereo. You know you’re talking about three symphony orchestras worth; but you can hear it when it’s divided up and it functions in surround, much like some stuff I heard earlier. I was talking to Steven Wilson last night and having just heard his surround sound mix of ‘Lizard’, the King Crimson album I said “I enjoyed that album much more in surround than in stereo” and he said, “yeah it makes more sense in surround doesn’t it?” Has Robert Fripp changed his mind about it? He was saying they had a lot of great ideas on that, back in the day and he said: “yeah lot’s of great ideas, none of which worked.” But I think it works very well in surround, so I hope he now agrees.

I think this goes on quite a lot: sometimes you love your earlier work and then you reject it. Then you come back to the same place perhaps knowing it for the first time and absorbing it from the point of view of true owners who are not the perpetrators of writers and musicians, it’s the audience. The audience are the true owners. They’re the people that bought it, that lived with it and loved it. They didn’t have to give birth to it, they merely had to enjoy it, the best of it. Love the best of it and reject what you don’t want. If you love something you talk to someone else who loves a particular record and you start noticing that they love the same things, so we’re looking at the same wonderful view and there’s a kind of consensus that almost creates the perfect figure. Do you know what I mean? I’m saying that people will marvel at the same things, particularly musicians who are fans of other people’s work. We come up with the same views.

Why do we love it? Take the case of King Crimson: I know I mention them a lot because they were a big influence on Genesis… you know, the influence of bands that were as influenced by jazz and classical as much as they were by rock and pop and all the rest… Take ‘Epitaph’, for instance, and the big crescendo. When I talk to people who love listening to it, we talk about the same thing. We say “yeah, wasn’t that like you know an atomic bomb going off?” You know, you get the mushroom cloud effect from it. Then, when I talked to the guy that wrote it, Ian McDonald, he said “oh I just saw it as a crescendo, I didn’t see it as that”, yet his instincts took him to that point where that marriage of lyrics and a piece song… wonderfully evocative, a real film for the eye chilling vision of a possible future.

You’ve mentioned the new album, the one you’re currently writing. How far along are you with it now?

Well I’ve finished it. I’m doing a day of interviews today so I won’t be there to hear the final surround sound mix, but we went through the first draft yesterday. Roger King and I were comparing notes and he thought he could do to improve things and get the balances right between the various tracks. There was a fairly small shopping list of things from my point of view. I know he’s hugely talented and capable and diligent. All of those things and a visionary in his own right, so I’m looking forward to hearing the final thing when I go back. He will be involved with doing the vinyl masters. We’ve mastered the stereo, he is currently mastering the surround. He’ll then move on to doing masters for vinyl.

You know, we try to provide for all formats and so the job goes on for him. It’s marvellous to have such talent on my side with the people I work with. My wife and I write much of the stuff and then by the time he’s had his input – it’s hugely important – he becomes one of the writers, because of the close detail. He’s a fabulous engineer, keyboard player and arranger, so that transforms everything. It’s a transcendent experience seeing these little doodles that I once had, become…

Fleshed out?

Yeah, fleshed out, full flower, yeah. It’s a truly magical experience seeing this stuff come to life. It’s as if you’ve dreamt up the idea of a tree and you see someone actually create one. It’s hugely detailed and no less marvellous to me than everything I see with the eyes. It’s a feast for the eyes and perhaps one could say it’s like a film for the ear rather than the eye and I see it visually and it stands out and there’s an aspect of world music and a mixture of all the genres.

Do you have a title for it yet?

I do. It’s going to be out, I think in the late part of January but I have to be a little bit circumspect about that, in that the news isn’t out officially at this point so I have to respect what the record company and publicist say, so there will be an official announcement of that. Up to the last minute titles have a habit of changing, especially with me, I’m afraid. Roger often says to me “are you sure these are the final titles” cause some of my things to go through three or four different working titles.

What’s the strangest rider request you’ve either made yourself or you’ve heard made? [*Note – at this point Nile Rodgers was playing loudly outside where our chat was happening, making it harder to hear each other!*]

Musical requests that is? Well, I think when I was asked to play with Evelyn Glennie and write something for her. At that time I was told that she was deaf. I subsequently learned that she’s hearing challenged and that she had an OBE from the Queen. But I did write an hour’s music that was performed on the South Bank Rhythm Sticks Meltdown at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. That was one of the strangest. I actually did three shows with her and they were different every time. But, that was hugely interesting because she’s a virtuoso percussionist, and all the more extraordinary and poignant because she has these hearing difficulties.

• Steve Hackett has announced details of his 2019 ‘Genesis Revisited’ tour, during which he will be playing ‘Selling England By The Pound’ in its entirety as well as celebrating the 40th anniversary of his ‘Spectral Mornings’ solo album. Full details are available HERE.

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