THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO STEVE HACKETT
Steve Hackett’s twenty-sixth studio album, At The Edge Of Light, reflects the former Genesis guitarist’s (he left after 1976’s Wind & Wuthering) continuing musical journey around the globe, soaking up environments and influences along the way.
While his solo-career trajectory continues apace, next year sees Hackett revisiting two of his musical totems: his former band Genesis’s 1973 album Selling England By The Pound, and his 1979 solo record Spectral Mornings.
In our conversation Hackett talks about travel, making music, the future, the past and the power of being in the moment. He’s eloquent, ruminative and happy to drift off topic frequently; as he puts it: “I digress because I like to digress. I’m tired of all the straight stuff people do.”
I do my best work as the day begIns
I get up awfully early. I find it helps the creative juices and helps me physically. I’m not much good at night. I might get five minutes of poetry down just before I fall off to sleep, but I seem to be able to function better in the morning. There’s less going on, there’s no call on my time.
It’s the time to operate by stealth and silence, before life starts.
travel really does broaden the mInd
As he gears up for the release of his new solo album, the guitarist reflects on being a morning person,
struggling with down time, the joys of travel and what it feels like being the son of Superman.
“I’ve spent time looking for the voice of the desert, trying to capture the spirit that’s out there – can we make this work?”
I travel for inspiration, but I would travel anyway. As a seven-year-old, my family emigrated – unsuccessfully – to Canada. But I did get to visit and spend four months there and went to school there and it fired me up for travel. At the same time it filled me with fear, as it made inroads into the family and made things very difficult coming back. I’d seen the wider world, and it seemed like they were determined to knock you down again at school when we got home. But I had seen the Rockies, I’d seen the Atlantic, I’d seen icebergs. It was like travelling through the Wild West and suddenly you were in this time machine and back in the forties or fifties in crumbling Pimlico. It does affect you and turn you inward when you undergo an extreme experience like that. You can’t be rewired to be smaller after all those experiences.
I try to soak up my envIronment, wherever It Is
We were in Petra a few weeks ago, out in the desert with the Bedouin, sitting around the fire. That was extraordinarily rewarding because I was seeing nothing. But the wilderness was remarkable. This nothingness is very primal and very basic. It’s an amazing thing. It stays with you forever. The desert will always be in my head. I’ve spent time looking for the voice of the desert, trying to capture the spirit that’s out there – can we make this work, can I do this with a guitar, sustain and frozen reverb, as spooky as hell, will that capture it?
the world’s gettIng smaller, but we’re closIng more borders
When I make an album, for example, a drummer in Iceland will send me his performance, we have the technology to do that kind of thing. Whereas politicians are telling us we ought to be arming ourselves to the teeth, cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world. But where does that leave us? It takes us back to the Dark Ages. We don’t really need countries any more, we don’t need borders, we just need to work with the best people in every field, so that we will cure cancer and we will make a better world. But without everyone’s brain on it we’re not going to bloody well do it, we’ll just fade away. It’s fortress mentality, and it’s been shown that it doesn’t work. It does my head in. We should be celebrating culture, embracing things.
sometImes It’s as Important to look down as It Is up
You can always spend your time thinking: “I’m always the bridesmaid and never the bride”, or you can go: “I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to do the things I’ve done.” There are people who would love to even own a Marshall amp and a Les Paul. When I was a kid staring into shop windows, I used to think that anyone who had that had already made it. Success for me is being engaged in the medium, not how it does in the marketplace. When we did [Genesis’s 1973 album] Selling England By The Pound and we couldn’t get a gig in the
States, John Lennon gave an interview and said we were one of the bands that he was listening to. That’s worth celebrating more than anything else. That means a lot to me.
some records take on a lIfe of theIr own
Every time you make an album, you do the same thing: you plug in and play and celebrate the things you write. But I think that those two albums, Selling England and Spectral Mornings, they’re magical. With England I seem to recall a lot of things getting written in the rehearsal room, and in the main I just brought in riffs and I said here’s this, here’s this. I think it was more instrumentally led, perhaps, than many of the other Genesis albums, and I was thrilled at that as someone who was mainly a player at the time.
Something special happened. The first track alone, Dancing With The Moonlit Knight, travelled through the Scottish plains to something like Elgar. It’s an amazing song. It doesn’t falter, even though at the end we’re doing the
quietest improvisation that any band has ever done. It goes through all sorts of techniques; jazz fusion, psychedelic. And to Phil’s [Collins] credit, he was able to do the right thing behind all of these disparate, angular-sounding riffs and salvos and make it swing. It’s a real adventure and I just love it.
I used to work myself Into the ground makIng musIc
Spectral Mornings was the first solo album I was hugely confident about. There was a great feeling in the team, we had a lot of laughs, and we recorded in Holland in sub-zero temperatures where all you could do was work. It was impossible to sleep. We’d get back at three or four in the morning and then the cleaners would come in at six and make a very real din upstairs. So I did that album on very little sleep.
I had a history of falling over doing albums in those days. I would keep working and working and I’d end up in hospital or unable to move, literally. So at the end of Spectral Mornings people were sending me back mixes and
I’m hanging on to the walls at home going: “A bit more tambourine in the left-hand corner!” I was just trying to give it everything. I wasn’t very sensible, but that helps to bring something to it.
I stIll fInd It very hard to do down tIme
I suppose I don’t really do that much relaxing – all work and no play. I’m aware that the clock is ticking, I think it’s the same for my brother as well. He’s doing the same thing where he’s coming up with an album all the time, and I say ‘how’s that’ and he’s on to the next one. We Hackett brothers are cut from the same cloth in a way.
my father was an amazIng man
My dad was an extraordinary, accomplished guy. There were twenty things that he was capable of doing, each of which could have been a career for him. If only I’d inherited more of those things. But it’s a bit like being son of Superman. I came away with one gift, which was to be able to fly on the guitar. My dad was able to do many more things – jump out of aeroplanes, play cricket and football to an extraordinary standard, make furniture, paint… He had all these gifts. But I seem to be a specialist in one area, and the other jobs that I had I tended to get fired from.
I was pretty useless.
musIc made sense to me from a very early age
I was trying to be just like my dad, as he was so musical. I was two and trying to play the mouth organ just like him, and even as a two year old I took it very seriously. My mother tells me I used to have this little case, and take it out on the Tube. She said I used to play the same tune over and over again. I got a chromatic when I was five and my repertoire was Dixon Of Dock Green on a good day, you don’t want to know the rest. But I started winning bets and taking money off people by playing the national anthem through my nose. I got an idea that maybe this music lark might be a good wheeze for when I got older. I started messing around with the guitar when I was twelve. I got really interested when I was fourteen, when I was big enough to get my arms around this huge guitar that my dad had with a brutal action and terrible strings. But I fought on – and the fight’s still going on. I was playing something yesterday and I was fighting for every phrase, and I thought: “I’ve got to crack this again.”
I’m happy lookIng forward as well as back
I figured I have the choice of honouring the past or taking people into the future, and I’ll do both those things for lots of reasons. It’s a privilege to do the stuff I once believed in – I don’t do anything I don’t believe in. But I am flexible. I have to be. It’s nice to be able to do both, it’s nice to keep the museum doors open. But beyond the money there are all sorts of other things going on. I am really proud of the new album and I’ll be doing lots of it at some point. It’s just steps in an ongoing journey.
The important thing is to keep going and stick to your guns. It’s a great joy to do that whether it’s old or new. It’s all part of the same spirit that drives it. It’s still the same vessel, and time is extraordinarily elastic. If I’m doing Selling England, I won’t be thinking: ‘This stuff is how old?!’ It’s forty-six years ago, which is extraordinary. But you have to trust yourself, and bet on yourself, and that only comes with time.
“I started winning bets and taking money off people by playing the national anthem
through my nose.”
At The Edge of Light is out on January 25 via InsideOut. Steve Hackett tours the U K in November.