Steve Hackett
The former Genesis guitarist reveals the secrets from his recent autobiography.
“LONDON WAS AN UNRULY PLACE BACK THEN, VERY POLLUTED, AND AS A KID IT WAS VERY DARK AND GREY. ON THE RARE OCCASIONS I’D
BE TAKEN OUT INTO THE COUNTRY I’D BE THINKING, ‘THIS IS INTERESTING – TREES AND SUNSHINE!’”
Steve Hackett may be one of prog’s best-loved guitarists, but how much do we really know about him? In his entertaining new autobiography, he sheds light on the friendship between his former Genesis bandmates and even lets Prog in on a few backstage secrets.
Locked down in his London home, Steve Hackett is missing the roar of the crowd… if not the smell of the proverbial greasepaint. And when talking to Prog over a temperamental phone line about one particular show, he still has fond memories. It was the last time he trod the boards alongside all four fellow members of Genesis’ classic line-up.
The occasion was October 2, 1982 when, in order to raise money to bail out the seriously debt-stricken WOMAD festival, the event’s curator Peter Gabriel asked his old bandmates to reform for a benefit show.
“It was done for all the right reasons,” says Hackett, “and I was very happy to be a part of it. And apart from my own role in it [he didn’t have time to rehearse, having rushed back to the UK from Brazil, but came on to play the encore], how lovely to see Genesis playing Solsbury Hill and stuff like that, as well as all the rest of the old material.”
His new book recounts how, afterwards, “Pete broke into Auld Lang Syne as we all linked arms. No stiff upper lips that night!”
These fond sentiments continue when the 70-year-old talks about the subsequent friendly relations that continued with his former bandmates. “Not long after that I did a benefit gig for Tadworth Court, a children’s hospital, and Peter and Mike both said they would like to be part of that, so we did get these partial reunions, coming together for all the right reasons, and it was nice to play each other’s songs… even for five seconds.”
These episodes are also referenced in Hackett’s new autobiography, A Genesis In My Bed, where his attitude to the band, and the musicians that helped make him famous, is consistently magnanimous and forgiving. It contradicts the perception in some quarters that he doesn’t get on with Messrs Banks, Rutherford and Collins, and still holds historical grievances.
“There’s been a lot of great music that has come out of that team,” he says, “and it went around the world a few times, and I’m proud of that, pleased they’re still doing it and so am I.”
Any lack of harsh words doesn’t make A Genesis In My Bed a dull read, though. For a man that once used to sit studiously onstage, behind Peter Gabriel, like an Open University lecturer pondering his next lesson plan,
Hackett writes eloquently and entertainingly (seemingly without a ghost writer) about his career. When you learn that the title was uttered by an American groupie of his acquaintance in the mid-1970s, you realise that his relatively undemonstrative stage persona isn’t for want of a sense of humour, while an observant eye and long memory benefit his account no end.
Born in 1950, Stephen Richard Hackett grew up on an inner London council estate, just across the River Thames from the iconic but toxic towers of Battersea Power Station. The fog seen in old movie depictions of the capital was no celluloid invention – it regularly killed people. “It really did,” he says. “When it was in full swing, schools would get closed, you’d be sent home and you literally couldn’t see in front of your nose.”
His evocative account of a childhood spent in London’s Pimlico (interrupted by his family’s abortive attempt at emigration to Canada) includes some startling details, including his scarcely believable visits to Peckham market, where he says they sold monkeys in cages (one of which bit him) and baby crocodiles!
“It does sound like Dickens’ London,” he laughs, “but I’m not making this up! I vividly remember putting my hand through the cage and getting bitten, and seeing these baby crocs, or alligators in fish tanks – they were obviously going to grow a lot bigger and
I guess a lot of them must have been flushed down loos! London was an unruly place back then, very polluted, and as a kid it was very dark and grey. On the rare occasions I’d be taken out into
the country I’d be thinking, ‘This is interesting – trees and sunshine!’ My world was concrete.”
The emergence of rock’n’roll offered the first glimpses of a vibrant future, and it did him no harm to spend his formative years living a plectrum’s throw away from the King’s Road, in a city where, as he puts it, “Lord Snooty and pals rubbed shoulders in the streets with Dennis The Menace.”
Like Phil Collins, who pursued music after teenage lessons at stage school, this broader range of peers made joining the privately educated gentlemen of Genesis that bit easier once Peter Gabriel answered Hackett’s fateful small ad in the back of Melody Maker at the start of 1971.
“Being from London definitely made it easier to get on with people from an upper-class background,” he says, and a catholic taste further benefitted him.
“I was as much into Segovia as I was Jeff Beck, Clapton and Peter Green. So these separate schools were coming together and Genesis were very much about that mix of styles.”
Then, on the same night that Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, a 19-year-old Hackett saw King Crimson at London’s Marquee club – Greg Lake announced the epochal event from the stage, in fact.
Inspired by “a pan-genre approach that allowed them to draw from jazz, rock and classical with a hint of The Beatles”, he tells of how he later identified the potential benefits that the integration of a Mellotron could have on Genesis’ sound
“Having seen King Crimson and The Moody Blues, I knew it could make you sound like an orchestra – you could sound like a choir with harmonies on top. And I think it broadened the ability of the band to be able to tell stories.”
Famously, the band bought said instrument from Robert Fripp, after a meeting in a rehearsal room beneath a café. Not that Crimson would miss it – “I was amazed to see they had four Mellotrons!” he writes.
Alas, relations between Hackett and Fripp would ultimately sour, for reasons memorably outlined in the book.
“I got invited around for afternoon tea one day in the 70s… and maybe I should have mentioned to him that I didn’t eat salad, because it was all very salad-based. So all I could do was eat the cheese and he said to me at one point, ‘You can’t have any more cheese.’ I thought he was joking and I had some more. But he wasn’t happy. And that was it for 40 years! He never spoke to me again!”
Fripp’s influence – dietary differences notwithstanding – can also be seen in the way Genesis studiously sat down to play, although in their case they had the bewitching figure of Peter Gabriel and his alter egos to provide a visual focal point.
“Well, one of the requirements for me when I joined was that I played electric guitar and 12-string guitar and that I sat down. So I thought, ‘Ah, okay, I can just get on with the music.’ It was pretty… sedentary.”
Back in the early days, though, this apparently shy, retiring bunch had to do their fair share of mingling with the right people to get the Genesis name known.
“Pete would often be late for rehearsals because he was on the phone to someone, much to the frustration of the band but ultimately to their benefit because he was trying to talk people into helping us out. And after hours, I found myself in and out of the clubs of Soho, The
Speakeasy and The Marquee. That’s where journalists were and I felt I could be an unofficial publicist for the band: ‘You want to do an interview? Fine, talk to me now over a few drinks.’”
Few Prog readers will need reminding of Genesis’ subsequent rise via 1971’s Nursery Cryme and 1972’s Foxtrot, culminating in 1973’s Selling England By The Pound, a hit single in the shape of I Know What I Like (In
Your Wardrobe) and tours of increasing size and success. And even at the time Hackett was aware that, while surrounded by other adventurous creative spirits, they were presenting something unique.
“It looked different, and live it felt magical with the white muslin backdrop and ultraviolet lights, so the look and the sound of it was a far cry from rock’n’roll’s roots”
Then things got really ambitious with the double LP sprawl of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. But like so many creative peaks of output, it was produced in spite of – or who knows, maybe because of – serious unrest within the Genesis camp.
“When a band is pulling in several different directions at once, it sometimes feels like an uneasy truce rather than a bunch of pals getting together like the four musketeers,” says Hackett. “So yes, the band were creating something special but it wasn’t easy. I was formulating ideas for what was to become a solo career, Peter was already looking to do his own thing, Mike Rutherford wanted to make an album with Anthony Phillips and I could see Phil wasn’t happy. In fact he was hoping to join Lindisfarne.”
Really? This is a new road-not-taken in the Genesis story.
“Yes. It might have been even earlier in fact,” says Hackett. “He very nearly did, and Tony Stratton-Smith talked him out of it.”
The post-Gabriel period saw Genesis evolve into more of a conventional rock band: “I was on my feet, I was getting clothes made, I shaved off all the… stuff, and then we started to look a bit more like other bands… suddenly we were Led Zeppelin!”
Well, not quite, but it turns out Hackett for one indulged in the kind of lifestyle excesses not always associated with prog’s more cerebral
take on rock’n’roll. In the book, he tells of hair-raising dalliances: “I had brief involvements with several,” he writes, “from the burlesque dancer and the female wrestling champion to the girl whose fantasy was a brutal night with Vincent Price.”
This section of the book is where the title comes from, when an American girl has a moment of disbelief as she reflects on who she’s shacked up with that night: “Oh my God, a Genesis in my bed!”
“Yes, there were girls and when I’ve swapped stories with other guys in bands of a similar level they tell a similar story, of going from being shy and not able to talk to girls to suddenly becoming extremely… available. So for a short time, usually between the marriages, there was a lot of partying.”
Meanwhile, his time as “a Genesis” was coming to a natural end. After a well-received solo debut with 1975’s Voyage Of The Acolyte, Hackett was writing more and more, but finding that the band, with several creative forces fighting to contribute, weren’t always up for using his material. Which might have been tolerable had they not also sought to restrict his solo activities.
The book relates the moment on the band’s 1976 world tour when he was being filmed during soundcheck for solo promo material, and Mike
Rutherford “threw down his bass in annoyance”. Banks and Rutherford then took him aside and told him he was not to do any more solo projects while remaining a member of the band.
Something had to give, and after his pleas for permission to work on solo material were again rebuffed after Wind And Wuthering, he quit during the mixing of the Seconds Out live album.
For a good while after his departure his decision didn’t seem to noticeably harm either party. While the three-piece Genesis soared to new commercial heights, Hackett’s solo sets Please Don’t Touch! (1978) and Spectral Mornings (1979) were lapped up by a loyal fanbase, and 1980’s Defector made the Top 10 of the UK albums chart.
One downside to this prolific output was a couple of bouts of illness. Hackett was hospitalised with stomach ulcers at the end of 1977, and then again while recording Spectral Mornings, the result, he writes, of combining alcohol, dope smoking and overwork.
“I didn’t know when to stop. It was the same way we used to work in Genesis, we used to try mixing at 5am round about the time of Foxtrot, and come back the next day wondering why it didn’t sound any good! And back then we weren’t on anything stronger than coffee!”
The other cloud in the sky around this time, the book suggests, was the sharp nosedive out of fashion that he found himself in after punk’s agenda hijacked the musical landscape around that time and turned the music press firmly against him too.
“That’s not to say I didn’t buy the first Sex Pistols album and find it entertaining,” he notes. “I think the punks were more anti-prog than we were anti-punk…”
Either way, Hackett found himself dropped by his label, Charisma, in the early 80s – something he suggests might even have had something to do with one Malcolm McLaren being brought in as an A&R consultant around that time.
“Charisma wanted a hit single, which I ended up delivering with Cell 151 [from 1983’s Highly Strung], but the process of getting there was difficult in the extreme. I’ve had three hit singles over my career – one with Genesis, one solo and one with [80s supergroup with Steve Howe] GTR – but I don’t think someone of my years should be worrying about hit singles. I don’t think you should be hanging around Hollywood in the hope Mr Tarantino is going to rediscover you.”
While his profile shrank considerably during the 80s and early 90s, the turn of the century saw a distinct upturn in fortunes, a change set in motion by the success of 1996’s Genesis Revisited project, in which major prog names such as Bill Bruford, John Wetton, Ian McDonald and Chester Thompson were brought to help not only revisit, but in some cases reinvent the 1971-77 era of Hackett’s alma mater.
Genesis Revisited has become an even bigger draw as a live show over the past decade, as Hackett has increasingly reeled in new fans to his solo work by playing it at either side of the Genesis material. Meanwhile, the guest vocalist policy of the early days has been replaced by the charismatic contribution of Nad Sylvan, who has given the show the kind of consistent sonic and visual focal point Peter Gabriel once offered.
“Yeah,” says Hackett, “and I think live that’s what it needs. It’s become a calling card for me all over again, but I’ve tried to mix it so you don’t just get Genesis you get my solo stuff too, while still giving people what they want.”
One could argue that the dormant state of Genesis since 2007 has added to the appeal of Hackett’s GR tours, but now Collins, Banks and Rutherford have announced plans to reconvene once more. Although Genesis Revisited was originally due to take place at the same time as, erm, Genesis, the Covid-19 pandemic has now forced them both to rearrange their shows for next year. Assuming there are no further scheduling clashes, will he be checking out the opposition?
“They’re welcome to come to my shows and I believe I’d be welcome to see theirs. But I don’t see the two as being in conflict: there’s all the more for fans,” he says.”
“There are all those thousands of people out there drawn to the 70s Genesis stuff, and there’s also a huge audience for the later material. Naturally they’re likely to prioritise the 1980s material, I’ll celebrate the 1970s, and fans get the best of both. I think Genesis is a band that’s interesting in all its incarnations and periods so people will be able to get a taste of the whole of the band’s history.”
A Genesis In My Bed is out now via Wymer. The Seconds Out + More! tour has been rescheduled for 2021. For more, visit www.hackettsongs.com.
“THERE’S BEEN A LOT OF GREAT MUSIC THAT HAS COME OUT OF THAT TEAM, AND IT WENT AROUND THE WORLD A FEW TIMES, AND I’M PROUD OF THAT, PLEASED THEY’RE STILL DOING IT AND SO AM I.”