STEVE HACKETT

To Watch The Storms/Wild Orchids INSIDEOUTMUSIC

Hackett albums from 2003 and 2006 get first-ever vinyl release.

As Steve Hackett’s live visitations of classic Genesis material and ongoing solo re-release schedule attest, he’s a diligent curator of his past. These two LPs from the early-to-mid-00s find him in playful mode, even if they rarely peak as high as solo-career masterpieces Please Don’t Touch! and Spectral Mornings.

Recorded with his then-touring band (including Hackett himself on vocals), 2003’s To Watch The Storms includes Wind, Sand & Stars, a classy deep-cut with ambient and flamenco flavours. Strutton Ground is gorgeous too: a vocal-harmony-rich song that namechecks ELO. Less effective, though, is straight-ahead blues instrumental Fire Island, which seems incongruous and overly safe alongside material such as Frozen Statues, a song whose opening soundscape conjures Kate Bush circa Hounds Of Love.

Released in 2006, Hackett’s 18th studio album Wild Orchids is similarly diverse. With its slowed-down, heavilytreated voices, Transylvania Express is conceivably a nod to

Jimi Hendrix’s …And The Gods Made Love, while there’s a haunting, Simon & Garfunkel-like feel to the reverb-heavy melodies and chiming steel-string arpeggios of Set Your Compass. Elsewhere, Waters Of The Wild is an ethnic percussion-loop and sitar-sound-propelled setting of WB Yeats’ poem The Stolen Child. It’s a decent, if slightly dated-sounding affair, but The Waterboys’ setting of the same Yeats poem on their 1988 album Fisherman’s Blues remains the definitive musical nod.

All the same, Hackett’s ‘ambient swampland’ cover of Bob Dylan’s Man In The Long Black Coat impresses, and Wild Orchids’ nylon-string guitar instrumental Until The Last Butterfly is deftly beautiful. Both these albums’ covers feature typically striking artwork by Hackett’s second wife, the Brazilian painter Kim Poor. She’d been his go-to illustrator since 1975’s Voyage Of The Acolyte, but the couple would divorce before Hackett released his next solo album, 2008’s Tribute.