Steve Hackett Goes to the Circus
With a personal new album, the former Genesis guitar icon journeys from past to present
Guitarist and composer Steve Hackett is a time traveler of sorts.
Although he’s always moving forward through music and motivation, his reverence for the early music he made with Genesis early on still remains prominent part of his musical mindset.
He continues to devote entire evenings to replaying the band’s early classic albums that he had contributed to originally (Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Selling England By the Pound, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, A Trick of the Tail and Wind & Wuthering) and many of those remarkable concerts have been captured on live releases.
Nevertheless, Hackett has never stood still. After leaving the band in the early ‘70s, he recorded a series of well-received solo albums that continued to affirm his reputations a prog pioneer, among them Voyage of the Acolyte (1975), Please Don’t Touch! (1978), Spectral Mornings (1979), Til We Have Faces (1984) and more than two dozen other albums that have also found him venturing into blues, jazz, world music and classical music, in addition to his revisits to the music he made with Genesis, with whom he was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.
He also formed some short-lived associations, including the band GTR with Yes guitarist Steve Howe, Squackett, which found him partnering with another prominent Yes man in the late Chris Squire, and the Royal Philharmonic. Classical guitarist Yehudi Menuhin was said to have been a great admirer. And indeed, Hackett’s skill on electric and acoustic guitar have made him equally adept when it comes to crafting both his majestic anthemic offerings and the more intimate stylings reflecting his passion for classical composers Johann Sebastian Bach and Erik Satie. His craft and creativity allow to easily adept to whatever musical setting he chooses to embrace with subtlety, skill, drama and determination.
With his new album, The Circus And The Nightwhale, Hackett returns to the daring and dramatic work that’s been his signpost since early on. Billed as a rite-of-passage conceptual work featuring a young character called Travla, it also takes a rare autobiographical angle.
Recorded between tours in 2022 and 2023, it finds Hackett himself on electric and acoustic guitars, 12-string, mandolin, harmonica, percussion, bass and vocals with Roger King supplying keyboards, programming and orchestral arrangements, Rob Townsend on sax, Jonas Reingold playing bass, Nad Sylvan sharing vocals, Craig Blundell, Nick D’Virgilio and Hugo Degenhardt taking turns on drums, and Amanda Lehmann on vocals. Hackett’s brother and ongoing collaborator John Hackett is once more on flute.
In the press materials that precede the album’s arrival, Hackett was quoted as saying,“I love this album. It says the things I’ve been wanting to say for a very long time.” Nevertheless, being such ardent admirers, we wanted to get Hackett’s personal impressions first hand.
It’s a pleasure to speak to you, sir. So tell us, aside from the fact that The Circus And The Nightwhale is a concept album, what inspired you to share this story?
It came out of a conversation I was having with my wife. I brought out an autobiography a few years ago and I was working on that in lockdown mode in order to finish it off. So this is a kind of companion piece that goes with it musically speaking, given that the album starts off as my life in 1950. It starts off with snippets of how radio sounded at that time, and so you get reflections of what life was like for the people of smoke. Referring to London, the ‘smoke’ is a nickname for London’s people at that time, and how in that period of post-war recovery, London was heavily polluted and very heavily populated. I grew up opposite the Battersea Power Station, made famous by Pink Floyd’s Animals album with the flying pigs on the cover. That was the view from my bedroom window from the age of three until I was seven. I tried to describe what London was like, both in terms of actual sound bites from radio of that time, and from snippets of industrial things like steam trains and electric stuff, with the occasional orchestra wafting in and out in a very surreal kind of way.
The soundbites enhance the narrative to a great degree.
My life journey started then and and it continues, with each track referring to a kind of flashpoint in my life — including the people I met, connecting with Genesis, and then joining the circus, so to speak. It’s not just the professional stuff, but the personal stuff too. There are a lot of songs in there. There were so many tracks, it’s impossible to describe them all at once. But I wanted to make the whole thing segue so I could to make it seem like all one long sequence that comes in at about 45 minutes. That’s a vinyl length album, but to be honest, I love the quality of CD. Plus there’s the artwork which features a big whale’s mouth swallowing a circus on the front. I like to look at the artwork on vinyl, but I like to hear it on CD.
You’ve gained a well-deserved reputation as the epitome of the true progressive rock perfectionist and all that the genre represents. And now it seems like this album is part of that continuum.
If you have an album that’s driven by narrative and it’s a story, people are going to say that there’s conceptual angle to it. But I was writing stuff to order a bit like self commissioning. We came up with it once we had the title, which was at the suggestion of my wife Jo, who writes a lot of the stuff with me. It starts with a conversation we have and then once we think we’ve got something ready, we record it and then the other musicians start to add things, so it takes the entire writing team to bring those ideas on board. After we’ve done the computer sketch, it goes down on paper, and then it goes down on a computer, then we get humans involved. That’s how we know what it’s supposed to do. We can extend and contract things. If somebody comes up with something really wonderful, then it becomes a very flexible way of working.
It seems like it can be quite an intensive process.
Actually, the album was put together fairly quickly, because I was doing a lot of touring for the past 15 years. So it meant that in lockdown, I had time to peruse things, but even so, I was still stretched to find time, so we make quick decisions. We planned it all out. It’s been like storyboarding for a movie. If you plan it all out, and you’ve got all the elements in place, you’ve got the roadmap. Then you know where where it’s going to go. To be honest, not having masses of time actually helped. I didn’t want anything to outstay its welcome. That meant fairly brief solos and engaging songs, while always moving on. If you got bored with one thing, it’s got replaced by something else. At least that was that was the plan. You always hope that some of its gonna stick and make a nice presentation.
It was recently announced that you’re preparing to go out on tour. Which means, you have to translate what you’ve done in the studio to the stage. How will that work?
It has its challenges, of course. But it seems like the album already, even before its official release, has gone viral. At the moment, I seem to be getting a lot of feedback from media and even the daily press over here. I don’t know why that is. Just something seems to have clicked. One of the videos has gone viral. I haven’t caught up with how many people have been watching it. So there’s a lot of interest in it. Which is also why I’m keeping the museum doors open as far as Genesis and I’m delivering that to a lot of areas that I wasn’t able to get to so far. We do the whole of Foxtrot. But I wasn’t expecting this new album to do quite so well, so I thought maybe I’d do just a couple of tracks from it. But now a lot of people have been saying, oh, do the whole album? And of course I’d have to I have to torture my band into into doing that. This time round, we probably won’t. But it’s coming I think. There’s a temptation to want to do it and hopefully to be able to deliver it. But you test people’s patience, and there’s this whole idea of are you educating or are you entertaining? I’ll always come down on the side of, “hey, here’s an old favorite.”
Well, people always want to hear the material they’re familiar with. Are you still committed to replaying the Genesis albums as the focus of your live sets?
That’s been what’s advertised. The 50th anniversary of Foxtrot was supposed to coincide with 2022. But because there have been places around the world where things were delayed for three years or so, I’m now hitting the American south for the first time in years and years and years. And the gigs are going very well. So I’m trying to deliver what’s on the packet. I’m not going to go in and play free jazz for people, you know what I’m saying? I’m working with this extraordinary band that I happen to have with me at the moment. They are they are extraordinary players. So I’m thrilled to work with them.
You seem to travel with ease from past to present and back again as far as your muse is concerned.
I’ve recorded pieces by Eric Satie. I’ve done some classical stuff. I’ve worked with orchestras. Only part of what I do is being a rock and roller and doing all that, but I’ve also got such high regard for the classics. It’s the musician’s equivalent of Shakespeare, and it’s never gonna get more musical than that. So to throw light on those things, and to put the classical guitar through its paces, I love doing that.
VIDEO: Steve Hackett “People Of The Smoke”
Have any of your former Genesis colleagues commented on your replaying of those early albums?
Genesis is a very competitive band, so you can’t expect too much from that quarter. In recent times, when I bumped into Tony banks, he said to me, “You’re keeping the legacy alive.” I thought he’d be the last person to say that. I thought he’d say, “Hey, why are you doing all that old stuff? Do something new.” But actually, he’s an interesting guy, and that’s what he said.
But it’s true. It’s true. You really are keeping that legacy in the public eye. Because let’s face it, that was wonderful music, and it’s wonderful to be able to hear it replicated on stage and hear the nuances and the craft and creativity that went into it. You really are doing us all a service by performing it live for those that might not have had that opportunity to witness it before.
John Lennon once said he loved Selling England by the Pound. That’s the best review I’ve ever had. It came at a time when we were touring the States for the first time, and we couldn’t get a gig anywhere. It really was just New York and then L.A., because nowhere else would have us in those days. But those dues have been paid since then. I’m still on the road living out of suitcases That’s what I do for a living.
Given the variety of music that you’ve been responsible for over the years, you’ve obviouslyHad a very proficient career. So what dictates your decision to go off in a particular direction at a particular juncture?
It’s a lot like wearing a lot of different hats or spinning plates. There’s always a lot going on. For instance, my wife and I visited Zimbabwe and we saw Victoria Falls, and that was extraordinary. So ever since then, I’ve been trying to describe it musically. So it’s usually starts with an acoustic guitar, and playing all these sort of arpeggios. I’m trying to convey what that was like. So each journey potentially turns into a piece of music. We just back from the Arctic Circle, and I was playing with this indigenous fusion band. So that was very interesting. A hurricane coming and the police were telling people to stay inside. But the windows were getting blown out. We were hoping to see the northern lights, but the weather was so volatile, and yet that all ends up in the music at some point.
Your muse apparently leaves you no time to rest.
I don’t get too much rest these days. We need more rest time.
It’s fair to say that as long as you’re inspired, that isn’t going to happen.
I’ve got some very active publishers, so they keep me on my toes. Plus, I’m always thinking that music changes the world. And so I’d like to be like to be known for being part of that. I think we need music to change the world!
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