Steve Hackett on the making and ideas behind Wolflight, his 2015 album that he called "my proudest moment".
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MusicTranscript
00:00 [Music]
00:03 Genesis always was a hard act to follow
00:21 and I've always been aware of that. I think for all the guys in the band
00:24 that's been the case.
00:27 You know, whether you have individual hits or whatever, there's always that
00:30 sort of... it's a bit like the mothership isn't it?
00:32 You know, when I write a song I think would this have
00:35 passed muster with the other guys? You know, would Phil have liked it
00:39 rhythmically? Would Tony have liked it harmonically?
00:43 Would it have worked for Mike? Would it have worked with Pete
00:46 lyrically? And you know, you have all of that and but at the same time of
00:51 course you want to do your own thing. And you know, I just thought, yeah
00:57 I've really got to push the envelope harmonically with this, you know.
01:00 It's got to be as good as some of those things that I've listened to.
01:03 It's got to be as good as Grieg. It's got to be as good as Tchaikovsky.
01:08 You know, it's got to be as good as that first day when I worked with Phil
01:12 in the rehearsal room with the band. He started playing me something
01:16 I said, "sounds fantastic" and he said, "oh that's
01:19 Ringo Starr's drum solo off of... what's the one... Abbey Road." And I always
01:25 remembered that and I thought, you know, I want to do something like that. That's a
01:28 little bit like Keith Moon, isn't it? You know,
01:30 so it's got the bass drum going but it's like it's like
01:34 doing fills all around that. So we had the Wolves at the beginning singing away
01:39 and a Frozen reverb note of that so they hit a seventh
01:42 and then the drums come in and then it's band kicking in
01:47 and the orchestra and choir and everything.
01:53 [Music]
02:22 Every time I've done an album I've always thought, well I need to get
02:25 orchestral perspectives in here but how do we
02:28 enlarge everything and even if you've got a real orchestra on it or
02:32 or you've got, you know, several people tracked up
02:36 it's quite hard to not have the orchestra impoverished
02:40 by the group because groups make a big noise.
02:43 But there's this area of marcato stuff where they're playing with
02:49 the edge of the bow and reinforcing some of the bass things
02:53 with brass so that it's not just
02:57 the sort of, the kind of definition of
03:00 bass end that when you get a great bass player with a really extraordinary
03:05 sound like Chris Squire who's on the album.
03:09 There's this thing that orchestras, they have a more amorphous
03:14 bass end. It's not dependent on great speakers and
03:20 sharp definition, it's more than that. So I wanted to get that idea of
03:26 infinite bass so we stacked up a lot of that, you know,
03:30 we had more than one thing playing basses, you know, I mean I think
03:34 on one track we had about, you know, 20 different things all
03:37 all doing bass. There's a lot of things on it that shouldn't really work.
03:42 Orchestras with rock groups shouldn't really work, you know, because
03:46 they're not supposed to be as percussive. And I wanted it to sound like an
03:50 expanded rock band but not just an expanded rock band that
03:54 sounded like it had an orchestra with it but also
03:58 with world music instruments as well. So the Arabian Oud,
04:01 the Didgeridoo, the Diduk, the Tar from Azerbaijan,
04:05 all these various things that help to expand it a bit, you know.
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04:43 Working with these other instruments that I'm not familiar with, working with
04:47 Malik Mansirov who plays the Tar. The Tar, small stringed instrument with
04:53 sympathetic strings, same family of instruments as the guitar
04:58 and the sitar. And Malik from Azerbaijan where 50% of the
05:04 people are still nomadic I believe, he's a little bit like, he's got the speed of
05:09 John McLaughlin and in a way the mysticism of Ravi Shankar.
05:15 He's incredible. And of course the other instruments that might be less
05:20 familiar to people, the Arabian Oud. I bought that in London, it's a
05:25 fretless lute. I learned to play it a little bit.
05:29 I'm not the level of virtuoso on it that Malik is on the Tar,
05:34 but I took some things from him, the idea of playing on one string,
05:40 more things on one string than you would normally do in sliding and so on.
05:45 Dust and Dreams, that kicks off. Some of these world instruments,
05:50 they often set the scene before the songs start. It's almost as if when Malik
05:55 is playing on the beginning of War Flight, you've got almost like the
06:00 flickering flames of a campfire. The kind of music that they might have
06:05 played at one time when they just sat around to entertain themselves.
06:09 And I wanted to get an aspect of that. A little bit like different relay teams.
06:14 So you've got the world music musicians, you've got the aspect of folk songs.
06:20 At times I wanted to delve back as far as Peter, Paul and Mary.
06:25 I wanted to have that, but then I wanted to have rock as well.
06:30 The edge of that and then whatever orchestra could do on top of that.
06:35 It's my proudest moment, to be honest, this album.
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07:06 (whooshing)