Steve Hackett recalls his Genesis days in Portsmouth and Guildford
Steve Hackett brings his Genesis Greats, Lamb Highlights & Solo Tour to the south coast with dates including Portsmouth Guildhall on Thursday, October 3 and Guildford’s G Live on Saturday, October 12.
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers, and it's
00:06always a huge pleasure to speak to Steve Hackett no less, and lovely to hear Steve that you're
00:11on the road again, this time with a tour which is going to honour an album which unbelievably
00:17is 50 years ago, amongst other things that you'll do, but you will be looking back to
00:21The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Now, in your mind, difficult to believe it's 50 years ago,
00:26but what made that album special? I think there were a lot of great tracks on it. It's
00:33survived through time, it's become very important to people, and I think older songs sound sweeter
00:43with the passing of time, you know, suddenly it's an old friend saying hello again, and
00:48that time cannot really be recaptured, you can't be with the same people, but music triggers
00:56the emotions in the same way that it did when you were terribly young, and it's just
01:03wonderful to be able to do that again. Does it take you back, or do you just look at it
01:11from a current perspective? Oh absolutely, it takes me back, and it makes me think of
01:18the beauty of certain of the songs, like for instance the beginning of Chamber of 32 Doors
01:25where I get to play these guitar phrases, which were largely improvised at the time,
01:31but they become cast in stone, and you can't really get away from it, so I do those, precisely
01:36those notes at the beginning, and as the keyboards swell in a kind of classic genesis, orchestral
01:44kind of way, there's this kind of outpouring of emotion that comes with it. And it's a
01:53monumental thing, isn't it, as you say, four sides of vinyl, 90 minutes. Genesis liked
01:58to push the envelope, didn't they, like to challenge. We did, we, I think we were one
02:05of the first bands to have done something that was almost 25 minutes long on Foxtrot,
02:12we did Supper's Ready, and it still seems to be a favourite amongst progressive listeners,
02:19seems to be the number one favourite choice, so I'm very happy to do that again. I mean,
02:25I have to say that although it's become, you know, the top favourite, it was as a result of
02:32just a year or two before I joined Genesis, I'd seen King Crimson live before they'd done
02:37In the Court of the Crimson King, and they were segwaying various tracks, I gather,
02:43the notion that perhaps they shouldn't stop, just in case it was way over audiences' heads
02:48and they wouldn't clap. So this idea of segwaying separate pieces of music, like one night they
02:56might go into Cliff Richards' The Young Ones and then twiddle it with Holst's Miles, God of War.
03:02And, you know, this was heady fodder for a young guy like me, and I thought, well, if they can do
03:07that, I wonder if Genesis can do this on record. So we did a piece that was, I think it's 22 or
03:1523 minutes, the original, and if I do it live, it tends to be longer, sometimes 25 minutes.
03:21And you say heady days, those were really exciting days, weren't they? The first half of the 70s,
03:26you had The Stones at their absolute best with Nick Taylor, you had The Who, you had
03:30Rih, all the bands, Iadog, Bad Company, just a brilliant, brilliant four or five years, wasn't it?
03:36First bit of the 70s.
03:37I think it was, I think it was a very creative time. I think, you know, there is a danger,
03:43of course, of being nostalgic and sweeping aside, you know, all those other times.
03:48I mean, the 60s was very creative for me, listening to people wanting to get in the game
03:54desperately. In the 70s, I was doing it with, it just happened to be a great band I was playing in.
04:02But then the 80s also threw up, you know, many things, although it's easy to sort of dismiss it
04:07and say, oh, the tail was wagging the dog by then, etc., etc. But I don't think so. I think
04:13there was some really punchy stuff coming through. Production was coming into its own,
04:19I think, and that's the difference between perhaps the earlier time when guitars developed very,
04:24very early on to do all the things that they still do today, but drums came into their own
04:30circa 1980, really.
04:32Yeah, fantastic. Well, happy, happy, happy memories and lovely to speak to you again,
04:37really, really nice to speak to you. And you will be with us in Portsmouth and Guildford.
04:45Thank you so much for your time.
04:47Thank you so much.