By: Rick Landers
Masterful, eclectic and prolific are all words that can be used to begin to describe guitarist Steve Hackett. From a guitarist’s perspective, Hackett certainly ranks as a “grand master” who has completed his theoretical studies and coupled them with hands on performance experience.
His journeyman level work with Genesis, which included Peter Gabriel (lead vocals), Phil Collins (drums and later, lead vocalist), Tony Banks (keyboards) and Mike Rutherford (guitar-vocals), helped in the evolution of the group that would eventually sell 150 million albums.
When I saw the group in the early ’70s, in Reading, England, Gabriel was fronting Genesis and the group was in its costume and pyrotechnics phase.
At that time, they had yet to significantly stretch their wings across the water to the U.S. However, they did manage a gold album credential in France with Foxtrot, on the Charisma label.
Peter Gabriel would leave the group by the mid-‘70s and Phil Collins would eventually take on the lead vocalist spot. And, for guitarists, Steve Hackett’s use of “tapping” in the early ‘70s pre-dates Eddie Van Halen use of the technique by about a decade, and Steve can be seen on the Genesis “Dancing With the Moonlit Knight.”
With respect to being eclectic, Hackett’s field of vision has moved beyond rock guitar. His work has extended into jazz, blues, and classical music. He began his foray into classical music with the release of Bay of Kings in 1980, which charted to #70 on the U.K. Albums Chart, and later he would garner audience admiration for his second classical guitar album, Momentum. He would join up with Steve Howe (Yes/Asia) to form GTR, a name derived as an abbreviation for “guitar.”
The album GTR was released in 1986 and went gold on the U.S. charts. Hackett would also venture into neo-classically influenced work with the release of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that he recorded with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1997. The album bolted up the U.K. classical charts, finally resting in the top ten.
Steve’s solo career has, indeed, been prolific with his work extending well beyond his Genesis and GTR years, with some of his latest work including Darktown and Wild Orchids, as well as his 2009 release Out of the Tunnel’s Mouth. In March 2010, Genesis was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and an honor that certainly bestows high credit on Steve Hackett and his musical contributions.
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Rick Landers: I find that as a guitarist you’ve gone through a lot of different phases, there’s a lot of diversity in the music. You moved from essentially from being a rock guitarist into classical, film scores, and world music. How about a rundown on how you’ve evolved as a guitarist over time?
Steve Hackett: Well, when I started out, I was listening to bands like The Shadows and the Ventures. Most guitar solos in those days tended to sound like the soundtracks to cowboy movies, and indeed were in many cases. So it’s really the story of how the guitar moved from the Bonanza sound that we all remember to the kind of screaming, sustaining, female-voice-emulating-screaming sound that we associate with all those long-haired reprobates all those years later.
You had the influence of the southern states first of all and all that Duane Eddy stuff and I loved all that. One of my favorite records as a kid was Because We’re Young. That became the theme tune for a radio station in England which used to have to broadcast itself through Luxembourg. It was known as Radio Luxembourg. The signal used to come and go on that thing and be very, very weak. But nonetheless, everybody in England who was into music had their ears glued to that. I was listening to all that early stuff and every period onwards.
Those wer the early influence and then, of course, I was being subjected to the R&B revolution. Then there were the Beatles, Stones and the Yardbirds, and before that of course, Chuck Berry. That was the sort of stuff I was listening to and then there was a little bit of a tiny revolution or revelation in my head. When I was 15, I had an album called Segovia Plays Bach, which was one side of an album. On the other side it was harpsichord versions of Bach material.
Up to then, I’d been thinking of the guitar as a single-line instrument, the electric guitar. Then I realized it was possible to play a number of things all at one time, and it didn’t have to be a poor second cousin to the keyboard. In a way, I feel that some of the best guitar music that was ever played was music that was never actually designed for the guitar in the first place. It’s a lot of the pieces that Bach wrote for violin and cello. So you’ve got these two separate influences that I had: on one end you have blues and you have Bach.
Rick: I guess Ricthie Blackmore also inserted some Middle Eastern scales in his work. Did you follow him at all?
Steve Hackett: Yeah, you’re talking about the Middle Eastern stuff. I think that the first time I heard a Middle Eastern scale being used with any bands I was in, I think it had to be Jeff Beck’s solo in “Shapes of Things.” The original version of that was seminal for many rock guitarists who had never heard feedback. So that was my introduction to the world of sustain and very different sounding scales, and a Middle Eastern influence, and the influence of maybe Spanish music, Moorish music and those sorts of harmonies. So I think you had the influence of acoustic music impinging on electric music.
Rick: And The Yardbirds had some of that on “Still I’m Sad.” Remember that?
Steve Hackett: There was that, yes, certainly. He had the sort of use of almost Gregorian chants in their vocals at that time. They tended to do a lot of reverberant multi, well, before the days of multi-tracking, I think. It tended to sound like monks on acid, really. But, it was probably pre-acid, although at that point, it was probably nothing stronger than Watney’s Red Brau, and that’s an English beer that no longer exists, but that was what they were all drinking at the time.
Rick: Yeah, I don’t remember that. I lived in Coventry for a couple of years back in the early 70’s. Newcastle Brown was a favorite.
Steve Hackett: Newcastle Brown is what I used to drink, when I used to go and see John Mayhall’s Blues Breakers with Peter Green. There’s a place called the Holy Island, where a lot of those bands emerged, and a wonderful gig that was in an old hotel on an island in the Thames. And we used to get Newcastle Brown Ale; they’d hand it to you with no glass, you’d drink it straight from the bottle and I was lucky enough not only to see a lot of the gigs that John Mayhall played with Peter Green when he was truly on form. I saw the Paul Butterfield Blues Band playing over here and they were just wonderful, as far as I was concerned. The best blues band ever as far as I was concerned.
Rick: A great time for music.
Steve Hackett: A great time for music. Yeah, it was just wonderful. But most people over here still haven’t heard of Paul Butterfield, unfortunately. But, ask Eric Clapton, he’ll tell you. He’s a fan. But somewhere down the line, the blues got a little bit lost, although the ‘60s spawned a number of great guitarists over here. It seemed to end with the ‘70s and, you know, with the occasional exception…
Rick: …with a little resurgence in the ‘80s with Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Steve Hackett: Of course, but that’s really a U.S.-based thing. I think you guys over there never really lost that. You’ve always had great players. I’m not just being flattering here. The reality is there really aren’t, to my mind, any really great young blues players of distinction that I’ve come across recently.
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Rick: Tell us how you are able to mentally and physically migrate from one form of music to a new form. When you move from rock to classical, there’s got to be a little bit of a leap and some discipline involved.
Steve Hackett: Sure, yeah, playing classical is harder. There’s no doubt about that. You’ve got to be more focused. The conditions have got to be right. It takes more practice. It’s as simple as that.
Rick: Do you find rock more intuitive?
Steve Hackett: I think you’re right. I think that’s a very good way of putting it, that rock is a lot more intuitive. I don’t say it’s a lesser form, because I don’t knock form. I worship spirit, I don’t knock form. The spirit behind good, honest rock is good enough for me. If someone’s playing it with a nice tone and a good vibrato, that’s good enough for me.
I’m an untrained classical person. I’ve trained myself, I’m self-taught. Anything I’ve heard someone do that I thought was interesting, I’ve tried damn hard to manage to do it and invent some moves of my own. All I can say is although it’s much harder, it requires much more from the player, I find it’s an area from which I derive infinite joy when I get it right.
Rick: The good notes. They always do that, I think.
Steve Hackett: That’s right. If you play it gently you can make the thing sigh. It can be very, very beautiful. It can be very, very peaceful, very lyrical. I think the nylon guitar is a good composition instrument as well, whereas electric guitar is more spontaneous. It affords that. But I don’t think that one is better than the other. There’s no point.
It’s like saying green is less beautiful than red. It’s just not possible. When I was a child, I used to have a torch that had one of those things that would go from green to red, and I would sit for hours in the dark looking at green thinking, “Green is the most beautiful color in the world,” and then I’d switch to red and I’d go, “Oooh, red is the most beautiful color in the world,” then I’d go back again. I was just hooked on color and it’s the same thing with acoustic music and electric music.
You think, “Oh, yes, acoustic music is the most wonderful thing in the world,” when you hear the right piece, in the right way. It envelopes you and moves you to tears. Another time you’ll just hear something which is full of energy, with rock, and it revives you and gives you so much energy. You think, “Well, why should music have any other function?”
But, I think that classical music floats and creates wonderful pictures in the mind and it’s a very restorative sort of thing. It’s a very consoling form of music, but electric again. I mean, it’s everything, isn’t it? It makes people jump around.
Rick: And shout.
Steve Hackett: Jump and shout and sing and cavort and kiss girls.
Rick: [Laughing]…or whatever.
Steve: Yeah, yeah, or whatever you do.
Rick: Some of the compositions that you’ve done that I was really drawn the was the “Outwitting Hitler” compositions. I would consider that pretty much a masterpiece of yours, there was a lot of a spirit of sadness that went through it, but there was also the oppression or the menacing evil of the Third Reich and you’ve got that all sort of moving together. How did you do that and how did it transform you?
Steve Hackett: Well, I have to say, it was something that was done very quickly, so I worked with existing stuff to do that soundtrack. It ended up being a massive editing exercise. I was using stuff that was unreleased, computer versions of things that would later become full orchestral portraits, that were being done as computer sketches. That’s because on Friday night, finally a contract was signed and they, I think it was HBO, wanted the soundtrack by the following Monday.
Rick: You’re kidding!
Steve Hackett: I had literally a weekend to do it. I think I managed to get hold of an engineer who would work on Sunday and so we put together a soundtrack in that time. But that’s because I’ve got a tremendous amount of stuff to draw from, from my past, and to some extent, unreleased stuff. Luckily, it’s eclectic enough that if someone said, “Oh, can’t we have such and such a mood, 1937, Bucharest,” I can go, “Yep, I’ve got just that thing. I think I’ve got something which is just grungy enough to be plausible.”
Rick: I was going through your website and the list of compositions and recordings you have and I was pretty amazed. I hadn’t seen all that before.
Steve Hackett: Yeah, well I’ve got a theory about film soundtracks. I think that film soundtracks should all be written in a day. And the reason is, you could spend a year on it but the director and the producer don’t like it. To get it, you might just as well have spent 24 hours on it. I know that sounds flippant, but to be honest…
Rick: Practical though…
Steve Hackett: Maybe the best thing is you send them a rough, and maybe they’ll just like it enough to use it. I’m a bit cynical about the film world. I love film, and I love some of the orchestral scores that have been done for film since the 1950’s, the 1930’s even, great, wonderful, a big influence on me. But, I don’t kid myself that someone’s going to love everything that I do.
I might think that it’s a masterpiece, but the other guy wants something else. “Can you do something that sounds like 2001?” is what they used to say. Even if you were doing an advert for household cement, they used to say, “Can you make it sound like 2001?” or they would say, “It sounds a little bit too much like 2001,” or, you know what I mean? There was that hang up about that.
Rick: Who do you listen to as far as guitarists? Do you still go back to the people like Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery?
Steve Hackett: Yes, I do listen to Django Reinhardt, more than Wes Montgomery. But I listen to, for instance, Fleetwood Mac, when they were a three-guitar lineup. Danny Kerwin I thought was very, very good. I remember he did a little blues thing called “Jigsaw Puzzle Blues,” and that was a beautiful little thing that he said was influenced by Django Reinhardt. So you had a ‘60s blues guitarist being influenced by stuff that first appeared in the 1940’s. And that was a beautiful, wonderful combination of influences.
Rick: What attracted you to the guitar in the first place?
Steve Hackett: As a kid I was always very struck with the sound of guitars, but I always felt there was something slightly wrong with the sound. Nonetheless, I used to buy lots of guitar records, and I think it was because in the early days a lot of the guitar tunes were written by people who I suspect didn’t play guitar…
Rick: A lot of the leads are from old saxophone leads.
Steve Hackett: Well, you’re probably right, you see. Maybe that’s it. A lot of those tunes could be played on one string or two strings, so you’ve got this sort of the approach of, you know, I’m thinking of stuff like “Wipeout.”
Rick: That was the Safaris.
Steve Hackett: Yeah, the Safaris and the Chantay pop, “Pipeline” you know, tunes that you didn’t actually have to think of too much, to be honest. You didn’t have to move around too much and you could play it on two strings.
Rick: What guitars are you playing now as far as both electric and acoustic?
Steve Hackett: Well I play Yairi, a Japanese make acoustic, nylons, and I play mainly Fernandez electric.
Rick: Japanese?
Steve Hackett: Japanese, that’s right, with a sustainer pickup. Funny enough, tonight between interviews I just picked up my Les Paul for the first time in months.
Rick: Does it have Fernandez sustainer on it?
Steve Hackett: No it doesn’t. I’m talking about an old ’57 original and if you want that to sustain, you’ve got to deafen somebody, including yourself. It’s a great old guitar; it’s a lovely thing. It’s like a grand old dame, almost like a Stradivarius. It’s almost too precious to take her out of her case. I’ve had that since about 1973. Anything that was worth listening to that I did with Genesis was played on that guitar.
Rick: Great guitar. What about amplifiers do you use?
Steve Hackett: Well, the funny thing is you try lots and lots of things. I use a Peavey amp for quite a lot of things, sometimes a couple of Peaveys. A Peavey Classic 50, but I originally bought that to get a harmonica sound, and I found out it was a great guitar amp along with a lot of other people, including Eric Clapton these days. Funny enough, I’ve gotten good sounds from a Groove Tube. But, one keeps coming back to the guitar amp, the Marshall. I’ve gotten an incredible sound recently with a combination of a Marshall 50 Head, 4 x 12 cabinet. I think it’s 4 x 12, it might be 4 x 10 actually, and I was using one of the Fernandez things and a treble booster, which was built for me by a guy called Pete Cornish.
Pete Cornish builds things, it seems that he builds things tailor-made to guys in the industry, like Brian May, to Pink Floyd to King Crimson. He basically furnishes professionals. For some reason, his stuff has never gone over big in the shops, but he makes tailor, custom-made things, and he built me a wonderful treble booster. The combination of the treble booster, the Marshall 50 and the Fernandez with the sustainer, mind you I was using at a deafening volume, I had it on stun, and it just rips. It’s a great sound.
Rick: Is it a vintage Marshall you’ve got?
Steve Hackett: I thought I was buying a vintage Marshall that a friend has, a guy called Ben Fenner, an engineer that I work with quite a bit. He had one of those old ones. But I wonder about this, about the fact of whether, because something is vintage or not, whether it works. Because I tend to agree with a lot of people who say, “Well, it’s like saying, getting too hung up on what paintbrushes Picasso used.”
Rick: I talked to Eric Johnson a couple of days ago, and as we’re talking, he likes Wes Montgomery and I said, “Standel is making amps again,” and he like jumped on it, he’s like “Really?” He couldn’t believe it, because he’s been looking for one. I mentioned I’ve got a 1964 Standel and he says “You wanna sell it?” So I ended up selling him the Standel.
Steve Hackett: Well, there you go. That’s great then, isn’t it? That’s marvelous. I mean, there is something about old amps. I don’t know what it is that Paul Butterfield used to use as an amp. I’d be very interested. I think he used to use an old Altec mic and they don’t build those anymore, so I don’t know, one’s always fascinated with…
Rick: Classic gear.
Steve Hackett: Yeah, classic gear. People are always asking me what I used back in 1973 or’71 and I like to think that I’ve improved on that. And there are certain things that you use, a combination of either a Marshall Super Fuzz or a Color Sound Fuzz Box and I’d use them both together, as the greatest resource, silvery sustain sound and it’s a sound that I really can’t get unless I hook that sort of gear together again.
And I used to use a little Fender Champ and an XR Fader and an Echoplex and I used to think at the time, one more thing I had which was a Roland Pedal and one of those octave divider things, and I was kidding with that. Nobody’s got a more produced sound live than I’ve got. It was state of the art at the time. People may want to copy that, but I figure it’s not what you’re using, it’s how you’re using it.
Rick: Many readers will remember you as the guitarist for Genesis. Tell us about some of your fondest memories playing with your mates.
Steve Hackett: I remember the very first album with Genesis, we were rehearsing for the album that was going to become known as Nursery Cryme and that was 1971. That’s an album that featured one or two tapping guitar solos.
Rick: That’s early.
Steve Hackett: That’s very early, yep. I do claim that as my technique.
Rick: Because I know Eddie Van Halen has always talked about being the tapping person.
Steve Hackett: Well, the truth is, it’s there right at the beginning of the ‘70s. I used tapping on just about all of the Genesis albums. It’s there to be heard on the opening cut of the Nursery Cryme album. The track was “Musical Box,” No two ways about it. I guess it’s not these little techniques so much, is it really? Your hand on the button, someone runs with the ball, and the origination of them, it doesn’t really matter who came up with it. Maybe there’s some guy in Ancient Rome who developed the…
Rick: Tapping a lute or something…
Steve Hackett: Some Etruscan guitarist sneaking around somewhere who’ll swear he invented feedback with it, and who are we to disbelieve him?
Rick: I’ve heard various stories about who invented feedback and it tends to be John Lennon or Jeff Beck, for the most part. It’s hard to tell who really did that.
Steve Hackett: That’s a difficult one, isn’t it? I guess that “Shapes of Things” has to be the first thing I’m aware of, which I think was ’65. If it was ’66, then obviously it was all over with the same year. And it’s arguable, isn’t it? I don’t know. Would it be “I Feel Fine?” [Vocalizing guitar sounds] Who was the first guy, maybe the first guy unlucky enough to record it, you know?
Rick: Name a musician or composer in each genre that inspires you to reach greater heights. Okay? Rock and roll.
Steve Hackett: Rock and roll, good God. Well, the Beatles. How’s that?
Rick: All right. Yeah. Jazz?
Steve Hackett: Miles Davis.
Rick: Latin music.
Steve Hackett: Latin music. There was a guitarist called Rafael Rabello who was Brazilian, and he died very young, in his mid 30’s, but he’s a brilliant player and if you get to hear anything that he ever did, especially with a guy called Ney Matogrosso, he was a wonderful accompanist and there’s an album called Pescador Dos Perlos, which is a live album and has wonderful guitar playing on it.
Rick: Okay, great. Blues?
Steve Hackett: Well, I’ve got two things: blues harmonica player, Paul Butterfield, no doubt. Blues guitarist, good God, this one’s tricky, so many good ones, of course. Hendrix was wonderful.
Rick: Film scores. Composers. Or even the name of a film that you like the score to.
Steve Hackett: Miklós Rózsa, who used to compose epics, he did Ben Hur andEl Cid.
Rick: What was the first song you learned on guitar?
Steve Hackett: The first song I learned on guitar was “Guitar Tango” by the Shadows. You probably wouldn’t know them. Cliff Richard and the Shadows. The Shadows was Cliff Richard’s backing band, but they had hits on their own, lots of hits on their own.
Rick: Hank Marvin was the guitarist, right?
Steve Hackett: Hank Marvin, that’s right.
Rick: He had the first Strat in England, a red one.
Steve Hackett: That’s right, I believe he claims to have had the first in England.
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