Steve Hackett Talks About His and Chris Squires new Squackett Album, His Sitar and Fans in China

By: Rick Landers

Today, Steve Hackett, the prolific guitarist who captured the spotlight when he joined Genesis is releasing a new album , Steve Hackett and Chris Squire: Life Within a Day, with bassist, Chris Squire, who rose to fame with the ’70s progressive rock band, Yes. They call themselves, Squackett, a fusion of their surnames and reflects the conjoining of the two formidable artistic talents on a project that is certain to delight their fans, as well as attract a new generation of followers to their brand of rock music.

Checking out Steve’s discography, it’s an eye-opener to realize the full breadth of his exploratory musical inclinations, his spring well of talents and his near primal need to find his way back to joust with basic rock, as he does with Chris on the Squackett album.

Like most of us, Hackett digs the pentatonic scale, but the geometry of his musical ambition is a cataclysm of classical, jazz, flamenco and nearly every other style that he can find to help him create new songs and new sounds, while blending, morphing and coloring his storied music. His journey is a path of discovery for him and a destination that’s a feast for the rest of us.

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Rick Landers: As usual, it looks like you’ve got a lot of things going on.

Steve Hackett: It’s been a very, very busy time. Probably the busiest time in my life, musically. A lot of different projects, a lot of touring and life is at breakneck pace at the moment. My feet really aren’t touching the ground.

Rick: I see that you’ve got a couple of new songs that are coming out in a couple of days. “’Til These Eyes” and “Enter the Night”. Are these gonna be along the lines of progressive rock, or have you ventured into different territory?

Steve Hacket: No, I would say neither of those tracks was progressive rock. I would say they were closer to mainstream rock and in the case of one of those tunes, “’Til These Eyes”, it’s a ballad basically, very romantic with a lot of strings, guitar, but it’s acoustic. It’s a very gentle number.

Rick: Is it more of a flamenco type of sound?

Steve Hackett: No, not flamenco. Straight ahead rock. I would say gentler, a ballad. It’s not a flamenco style. Guitar-wise, I guess you would say it was claw hammer picking. It’s right-hand technique. The other song is electric and it’s basically straight ahead 4-4. It also has Chris Squire on it. Exciting time at the moment.

Rick: Who else is on it besides Chris?

Steve Hackett: On that track it’s Gary O’Toole on drums, Roger King on keyboard, Amanda Lehmann on backing vocal, Chris Squire on bass, Steve Hackett on guitar, me on vocals. That’s the “Into the Night” track. The other track, as I said, is acoustic. A friend of mine loaned me a guitar which is absolutely beautiful on it, a six-string steel. I can’t tell you what make it was, but it once belonged to Roy Harper.

Rick: Really?

Steve Hackett: Yeah, that’s the track “’Til These Eyes”, a very gentle ballad which is on the album Beyond the Shrouded Horizon, as is the “Into the Night” track. “Into the Night” is a remix. It’s a slightly shorter version of what’s on the album.

Rick: It’s funny you mention Roy Harper. I used to live in England and worked for Virgin Records for a short period of time. I sat in on his HQ album at Abbey Road. I think the track he was doing was “The Game”.

Steve Hackett: Yeah, a very talented artist.

Rick: I understand that you’re combining your ambition with your altruism, in that a portion of the proceeds from the sales of those two songs will go to charity. What can you tell me about the charity and why that particular charity?

Steve Hackett: Okay, there’s a charity in England called Child Line, which is also associated with the great Ormond Street Hospital. It’s an important London charity, an important British charity, because it addresses the issue of abused kids. Now in every school in England, in Britain in fact, there’s a number that they can call. It can be anything from being bullied by someone at school to being abused by a family member or friend. It’s a very important charity which was originally set up by a lady called Esther Ransom, and she was a full-time TV personality. It’s a very heavily supported one by the media over here, by the entertainment industry, by musicians, singers, comedians, actors and actresses.

I’m very happy to be involved with that particular charity even though it’s in a small way. I’m doing a benefit show, in fact, on Sunday in London for that. It seems to have attracted the attention of the media, which isn’t the reason for doing it, but it just works out that way. It was a small showcase event, but it’s been totally oversubscribed because so many people want to go to it, and those people are people that are in the industry. To some extent I’m sort of performing in front of the industry.

Steve Hackett and Chris Squire

Rick: Peers.

Steve Hackett: It’s a funny thing, isn’t it? I did a whole tour earlier this year in England, but this thing was in addition. I’m doing that. I’m also doing the Isle of Wight Festival which is a biggie over here. That’s all taking shape in the next few days, next few weeks.

Rick: Who are the members that are going to be with you? The Electric Band?

Steve Hackett: It’s called the Electric Show. It’s the Electric Band. It’s Rob Townsend on saxes, flutes, all things blown. Amanda Lehmann on vocals and guitar. It is Lee Pomeroy on bass who works with Rick Wakeman and Take That, which were huge over here, huge in Europe. It’s Gary O’Toole on drums and vocals. Roger King on keyboards, who also has engineered and produced the Squackett album with Chris Squire.

Rick: Oh, yeah. I saw that he was on that. What gear do you plan on taking on the road?

Steve Hackett: I’m using Marshall amps. When I can’t get the vintage ones, I use replacements. I’m using Fernandez guitars for the electric stuff. Fernandez are made by the Japanese these days. I love the Sustainer pickups. I’m also using, nylon guitars, I’m using Yairi Japanese guitars.

Rick: Those are great.

Steve Hackett: They are great guitars. I’m using pedals and a controller, Zoom unit. I use a Sans amp, which I rely on for distortion. It’s a very smooth distortion. I use a couple of different wah-wah pedals, using in fixed positions, as it happens, both a Crybaby and a Vox, a Digitech whammy pedal. I have a Floyd Rose tremolo arm on the guitar, which I use along with the Sustainer pickup to create a lot of the sounds in the way I play. A combination of all these things. I have a Line 6 green box, which I use mainly for backwards effects, and lots of other toys, but they’re not always part of the live rig.

Rick: What prompted the collaboration with Chris Squire on the Squackett album? I know that you’ve worked with him before and you worked with Steve Howe.

Steve Hackett: Steve Howe and I had GTR in the mid-’80s and we toured that extensively in the States. Chris I met roundabout that time when I was playing Los Angeles, and he called me up in recent years at the end of 2007. He was doing a Christmas album and wanted somebody to play guitar on it. I said “Yep, fine, sure.” Two weeks later we had that done. Then he returned the favor for me on some recorded stuff, which spread over two separate albums, along with some of the stuff that was intended for the Squackett project.

Along the way we developed this sense of comradeship and there was this kind of natural harmony between us. We liked a lot of the same things. We liked vocal harmonies very much. We shared a lot of orchestras, vocal harmonies, and we spent a lot of time together socially swapping stories and painting the town.

Going out we had a lot of fun. We attended a lot of gigs together and had a lot of friends in common, of course. I introduced him to one or two of the Genesis guys. Over the years I’ve done various things with Yes, and I even worked on Pete Banks’ first solo record. He’s the third member, actually the fourth if you include Bill, of course. Bill Bruford was working with Genesis in the mid-70s. I’ve worked with quite a lot of the Yes guys and enjoyed their company and their expert musicianship.

Rick: You’ve brought up the harmony thing with you two. Do you go back to older guys that you like, like the Beach Boys or Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young?

Steve Hackett: Absolutely, yes. I go right back to the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, Roy Orbison, the Who. I’m thinking of bands that use harmonies. I’m thinking of Beach Boys, American bands, also Jan and Dean, who I adored. The Byrds, of course, Crosby, Stills. Beyond that, Buffalo Springfield, where do I stop? Mamas and Papas, great bands of a certain era where vocal supremacy was popular.

Rick: Kind of the four-part harmony.

Steve Hackett: Yeah, four-part, three-part, two-part, we use a lot of those things.

Rick: Everly Brothers, of course, two parts. They were amazing.

Steve Hackett: Yes, they were. They were amazing.

Rick: I want to say congratulations. Since the last time we spoke it looks like you got married to an author, right?

Steve Hackett: That’s right. I got married to Jo, who’s now Jo Hackett. Jo Lehmann Hackett. That’s right.

Rick: Do you two mix it up as far as collaborating on lyrics or on her writing?

Steve Hackett: Yes, we have. We have done on a couple of albums now. I find that a very interesting experience, batting the ball backward and forward. I like working with Jo very much.

Rick: Do you get surprised by some of the ideas she comes up with?

Steve Hackett: I do, yes. She’s very poetic at times. Sometimes it’s working on things beyond that. She’s written a couple of books and also made films, so there are quite a lot of things we share. Believe me, we’re a very busy couple.

Rick: You’re so prolific in the number and the styles of recordings and I don’t how many you’ve gotten, but the scores of albums you’ve done yourself and been on. Do you ever get to the point where you draw a blank, where you feel like you kind of run out of music ideas?

Steve Hackett: Fortunately that hasn’t happened yet. I think much of the time it’s an attitude of mind. If you feel fulfilled and you’re up, I think it’s easy to write songs. I think that if you’re terribly depressed and you feel that things are stagnating, it’s not so easy to write some things. I’ve been just so very busy engaging with close family, but also with fans. I tend not to draw any distinction between fans and friends. It’s all one to me. We’re very busy doing that, but it’s a great time right now for me. A lot of things are falling into place that I could only have dreamed about years ago.

Rick: I see that you’ve got a guitar-sitar, and I couldn’t tell the name. I thought it might be a Cort.

Steve Hackett: Sorry, originally I had a Danelectro and this one they call sitar is known as a baby sitar. I’m not quite sure what the make is on it. For all intents and purposes, it seems like a copy of a Danelectro.

Rick: Is it a six-string? Do you play it like a guitar?

Steve Hackett: It’s a six-string. I often stretch in the strings so I can bend, which are as long as a real sitar. When I record it, I often twin it with sitar samples and sympathetic strings and try every trick in the book to reverse it and trans-stretch it and compress it and shove it through. We do all sorts of stuff. We get a pretty good sitar sound at the end of it, and we get something which is I think quite unique sounding. I used it on a couple of albums now. I’m very pleased with the sound of it. There’s a track on Wild Orchids called “Waters of the Wild”, which has a very convincing sitar sound on it, and also there’s something from Beyond the Shrouded Horizon which features it. “Wading to Life”, it’s called.

Rick:  Managing a career as long as yours, it takes more than just musical talent. I expected you guys got pulled into the business side of things pretty early. Do you find that the business aspects are kind of a grind or do you get a kick out of them? How does that work for you?

Steve Hackett: Well, I think it’s relatively late that I got involved with the business side of things. I think these days there is a tremendous amount to do, because I’m virtually self-managing with Jo these days. It’s myself. It’s Jo. It’s Roger King. It’s also Brian Coles, who organizes the live shows.

We tend to make decisions almost entirely democratically. I have the casting vote at the end of the day and the power of veto, but we all listen to each other because everyone’s got something to say here. Jo is – in a way she’s been a short time in the music business with me, but she’s a very fast learner and she practically has a clairvoyant sense of what’s going to work with schedules and what isn’t. I find it’s far more effective than working via a manager who – even the best managers have their own agendas, pet likes, dislikes and priorities. I’m at a point in time where I no longer have to wait for any manager to underestimate the power of my abilities or popularity.

I figure if I’m focused enough, I can bring things to bear. I’m using this term of things I’ve only dreamed about at one time, but now I’m in the driving seat of that. At times it can be a hairy ride, because I might not be the greatest negotiator, but on the other hand, with a few self-help books, it doesn’t have to be rocket science, as they say, and at least you’re the first to know if there’s an offer made. It comes to your table and nobody turns it down, like a manager I once knew turned down Live Aid because he thought it was a good idea. That’s the sort of thing that top managers do for you. Do you need that kind of expertise working for you? I suspect the answer is no.

Steve Hackett and Chris Squire

Rick: So you feel a greater sense of empowerment I would think.

Steve Hackett: It is a sense of empowerment, I think. I thought at one time, how is it possible? I thought you had to be tremendously a billion-selling artist to justify it, someone like Mick Jagger. But, actually it seems as if, no, that’s not the case. Maybe to get in on the ground floor early on, I would certainly advise to people, then you’ll know if a job is being done or if it isn’t.

It seems to me that people are prepared to accept the idea of self-managing artists these days because there is so much that the artist has to do that at one time would have been the province of the manager’s secretary. The business doesn’t work like that anymore. You’re maintaining a website, Facebook, Twitter and who knows what it will be tomorrow. You have to be engaged. You have to handle if you’re going to make the most of the technologies that are going to be available to you.

Rick: When you’re looking at your future career, do you look over the horizon or do you have like a one year actionable plan, or do you look beyond that?

Steve Hackett: Yeah, I’m basically looking at next year. I have a plan that will keep me busy for the next twelve months, probably until the end of next year, so that will be a bit more than that. It’s a bit more like an 18-month plan.

I think beyond that, realistically, you probably are talking about how you’re best gonna handle your archiving. But, if you want to be active, I think you need to have those responses to the very seeds that you’re sowing, like the Squackett one, for instance, with Chris Squire. That project will be out in a number of days. I’m working on a number of Genesis re-records with a number of very well-known guest artists and I intend to tour that next year. I’m hoping there will be some Squackett gigs next year, so I can’t really plan too far ahead, because we have to see what’s going to capture the public imagination.

The nice thing is at the moment, I was part of a compilation which involved a number of progressive artists in this country including Jethro Tull awhile back. That thing just sold 800,000 copies. It’s gone absolutely through the roof for EMI in this country. That’s just tremendous for a compilation album. It seems as if the level of interest in all things progressive is just going absolutely ape.

It’s a very interesting time for the industry when it seems as if the revival, for lack of a better word, of detail rock, long-form pop, whatever you want to call it, instrumental-based music. It seems as if it’s absolutely wide open and I think the more original an act is right now, they’ve got every chance of rivaling the sales of the huge acts that were established way back in the ‘70s.

Steve Hackett at the Hammersmith Odeon 1976.

Rick: I was looking at the Genesis website. There are, something like, 50 Genesis tribute bands.

Steve Hackett: Yeah, it’s quite extraordinary. Did you say 50? That’s extraordinary, isn’t it? Yeah, for some reason, Genesis, above all other bands, seems to spawn so much of that.

I suspect it’s because of the theatricality of the band at one time. I think that band in all its incarnations had something to offer. Obviously, I think the pan-genre approach, if you consider what all of the various members in terms of the various styles that they’ve managed to have hits with both collectively and individually, the pan-genre approach seems to have worked. It’s not really just straight-ahead rock. The guys variously have been involved with rock, jazz, big band music, pantomime…film. It’s kind of nonstop and laterally with Phil, with Motown re-records and even some country music I’ve been involved with recently. It’s really across the board. There’s nothing those guys, collectively I should say we, won’t touch.

Rick: Did you see The Hangover movie where Mike Tyson starts to play like he’s playing drums for the Genesis song “In the Air Tonight”?

Steve Hackett: Really? No, I haven’t seen that. That’s extraordinary, isn’t it, to think that…I mean, I had a dream years ago. It’s a weird one. About 20 years ago I had a dream that 1 in 10 Chinamen was gonna own a Genesis album at one point [Rick laughing]. Now, the weird thing is I sign photographs for people that write in and say they want one and send them off. We send massive to China, massive to Russia. I only played in Leningrad in Russia, thus far. I’ve never visited China. It’s extraordinary.

That dream seems to have been somewhat prophetic. It’s a very weird thing. I was on BBC World Service News, something that’s just been shown, with the ex-president of Pakistan. I’m sitting there playing a Genesis piece on an acoustic guitar, playing “Horizons”, would you believe? Although we don’t get that show in England, strangely, it seems to play to a huge worldwide audience of several million, which is extraordinary. It’s very weird isn’t it?

At one time record companies were trying to convince me out of playing nylon guitar and saying, “No, there’s no future in that.” On the other hand, you just get through to so many living rooms doing that. The nylon guitar is a passion of mine. I’ve never given it up. I’ve sometimes made classical albums with nylon. It’s never just been rock with me, and I adore both rock music and classical nylon and flamenco with a passion. I love all ends of the spectrum.

Rick: I think people would be surprised that there’s a huge classical guitar audience out in the world.

Steve Hackett: I think there is. I do believe there are two million Japanese classical guitar players, all trying to sound like Andre Segovia. It’s huge, yes. I think people have to revise their thinking about what’s commercially viable. You don’t just have to take the all-singing, all-dancing Madonna route, great though she is at that. If you have a skill and you want to hone it, go for it.

Rick: It kind of begs the question, do you think you’ll have a China tour someday in your future?

Steve Hackett: I don’t know. I have no idea. All I know is that when I send off these photographs to the Chinese…Jo and I organize all these. She puts them in front of me. I sign them. We post them off. There’s no telling where it will end up. All I know is that each time all of those guys and girls live in one room. That’s how it works in China. It’s room number such and such, Province such and such.

Rick: In a factory somewhere, sure.

Steve Hackett: You know what I’m saying? It’s in one room. So, their window on the world is partly the music they seem to be absorbing from way back. I would never have dreamed that this stuff has got such a wide catchment area, such a wide reach.

Rick:  Does one ever really master the guitar?

Steve Hackett: Oh, no. I don’t think so. I think one is always a pupil of it, a fan of it. I’m always trying to seduce it into cooperation. I don’t think one can ever be good enough. I don’t think anyone can ever be good enough for all the things that the guitar can do. If you could combine the brilliance of everybody into one guitarist, what an extraordinary instrument it is, something that can sound anything between the human voice or a bell or a drum. It’s a natural synthesizer before you start sticking it through any electronics. There are so many ways to drive that string. If you eliminate percussion and decay, you’ve got all that sustain in the middle. How do you treat that? Like a violin? Like brass? Like voice? Woodwind? It’s an extraordinarily versatile instrument.

Rick: A final question that’s more conceptual –  It sounds like you’re more of an explorer than anything with the guitar.

Steve Hackett: Yeah, I’ll tell you one of the things I like very much is to blur the distinction between the guitar and other instruments. In other words, to make up a third instrument out of the sound, for instance, a keyboard and guitar. It’s something that I explored very early on with Genesis and many times in Genesis you wouldn’t really know what’s guitar and what’s keyboard. Often with 12-strings, but sometimes mixing 12-strings and 6-strings, and nylon and 12s, then later guitar-synth of course. Yeah, the guitar story certainly isn’t over yet.