Rock guitarist Steve Hackett revisits prog classics aiming to re-energize the tunes
"I wanted people to come up with hybrid musical styles. I like to work with people in unfamiliar styles and see if there's any common ground. Music can afford to build bridges and ignore borders." - guitarist Steve Hackett
by Roger Levesque
Steve Hackett. Courtesy Image
In the annals of rock music history, the 21st-century revival of art rock or progressive rock, or just 'prog' is something that few would have predicted. For some - like guitarist-composer Steve Hackett - it never really went away.
But what is prog anyway, and how did Hackett help to keep it alive?
For the uninitiated, prog is that eccentric side of rock that first sprang up in the late 1960s and '70s when British bands like King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, ELP and (for a while) Canada's Rush started to fashion longer songs, tunes that borrowed more from the complex forms and time signatures, tempo changes and textures of classical and jazz than they did from the blues.
Often celebrated (or lambasted) for its aura of otherworldly or sci-fi fantasy reality, the sub-genre of prog faced relative obscurity several decades on, taking a backseat to developments like punk, new wave, grunge and the rise of hip-hop. Many prog bands broke up or shifted to more simplified pop material.
London-born Steve Hackett knows that story. He came to fame as the lead guitarist with Genesis during its first decade when the band was fronted by singer Peter Gabriel. While the group went on to sell around 150 million records worldwide, most of that came about after original drummer Phil Collins took over vocals and the band starting tapping pop sounds.
But somewhere along the way the original impetus behind prog resurfaced. A new generation of bands (Steve Wilson's Porcupine Tree, Opeth, The Mars Volta, and many more) created new variations on an older concept as the Internet and print media nursed it back from niche status.
Hackett's prolific solo career has touched on varied genres, jazz and global traditions included, but nothing else has kept him quite as occupied as Genesis Revisited, the revival project that tours the world, making its Edmonton debut next week.
His musical career really took off when the London-born guitarist put an advertisement in the British music journal Melody Maker in 1970 with a line that could have been a manifesto for prog rock: "Imaginative guitarist-writer seeks involvement with receptive musicians, determined to strive beyond existing stagnant music forms."
"We didn't call it progressive rock then but we certainly had the idea of making progress."
After Peter Gabriel called him up Hackett became the lead guitarist for Genesis, recording 10 albums, contributing much to the band's sound and songs, and innovating new guitar techniques along the way.
He recalls the early Genesis as a band of contrasting characters bent on discovering new sounds, using Gabriel's quasi-theatrical vocal 'sampling' style (before digital sampling existed) to then-new keyboard technology like the Mellotron.
"When I joined people often disagreed about the way forward, what was the verse and the chorus. So we had to find some common ground and you got this cross between church music and the music of bordellos, the sacred and profane, with the influence of classical music and musique concrete. There were no overt references to blues in there, but that's where the sonic developments happened in electric guitar like bending notes. We became this hodgepodge, a collision of all these ideas."
Consequently, the narrative qualities of their songs had amazing breadth, from satirical jabs at everyday life like I Know What I Like In Your Wardrobe to the fantastical feeling of tunes like the chilling 23-minute suite Supper's Ready, loosely inspired by end-of-the world visions from the Bible's book of Revelations.
"Storytelling was a big part of it and Peter (Gabriel) had an actor's approach towards singing. As a lyricist he was a radical who revelled in the obscure, stuff that nobody else would touch. It's more than swords and sorcery."
Selling England By The Pound is Hackett's favourite Genesis album and will be performed in its entirety as part of the touring setlist, which usually runs to around three hours.
"The playing on that album is more virtuosic or aspires to be, but we were a young band then. It's from the time that John Lennon said Genesis was one of the bands he was listening to, and that was hugely important for the band at a time when we could barely get a show on that side of the pond (North America)."
Hackett was with Genesis when he launched his solo career, and the tour also features tracks from his 1979 disc Spectral Mornings. At last count you can find 25 studio albums under his name up to 2019's At The Edge of Light, touching on exotic electronic atmospheres, classical and Brazilian music, and more. Add in co-led projects like GTR and his fruitful guest spot with Hungary's jazz-rock band Djabe (the same band that has played Edmonton's jazz fest several times).
"I wanted people to come up with hybrid musical styles. I like to work with people in unfamiliar styles and see if there's any common ground. Music can afford to build bridges and ignore borders."
Finally, you can peruse a series of luxurious live concert sets from Hackett's Genesis Revisited tours, usually two CDs with a DVD, filmed in Britain's top concert halls. Last year's GR live set from Royal Festival Hall incorporates an orchestra.
The first two Revisited albums from 1996 and 2012 were marginally successful studio efforts with an all-star band, but the immaculately recorded live sets up the ante, capturing songs with occasional improvements or additions like saxophone.
"My tour manager told me, 'you've got to be better than a tribute band' and I realized we needed to not just revisit this stuff but to enlarge upon it, change it and honour the spirit of the original band. It needed to evolve. So the original track I Know What I Like was a three-minute ditty, but it became longer to facilitate on-stage shenanigans. Now the way we do it there's a kind of jazzy funky section. We take liberties, but no more so than Genesis was doing back in the day. We re-energize it."
Hackett's current touring band features six on stage starting with two Swedish imports, singer Nad Sylvan bringing a more than credible alternative to Peter Gabriel's studio work, and Jonas Reingold on bass and 12-string guitar. Roger King plays keyboards and Gary O'Toole covers drums and percussion, completed with the bandleader's bank of guitars.
While Hackett was largely self-taught he admits he spent years studying guitar virtuosos from Hendrix to Segovia and he still puts in "a serious amount of hours" to keep his electric and classical acoustic guitar skills up to snuff. On top of turning 70 earlier this month, he remains a player of great agility, sensitivity and imagination.
"Guitar playing has always been this symbol of freedom for me, an alternative to being taught at school, but anyone who does anything remotely interesting becomes my teacher. I just choose my teachers carefully. I've got this mongrel approach. Making my own mistakes was very important and still is, and plundering into breakthroughs was important too. If you take away the prejudice you can draw something from baroque music or blues and combine those influences to take it beyond."
