Steve Hackett: Former Guitarist with the band Genesis

Speaker 1:

Takin’ a walk.

Steve Hackett:

I can’t teach anyone how to write a song because if a song really, really works, then it’s like a world unto itself. If you come up with a really good one that no one has quite done in that way. But I think the only thing that can drive anyone on is to love it. It’s to love what you are doing, whether it be successful or if it falls on deaf ears, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is if you love it, then it will never let you down.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to another edition of Takin’ A Walk, music history on foot. Buzz Knight is your host, and on this episode we have one of progressive rock’s great guitarists, Steve Hackett. He was the lead guitarist for the British supergroup, Genesis, from 1971 to 1977. He continues to have an accomplished solo career. Steve is a member of the Rock Hall of Fame. And he joins Buzz next on Takin’ A Walk.

Buzz Knight:

Hello, Steve.

Steve Hackett:

Hi there, is that Buzz?

Buzz Knight:

That is Buzz. How are you, Mr. Hackett?

Steve Hackett:

Yeah, very good, Buzz, very good, thank you.

Buzz Knight:

So great to speak to you. I’ve been a fan for a long time, sir.

Steve Hackett:

Thank you very much. I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the stuff over the years.

Buzz Knight:

So how enjoyable for you has it been celebrating your great work like Foxtrot at 50?

Steve Hackett:

Well, it’s been kind of amazing because we recorded, and toured this stuff last year in the rest of the world, and we recorded this album live in Brighton on the south coast of England, and it’s gone to number two in the rock charts over here. So a nice validation for vintage material to have a second chance of … Genesis fire in a way, I’m very proud of it, very pleased that it’s out there again, that I’m able to hear it from an era when John Lennon gave an interview and said he considered Genesis to be true sons of The Beatles, which is rather extraordinary.

Buzz Knight:

And John was a big fan of Selling England by the Pound also, wasn’t he?

Steve Hackett:

That’s right, yeah. I think that era of Selling England was the one that I first heard that Genesis he said was one of the bands that he’d been listening to at the time. And then this other interview, Nigel Pearce in the UK told me about this, he said he’s got a paper, this is what John Lennon says, so I need to unearth it. He’s a huge Beatle-o-phile this guy, Nigel Pearce, and he’s got all sorts of Beatles memorabilia and everything. He’s basically a DJ and a presenter and a complete Beatles fanatic of course.

Buzz Knight:

And it’s quite obvious listening to, well, one of my favorites and certainly our listeners’ favorites, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, that has a tremendous tip of the hat to The Beatles I believe, is that fair to say?

Steve Hackett:

Well, I think maybe songs like Counting Out Time, I would think of maybe at our most Beatlesque, we were doing What I Like (In Your Wardrobe), and that is pretty much pure Beatles and was our first hit single. I think by the time we were doing Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Peter Gabriel wasn’t sure that he wanted to be the lead singer of Genesis anymore. He was really heading towards a solo career. And he did great things of course. But I think of that album, Lamb Lies Down on Broadway really as his swansong with Genesis.

Buzz Knight:

So did you have the opportunity while John Lennon was alive to encounter him and talk music and guitar playing and such?

Steve Hackett:

If only. No, that never happened. I think in those days … My God, wouldn’t that have been amazing? But we came from humble beginnings. And when we heard he’d said that that was just peachy. We were trying to get gigs in the States at that time. We were just leaving New York when he started to give us a name check or two. And that was great. Maybe it was just because Peter Gabriel had used the coo coo coo coo thing in I Know What I Like. Maybe it was as simple as that, referencing them, quoting perhaps. Maybe it was because of that, he wanted bands that were nodding or giving them a nod because obviously they did great things. I mean, we all rode in on the coattails of The Beatles. They really opened up the industry for the rest of us.

Buzz Knight:

So do you recall a song or artist that you first heard growing up that hooked you on music for life?

Steve Hackett:

Oh, well, it was so much stuff, I mean, in the very early days I was learning to play harmonica and I loved the harmonica players of a certain era, people like Larry Adler and many more. But I do remember hearing Mario Lanza on the radio. This is much earlier than you are imagining I’m going to say. But I just remember listening to this stuff and literally falling over at the power of the notes. It just drove me absolutely nuts. And I tried to get something like the same thing with a guitar tone many years later, operatic rock guitar if such a thing was possible. I wanted to make it sing. And of course technology allows you to do that with the Fernandez guitars, with the sustainer pickup, they’ll do that. It’s no tyranny of volume, there’s feedback on board the guitar itself.

Buzz Knight:

In Guitar World, and I’m going to quote Guitar World, they said Steve Hackett’s early explorations of two-handed tapping and sweep picking were far ahead of their time. And they say the influence ultimately went to people like Eddie Van Halen, Alex Lifeson, and Brian May among others. How does that make you feel?

Steve Hackett:

Well, it’s a strange thing that they had the European Guitar Awards fairly recently, and they gave me the award, it was in Holland, it was extraordinary. And a lot of these guys sent films congratulating me, which was marvelous. I worked with Brian, and met some of them, but not all of them. And it was great. The guitarists were so generous to say this sort of thing. But I’m very grateful to them all because a lot of the time I think we can beaver away in the dark and you come up with something and you hope it’s going to work. And maybe a technique like tapping just kind of caught the imagination of a lot of guitarists and they figured it’s a way of playing very, very fast on one string. And then if you can hop from one to the other and actually do it in time, then you can fire off this kind of machine gun rapid fire thing. It’s the Gatling gun of guitar playing techniques for us fret-wallahs.

Buzz Knight:

I’m grateful to have had your mate, Steve Howe, on a previous episode of this podcast. And one of the things we discussed was his diversity of musical influences. You celebrate a tremendous diversity as well of influences starting I think with the blues. Can you talk about your diverse musical influences?

Steve Hackett:

Yeah, I remember hearing blues in the early 1960s when I was growing up and thinking, oh, wow, maybe I could do something like that on harmonica. And I used to play along to records like crazy and even used to emulate the mistakes just to try and get it right.

I absolutely loved blues. I’ve got enormous respect for Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters and Little Walter, these guys, they were all great harmonica players. And then of course the white version of that was personified and deified by Paul Butterfield, who was so absolutely brilliant. And I saw his band, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in the mid-1960s, ’66. And Bloomfield was in the band, Michael Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop, Mark Naftalin on keyboard. My God. And I think it was two guys who’d been with Howlin’ Wolf’s band, Sam Lay on drums I believe. And it might’ve been Jerome Arnold on bass. But it was absolutely spellbinding. It was wonderful.

I’d been playing harmonica for years, and yet I’d never heard the instrument sound anything like the ripping sound that Butterfield had, with that control and the vibrato, which was just to die for. It sounded like a trumpet or like a guitar. It was just this little tiny instrument that was being reinvented in front of my very eyes.

So I have to say, I saw a lot of great blues gigs, including Cream and many others. And of course, the young and wonderful Pete Green, Peter Green on guitar was so enormously good with John Mayall’s band. So that’s some of them. So many of them. Sonny Boy Williamson, harmonica player extraordinaire. I absolutely loved the blues.

I thought I was going to be a blues guitarist, harmonica player, but then like so many others who were aspiring towards that form, the blues boom really died on me at the end of the 1960s, just like so many others. And music was on the turn, it was about to change, and it was going to absorb a number of guilty pleasures like classical music. And those who’d been listening to Andres Segovia and Bach.

Buzz Knight:

Where do you get your curiosity that is still a burning passion?

Steve Hackett:

Well, I don’t know where the burning passion comes from, but it still is a passion, I’m still nuts about it. Music never really goes away, it has been a very good friend to me. It’s been rather extraordinary, and there’s always surprising things that come up out of it.

Funny enough, I’ve just done a new album as well. I’ve done a new video album. And there’s some stuff on that that I absolutely love. And I hope I’m going to be doing some of that next year when we come back with some of the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway stuff. I’m not going to do Lamb Lies Down in its entirety, but I’ll do some tracks from it and choose what I think is the best. And we’ll take it from there, with some new material as well. It’s so important to keep coming up with new stuff.

Buzz Knight:

I have a couple of listener questions for you. First, Tom, who’s a major fan of your work from the Boston area, he asks, you’re carrying the Genesis torch, is there any animosity at all from Tony and Mike with regard to that?

Steve Hackett:

I don’t think so, no. Funny enough, Tony Banks said to me, this was on the launch of Mike Rutherford’s book, he said, “You’re keeping the legacy alive.” And I thought he was going to steam into me and say, “What are you doing that old stuff for? Can’t you do everything else?” And he said, “You’re keeping the legacy alive.” So I think he’s a strange contradiction in many ways, but it was a compliment. You’re keeping it alive. So hey, I’m doing it. I’m reinventing it. I sometimes play it with orchestras. Many times play it with the band I have who are extraordinary. As I say, the album, Foxtrot at 50 has gone to number two in the rock charts in the UK. So all these years later, that little old album we did in 1972 seems to have not only sprouted legs but wings now and let’s hope it lasts as long as Beethoven.

Buzz Knight:

Amen to that. Another question, Bill from the Atlanta area, he wanted me to ask you, what are some of your favorite venues over your career that you’ve played in the United States?

Steve Hackett:

Well, I remember doing the Roxy Club in LA in 1973 when we were first touring there. And we did three nights, two shows a night. And I still think they were some of the best shows we ever did. We’d be doing I think the best of Foxtrot and quite a bit of Selling England by the Pound. And I do remember that venue very, very well and felt very at home there, very, very, very comfortable. So I remember doing that.

And from small places to much larger, Madison Square Garden was amazing. We did that, if I remember it correctly, we did that in 1977. And that was amazing. Absolutely wonderful. So there’ve been many gigs, lots of, I’m talking about the smallest and perhaps the biggest, and many, many more.

Buzz Knight:

I have to ask you, it’s been heart-breaking to see Phil Collins’s health deteriorate. How is Phil from your perspective? And how are you guys getting along these days?

Steve Hackett:

Well, I think that Phil has given his whole life to music, and even before that, to film and stage and theater, he was the Artful Dodger in Lionel Bart’s Oliver. He was a child actor and singer, you have to remember he was a veteran before he’d even hit his teens. So this is early stuff.

So yes, it is heartbreaking to see him now at this stage of the game. But he’s given it his all. He’s a sweet guy. I’m so proud to have worked with him in Genesis. He was full of great ideas and he was a great inspiration, full of energy. And I think that Genesis was lucky to have somebody who was not only a great drummer, but a great singer and songwriter and arranger, all of those things. People often thought that it was other people who did it, the lead singer, it’s always the lead singer who invents everything people assume. But Genesis was full of great writers, of good players and much more. But Phil was the linchpin really of Genesis.

Buzz Knight:

Well, lastly, I just want to ask you, if somebody were starting out a musical career who’s listening to this, what sort of advice would you give them on mastering the creative process as someone who has really mastered the creative process?

Steve Hackett:

Well, I can’t teach anyone how to write a song because if a song really, really works, then it’s like a world unto itself if you come up with a really good one that no one has quite done in that way. But I think the only thing that can drive anyone on is to love it. It’s to love what you are doing, whether it be successful or if it falls on deaf ears, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is if you love it, then it will never let you down, there will be no failure. That music is very broad, it’ll encompass you. And I think if you treat it as a game where if you’re always playing the tables or always playing the instrument, lady luck will smile on you eventually. So I would say please don’t throw the towel. And to quote Peter Gabriel, don’t give up.

Buzz Knight:

I love it. Thank you for the joy you’ve certainly given so many of the listeners of this podcast and the joy that you’ve given me with your music. I’m so grateful.

Steve Hackett:

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Takin’ A Walk podcast. Share this and other episodes with your friends. And follow us so you never miss an episode. Takin’ A Walk is available on the iHeartRADIO app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.