Interview: Steve Hackett

15th February 2024

On 16th February 2024, Steve Hackett releases his new album, The Circus and The Nightwhale. A couple of days before the albums release, Hotel Hobbies spent some time speaking to him about the album, his career and his influences. Read a review of The Circus and The Nightwhale here: https://www.hotelhobbies.com/post/album-review-steve-hackett-the-circus-and-the-nightwhale-2024-insideout-music

Hotel Hobbies: Firstly, how are you? I hope you had an enjoyable birthday on Monday?

Steve Hackett: Yes, thank you, I did. It has been an incredibly busy time with interviews and we are off to America again soon for the next leg of the tour.

HH: We are here to discuss your career and in particular your upcoming album, The Circus and the Nightwhale. It is your thirtieth solo album. Did you think way back in the mid-1970s when you released The Voyage of the Acolyte that you would ever reach thirty solo albums?

SH: A long time ago isn’t it, all of that? That title was suggested to me by Tony Stratton-Smith and I was so pleased to get a record deal at that time, I said yes. I really wanted it to be called Premonitions. Later on there was a box set that included everything that had been involved in that, which was called Premonitions. So up to the present day and there are thirty studio albums and probably one hundred live albums! There are tracks I’m particularly proud of on most of my albums and I enjoy listening to most of the tracks. I feel that Spectral Mornings and the new album, The Circus And The Nightwhale, are possibly my favourites.

SH: (noticing a picture of the Pink Floyd Animals cover on the wall behind me at Hotel Hobbies): I see you’ve got the Battersea Power Station in the background there. That’s what I grew up opposite when I was a kid in Churchill Gardens, the flats overlooking that between 1953 and 1957. You can go up inside one of the chimneys now, which I did fairly recently and it’s a spectacular trip. They do it really  well; it’s wonderful.

HH: The Circus and the Nightwhale is also your sixth album in the last ten years. You are as prolific as you have ever been. What inspires you to keep writing new music after all this time?

SH: I was playing the guitar this morning. I’ve got a fairly unique tuning on an acoustic guitar and I found a succession of chords that sounds like an emotional orgasm. It rises and rises and I’m still looking for the peak of the sequence. It sounds fairly promising but I know that I have to complete it. During my first album with Genesis in 1971, we were working on a song that was ultimately called The Fountain of Salmacis and it got banned on Italian radio for being too sexy, which is pretty weird considering the classical Greco-Roman background to that song. In musical terms you have to use your imagination but if music when it rises, wrenches you out of your seat, that’s part of what it’s all about. Travelling motivates me. Recently, within the last month, we have been in the Arctic and in Africa. If I’m thinking of Norway in the Arctic Circle, where we were in Bodø, that makes me think of Greig and the elemental quality of his music. I think of him as truly progressive. I was listening to some of the Peer Gynt suite this morning and it casts that strange spell. And having seen Victoria Falls, I found myself trying to write a piece of music that conveys all that teeming water.

HH: You’ve mentioned recently that the new album says things you have been wanting to say for a very long time. How long has such an album been on your mind?

SH: There are certain ideas you have and I find myself saying, “Dare I do this?” Normally though, those ideas keep re-presenting themselves, rather like the intro to the album. “Dare I use existing BBC stuff from 1950?” Someone used the word retro recently and yes it is. These things that don’t exist anymore. Steam trains and Listen With Mother, before you get Rock ‘n’ Roll. These are all found sounds, collages – all of that put together. I thought I should frame the album and give it these misleading, decoy type portals or trapdoors to lead people into. It seems to have found its mark with people who have heard it.

HH: It is an album rich in atmosphere, variation styles and it flows beautifully as a concept. It is autobiographical through the eyes of the character Travla? How did you go about selecting the different moments of Travla’s life that were important to tell?  Did the story develop as you were writing the music or was it more planned beforehand?

SH: A lot of it came out of conversations with my wife, Jo who was responsible for writing a lot of the lyrics with me. The way we work together is to vet each others ideas if we think there could be a stronger line, a stronger chord or stronger solo. We are pretty brave with each other now. If I say, “I think there could be a stronger line here,” she will say, “I  agree.” We are always like, constructively critical. That also works with Roger, who is extremely critical. Working with Roger King, the third writer, it can be alarmingly so. He sometimes has a non-emotional response to music. I think the only thing we truly agree on is that we both love Bach. What I bring to it, is the love of it. If you love every note, you can produce things in a way that hasn’t been done before.

HH: The album opens with People of the Smoke and there is a mechanical feel to the song. The drums seem to imitate the machines of the factories, for example. How much of that time of your life do you recall and how much is represented by that song?

SH: I’ve got a pretty good memory. I can go back to pretty early on. I do remember quite a lot. It’s always the same memories you come back to. Early moments of trauma, the time you fell down the stairs or got stuck in the loo! People of the Smoke refers to London. We’ve mentioned Battersea Power Station, which was the largest building in Europe and powered half of London. There was a price for the lighting and heating. The pollution and the daily lungful you had to deal with. I remember growing up in a concrete world, a lot of which had been trampled on by the war. The houses with the Georgian pillars originally looked like Belgrave Square. They were all falling apart. The white stucco was all blackened, looking like rotten teeth. A lot of rain of course, it being Britain. People of the Smoke tries to paint that picture, like an imaginary film.

HH: Two songs on The Circus and the Nightwhale focus on your time in and then out of Genesis. From the tours your have done, it is clear that it is still a time in your musical life that you treasure. How does the love of the music balance with your memories of  “The Circus” as you call it on the new album?

SH: One, Enter The Ring, is a celebration of what was going on at the time. Get Me Out is more about the claustrophobic atmosphere of being in what had become an internationally successful rock band playing to huge audiences everywhere. The price of that was being told, by certain members of the band, that I shouldn’t be doing anymore solo stuff but be giving it all to the band without any guarantees that the ideas put forward would be accepted. Composition by committee can be daunting. Once I’d turned on the creative taps for Acolyte, I wanted to keep going and not go back to being another member of the crew or asking permission for things. I joined the band as a full member and then I was being told I was virtually an employee, once Peter had left. Even Peter Gabriel was being treated like an employee at an earlier point and he left for much the same reasons that I did. I don’t think it did him any harm! I think when anyone left that band, they took there muses with them and kept going.

I look back on the music with tremendous fondness. Harmonically and lyrically, it was a band that was very creative. It was interesting writing when everyone was pitching in. It was like being back at school with guys who had literally been at school with each other. They had been at schools that were designed to produce bastions of Empire or perhaps the next Viceroy of India, not the next Mick Jagger. They weren’t allowed to visit the local record shop and Mike Rutherford was banned from playing guitar at school. So what does he do when he leaves? The very thing he was forbidden to do. It’s the Nureyev effect. His father tries to beat the dancing out of him and he becomes the world’s foremost ballet star.

HH: The Circus and The Nightwhale is an album rich in a range of emotions. There is the heated and the belligerent Get Me Out and the utterly beautiful Ghost Moon and Living Love. It seems like the album was a cathartic experience, both exorcising demons of the past and celebrating happier moments of life?

SH: Yes, definitely! There’s an aspect of Get Me Out that’s probably the most unsettling and angry part of the album. There’s an influence, beyond the obvious bluesy stuff, of the Perry Mason theme. I wanted to have that there. I liked it when I was a kid but it scared me. I wouldn’t have used the word noir then but if there’s ever been a noir soundtrack, it’s probably that. At the end of Get Me Out, there’s insistent piano, multi-tracked to make it sound like we are using brass instruments. We were but we used single note samples of everything. It mixes well with guitar that is overdriven.

HH: Your guitar work on the album is, as usual, sublime. My favourite solo is the one in Ghost Moon and Living Love. How do you go about constructing solos? Do you write solos to fit the songs or have solos written that you fit into other pieces?

SH: I was influenced by the work of Dare, the band with Darren Wharton. I love his voice. Rock with a ballad voice. I had an idea for the theme and I thought it could be like Local Hero and we could do it on sax. So originally, I was going to get Rob to do it. Rob was living in Denmark, so there was no way I could get a demo of it. It could have gone that way. In the end, I decided to do it with harmony guitars. Brian May, who’s a pal, and I have influenced each other with that. Thinking of the ending of The Musical Box, there’s a three part harmony guitar solo. Brian said he liked that a lot and I always thought he’s the guy who is ‘Mr Three Part Harmony Solos’. That defined him; the idea of a guitar orchestra. That’s something between the two of us and I have one of the guitars he invented some years ago. I used three guitars: a Les Paul, a Fernandes with the sustainer pick-up and Brian’s one with the rich upper harmonic.

HH: You have described your relationship with your wife, Jo, as a turning point in your life. Wherever You Are is one of the most important songs on the album to you. How closely do those two things align and how would you describe your work together?

SH: Jo and I first encountered each other when she was making a film and wanted someone to do the music for it. Work turned into love between us. We work very closely on things. Sometimes she will come up with an idea for a song. For instance, on the previous rock album, Surrender of Silence, we had a song called Natalia. She basically came up with the words first of all. She wanted a song about a Russian everywoman and a bit like Kenny from South Park, at the end of every verse, she dies because of very levels of suppression. I lived with the lyric for that song for about six months before I really had a clue of how to do it. One day the penny dropped. I thought if we do the backing, the orchestration in style of Prokofiev and if she’s happy with it, we do a chorus that was more reflective of Tchaikovsky. That meant we had two principle Russian composers to draw from. Jo is conceptually very good. It was her that suggested Under A Mediterranean Sky and doing bits of music all about different countries around the Mediterranean. First of all, I took a deep breath and thought that would be a limitation. Then I realised it would present enormous possibilities, you just have to focus on it, not be stupid and hopefully not too intellectual either.

HH: You revisit your love of Spanish guitar on White Dove. It is a track full of hope and a feeling of freedom. Is that how you see your life at present?

SH: Yes. Freedom, hope and industry. Trying to keep up with commitments and dreams. We are all limited to some degree. You’ll be dreaming about your writing and I’ll be dreaming about the songs I’m going to write. As long as it all keeps working, we can keep the doors open to past glorious exhibits, such as Genesis or new things that will draw people in. It is like this one, The Circus and The Nightwhale is the closest I’m ever going to come to Sgt. Pepper. The thing I come back to with Sgt. Pepper, apart from the weird and wonderful songs, is the introduction – you’re wrong-footed from the word go. It’s apparently a live concert, it’s apparently an orchestra but actually it’s a rock band and there are interjections of other things that rise to fire salvos.

HH: When you play live how to you go about selecting tracks to play from such an extensive back catalogue? Going forward you will no doubt be playing some of The Circus and The Nightwhale live. Due to the storytelling nature of the album, is there a temptation to play the whole thing, as you have with some of the Genesis albums?

SH: I’m aware of favourite songs for audiences as well as my own, and also which numbers work best played live. I always enjoy playing numbers live from Voyage of the Acolyte and Spectral Mornings in particular. With The Circus and The Nightwhale, there is the temptation to play it all and I might do that at some point, but at least for the time being, I will select highlights.