Steve Hackett - Light at the End of the Tunnel

Story by Bill Kopp

Guitarist Steve Hackett has charted a long and successful career as an innovative musician. He rose to fame as the guitarist in Genesis during what is arguably that group's most creatively fertile period. Joining in 1970 at the tender age of 20, Hackett remained with the band through 1977, at which time the group's progressive period effective ended. Hackett went on to record a long string of solo albums, and these releases found him pushing the limits of his chosen style into world music, near-classical, and more. In the mid 1980s he took a swing at the commercial end of the musical spectrum with the supergroup GTR -- also featuring Yes' Steve Howe on guitar -- but after that Hackett put his attention back toward solo-billed pursuits.

Hackett's latest release is Out of the Tunnel's Mouth, a collection of songs that are true to all of his best qualities: progressive arrangements, powerful playing and healthy drawing from disparate world music styles. On the eve of the album's release, I spoke at length with Steve about the new album, though eventually -- in light of the recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction -- our conversation turned to Genesis as well.

The single most remarkable thing about Out of the Tunnel's Mouth is how deftly Hackett moves between styles and genres. The song "Nomads," for example, starts out as an acoustic ballad with a strong melody, then it gallops into a Spanish flamenco guitar with what a Gypsy ambience. Then it explodes into a wide-screen rock solo. All of this takes place in a mere 4½ minutes. What's more, that approach of variety persists throughout the album: every song goes some place.

"What I tend to like to do," Hackett explains, "is to mix genres. For instance, on that tune you've got the flamenco introduction, then a tune, then use of nylon [string] guitars, then trying to create a picture of a gypsy world. Then, to get to the next level of energy I felt that I needed drums and electric guitars to kick in. Acoustic music -- beautiful though it is, and I absolutely adore it -- is limited in terms of the amount of energy that you can convey with it. And there's just something about the electric guitar that has another level of energy and excitement, and so I set up one genre and then I supercede it with another. I think that's why that particular tune works for me. It's one of the best, and I think it has some of the best 'drumscaping' on it, if you know what I mean.

Hackett elaborates on the term. "It's not a real drummer; it's two virtual drummers playing at the same time. My musical partner Roger King is very adept at recreating the best of what you'd expect from a drummer. He's does virtuoso drum performances without actually touching a [drum] skin. He's done it with compressors and selections of different dynamics." Modern sonic innovations have come a long way from the brittle, synthesized/sampled drums of just a few years ago. And while Hackett remains fond of real instruments, the choice here was borne largely out of necessity. "I was recording at home and I didn't have a facility to use a real drummer on this. And so we decided to go this route, to make it containable.

The entirety of Out of the Tunnel's Mouth was recorded at Steve's home. The reasons for not using a traditional studio were, he says, "partly economic, and partly a diplomatic solution, because I'd gotten to the point where I felt I could no longer work with my ex-wife and my ex-manager. Let's put it diplomatically: it was impossible to work autonomously in the studio that we all shared together. So I felt the way to go was to work from home." But Hackett's quite at home -- so to speak -- in the creation of music on his own. "Autonomy in the workplace is sacrosanct for me. The idea of anyone impinging on that territory is something that anyone in any office shouldn't tolerate." So his approach for the new album was to "scale down, work at home, work in miniature, work quietly, and use smaller equipment to create big sounds."

Another benefit of working in one's home studio is freedom from time constraints: you can work when the muse strikes you. "I think that is the case, Hackett says. "And for me personally I'm less technically adept. I'm probably a technically-challenged person. But where my neurons seem to spark is in the realm of the imagination. I like to work on paper a lot."

The made-on-Apple aesthetic may have been key to the creation of Out of the Tunnel's Mouth, but the feel of the album belies its computerized genesis. The track "Emerald and Ash" is the sort one could play for someone as evidence that the disc was created the old-fashioned studio way. Hackett believes that the drums "sound very natural and very roomy." He notes that the song was informed by "a number of influences: Russian ballet. Beatles, really. And many bands like Led Zeppelin," who Hackett refers to as "the heaviest band on the block."

There are also hints -- in the screaming guitar and stomping beats -- of late period King Crimson. "It's funny, that, isn't it?" Hackett muses. "I was very keen on the early King Crimson, but I didn't have King Crimson in mind at all for that section. Maybe it was the scale that was being used."

While the album includes guest spots from some musical heavy hitters -- Chris Squire, to name one -- in many cases, those players recorded their parts digitally and sent them to Steve. "A number of people who worked on the album worked in their own living rooms," Hackett reveals. "Sometimes we would do things in the studio together, but a number of people had total autonomy, and I was always thrilled with the results of what they sent me." He notes this approach means that "musicians can send in the part that they're proud of, as opposed to my idea of what they should be doing." Still, Hackett is clear about keeping his options open: "I'm not saying in the future I won't resort to a more traditional method of working face-to-face with people."

Recording on a computer did present some sonic challenges, Hackett readily admits. "I was very keen that we didn't try and fool ourselves with volume. Musicians, you know, we all become volume junkies. It sounds great in the studio when we first do it and you say, 'wow, it sounds powerful.' And then you listen to it back on a number of different systems and you go 'mmm...lost something.' So if you can manage to make it sound like big in miniature, it seems to me that that is the way to go. The hardest thing is to mix bass levels, in order to get a realistic bass level. You have to compromise in order to make a mix portable enough to survive the systems that people will insist on playing it back on. Not everybody has got professional speakers or equipment of a professional standard, of course. That's a privilege of the few."

Anthony Phillips -- Hackett's predecessor in the Genesis guitar chair -- plays on two of the new album's tracks. Surprisingly, the two had never worked together before. "I had been trying to get Anthony to work on one of my things for quite some time," Hackett explains. "He showed up with a 12-string guitar and thought we were just going to do a rehearsal. But cunningly I had an engineer in place! Five minutes later he'd done this beautiful guitar part." After a number of overdubs, the resulting "Emerald and Ash" had a lot of guitar: "There are two electrics, and two arpeggiating electrics, and two arpeggiating 12-string guitars playing together. And the combination is very much that gorgeous, early Genesis sound." Hackett characterizes Phillips' playing as "very courageous. He's highly underrated; he's a fabulous 12-string player."

Some songwriters claim that music comes to them fully formed; others craft the songs form the ground up, but by bit. Steve Hackett says that "I find that songs don't come fully-formed, but some sections come fully-formed. Normally I've got a giant jigsaw with a thousand different disconnected bits that sometimes seem to belong together, and even things that don't belong together are put together, often for the sake of contrast and dynamics."

As an example, he cites the new track "Fire on the Moon," with what he describes as "a small, bewildered childlike naive verse, followed by the explosive primal scream in the chorus." That song developed out of a very difficult and personal set of circumstances for Steve Hackett. "That particular tune," he admits, "was really a kind of an attempt to convey the idea of a nervous breakdown -- of all-out deep depression -- but to convey it in song, rather than look at anybody else's mythologies. It was time to examine what was going on inside me and how I felt at the time; I felt my world was crumbling after my divorce. And so I was just trying to cope with staying sane at that point. And I thought that the best thing to do was to convey all these feelings of anxiety. It sometimes used to manifest itself like a black cloud descending, or feeling like I was losing my grip, so I thought, 'well, let's not let that go to waste.'" Drawing form that authentic well of emotion is preferable to Hackett; he characterizes the alternative as "looking it up in a dictionary or in books, vicarious fulfillment in lyrics via other people's stories." In the end, the experience has had positive effects for him: "My own life was certainly becoming rich in experience at that point. The innocence was gone, but it did give me a very good basis for starting the tune."

That organic feeling shines through all of the admittedly-precise technique on Out of the Tunnel's Mouth. The first half of "Emerald And Ash" features precise vocal harmonies -- all from Hackett himself -- while the song's second half adds in the voice of Amanda Lehmann, who's also a member of Hackett's touring band. "It's very nice to work with a girl's voice again," Hackett admits. Lehmann is, he says, "full-on on tracks like 'Sleepers' and 'Still Waters,' for instance, and I'm very pleased with that combination of male and female voices."

On the track "Still Waters" Hackett was aiming for a feel similar to "a gospel chorus. But I wanted slow blues and I wanted the guitar to be the voice, really." He points out that "the lyrics on the verse were written by my partner Jo, who's a girl, but she wrote it as though it was from a chauvinist man's point of view. And so all of those allusions to ladies of the night out in Storyville actually came from her pen rather than mine! But the idea, of course, is that still waters run deep. So we have the verse that refers to all these show girls, and the whole bought-and-paid-for scene, and compared with somebody who's more demure, but just as passionate of course, if not more so. And so I think the song strikes a blow for all the quiet ones."

"Still Waters" is also, Hackett admits, "an excuse to play blues guitar. I feel that within expectation of what progressive listeners prefer listening to, part of the time they find the 12-bar blues a little bit too basic for them. But it's not the case of what's being done, but how you're doing it, I think.

The album wraps up with "Last Train to Istanbul," a musical marriage of Eastern and Western styles. Hackett recalls that his interest in world music started decades ago. "I think it was probably in '65 or '66 with the Yardbirds. Jeff Beck was kicking in the feedback and the Moorish influences and the Arabian-sounding stuff. And really, I think George Harrison was picking up the sitar at around the same time. There's something about that, the first time that we were hearing the idea of quarter-tones and the ideas of inflections that were coming so naturally to him at the time that paved the way for world music. Of course, world music, you have to lay it at Harrison's door when it started."

For "Last Train to Istanbul" Hackett says he "was influenced by some Turkish music that I heard in Sarajevo, and it struck me that Turkish music sounded as if it were a sitar solo given over to an orchestra to play, and then something improvised on top of that again. The idea of music flying in all directions sounded impossibly exotic. So there's one phrase on 'Last Train to Istanbul' where we're playing in opposite directions, and that was really when what I was looking for...I was looking for that moment. And with that thing you can't tell what the hell's being played, but it just sounds so marvelously exotic.

Back in the Genesis days, many songs were credited as group efforts. But Hackett explains that "although everything that was written in Genesis was credited to everybody, not everything was written eyeball-to-eyeball. People were tending to bring in things in bits, and things were written face-to-face." For Out of the Tunnel's Mouth, Hackett composed alone and with Jo Lehmann, Roger King and a select few others. "I like both methods, really," he says. "In the main I find most really great writing tends to go on in private, and then arranging things is the whole name of the game then."

He elaborates on his understanding of the songwriting process. "I think that what has to happen is that the courageous start of a particular idea in the main has got to come from outside. And then you bring it in and turn an instrumental riff into a great song. Once you've got some idea of the rhythm, some idea of the chords, the atmosphere, it can set itself up for good writing. But I do try to get the best out of the people that I work with. For instance, today we -- Jo Lehmann's sister Amanda Lehmann and myself -- and she was singing some stuff from a new tune of mine. We did about three tunes in one day. She'd sing harmony parts, and it was great just to see how it would shape up. Bit by bit, she covered all the harmonies that I did. And then she came up with some other ideas as well."

Hackett says, "I've had a stunning day of recording today. You know, right at the end of this tune we were working on I was trying to get a note. I was trying to sing it myself and I couldn't. I just knew that either I had to do it my androgynous best or maybe it would be a girl's voice. And a girl singing that is just so joyful, to sing a note like that. You can't do it all yourself, that's what it comes down to. That's what I've discovered."

Born in 1950, Steve Hackett is a bit younger than the first wave of the British Invasion or beat group artists. "When I was growing up in the 60s," he recalls, "the guys that were playing the great blues guitar were all five years older than me. But at the time when I was started listening to rock -- I was buying my first records in about 1959, I think it was -- I would've been buying Cliff Richard and the Shadows back in those days."

He continues, "It was an interesting time, but it was really not until around 1964 or 1965, whenever the Stones started doing their first album and Brian Jones was playing bottleneck guitar. It was the first time I really heard a guitar riff was the solo on 'I Wanna Be Your Man.' It was the first time I heard a guitar absolutely sounding right for me. You know, I was fascinated by the sound of guitars in the early days...the overdrive and the scream aspect of that that was something that was unforgettable for me. It was really the aural equivalent of getting on a Harley-Davidson bike and doing 100 suddenly. Everything else was like a Morris Minor doing 30 miles an hour! And that was the difference for me. It was musical delinquency. And it was glorious."

Hackett's shredding guitar approach on the breakneck "Tubehead" calls to mind the style of a slightly younger player, Joe Satriani. On the track, Hackett doubles the guitar attack with keyboard. But they don't sound like keyboards. "There are moments," Hackett notes with pride, "where you simply can't tell if it's guitar or synth. We used a keyboard sound that was a sample of a Fender Rhodes piano put through distortion and it meant that Roger could bend the notes on that with a flywheel as well. We found that approach more engaging and a more interesting sound than doing a solo guitar part. So you've got guitars that sound like keyboards, and keyboards that sound like guitars, all on the same tune." He pauses then mentions, "that the area where I was most interested with Genesis in the very early days. It wasn't always possible to tell what was playing, and I must admit I do enjoy that area very much: when I'm not really sure what I'm hearing. That's always a great thing, I find."

Out of the Tunnel's Mouth features the instrumental "Ghost in the Glass." Hackett says that "I was influenced by working with my former keyboard colleague Nick Magnus." There was a particular chord Magnus used "right around the time of Defector [1980]. I can't tell you particularly technically what the name for it is, but if it was a B minor it would have a C# in it, for instance, and it's one of those chords that jazzers like a lot, and its kind of mystical, doomy-sounding. I find it very full of promise."

That track also features a string part laid atop the guitar, an approach influenced by some of the sounds Jeff Beck used on 1975's Blow by Blow. Hackett says "we used real strings and Mellotron strings together. We used the real and the fake together; some slight distortion from the strings, makes it sound like the sort of strings that were being recorded in the 1950s in a way. There's something about the quality of Mellotron strings. I use the actual tapes without them going through the Mellotron itself rather than going through the Mellotron [playback] head where you can't actually control the individual notes that way. You play a clump of chords and you find some notes are going to be more edgy than others."

Hackett explains how he manages to use Mellotron tapes without the machine itself. "Luckily enough, years ago I did some guitar work for the Mellotron people, and they gave me the DAT tape of the original Mellotron strings that had been recorded in a bedroom in 1953! It was three women in a bedroom in 1953," he chuckles, "having as much fun as you could with violins!"

Onstage Hackett avoids the notoriously unreliable beast. "I prefer not to use a real Mellotron these days. Because having toured with Mellotrons for years, I've seen every keyboard player who ever used one having a nervous breakdown at some point or another. The technology just isn't reliable. As soon as you get onstage, there comes a moment when the thing starts playing in a key all its own, and that's if you can stabilize the electrical supply to it. And so I use a virtual...or Roger King uses a virtual version of the Mellotron, something infinitely more reliable."

"But," Hackett stresses, "the important thing is that we do use those original sounds. They are irreplaceable in a sense. They combine very well. They are more abrasive than real strings, and they will double guitar wonderfully, and they are a sound that will cut through any wall of sound because they're so edgy."

In spring 2010 Genesis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That institution -- driven largely by the personal tastes of a handful of music industry figures -- generally affords little respect to bands treading the progressive end of the musical landscape. Genesis' selection likely had more to do with its commercial output, music created long after Hackett (and Peter Gabriel) had exited the group.

"Well, it's funny, that," Hackett muses, "because there are almost three different versions of Genesis. From the early years to what it became in the '80s. In brief, all I know that I was asked to join a band that was presented to me as a songwriters' collective. And when there were five of us, there were an awful lot of ideas flying around. I think that the stuff that musicians tend to mention is usually based on the early era, and normally the earlier the better, you know when Peter Gabriel was involved. Obviously I stayed for the making of two albums after he left, Trick of the Tail and Wind and Wuthering, both of which've got great moments on them."

"And once I left," he continues, "what happened was I think the video era kicked in very much around the same time. So I think as production techniques improved, and Phil [Collins] came into his own as a singer. And as a drummer with that sound, that famous [gated reverb-treated] sound, Phil influenced the production of so many records. That was a fabulous sound, and they created lots of room for that."

"But," Hackett observes, "then there's another era of Genesis which is infinitely more detailed, where half the time instruments are fighting for supremacy. Particularly with the early mixes where it's not necessarily clear what instrument is doing what. I feel the band had a kind of orchestral, sometimes demonic, often pastoral kind of sound to it. You couldn't tell the difference between guitars and keyboards, and it really wasn't at all obvious what was being played. And that," he laughs, "was something that we milked, arguably to death. The idea of lots of 12-strings all playing together, which sounded almost like an orchestra of harpsichords. And we tended to use that kind of stuff a lot."

Hackett was pleased that presenter Trey Anastasio's Hall of Fame speech shone a light on the contributions of the early Genesis. "You know," Hackett comments, "that was a very exciting time for me, and I was thrilled to work with the band at a time when we were more innovative, perhaps. I think that a band like Pink Floyd, for instance, stayed truer to their roots in terms of stressing atmosphere perhaps at the expense of accessibility and radio-friendliness, but Genesis went the other route. And it's really up to the listener to determine which era they're most drawn to. I think both are equally valid, but I like to think the outfit that I joined became a fusion band, a fusion of so many disparate styles, and gloriously pan-genre oriented.

The official release date for Out of the Tunnel's Mouth is June 8 2010. Early copies of the physical CD include a bonus disc including live tracks from Hackett's touring band. Modern-day performances of some old Genesis favorites are included: "Blood on the Rooftops" from Wind and Wuthering (Hackett's last album with Genesis), "Firth of Fifth" from the tour-de-force Selling England by the Pound and two songs from the 1974 opus The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Hackett's tour of North America begins June 18; more dates may be added. For more details, the only official Steve Hackett web site is www.hackettsongs.com

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