Hackett: “Banks Says I’m Keeping Genesis Legacy Alive”

Since he left the Genesis in 1977, the guitarist Steve Hackett he has created his own musical identity that blends sounds from different musical genres but has never lost sight of the time spent with the English band. Even in the last tour Hackett has followed this pattern to compose his set: songs from his solo repertoire and songs from a given period of the Genesison this occasion the album that the 74 year old London guitarist is proposing live is “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway”released in 1974, the last album with Peter Gabriel in training.

Here below we report a part of the interview (the part where he talks about the Genesis) by Dave Ling of Classic Rock a SteveHackett.

Now that Genesis is no more, if someone considered you the unofficial curator of their legacy, how would you feel?

“The museum curator’s hat is largely the product of my own ideas.

I love polishing those old works. Shoulder to shoulder with the other Genesis, I sweated blood to make them and I’m extremely proud that they became a sort of model for the way prog music was created.”

Have any of the other former Genesis members given you any feedback on these themed tours of yours, whether positive or negative?

“It came from the least likely source, strangely enough. Tony Banks has said a couple of times that I’m the one keeping the legacy alive. I like to think that what I’ve done (with themed tours) is created a model that allows artists to revisit their older material but also keep things fresh. Dave Mason (former Traffic member) has done that as well. Every member of any band has the right to open up the history book and say, ‘This is what I’m doing. Here’s the old stuff and the new stuff.’ The best of both worlds.”

As a conceptual double album, by its very nature ‘The Lamb’ is, for some, a very “difficult” Genesis album. In a book about the band’s Peter Gabriel era, written by Mario Giammetti, you said that it was a bit hard to find space for your guitar on the album.

“Yes, but Selling England By The Pound (the 1973 album preceding The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, ed.) had been largely shaped by the guitar. ‘The Lamb’ was a difficult album, because we were losing our singer (Peter Gabriel, ed.), who had been largely responsible for the band’s success. Plus we were all getting older. We were no longer a group of promising young men. (…) Losing someone of Peter’s stature was very worrying, which prompted a lot of us to leave to do solo projects. It was a watershed moment for the band, where our existence was seriously threatened.”

So going back to that state of mind of 1975 is it somewhat bittersweet?

“Those memories are very mixed. But my opinion is that taking the best of ‘The Lamb’ can withstand any criticism of the album. I think that’s the right thing to do.”