A Conversation With Guitar Icon Steve Hackett

On developing the theme for Under A Mediterranean Sky – Well, my wife and I, Jo,  in her time, she’s been, a writer, a filmmaker, many things. She comes up with musical ideas that are really, really great as well. It’s normally top-line ideas, but I hear them. So she has quite a bit of input on this stuff, and she’s always keen on variations of things. But we were kicking around the idea of music that had a theme to it. And she was always keen on me using some kind of story. Before that, I was writing a lot of songs and vagueing out on them and finding out if I’d written some lyrics, I’ll find out what it’s all about later, I let the words lead me. But she comes at it from the other perspective of saying, “Well, if you have a story or a concept, it will stretch you into areas that you won’t necessarily normally do.” And she said, “I think with your next acoustic effort, you should try and change it and not just stick with stuff that’s just sort of mid 19th century romantic and baroque influences. But what about the aspect of world music and different regions and places that we visited and being affected by that?” And some of that stuff has permeated the rock albums I’ve done, particularly in recent years. And we thought we’d try and do the same thing with an acoustic album,  so-called acoustic album. But how to stretch the boundaries of an acoustic album and make it as orchestral as possible, so that you’ve got the question and answer thing? I think you use the term palate cleanser, it’s a little bit like we tend to have one of one orchestral track with guitar, and then we have one that’s just guitar, the self-orchestrating idea of that. So it’s sort of big picture, small picture, a big picture, small picture to try and give the thing pace. And use some instruments that I would never normally think of using on an acoustic album like the Arabian Oud, the Arabian lute that I’m very bad at playing. But I can manage a few phrases on,  I love the sound of it, and we had to the duduk, the Armenian guitar from Azerbaijan. We had some soprano sax and back to the idea of flute and two flutes at times, Plus the incredible string work of Christine Townsend playing violin and viola. We had a small team of this one, but it doesn’t sound like a small team. It sounds like a big wide canvas. And of course,  the Mediterranean as a dream. It’s the place you want to go to for your holiday. When you grow up in cold climates like we did the chance to go somewhere with the sky is blue and the colors are golden. The challenge was trying that across with music trying to paint the picture and the fact that no one can really travel at this point in time with complete certainty. In a way, it’s another way of traveling. I guess it’s the kind of travel log or journey. I’m very proud of it for what it does.4:40

On playing classical pieces live – I have played some of these pieces live,  not normally with an orchestra. I mean, I have played nylon guitar with orchestra live sometimes. Not very often, because the logistics, as  I’m sure you can imagine, of showing up with an orchestra are not as easy as saying, “Well, we can figure it out with a small team.” It’s a group. It’s a different thing, But sometimes we can conjure that with smaller forces. I never say never.  What I try to do with these types of albums is to free myself up and say, I never feel that I have complete need to play pieces that are this subtle in front of an audience and put them through that. I think that. Many times I’ll do this. And I might just play these melodies just once in order to get them up to a standard for a record and for people to, how can I put it… If they’re affected by it and you get taken by it, then wonderful.  In the past, I’ve concentrated more on safe bets where particularly in recent years, by bringing back a lot of the really early Genesis music in front of audiences, some of which have never heard that stuff or weren’t really aware that Peter Gabriel with the lead singer years before Phil Collins took over on vocals. So it’s a difficult choice. It’s an embarrassment of riches and possibilities live. But I do try and keep people happy. So the idea is to go out with Seconds Out in its entirety and probably a more fleshed out version even than the double album that came from it in 1977. Whenever we’re up and running, whenever the world is open for business again, we’ll be open business. Officially, we’re supposed to be there in April. Whether that will happen or not, I don’t know. All I can say is that things have been scheduled and rescheduled, And maybe again, we don’t know with any certainty because there is no certainty that accompanies this pandemic except that we hope that everyone will stay safe and not be too suspicious of vaccine. Because without vaccines I mean, what hope is there for the world?  And I’m hoping to get back to some sense of normality. Meanwhile, it’s nice to be able to record this kind of stuff.13:12