THE QUIET ONE
Just past the Moulin Rouge and the neighbouring temptations of Souvenirs Sexy, on a sunny afternoon in Paris, Steve Hackett sits in the lobby of his hotel, contentedly filing his nails. Having dumped plectrums years ago, the most modest of 70s rock’s great British guitarists needs immaculate fingers in order to function. He seems the most sanguine and self-contained of rock musicians. Not a movement is wasted, his Zen-like balance and calm complete.
“Steve didn’t look like us,” his Genesis bandmate Mike Rutherford recalled, mystified, in his autobiography The Living Years. “He looked like an art student. Black corduroy jacket, black jeans, black scarf, black shirt. For years, Steve was all black. ‘He’s very quiet, isn’t he?’ mum said when he was gone.”
A grammar-school boy in a mostly public-school band, Hackett was, Rutherford added, “always a slight outsider”. A shadowy, still presence on stage with Genesis as their singer cavorted in dresses and fox heads, his exit in 1977 after playing at the heart of all the band’s great work with Peter Gabriel was “almost a non-moment”, Rutherford concluded, with perhaps unconscious cruelty.
But in 2019, Steve Hackett, far more than any of his former bandmates, is keeping Genesis’s flame alive. His Genesis Revisited tours, this year including in its entirety, give fans an authentic taste of the band at their best. Since his 2012 album reacquainted them with his past, his solo career has also been plays to all his strengths with its lush symphonic rock, pastoral passages, global influences, heavy yet melodic guitar and even earthy gospel-blues. It’s his second consecutive Top 30 entry.
