Artist: Steve Hackett
Album: The Circus And The Nightwhale (InsideOut Music)
Steve Hackett has been enjoying phenomenal success worldwide with his Genesis Revisited project, but live shows are always peppered with material from a solo repertoire that extends back into the 1970s. Recent years have seen his albums gain traction in the charts with his signature melodic guitar tone always to the forefront. As he’s continually searching for new themes to explore, the latest album is largely semi-autobiographical, featuring the life and times of a fictional character called Travla. Heavy riffs and lavish orchestrations are the order of the day hereabouts, and we couldn’t resist the opportunity to find out more about the album’s origins…
Your albums have always had quite a strong narrative to them, but this one in particular, to the extent that you have described it as semi-autobiographical. Could you explain a little bit about the story behind The Circus And The Nightwhale?
“Well, my wife, Jo [Lehmann], had the idea for the title. We had been, the opening track – ‘the smoke’ being a nickname for London. Like so many of the things that I work on with her, it took a little bit of time for the penny to drop. She was the one who said to me that people like a story. I resisted that for a while, I thought, ‘Oh, concept albums…’ they were something always heavily criticised by critics at one time. It became very passé. But then it became acceptable again and we’ve done various things that are stories within themselves, like [2021], my instrumental album, describing different countries around the Mediterranean.”
