These are the Genesis tracks that Steve Hackettregards as the best of his six-year tenure.
BY JOE MATERA
DURING THE COURSEof an illustrious career that has lasted more than 50 years, Steve Hackett has consistently explored a diverse musical cocktail, delving into everything from prog-rock and classical to blues and beyond. After making a name for himself as a guitarist with several English outfits in the late 1960s, including pop-rockers Quiet World, he came to worldwide acclaim with the English prog-rock group Genesis in 1971, featuring singer Peter Gabriel, drummer Phil Collins, keyboardist Tony Banks and bassist Mike Rutherford. Hackett’s highly skilled technique and stylistically mixed bag were integral contributions to the group’s ever-evolving sound on the six studio albums he contributed guitar to, but he departed Genesis in late 1977 to pursue a hugely prolific solo career that continues today.
Along the way, Hackett found time in the mid 1980s to assemble the short-lived supergroup GTR with Steve Howe from Yes, as well as appear as guest guitarist on numerous recordings by artists such as Box of Frogs, John Wetton and Steven Wilson, to name but a few.
Yet, it’s his early work with Genesis that saw him inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, firmly solidifying his position in the pantheon of influential guitar greats. An innovative and creative guitarist of the highest order, he set the standard for many of the approaches and techniques that have become the vocabulary of any modern-day guitarist’s modus operandi. His pioneering use of right-hand tapping is but one example.
Exceptionally proficient on both acoustic and electric guitars, Hackett has a visionary six-string approach that’s informed by the musical masters, stretching from the works of Baroque composer and keyboardist J.S. Bach right to the unorthodox six-string artistry of the late great Jeff Beck.
“It always comes back to Bach and Beck,” Hackett affirms. “If it’s first-inversion chords, and churchy changes, it’s all Bach, while Beck informs my every note on electric guitar. Before players like him, guitars used to just go ‘twang.’ Then they learned to sustain and scream and impersonate a woman’s voice and imitate brass instruments. I was fooled when I first heard the Stones doing ‘Satisfaction,’ as I thought it was a brass section or a trumpet. I had no idea at the time that it was a guitar! I realized at that moment, that was where the guitar was heading, that it was going to be impersonating
