THE LINEUP
Steve Hackett dishes out a rich helping of prog on The Circus And The Nightwhale. We look behind the scenes with the ringmaster himself…
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 kicking around the idea of something that was semi-autobiographical so I could draw on the experience of what it was like to be born in 1950, in London, as in People Of The Smoke, 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 Under A Mediterranean Sky [2021], my instrumental album, describing different countries around the Mediterranean.”
How did you begin to shape the story?
“Jo suggested Travla as a third person so that we could take it into realms that were perhaps more Pinocchioesque, or more Homeric, perhaps. The hero’s quest approach. That’s how we work together, things are born out of conversations and then Roger King [keyboards, programming and arrangements], who puts all this stuff together, makes our dreams a reality. I play guitar, I sing, I try to get involved in the close detail as much as possible. We do computer sketches, then we get humans to play it – that’s how it seems to work. It’s always been a mystery to me how anything g
