Some solo careers are born of turmoil; a sudden, dramatic rift between an artist and the band in which they made their name. Steve Hackett's solo debut album Voyage Of The Acolyte wasn't born like that. After its release in October 1975, the Genesis guitarist made two more albums with them: February 1976's A Trick Of The Tail and December 1976's Wind & Wuthering. Indeed, Hackett wouldn't bow out of Genesis until after their May 1977 EP Spot The Pigeon.
"You have to remember that my experiences in Genesis were largely extremely positive," Hackett says today. "In fact, when we were touring Selling England By The Pound, a bit of Foxtrot and a bit of Nursery Cryme, I felt like I was in the best band in the world.
For me, Selling England... is the epitome of the form. It's got elegiac lyrics and hugely accomplished songwriting.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1706879462/articles/IrxwS0rNJ1707137680005/1478776011.jpg]
I was thinking, "This is it. This is where I belong."" It was while making the follow-up to Selling England..., the double album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, that Hackett tells Prog that his sense of belonging began to falter a little. The Lamb... was his fourth album with Genesis, and the one after which singer Peter Gabriel, who had brought Hackett to the band after seeing his ad in Melody Maker, left the group.
"I'm surmising here," says Hackett, "paraphrasing, perhaps, but my memory of making The Lamb Lies Down... is that Peter didn't really want to be part of Genesis any more.
Composition by committee had become anathema to him, and his first wife, Jill, had had a difficult pregnancy.
On top of that, William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist, had approached Peter about writing a screenplay, and I think Pete saw that as a new world of multimedia possibilities." To further complicate matters, when Friedkin sensed that his screenplay offer might spell the end of Gabriel and Genesis, he didn't want that on his head. "So he dropped the idea," says Hackett. "Then Peter came back and agreed to tour The Lamb Lies Down... and promote it. He also made it clear he'd leave the band after doing so.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1706879462/articles/IrxwS0rNJ1707137680005/4110813404.jpg]
"Maybe what Peter really wanted was to take some time off, be a family man and resume with Genesis later," Hackett reflects. "But I wasn't party to that information at the time. That was more a conversation he had with Mike [Rutherford] and Tony [Banks], who were his fellow founding members." The crux of it all, perhaps, was that old chestnut 'musical differences'.
Within the very competitive confines of Genesis, Banks's keyboard-playing around the time of The Lamb... was becoming increasingly virtuosic, and Gabriel met this with what Hackett describes as "a similarly intensified approach to vocals, equally dense with lots of imagery. So you had this claustrophobic thing going on: two guys locking antlers within the band.
"Once we were losing Pete and everybody was at loggerheads over space in the music, everything got much more difficult," Hackett concludes. "True, I made another two Genesis LPs with Mike and Tony after Pete left, but what was being born in my mind was something where instrumentals were as important as vocals. That's why you've got Voyage Of The Acolyte." With each of its eight tracks based on a different card from the tarot, Voyage Of The Acolyte was an esoteric, art-for-art's sake affair, rather than something governed or grounded by commercial appeal. Its delicate, Chinese watercolour sleeve art was the work of Hackett's then-partner, Brazilian artist Kim Poor. The cover depicts a travelling spirit carrying a fortune-teller's crystal ball. The inner gatefold shows a cave-dwelling, sackcloth-clad hermit. Genesis circa I Can't Dance this was not.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1706879462/articles/IrxwS0rNJ1707137680005/1684874313.jpg]
Hackett had written some of the album's material in US hotel rooms while touring The Lamb... with Genesis (something he found to be a useful distraction from his stage fright), but the recording of Voyage... began back in the UK in June 1975. Still on good terms with his Genesis bandmates, Hackett enlisted Mike Rutherford to play bass guitar, bass pedals and fuzz 12-string, and Phil Collins to play drums and sing lead vocals on Star Of Sirius. The flute-playing that might otherwise have fallen to Peter Gabriel was by Hackett's younger brother, John, a classically trained virtuoso who featured on many Steve Hackett solo albums from that point on, and became part of his elder brother's touring band until 1983.
"It was an incredibly exciting time for John and I," says Hackett. "We were working very closely together and I was living at home with my parents again.
I was given a very decent advance of £20,000 by [label] Charisma, and we worked so quickly that I had money left over at the end. That was pleasing, because I'd never attempted to write a whole record on my own before and wasn't feeling terribly confident. I'd been concerned I might end up with a load of outtakes and waste the advance." Voyage... was recorded at Kingsway Recorders at 129 Kingsway in London's Holborn. Famously the hatching ground for such tracks as The Jimi Hendrix Experience's cover of Hey Joe, it was a studio in which Peter Green, one of Hackett's early guitar heroes, had worked with Fleetwood Mac.
"Kingsway was actually in the basement of a building called Aviation House," recalls Hackett. "You couldn't make any noise until after 6pm, but after that you could make as much racket as you wanted - and we did.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1706879462/articles/IrxwS0rNJ1707137680005/7860011638.jpg]
You'd sometimes hear London Tube trains when you were in the echo chamber they had there, but that just added to the special subterranean character of the place. It was bit like being down in the War Rooms or something: 'Here we are with mighty forces at our disposal!"" Statements of intent don't come much more bold than the album's astonishing opener, Ace Of Wands. In the tarot deck, that card symbolises inspiration, potential, fun and growth - all things someone embarking on a solo career might hope for.
"Yes, that's it precisely," says Hackett. "One of the many books about the tarot I was reading at that time described it as the beginning of a new venture, so with Ace Of Wands and what that card means, I thought what could be more apropos?"
Other players on the sometimes classical-sounding Voyage Of The Acolyte included Robin Miller on oboe and English horn, cellist Nigel WarrenGreen, John Acock on all kinds of keyboards, and Percy Jones of jazzfusion band Brand X on bass. Phil Collins also played in Brand X, whose debut album Unorthodox Behaviour would be released the following year.
Hackett confirms that Jones came to Voyage... via Collins, but the bassist was also recommended to Hackett by Brian Eno.
"Percy would always do something spontaneous and brilliant," says the guitarist. "That anarchic fretless part on A Tower Struck Down is him. Percy wasn't a 'follow the riff' kind of guy." Elsewhere, it was bassist John Gustafson (then with the Ian Gillan Band) who played on the brilliantly arranged Star Of Sirius, his inclusion likely somewhat serendipitous, since Kingsway Studios was by that point owned by Gillan together with Deep Purple producer Martin Birch. Of Collins's lead vocals on Star Of Sirius (Collins also played drums and by John Hackett. Elsewhere, operatic voices played on Mellotron have shades of Carl Orff's devilish 1935 cantata Carmina Burana. A Tower Struck Down's malevolent feel is cemented by its sinister soundscape section, which includes an archive recording of Nazi Party supporters chanting "Sieg heil!" As someone who had grown up in the post-Blitz bombsites of London, it was natural for Hackett to document destruction in A Tower Struck Down, but Prog wonders if, circa Voyage..., he ever felt uneasy drawing inspiration from some more foreboding cards?
"No," he says. "Because tarot, for me, symbolises a number of possibilities. And when you read the various analyses of the Death card, say, it's not meant to be taken literally. I think it's most aptly described as symbolising the end of one way of life and the beginning of another. Not that I decided to write a song called Death. I thought that might be a bit much!"
Perhaps we've all seen too many movies where the Death card proceeds someone copping it? "Yes," Hackett agrees, smiling. "It's made for it, isn't it? Like in the tarot scene in Live And Let Die. I only ever took the tarot metaphorically," he adds. "I saw it as an extension of other philosophical ideas."
So tarot was part of his interest in other esoteric subjects?
"Yeah. I remember reading [Scottish psychiatrist] RD Laing's The Divided Self: An Existential Study In Sanity And Madness, for example. Years later, I wrote a song about it [2012's Divided Self, by Hackett and Chris Squire's side-project Squackett]. I'd get hold of the most perplexing material and try to understand it; start at the top of the mountain and work my way down. I'm a bit of an extremist that way."
There is, as Hackett acknowledges, a beautiful melancholy to much of Voyage Of The Acolyte. Or, as he puts it, "a kind of a...
"You have to remember that my experiences in Genesis were largely extremely positive," Hackett says today. "In fact, when we were touring Selling England By The Pound, a bit of Foxtrot and a bit of Nursery Cryme, I felt like I was in the best band in the world.
For me, Selling England... is the epitome of the form. It's got elegiac lyrics and hugely accomplished songwriting.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1706879462/articles/IrxwS0rNJ1707137680005/1478776011.jpg]
I was thinking, "This is it. This is where I belong."" It was while making the follow-up to Selling England..., the double album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, that Hackett tells Prog that his sense of belonging began to falter a little. The Lamb... was his fourth album with Genesis, and the one after which singer Peter Gabriel, who had brought Hackett to the band after seeing his ad in Melody Maker, left the group.
"I'm surmising here," says Hackett, "paraphrasing, perhaps, but my memory of making The Lamb Lies Down... is that Peter didn't really want to be part of Genesis any more.
Composition by committee had become anathema to him, and his first wife, Jill, had had a difficult pregnancy.
On top of that, William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist, had approached Peter about writing a screenplay, and I think Pete saw that as a new world of multimedia possibilities." To further complicate matters, when Friedkin sensed that his screenplay offer might spell the end of Gabriel and Genesis, he didn't want that on his head. "So he dropped the idea," says Hackett. "Then Peter came back and agreed to tour The Lamb Lies Down... and promote it. He also made it clear he'd leave the band after doing so.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1706879462/articles/IrxwS0rNJ1707137680005/4110813404.jpg]
"Maybe what Peter really wanted was to take some time off, be a family man and resume with Genesis later," Hackett reflects. "But I wasn't party to that information at the time. That was more a conversation he had with Mike [Rutherford] and Tony [Banks], who were his fellow founding members." The crux of it all, perhaps, was that old chestnut 'musical differences'.
Within the very competitive confines of Genesis, Banks's keyboard-playing around the time of The Lamb... was becoming increasingly virtuosic, and Gabriel met this with what Hackett describes as "a similarly intensified approach to vocals, equally dense with lots of imagery. So you had this claustrophobic thing going on: two guys locking antlers within the band.
"Once we were losing Pete and everybody was at loggerheads over space in the music, everything got much more difficult," Hackett concludes. "True, I made another two Genesis LPs with Mike and Tony after Pete left, but what was being born in my mind was something where instrumentals were as important as vocals. That's why you've got Voyage Of The Acolyte." With each of its eight tracks based on a different card from the tarot, Voyage Of The Acolyte was an esoteric, art-for-art's sake affair, rather than something governed or grounded by commercial appeal. Its delicate, Chinese watercolour sleeve art was the work of Hackett's then-partner, Brazilian artist Kim Poor. The cover depicts a travelling spirit carrying a fortune-teller's crystal ball. The inner gatefold shows a cave-dwelling, sackcloth-clad hermit. Genesis circa I Can't Dance this was not.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1706879462/articles/IrxwS0rNJ1707137680005/1684874313.jpg]
Hackett had written some of the album's material in US hotel rooms while touring The Lamb... with Genesis (something he found to be a useful distraction from his stage fright), but the recording of Voyage... began back in the UK in June 1975. Still on good terms with his Genesis bandmates, Hackett enlisted Mike Rutherford to play bass guitar, bass pedals and fuzz 12-string, and Phil Collins to play drums and sing lead vocals on Star Of Sirius. The flute-playing that might otherwise have fallen to Peter Gabriel was by Hackett's younger brother, John, a classically trained virtuoso who featured on many Steve Hackett solo albums from that point on, and became part of his elder brother's touring band until 1983.
"It was an incredibly exciting time for John and I," says Hackett. "We were working very closely together and I was living at home with my parents again.
I was given a very decent advance of £20,000 by [label] Charisma, and we worked so quickly that I had money left over at the end. That was pleasing, because I'd never attempted to write a whole record on my own before and wasn't feeling terribly confident. I'd been concerned I might end up with a load of outtakes and waste the advance." Voyage... was recorded at Kingsway Recorders at 129 Kingsway in London's Holborn. Famously the hatching ground for such tracks as The Jimi Hendrix Experience's cover of Hey Joe, it was a studio in which Peter Green, one of Hackett's early guitar heroes, had worked with Fleetwood Mac.
"Kingsway was actually in the basement of a building called Aviation House," recalls Hackett. "You couldn't make any noise until after 6pm, but after that you could make as much racket as you wanted - and we did.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1706879462/articles/IrxwS0rNJ1707137680005/7860011638.jpg]
You'd sometimes hear London Tube trains when you were in the echo chamber they had there, but that just added to the special subterranean character of the place. It was bit like being down in the War Rooms or something: 'Here we are with mighty forces at our disposal!"" Statements of intent don't come much more bold than the album's astonishing opener, Ace Of Wands. In the tarot deck, that card symbolises inspiration, potential, fun and growth - all things someone embarking on a solo career might hope for.
"Yes, that's it precisely," says Hackett. "One of the many books about the tarot I was reading at that time described it as the beginning of a new venture, so with Ace Of Wands and what that card means, I thought what could be more apropos?"
Other players on the sometimes classical-sounding Voyage Of The Acolyte included Robin Miller on oboe and English horn, cellist Nigel WarrenGreen, John Acock on all kinds of keyboards, and Percy Jones of jazzfusion band Brand X on bass. Phil Collins also played in Brand X, whose debut album Unorthodox Behaviour would be released the following year.
Hackett confirms that Jones came to Voyage... via Collins, but the bassist was also recommended to Hackett by Brian Eno.
"Percy would always do something spontaneous and brilliant," says the guitarist. "That anarchic fretless part on A Tower Struck Down is him. Percy wasn't a 'follow the riff' kind of guy." Elsewhere, it was bassist John Gustafson (then with the Ian Gillan Band) who played on the brilliantly arranged Star Of Sirius, his inclusion likely somewhat serendipitous, since Kingsway Studios was by that point owned by Gillan together with Deep Purple producer Martin Birch. Of Collins's lead vocals on Star Of Sirius (Collins also played drums and by John Hackett. Elsewhere, operatic voices played on Mellotron have shades of Carl Orff's devilish 1935 cantata Carmina Burana. A Tower Struck Down's malevolent feel is cemented by its sinister soundscape section, which includes an archive recording of Nazi Party supporters chanting "Sieg heil!" As someone who had grown up in the post-Blitz bombsites of London, it was natural for Hackett to document destruction in A Tower Struck Down, but Prog wonders if, circa Voyage..., he ever felt uneasy drawing inspiration from some more foreboding cards?
"No," he says. "Because tarot, for me, symbolises a number of possibilities. And when you read the various analyses of the Death card, say, it's not meant to be taken literally. I think it's most aptly described as symbolising the end of one way of life and the beginning of another. Not that I decided to write a song called Death. I thought that might be a bit much!"
Perhaps we've all seen too many movies where the Death card proceeds someone copping it? "Yes," Hackett agrees, smiling. "It's made for it, isn't it? Like in the tarot scene in Live And Let Die. I only ever took the tarot metaphorically," he adds. "I saw it as an extension of other philosophical ideas."
So tarot was part of his interest in other esoteric subjects?
"Yeah. I remember reading [Scottish psychiatrist] RD Laing's The Divided Self: An Existential Study In Sanity And Madness, for example. Years later, I wrote a song about it [2012's Divided Self, by Hackett and Chris Squire's side-project Squackett]. I'd get hold of the most perplexing material and try to understand it; start at the top of the mountain and work my way down. I'm a bit of an extremist that way."
There is, as Hackett acknowledges, a beautiful melancholy to much of Voyage Of The Acolyte. Or, as he puts it, "a kind of a...
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Prog (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 147