Steve Hackett on securing Genesis' legacy

It has been almost 50 years since Steve Hackett left progressive rock titans Genesis but the 72-year-old guitarist is still carrying the torch for their now legendary 70s era.

Between 1971 to 1977, he helped create some of Britain’s most expansive and eccentric music before the band transformed into the Phil Collins-fronted soft rock outfit we know today.

Through his current live shows, Hackett does more than just pay tribute to that period. He brings it up to date for a new audience.

“We change things,” he explains, at home for a few days before jetting off back to Europe for more shows. “It evolves.

“There are extra things that go on with the music that were not there originally. I don’t want to slavishly do it. I just want to be authentic without it being exactly the same.”

Hackett, whose polite manner hides a steely determination, launched his Genesis Revisited project just over a decade ago with the aim of securing the music of the group’s classic line-up, which also included singer Peter Gabriel, bassist Mike Rutherford, keyboardist Tony Banks and drummer Phil Collins.

In September, he begins a 25-date UK tour marking 50 years since the release of Foxtrot, one of their best loved albums. “I sweated blood to write those songs and try and force the band to get a lightshow or a synthesiser and all these other things that were unpopular ideas at the time within the band,” he recalls.

“I had this philosophy that you have to make yourself unpopular to be popular.

“I had to be bloody-minded enough to try and get some of these ideas across, otherwise the band stuff was just going to sound eccentric and English and wasn’t going to communicate to the Americans.”

After helping create classic tracks such as Dancing With The Moonlit Knight and The Musical Box Hackett left Genesis in 1977 in search of greater autonomy.

The band then entered its most commercially successful era with Collins at the helm. Hackett describes the music Genesis made in the 1980s as its “MTV-approved stuff” – as opposed to the “sonic odysseys” of his era.

Now through his live shows, he caters to audiences in search of their more experimental fare.

“It seemed as if there were two types of Genesis fans,” he offers. “The ones who felt disenfranchised by what the band had become and then the new lot who only really knew the Invisible Touch years and the Phil Collins-driven stuff.

“I thought that we had worked bloody hard sweating blood to get that stuff together. Why don’t I reclaim it? I don’t want it to be lost.”

Genesis material features heavily in Hackett’s current sets, of course. But they also take in his newer solo material, orchestral moments and classical guitar played on nylon strings for a mellower sound.

He wrote and recorded two albums during lockdown, the acoustic Under A Mediterranean Sky and the brash, rocking and sometimes political Surrender Of Silence.

The UK Foxtrot At Fifty Tour starts on September 9 and Hackett will be in Hull, York and Sheffield.