STEVE HACKETT - The Hour of the Wolf

26. March 2015

Steve Hackett Genesis

STEVE HACKETT - The Hour of the Wolf

For a long time Steve Hackett held up the flag of progressive rock of the seventies with his releases, to finally celebrate this peak on his own account with "Genesis Revisited" and at the same time reap the deserved harvest of his steadfastness. For this and above all to the new album, the concept album "Wolflight", the smart Brit is our question and answer.

The project "Genesis Revisited II", which is documented on the magnificent recordings "Live At Hammersmith" and "Live At The Royal Albert Hall", finally brought the English guitarist Steve Hackett, who was in the service of Genesis from 1971 to 1977, broader success as a solo artist - with a large-scale world tour and considerable sales figures. He had previously released several ambitious progressive rock albums, most recently "Out Of The Tunnel's Mouth" (2009) and "Beyond The Shrouded Horizon" (2011). With "Wolflight", he is now consistently continuing along this path.

eclipsed: How was it after the "Genesis Revisited" projects to return to your own music?

Steve Hackett: The preoccupation with the Genesis songs reminded me again of the power of long experimental music forms. Genesis quickly became my ideal as a band. I tried to steer them in certain directions, which was not easy with all the strong personalities in the band.

eclipsed: What's Wolflight all about now?

Hackett: First and foremost, to uphold the flag of cultural diversity. This is important, whether in music, art or politics. Given the fundamentalism that is currently boiling up, we are living in a dangerously intolerant time. That's where we have to get up and make ourselves felt. I don't want the world to return to bankrupt ideologies. That's why the album has deliberately turned out to be as stylistically diverse as possible. I work on it with many genres and different cultural influences. I call the pan genre. So you hear a Tar from Azerbaijan on the title track, then there's a didgeridoo, an Arabic oud, the sound of the desert. Archaic instruments dating back to the dawn of mankind; all in a modern cultural exchange.

eclipsed: What's with the album title?

Hackett: He stands for a lot of things. "Wolf" is a synonym for freedom and independence. Musically it also means for me to break with rigid boundaries and rules in order to create something new. The title itself refers to the hour before dawn, the term appears in this context for the first time in the "Odyssey". That's how far back it goes. At this hour I wrote a lot of the new material. It is a very creative time, still clouded in dreams and before human logic, a time of poetry.

Lesen Sie mehr im eclipsed Nr. 169 (April 2015).