Steve Hackett on the making and ideas behind Wolflight, his 2015 album that he called "my proudest moment".
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00:00Genesis always was a hard act to follow, and I've always been aware of that. I think for
00:23all the guys in the band that's been the case. Whether you have individual hits or whatever,
00:29there's always that sort of, it's a bit like the mothership, isn't it? When I write a song,
00:34I think, would this have passed muster with the other guys? Would Phil have liked it rhythmically?
00:40Would Tony have liked it harmonically? Would it have worked for Mike? Would it have worked
00:45with Pete lyrically? And you have all of that, but at the same time, of course, you want
00:52to do your own thing. And I just thought, yeah, I've really got to push the envelope
00:59harmonically with this. It's got to be as good as some of those things that I've listened to.
01:03It's got to be as good as Grieg. It's got to be as good as Tchaikovsky. It's got to be as good
01:09as that first day when I worked with Phil in the rehearsal room with the band. He started playing
01:14me something. I said, it sounds fantastic. And he said, oh, that's Ringo Starr's drum solo off of
01:20Abbey Road. And I always remembered that, and I thought, I want to do something like that.
01:28That's a little bit like Keith Moon, isn't it? So it's got the bass drum going, but it's doing
01:34fills all around that. So we had the Wolves at the beginning singing away, and a frozen reverb
01:40note of that, so they hit a seventh. And then the drums come in, and then it's band kicking in,
01:47and the orchestra, and choir, and everything.
02:17Every time I've done an album, I've always thought, well, I need to get orchestral perspectives in
02:26here, but how do we enlarge everything? And even if you've got a real orchestra on it,
02:31or you've got several people tracked up, it's quite hard to not have the orchestra impoverished
02:40by the group, because groups make a big noise. But there's this area of
02:47marcato stuff, where they're playing with the edge of the bow, and reinforcing some of the
02:52bass things with brass, so that it's not just the kind of definition of bass end that,
03:02when you get a great bass player with a really extraordinary sound, like Chris Squire,
03:08who's on the album, there's this thing that orchestras, they have a more amorphous
03:14bass end. It's not dependent on great speakers and sharp definition, it's more than that.
03:23So I wanted to get that idea of infinite bass, so we stacked up a lot of that. We had
03:30more than one thing playing basses. I mean, I think on one track, we had about 20 different
03:37things all doing bass. There's a lot of things on it that shouldn't really work. Orchestras
03:43with rock groups shouldn't really work, because they're not supposed to be as percussive.
03:49And I wanted it to sound like an expanded rock band, but not just an expanded rock band that
03:54sounded like it had an orchestra with it, but also with world music instruments as well. So
04:00the Arabian Oud, the Didgeridoo, the Diduk, the Tar from Azerbaijan,
04:05all these various things that help to expand it a bit.
04:30So
04:43working with these other instruments that I'm not familiar with, working with Malik Mansirov,
04:49who plays the Tar. The Tar, small stringed instrument with sympathetic strings,
04:54same family of instruments as the guitar and the sitar, and Malik from Azerbaijan,
05:03where 50% of the people are still nomadic, I believe. He's a little bit like, he's got the
05:09speed of John McLaughlin, and in a way, the mysticism of Ravi Shankar. He's incredible.
05:18And of course, the other instruments that might be less
05:21familiar to people, the Arabian Oud. I bought that in London, it's a fretless lute.
05:27I learned to play it a little bit. I'm not the level of virtuoso on it that Malik is on the Tar,
05:34but I took some things from him, the idea of playing on one string, more things on one string
05:42than you would normally do in sliding and so on. Dust and Dreams, that kicks off. Some of these
05:48world instruments, they often set the scene before the songs start. It's almost as if when Malik is
05:55playing on the beginning of War Flight, you've got almost like the flickering flames of a campfire.
06:04The kind of music that they might have played at one time when they just sat around to
06:08entertain themselves, and I wanted to get an aspect of that. A little bit like different
06:13relay teams, so you've got the world music musicians, you've got the aspect of folk songs, so
06:21at times I wanted to build back as far as Peter, Paul and Mary. I wanted to have that,
06:28but then I wanted to have rock as well, the edge of that, and then whatever orchestra could do
06:34on top of that. It's my proudest moment, to be honest, this album.
07:04you