Steve Hackett interview with Prog Magazine about the album: Wolflight
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
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
00:46with Pete lyrically? You have all of that but at the same time of course you want to
00:52do your own thing and I just thought yeah I've really got to push the envelope harmonically
00:59with this. It's got to be as good as some of those things that I've listened to. It's got
01:04to be as good as Grieg. It's got to be as good as Tchaikovsky. It's got to be as good as that
01:10first day when I worked with Phil in the rehearsal room with the band. He started playing me something
01:15and I said it sounds fantastic and he said oh that's Ringo Starr's drum solo off of Abbey Road
01:24and I always remembered that and I thought you know I want to do something like that. That's a
01:28little bit like Keith Moon isn't it? So it's got the bass drum going but it's like
01:33doing fills all around that. So we had the Wolves at the beginning singing away and a Frozen
01:40reverb note of that so they hit a seventh and then the drums come in and then it's band
01:46kicking in and the orchestra and choir and everything.
02:10Every time I've done an album I've always thought well I need to get orchestral perspectives in here
02:27but how do we enlarge everything and even if you've got a real orchestra on it or you've got
02:34several people tracked up it's quite hard to not have the orchestra impoverished by the group
02:41because groups make a big noise but there's this area of marcato stuff where they're playing with
02:49the edge of the bow and reinforcing some of the bass things with brass so that it's not just
02:57the sort of the kind of definition of bass end that when you get a great bass player with a
03:04really extraordinary sound like Chris Squire who's on the album there's this thing that orchestras
03:11they have a more amorphous bass end. It's not dependent on great speakers and sharp definition
03:21it's more than that so I wanted to get that idea of infinite bass so we stacked up a lot of that
03:29you know we have more than one thing playing basses you know I mean I think on one track we
03:35had about you know 20 different things all doing bass. There's a lot of things on it that shouldn't
03:41really work orchestras with rock groups shouldn't really work you know because they're not supposed
03:47to be as percussive and I wanted it to sound like an expanded rock band but not just an expanded
03:53rock band that sounded like it had an orchestra with it but also with world music instruments
03:59as well so the Arabian Ud, the Didgeridoo, the Diduk, the Tar from Azerbaijan all these various
04:06things that help to expand it a bit you know.
04:18So
04:43working with these other instruments that I'm not familiar with working with
04:47Malik Mansirov who 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 where 50% of the
05:04people are still nomadic I believe he's a little bit like he's got the speed of John McLaughlin
05:11and in a way the mysticism of Ravi Shankar he's incredible and of course the other instruments
05:19that might be less familiar to people the Arabian Ud 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 and sliding and so on dust and dreams that that kicks off some of
05:48these world instruments they often set the scene before before the song start it's almost as if
05:54when Malik is playing on the beginning of War Flight you've got almost like the flickering
06:01flames of a campfire you know the kind of music that they might have played at one time when they
06:07just sat around to entertain themselves and I wanted to get an aspect of that so a little bit
06:12like different relay teams so you've got the world music musicians you've got the the aspect of folk
06:20songs so you know at times I wanted to delve back as far as Peter Paul and Mary I wanted
06:26to have that but then I wanted to have rock as well you know the edge of that and then
06:32whatever orchestra could do on top of that it's my proudest moment to be honest you know this album
06:56so
07:05you