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Review: Steve Hackett, Colston Hall, Bristol
In those early Peter Gabriel-era Genesis videos, guitarist Steve Hackett cuts a rather shy dash, hidden away behind glasses and luxuriant facial hair. It was easy to underestimate his contribution to the band’s distinctive sound. Today the specs and whiskers are gone and he seems altogether more comfortable as the centre of attention, becoming quite the Mr. Chuckletrousers as he threatens to “punish” us with new material before wheeling out most of Wind and Wuthering for a 40th anniversary airing. There’s even a bit of political soapboxing – unthinkable during the Genesis years, except when Phil Collins gifted to the NME his threat to leave the country if Labour won the 1997 general election. Introducing Behind the Smoke, the refugee song from new album The Night Siren, Hackett observes that he wouldn’t be here tonight if Britain hadn’t welcomed his family after they fled religious persecution in Poland.
We get three impressive tracks from the album – including El Nino and In the Skeleton Gallery – in the first of two lengthy sets, their Middle Eastern flavours broadening the Hackett musical palette as his guitar weaves around jazzer Rob Townsend’s soprano saxophone. The band remains much the same as the last time he played here, with singing drummer Gary O’Toole and keyboard player/occasional songwriting collaborator Roger King. But regular Steven Wilson sidekick and – lest we ever permit him to forget – former Kajagoogoo popster Nick Beggs takes over from The Flower Kings’ Roine Stolt on a multitude of guitars. That Beggs, like O’Toole, is a strong vocalist proves particularly advantageous, since singing is not Hackett’s strongest suit. Those CSN-style multi-part harmonies come to the fore during a gorgeous rendition of Serpentine Song from 2003’s To Watch the Storms album. As usual, Hackett ends the first set with the magnificently bombastic Shadow of the Hierophant – a Genesis song in all but name – which sees Beggs on the floor pounding bass pedals with his fists.
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Despite being musically tight, they’re an unlikely looking band, Hackett’s only sartorial instruction seeming to be that they dress in black like their leader. O’Toole favours the smart suit’n’tie look, while Beggs wouldn’t look out of place in an extreme metal band with his long hair, T-shirt and tattoos. But here comes Nad Sylvan to add a touch of flamboyance to the second set. He’s resplendent in a remarkable full-length purple coat that . . . well, let’s just say someone is probably missing a rather fine pair of curtains. An extraordinarily accomplished vocal chameleon whose timbre is closer to that of Gabriel than Collins, Sylvan is singing mostly Collins-era material tonight which gives us an intriguing insight into what Wind and Wuthering might have sounded like with the Bard of Box on vocals.
Hackett tells us that Wind…, his Genesis swansong, is his favourite album with the band. Mike Rutherford remains sniffy about it, which is perhaps why his sweet love song Your Own Special Way is excluded. That’s a bit of a shame, but it’s hard to argue with the rest of Hackett’s minor score settling. The jarring ‘Phil Collins does Weather Report’ of Wot Gorilla? remains on the bench, as does Tony Banks’s fun but throwaway All in a Mouse’s Night. Reinstated is Hackett’s superior Inside and Out, which was dropped from the album, hastening his departure from Genesis, and subsequently popped up on that odd Spot the Pigeon EP (still a UK top 20 hit back when such things mattered).
He’s much more comfortable with the Tony Banks songs, which give Roger King a chance to shine on the keyboard-driven One for the Vine, whose cynicism about false prophets becomes ever more timely, and that rarely played piano intro to live staple Firth of Fifth. The latter remains one of the great Genesis songs that shouldn’t work on paper but really does, reminding us of just how musically adventurous they were in their prog heyday and featuring one Hackett’s best guitar solos. Sylvan, meanwhile, sits out Blood on the Rooftops, leaving O’Toole to take the vocal on one of the album’s under-appreciated gems.
Beggs is a more muscular player than Rutherford, which gives the material some additional oomph, but the real challenge here is in finding something for Townsend to do. For all its many qualities, Wind and Wuthering is not an album noted for its brass and woodwind. He takes a few of Banks’ keyboard lines effectively enough, but is often reduced to contributing additional percussion.
With so much concentration on one album, there’s only room for a modicum of other fan favourites. Dance on a Volcano and encore Los Endos are drawn from its predecessor, A Trick of the Tail, while the main set climaxes with a spine-tingling Gabriel facsimile from Sylvan on The Musical Box (featuring the tapping guitar solo that created modern heavy metal).
History records that Wind and Wuthering was released just days after the Sex Pistols allegedly shocked the nation on the Bill Grundy Show. Inconveniently for those who would have us believe otherwise, this had absolutely no impact whatsoever on Genesis’s upward career trajectory, though there are those who would argue that it’s their last great prog album. That its finest moments still sound so great four decades on underlines the fact that the most enduring music is made without heed of fad or fashion.
All photos by Mike Evans
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