- Hello there, how are you doing

- First of all, I would like you to tell me about the new album, "Genesis Revisited", what is the idea behind this album ?

-Well the idea was to re-record Genesis songs that I did during the seventies by the band, that was popular with the audience and that would sound more up to date if I recorded them now. I was always very found of "Watcher of the skies", but I always felt that it sounded much better live than it did on record. And now I think with the experience and the improved production technique, it’s possible to make that track sound very powerful and something like the way it did live, but also with a slice of re-arrangement so it flows better I think. So that’s some of the reason why I did the Genesis materials. There’s one other reason as well, over the years fans of Genesis stuff said they felt that the band missed my inputs and presents in guitar playing, and they asked me if I ever was going to re-join the band, and I always said I don’t think that’s likely but certain songs has become classics in their own rights, and I felt the need to do my own versions of those songs.

- How did you pick out these songs for this collection ?

- Picking out the songs, well, I went for my favourites, the ones that people think of as big kind of epic songs. Songs that went through a number of different move changes. A number like "Watcher of the skies" have a kind of mystical and sophistical quality to it as well. In the same way I think "Firth of Fifth" have that too, and those were from albums that was recorded within about a year from each other. "Watcher of the Skies" first appeared on "Foxtrot" in 1972, and when "Firth of Fifth" was on "Selling England by the Pound" from 1973. Both of them had a very powerful effect on the audience.

- You were playing in the band for a long period, from "Nurcery Cryme" in 1971 to "Wind and Wuthering" and the live album "Seconds out" in 1977

- I was in the band for about seven years, and there were about an album a year plus some extra live stuff, all in all I must be on 10 or 11 Genesis albums.

- There are two songs on the album that aren’t from any Genesis albums, "Valley of the Kings" and "Deja Vu", can you tell me about those songs ?

- "Deja Vu" was a song that Peter Gabriel wrote while he was singing in Genesis in the early seventies. It was a song that he started with in about 1973, and I had hoped at that time that it would be included on "Selling England by the Pound", but the song was never finished. That seemed like it was a competition between that song and "Firth of Fifth". I liked the melody very much, and some of the lyrics that Peter had at that time. I asked him if he minded if I finished off the song, and he said "Fine, go ahead". I finished the lyrics, and re-arranged the song. When I send him a copy of it, and he said he liked the guitar playing very much. It’s Paul Carrack that sings on the song. The other song was not really a Genesis tune at all. Something called "Valley of the Kings" which is a song of mine. When I was originally putting the album together for Japan, I didn’t have enough songs to go on the total package, so I included one or two of my own, and that one seems to be the favourite. When I played with Bill Bruford, I played him that, and he said he really loved the track and that it was his kind of music. He also liked the drumwork and the way it seemed to function in a kind of an unchanging way. So I thought, well so if people like Bill Bruford think it’s good, I’ll keep it on the album.

- You mentioned Paul Carrack a while ago, which other members are on the album, and what’s their musical background ?

- Well, Bill Bruford I mentioned, I guess everybody knows that he played with Yes and King Crimson, but he also played with Genesis for a year on the road, and that was very interresting. He played live for us the most of 1976. Tony Levin who also worked with Bill Bruford as a part of King Crimson rhythm section. There are in fact quiet a few King Crimson members on the album. Most of us have worked with each other in various ways through the years. Ian McDonald is on the album, who was from the original 1969 lineup of King Crimson, and John Wetton who was in the band around 1972. John Wetton who is singing and playing bass. Paul Carrack that we mentioned, was playing with Mike & The Mechanics these days, and was the leadsinger of Ace and worked with Squeeze as well. Colin Blunstone from Zombies, Chester Thompson and Alfonzo Johnson - Chester worked with Frank Zappa and with Weather Report, and he also worked with Genesis as a live drummer for many years. Alfonzo also played withChester in Weather Report. I think you also can say that Alfonzo was Chesters favourite bass player, and I would like to see how they worked together on a couple of tracks. Funny enough Alphonzo seemed to be aware of the early Genesis works, which may seem strange for a black american in the early seventies. You think that european stuff wouldn’t really appeal very much, but he is a very clever player and has a very wide taste, so it was great to work with him as well. There’s probably a lot of people that I left off. There’s people like Hugo Degenhardt on the album on drums, fine young drummer. He was in my band for a couple of tours, and on one or two albums as well. And also Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and my brother John Hackett and Julian Colbeck.

- Over to your musical background, the first time I ever heard about you, was in a band called Quiet World in 1970, was this the first band you played in ?

- Yes it was the first band I did a record with.

- The album by Quiet World was called "The Road", can you tell me about the band ?

- Well, I was hired as a guitarist to play with that band, but I didn’t do the writing, allthrough there’s a track called "Star" on it, that I wrote some of, but I’m actually not credited for it. Funny enough the first track on "The Road" was called "In the beginning", and that’s the same as the first track on the first Genesis album, which was called "In the beginning", there is some syncronicity at work within our joint background.

- Which other people did you play together with in Quiet World ?

- There was a drummer called Ernie O’Malley. it was mainly put together by some english brothers that moved to South Africa, called the Heather brothers, there was three of them, who now currently write musicals, and they have one or two of them put on the West End in London, so I guess they had success in the Lloyd Webber style.

- How old were you the first time you picked up the guitar, and which guitar players did you look up to at that time ?

- Well, by the time I was about twelve, I was starting to pick up the guitar, but not seriously before I was fourteen. I had an old guitar that my father had which was very big, it was too big for me really for many years, and finally when I was about twelve I was getting round it. The guitarplayers I was listening to at that time was Hank Marvin of The Shadows, and Jet Harris, who also was a guitarist with The Shadows at a time, who I think played bass with them at one point. There was people like Duane Eddy, quiet a lot of the stuff in these days sounded like cowboy movies, kind of country picking style, and I supposed that most of the records that people maked in those days sounded like Bonanza, a very twangy kind of guitar sound. And when I became interrested in the Stones, and Brian Jones Bottleneck technique, which I just thought was terrific. When I heard him played "I wanna be your man" playing the melody on guitar, get me really excited. And I started to listen to Segovia playing Bach in 1969, and that was very formative, and I realized that the guitar could do a number of things all at once, so I become interrested in classical guitar at that point.

- How was the rock scene in Britain in the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, and what did the wave of progressive bands and record labels at that time means for you ?

- Progressiv music hasn't really been coined, you had bands like Jethro Tull that combined some classical and jazz influences. Bands tended to be much more of a mixed bag really at that point, you had bands like Soft Machine and Pink Floyd, but in the way I thought that the fusion of classical, jazz and pop was perhaps ferficified by King Crimson with their "In the court of the Crimson King" album, which was one of my all time favourites, and I worked with some of these guys now, I work with Ian McDonald and Mike Giles and this very weekend we gonna re-record a version of "I talked to the wind" from that album.

- How did you come in contact with Genesis ?

- I put an advert in a musical paper, Melody Makers it was called, and after about five years of advertising myself, adventuary I got a call from Peter Gabriel, so that's what happened.

- You took over the guitar role in Genesis after Anthony Phillips, how was it the first time you entered the stage with Genesis ?

- Well the very first gig I did was a disaster, because there was a lot of music to remember and the equipment wasn't standarized at that point, so there was quiet a lot of equipment problems, so I remember that it wasn't a really happy experience the first gig. The second gig was a lot better. It was like a rehersal in front of 2 or 3 people, but still the less it was a gig. We managed to do it and i managed to remember it all and the equipment worked.

- Then you tried to get the job in Genesis, did you have to play an audition among many other guitarists and how was that ?

- No, I didn't actually. They have already some months earlier been through an audition and they had somebody, I think he was Mick Bernard, but they didn't feel he was right for them, so they was still looking around, so there was just me on my own, and I saw Pete and Tony and played for them, and then I met Mike and just playing some chord changes with him and we instantly seems to agree musically, lucky for me. That's where it started to take off.

- Can you tell me about your period in Genesis ?

- I can tell you it was seven years of very mixed emotions. I saw the band going from being a tiny band that was playing clubs. There was one gig I remember where there was just five persons in the audience, and then we doing stadiums with 18.000 and 20.000 people and selling out everywhere. In 7 years it was a very interresting turn of events, the band become far more professional with time and we get bigger and better road crews, they become more and more professional. I think that's the best way to describe it.

- How did you work together when you was making new songs, and how was the co-operation between the members of Genesis ?

- Well we used to make albums in those days, usually we used to spend about six weeks rehearsing and album, and about six weeks recording it. And when it was done, we was going touring everywhere in the world, and when next year it would be the same again. We did long long tours of America and Europe, we were sometimes touring for three months straight in USA and then come back to Europe and do three months of shows in France, Germany and Italian gigs that was always crazy, and all the other places in Europe. But in the main it was that kind of time frame and the way we worked with each other was that everyone would bring in their own seperate ideas and we tried to form them into shape collectively.

- You were on a record label called Charisma, did the record company in any way set limits for Genesis in their musical directions ?

- No, not at that time. Charisma was anguish that the band should express themself fully without interference. They was sometimes critical, but I think they was happy to see the band take off. They wasn't interresting in critesism tremendensly. They just let the band get on with the job, which I think was a very good way of doing it. I think the band narurally starts to orientate what they ought to be doing and I think that no band is perfect and sometimes a band can lose direction, but in the main I think around the time of "Foxtrot" and "Selling England by the Pound" the band was heading against a direction that was very strong.

- "The Lamb lies down on Broadway" is one of my favourite albums, can you tell me a little bit about that album ?

- Well, it didn't start out as a concept album. it startet as a serial of seperate pieces, and when Peter starting to write a story around the album, which is why it become a concept album. Peter Gabriel came out with the idea of a central character called Rael, who went through lots of changes in his life and he was sent into the underworld. It was a kind of modern miss, a kind of urban miss and it was an atempt for the band to do something more contemparary than based on historical or mythological arcitypes.

- You went out of Genesis after "Seconds Out" album, why did you leave Genesis ?

- Well, I wanted to work with some other people, that's the truth. I felt by then I exhausted the posibility to working with those particulary people and I wanted to devolop my own techinque and to understand more about music, so that's why I left.

- Well, Acolyte was my first solo record, and I didn't know if I was capable to do a whole album or not. So when I started working on "Voyage of the Acolyte", I really used to write part of songs with other people, and very rarely whole songs by myself. It required confidence and a sense of wonder and the ability ot experiment and to be able to see an idea through all the way. So it was a very interesting and very very satisfying experience seeing a tremendous amount of music come forward that I dreamt of myself.

- Through the carriere of yours, you also played in a band called GTR, can you tell me a little bit about that band as well ?

- Yes, GTR was a band that I had for about 2 years with Steve Howe. We had one studio album, and we toured mainly in America with it. It was produced by Jeff Downes, who Steve Howe worked together with in Asia. Just recently there been a live album released of a concert we did in Los Angeles - on a place called The Shrine in 1996. So that's out on a label called King Bisquit Flower and shows the band playing live, absolutely live, no overdubs. It was absolutely as it was played.

- You were also in a band called Box of Frogs on their second album ?

- I think I played with them for a day or so. I just came in and played a few soloes for them, so I wasn't actually a member of the band. I was just hired as a session player.

- Is it the same thing with the Peter Banks album you was on too ?

- Yes, I did a session for him. I was just one in a team of guitarists, in both cases there was a team of guitarists employed and I was one of the team.

- There are a whole lot of albums with you from 1975 untill now, is any of these albums that you remember better than the other ones ?

- I remember doing "Spectral Mornings" which was an album I did in 1979. I remember that particulary because I had a new band of my own, that was very well received and was full of very clever people and so I enjoyed the album very much. I think it has a freshness of sound which feels beautiful to me.

- We are now into 1997, and what kind of promotion are planned for the new album like vidoes, and are you going out on a tour to promote the album as well ?

- Well, at the moment I just spending my life making albums and spending less time touring, but in the future we would do more concerts. I did some concerts in Japan at the end of last year witch was promoting "Genesis Revisited" with Chester Thompson, Ian McDonald, John Wetton and Julian Colbeck. We also had a live video from that and also a live album that's gonna be released at sometimes in the nearest future. I have live works witch is on video, not the kind of videos that is full of effects and everything, but it's really plain, an I think it's a good video.

- What are your future plans now, is it another album with Genesis struff or is it brand new stuff the next time you are going into studio ?

- Well I have been recording classical stuff for a while now, and I had a hit album earlier this year with an album called "A Midsummernights dream" which was pieces recorded for nylon strings and classical guitars and contemprary classical and orchestra, so it is Royal Philharmonic Orchestra again, and it was based on very traditional material. The Shakespear play "A Midsummernights Dream". And I'm also working on another classical or contemprary classical piece of work, so I think I'm coming back working with orchestras. I enjoy this very much

And that was the end of the interview with Steve Hackett, and for you Genesis fans out there. His album is a must, a really good piece of work, so check it out.

Geir Fosby - for High Voltage