A step back in time

© Simon Poulter 2022

In 1978 Genesis had a hit with the love song Follow You, Follow Me, which marked a sea change in their concert clientelle. At a stroke, the band have noted, there were exponentially more women at their gigs. For the previous ten years, they’d been mostly patronised - again in their words - by men wearing army surplus greatcoats and carrying notebooks in which to record their thoughts about the noodly progressive rock they’d come to consume.

From that moment, Genesis would go on to become one of the biggest pop-rock bands in the world, still rooted in the progressive genre, but with shorter, MTV-friendly songs leading their repertoire. Steve Hackett, who until 1977 had been the band’s highly innovative lead guitarist (he invented the ‘tapping’ technique later made famous by Eddie van Halen and numerous other long-haired headbanging axemen), had left to pursue a solo career, just before this transition in the band’s fortunes. And, yet, for those still attached to the band’s arguably most novel era - with Peter Gabriel as its frontman, replete with his costumes, characters and penchant for lyrical theatricality - Hackett continues to keep the flame alive.

© Simon Poulter 2022

Which is why the crowd queuing outside the Eventim Apollo (the venue better known to old heads like me as Hammersmith Odeon), appeared to be 50 year-aged versions of those earnest young men in their army greatcoats. Paunches were in evidence, while some of those who still had hair had it tied in ponytails, despite expanding bald patches. This meant invariably finding yourself standing next to someone looking exactly like The Simpsons’ Comic Book Man. I do say this from a point of smugness at having a full head of hair.

Once inside, however, with the lights down, such cosmetics count for nothing. Hackett and his band - which includes longstanding keyboard stalwart Roger King, second guitarist Amanda Lehmann, bassist Jonas Reingold, flautist/saxophonist Rob Townsend and drummer Craig Blundell - launched into a first half of songs from Hackett’s early solo ventures, such as Ace Of Wands, The Devil’s Cathedral, Spectral Mornings and Every Day. All very good, but it was, I suspect, the second act of the evening that most punters had come to hear - the 1972 Genesis album Foxtrot performed in its entirety.

Being only 5 at the time it came out, I would have missed the original tour for this album, which included Gabriel’s notorious (and, to his bandmates’ surprise) appearance in Dublin wearing a scarlet dress and a fox’s head (a literal representation of the Foxtrot album cover), commencing the costuming that would become the hallmark of his time as Genesis frontman until his departure in 1975. So it would be fair to say that my interest last night at the Apollo/Odeon was to experience something of the magic of an album that, while not changing the band’s financial fortunes, is still held in the hearts of fans as being one of considerable virtuosity, with a still-young band of gifted musicians writing complex songs about complex subjects.

© Simon Poulter 2022

Opening with Watcher Of The Skies, a tribute to an Arthur C. Clarke novel with a bit of Holst’s The Planets thown in, Hackett introduces his vocalist Nad Sylvan, the gloriously eccentric Swedish singer who, vocally sits between Gabriel and his successor, Phil Collins, but despite his long blond Scandi hair and somewhat theatrical mannerisms, blends into the band canvas, rather trying to take centre stage, as Gabriel would have done in 1975. 

Foxtrot’s first side is worked through in sequence, including the prescient social commentary of Get ’Em Out By Friday (a somewhat dystopian Gabriel song about a 70s newtown in which the idea is floated to have residents genetically shortened so that they fit smaller homes in order to build more of them). There is, too, Can-Utility And The Coastliners, a rare early Hackett composition, losely based on the story of King Canute who, you might remember, ordered the sea to be turned back in response to lickspittle sycophancy, something rock bands will know a thing about. 

To replicate the flip from Side 1 to Side 2 of Foxtrot, there is a mini interval, after which Hackett is provided with a classical guitar and a stool. Performing alone, Hackett plays Horizons, a beautiful, baroque instrumental which, in Hammersmith, underlines Hackett’s status as an under-appreciated classical guitarist (he has produced several albums of classical playing, alongside his rock releases). Faithfully following the album’s track listing, it’s a precursor to one of the most adventurous pieces of music any band has ever pulled off: Supper’s Ready. 

No doubt part-inspired - or at least encouraged - by the 16-minute, eight-song closing medley on The Beatles’ Abbey Road, over the course of seven parts Supper’s Ready romps through a variety of time signatures and themes, starting with the ghostly apparition Gabriel claimed to have seen, through the Lewis Carrroll-esque whimsy of Willow Farm, to the epic conclusion of  As Sure As Eggs Is Eggs (Aching Men's Feet), with its biblical reference to “a new Jerusalem”. Perhaps, on the original record, it appeared more as a collection of songs, but hearing the enture 23-minute suite performed live for the first time in my lifetime, there is an added power to the song that not even the rendition on the imperious live album Seconds Out (during the mixing of which Hackett quit the band) captured.

Many, many years ago, for only my second live review for the NME I saw Sade at the Royal Albert Hall, and was struck by the somewhat clinical, sterile recreation of the Diamond Life album that had propelled her to stardum. Live performances work best when there is some reinvention, either to mitigate the inability to recreate complex arrangements created in the studio, or simply to indulge the artist’s whimsy, and introduce some riffing. Hackett has no need for either. With a piece as intricate as Supper’s Ready - and indeed the entire Foxtrot album - there was no need for embelishment.

© Simon Poulter 2022

This applied, too, to Firth Of Fifth, the grandiose epic on Selling England By The Pound that opens with an extended piano solo - played by Tony Banks on the original, and here faithfully and expertly recreated by King - before the song opens out, heading towards its somewhat legendary guitar solo. I once made a tit of myself when interviewing Hackett, in which I told him that, as a 13-year-old, I’d learned to play the solo, note-for-note, on my Spanish guitar. He was suitably unimpressed. It is still one of the greatest rock guitar solos of all time, though usually criminally overlooked by Jimmy Page’s on Stairway To Heaven, or David Gilmour’s on Comfortably Numb.

Solos are, of course, one of the nadirs of rock concerts. This Is Spinal Tap captured the indulgent absurdity of it, and there is a taste of this with an extended bass solo by Reingold earlier in the show. Blundell introduces the final song of the night with an elongated workout on the drums, but I’ll give him that for two reasons: 1) Craig is a thoroughly decent bloke who recorded a video of encouragement for a friend of mine after she was caught up in the 2015 Bataclan attack and took up drumming as a coping mechanism; and 2) Collins and his co-drummers (Chester Thompson and, briefly, Bill Bruford) would perform a drum duet as a prelude to Los Endos, the closing song of the Trick Of The Tail album whenever it was played live. And thus, Los Endos closes the evening with Hackett and Co in all its grandeur.

I’ve often maintained Trick Of The Tail and Wind & Wuthering, the albums that bore Hackett’s final studio contributions to Genesis, are two of the band’s best, bridging the lyrical and musical flights of fancy of the Gabriel era, and predating the pop orientation that Collins, Banks and Mike Rutherford as a trio went for in the 80s. There have been claims that Hackett’s contribution to the band, over the six albums in as many years, has been diminished. Part of this maybe due to the dominance of writing by Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford, and then the perceived commercial success that Collins’ higher profile led to, long after Hackett had left. But listening back to the albums he played on, his guitar work plays a much bigger role in the soundstage than is ever given credit for. 

In Hammersmith last night, we were given a highly enjoyable reminder. His solo material notwithstanding, I suspect the majority of last night’s punters were there for a trip down Memory Lane. And they would have been richly rewarded. Compared to the disappointing final experience of Genesis, earlier this year at London’s O2 Arena, this felt like the real deal. A wallow, yes, but a thoroughly enjoyable, comfort food-for-the-ears indulgence, provided authentically by the original purveyor.