Steve Hackett on the making and ideas behind Wolflight, his 2015 album that he called "my proudest moment".
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00:17 Genesis always was a hard act to follow
00:20 and I've always been aware of that.
00:23 I think for all the guys in the band that's been the case.
00:27 Whether you have individual hits or whatever,
00:30 there's always that sort of... it's a bit like the mothership, isn't it?
00:34 When I write a song, I think, would this have passed muster with the other guys?
00:38 Would Phil have liked it rhythmically?
00:41 Would Tony have liked it harmonically?
00:43 Would it have worked for Mike?
00:45 Would it have worked with Pete lyrically?
00:48 And you have all of that, but at the same time,
00:51 of course, you want to do your own thing.
00:54 And I just thought, yeah, I've really got to push the envelope harmonically with this.
01:00 It's got to be as good as some of those things that I've listened to.
01:03 It's got to be as good as Grieg.
01:05 It's got to be as good as Tchaikovsky.
01:08 It's got to be as good as that first day when I worked with Phil
01:12 in the rehearsal room with the band.
01:14 He started playing me something, I said, "It sounds fantastic."
01:17 And he said, "Oh, that's Ringo Starr's drum solo off of...
01:22 what's the one? Abbey Road."
01:25 And I always remembered that, and I thought, "I want to do something like that.
01:28 That's a little bit like Keith Moon, isn't it?"
01:30 So it's got the bass drum going, but it's like doing fills all around that.
01:35 So we had the Wolves at the beginning singing away,
01:39 and a frozen reverb note of that, so they hit a seventh.
01:42 And then the drums come in, and then it's band kicking in,
01:47 and the orchestra and choir and everything.
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01:55 [music]
02:23 Every time I've done an album, I've always thought,
02:25 "Well, I need to get orchestral perspectives in here,
02:27 but how do we enlarge everything?"
02:30 Even if you've got a real orchestra on it,
02:32 or you've got several people tracked up,
02:36 it's quite hard to not have the orchestra impoverished by the group,
02:41 because groups make a big noise.
02:44 But there's this area of marcato stuff,
02:49 where they're playing with the edge of the bow
02:51 and reinforcing some of the bass things with brass,
02:56 so that it's not just the kind of definition of bass end
03:02 that when you get a great bass player with a really extraordinary sound,
03:07 like Chris Squire, who's on the album,
03:10 there's this thing that orchestras, they have a more amorphous bass end.
03:16 It's not dependent on great speakers and sharp definition.
03:21 It's more than that.
03:24 So I wanted to get that idea of infinite bass,
03:28 so we stacked up a lot of that.
03:30 We had more than one thing playing basses.
03:33 I think on one track, we had about 20 different things all doing bass.
03:40 There's a lot of things on it that shouldn't really work.
03:43 Things with rock groups shouldn't really work,
03:46 because they're not supposed to be as percussive.
03:49 I wanted it to sound like an expanded rock band,
03:52 but not just an expanded rock band that sounded like it had an orchestra with it,
03:56 but also with world music instruments as well.
04:00 So the Arabian Oud, the Didgeridoo, the Diduk, the Tar from Azerbaijan,
04:06 all these various things that help to expand it a bit.
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04:43 Working with these other instruments that I'm not familiar with,
04:46 working with Malik Mansirov, who plays the Tar.
04:51 The Tar, a small stringed instrument with sympathetic strings.
04:55 Same family of instruments as the guitar and the sitar.
05:00 Malik, from Azerbaijan, where 50% of the people are still nomadic, I believe,
05:07 he's a little bit like, he's got the speed of John McLaughlin,
05:11 and in a way the mysticism of Ravi Shankar.
05:15 He's incredible.
05:18 And of course the other instruments that might be less familiar to people,
05:22 the Arabian Oud.
05:24 I bought that in London, it's a fretless lute.
05:27 I learned to play it a little bit.
05:30 I'm not the level of virtuoso on it that Malik is on the Tar,
05:35 but I took some things from him, the idea of playing on one string,
05:41 more things on one string than you would normally do in sliding and so on.
05:45 Dust and Dreams, that kicks off.
05:48 Some of these world instruments, they often set the scene before the songs start.
05:54 It's almost as if when Malik is playing on the beginning of War Flight,
05:59 you've got almost like the flickering flames of a campfire.
06:05 The kind of music that they might have played at one time
06:07 when they just sat around to entertain themselves.
06:10 And I wanted to get an aspect of that.
06:12 A little bit like different relay teams.
06:14 So you've got the world music musicians, you've got the aspect of folk songs.
06:22 So at times I wanted to delve back as far as Peter, Paul and Mary.
06:25 I wanted to have that, but then I wanted to have rock as well,
06:30 the edge of that, and then whatever orchestra could do on top of that.
06:35 It's my proudest moment, to be honest, this album.
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