Steve Hackett on the making and ideas behind Wolflight, his 2015 album that he called "my proudest moment".
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00:00Genesis
00:18always was a hard act to follow and I've always been aware of that. I think for all the guys in
00:24the band that's been the case. You know, whether you have individual hits or whatever, there's
00:29always that sort of, it's a bit like the mothership, isn't it? You know, when I write a song I think
00:35would this have passed muster with the other guys, you know, would Phil have liked it rhythmically,
00:40would Tony have liked it harmonically, would it have worked for Mike, would it have worked
00:45with Pete lyrically and, you know, you have all of that and but at the same time of course you want
00:52to do your own thing and, you know, I just thought, yeah, I've really got to push the envelope
00:59harmonically with this, you know, it's got to be as good as some of those things that I've listened
01:03to. It's got to be as good as Grieg, it's got to be as good as Tchaikovsky, you know, it's got to be
01:09as good as that first day when I worked with Phil in the rehearsal room with the band. He started
01:14playing me something, I said, sounds fantastic and he said, oh, that's Rego Starr's drum solo off of,
01:21what's the one, Abbey Road and I always remembered that and I thought, you know, I want to do something
01:28like that, that's a little bit like Keith Moon, isn't it, you know, so it's got the bass drum
01:31going but it's like, it's like doing fills all around that so we had the Wolves at the beginning
01:37singing away and a frozen reverb note of that so they hit a seventh and then the drums come in
01:45and then it's band kicking in and the orchestra and choir and everything.
02:15Every time I've done an album I've always thought, well, I need to get orchestral perspectives
02:26in here but how do we enlarge everything and even if you've got a real orchestra on it or
02:31you've got, you know, several people tracked up, it's quite hard to not have the orchestra
02:39impoverished by the group because groups make a big noise but there's this area of
02:47marcato stuff where they're playing with the edge of the bow and reinforcing some of the
02:52bass things with brass so that it's not just the sort of, the kind of definition of bass
03:01end that when you get a great bass player with a really extraordinary sound like Chris Squire
03:08who's on the album, there's this thing that orchestras they have a more amorphous bass end,
03:16it's not dependent on great speakers and sharp definition, it's more than that.
03:24So I wanted to get that idea of infinite bass so we stacked up a lot of that, you know, we
03:30have more than one thing playing basses, you know, I mean I think on one track we had about
03:36twenty different things all doing bass. There's a lot of things on it that shouldn't really work,
03:43orchestras with rock groups shouldn't really work, you know, because they're not supposed
03:47to be as percussing. 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 as well.
03:59So the Arabian hood, the didgeridoo, the deduk, the tar from Azerbaijan, all these various things
04:06that help to expand it a bit, you know.
04:08You know.
04:11Yeah.
04:13Yeah.
04:16Yeah.
04:17Yeah.
04:27Working with these other instruments that I'm not familiar with, working with Malik 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 people are still nomadic I believe, he's a little bit like, he's got the speed of John McLaughlin and in a way the mysticism of Ravi Shankar, he's incredible.
05:17And of course the other instruments that might be less familiar to people, the Arabian Ud, I bought that in London, it's a fretless lute, I 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 than you would normally do in sliding and so on, Dust and Dreams, that kicks off.
05:47Some of these world instruments, they often set the scene before the song starts, it's almost as if when Malik is playing on the beginning of Warflight, you've got almost like the flickering flames of a campfire,
06:02you know, the kind of music that they might have played at one time when they just sat around to entertain themselves, and I wanted to get an aspect of that, so, a little bit like different relay teams, so you've got the world music musicians, you've got the aspect of folk songs, so,
06:20you know, at times I wanted to, you know, at times I wanted to build back as far as Peter, Paul and Mary, I wanted to have that, but then I wanted to have rock as well, you know, the edge of that, and then whatever orchestra could do on top of that, it's my proudest moment, to be honest, you know, this album.