Steve Hackett In Conversation March 2000

Steve Hackett In Conversation

Steve Hackett in conversation about his solo career with Alan Hewitt. Interview conducted March 2000.
So, Steve, why that particular composer, why Satie?
	Well, John and I had talked for some time about doing something together; we discussed possible flute and guitar combinations, a mixture of composers, and were also contemplating a suggestion of John's that we record all of the stuff that we had played on tour together in the past - acoustic material and adaptations of electric things basically written for flute but still close to both our hearts. John was very keen on that and it's still a strong possibility in the long term. However, Billy (Budis) said "Why don't you create two separate projects? Why not do an album of Erik Satie material and a separate album of the old stuff?".
I think that whenever there is a brief you always try to widen it, no matter what you set out to do at the beginning of an album or, indeed, at the beginning of a day. Often something will make sense at the time but a few hours later you don't feel the same way - I'm extremely changeable and what feels right today might not necessarily feel right tomorrow. But, I must say, the idea of doing Satie and putting all pressures to one side of having to be a writer did feel absolutely right from the beginning; to take the work of a separate composer and dedicate yourself to it in the time-honoured way people do when they are trying to bring someone else's music to life. Many years ago when John was starting out with flute we had an album of Erik Satie's material and I didn't know it at the time, but most of the arrangements we were hearing were based on Debussy arrangements of the Gymnopédies. I found out later about the Poulenc versions of the Gnossiennes. Debussy orchestrated two of the Gymnopédies and Poulenc did two of the Gnossiennes. What those composers had done was to take what was written for piano and transfer the top lines to woodwind supported by strings and a little bit of brass. So, you got the melodies being carried by the flute or by clarinet or by oboe, maybe Cor Anglais. All this Satie stuff was very haunting, slow melodies and it sounded wonderful to us. One of the pieces is very, very famous, everyone recognises it. I had heard that piece ten years earlier and kept humming it to people, asking "do you know this melody?" and no-one did. I had bought an album on spec in the Kings Road where I used to buy albums almost in a wholesale lot, where you would get Frank Zappa next to Mrs Mills, that sort of combination. I came across this album called 'Erik Satie, The Velvet Gentleman' and it wasn't until I got it home and played it and played the third track that I realised that it was the piece that I had kept trying to find for years! At last I could give a name to it.

Satie's music is numbered - he tended to write things in threes so instead of getting one Gymnopédie, you get three. The piece I liked and which had been haunting me for so long was Gymnopédie no. 1. Now that has a history because he originally wrote that as no. 3 and Debussy suggested that he change it to 1 and what we did on our album was restore the original order, echoing the track listing of that original album I had discovered. In other words, three and two have been reversed with both the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes respectively. We've reversed them but given them the correct numbers which will cause a tremendous amount of confusion! (laughter). It's very confusing for the uninitiated and so I started with one of the less well known pieces but it just so happens that John plays that beautifully, as he plays all of them; his playing is absolutely fantastic on this album. One of the nice things is that as you're listening to John's flute some of the notes which are in a pretty rich area almost start to sound brassy - almost like oboe and he deliberately plays some phrases very gently with hardly any breath and then becomes more clarinet-like, probably just a happy accident I suspect and I'm reading something into it that I think was meant to happen and is all part of the magic.
How many musicians are on the album?
Just two - flute and guitar. Flute is very much the star on this album and takes the major amount of lead parts. Four of the tracks are just guitar and rather than intersperse the flute ones with the guitar tracks we've placed them in a chunk in the middle as they're all very short pieces - a kind of little suite of pieces in the middle. If I may say so it is a great combination, the two instruments together. To really do it justice you need two guitarists to fill out the harmonies and I've had to de-tune the guitar - probably a semi-tone lower than a whole octave for the bass to get the bottom notes and I had to use harmonics, false harmonics, to go right to the top as I don't have the stretch that pianos have - that sort of thing doesn't exist on guitar. Then you get closely grouped harmonies which aren't possible on guitar but the overall effect is one whereby you have a guitar with piano "leanings", piano legs if you like! It's probably the cleanest album I have ever made there isn't a single click or breath that wasn't intended.
You always say that one project begets another. What other projects are you working on?

Well, hopefully that will beget another guitar and flute album... I would enjoy that and there are so many pieces by the likes of Bach... it's a case of finding out which pieces we're familiar with. John might know the opus number and I might not.

I have some rock stuff on the go too and I don't know how close I am to finishing that because something is never actually finished until it's released. It might need a couple more tunes and a couple of re-mixes. That's the opposite of Darktown which took the best part of a decade, but I don't think it's any worse for having been done quickly - it's been done slightly on the crest of a wave. It's almost as if I have to get stuff done quickly before time slows me down, before the glue emerges under my feet and the process of life itself intervenes and slows the process. r breath that wasn't intended.

There is also, I believe another orchestral album? Is this one on a similar premise to A Midsummer Night's Dream, is it based around one idea or...?

Yes it was initially but it may well be that it's eventually presented as a non programmatic piece and by that I mean a piece of music that tells a story. The nice thing about concertos is that they are deliberately ambiguous, you only have the title. With a lot of concertos, the writer usually names the place where they did it and to some degree you can let the music speak for itself. I suspect that the sub text of most concertos is that of re-birth because the final movement always tends to be triumphant.

Well, that one's in a position where most of it has been done and I'm very pleased with it but I haven't recorded the orchestra yet because most of the cash at present has been spent on building the new studio!