Of course, reading it, my interpretation of DARKTOWN, reading the words first of all, in no way would I have expected that it had anything to do with a geographical location. It just seemed to spark off Edgar Allen Poe images to me.
BB: Something almost Gothic?
SH: Yeah, gothic and mausoleum like, and I'm sure that now that I will be using this for a title for an album, I'm quite sure it will be too good a title for any filmmaker to pass up on. At some point, I'm convinced that all song titles become film titles, therefore any good song titles will eventually become films. I'm sticking my neck out there, but for all I know there's a DARKTOWN I-II-III-IV-V, kind of like Jaws.
BB: Which came first, the title or the music?
SH: It was the music that came first.
BB: You've covered quite a lot of musical territory in the past few years, in terms of "styles".
SH: I've tried to be ultra-productive.
BB: Well I think you've succeeded in doing that quite well! From what I've heard this album is more in the "electric" mode, more like Guitar Noir.
SH: Yep, absolutely, this has electric, it has acoustic, it has singing, it has dancing, it has all of those things. It's not trying to be anything other than broad based rock music. There is a lot of influence from the orchestral world, there's an influence from Jazz ... it's really a meeting place, or a meeting point, for a number of styles which cover just about every available genre. If I've left something out, I'm sorry. I'll get around to country music, if only to pastiche it at some point <g>.
BB: So who have we got on this one? I haven't heard any info yet. What is the lineup?
SH: In terms of characters you may have heard of we have Ian McDonald and Jim Diamond - a Scottish singer who's very well known in this country, not so well known in the States, very well known in Europe. He's a guest singer on one track, on the rest of the album I'm doing the vocals myself. Ian McDonald guests on one track on sax, and plays wonderfully ...
BB: Are there the usual suspects, Julian Colbeck, etc.?
SH: Well, I'll have to go over it track by track to remember everyone. There are a number of people that you may not be aware of apart from my previous history; Roger King for instance, Ben Fenner ...
Jerry Peal ... let me see ... I think in the main those are the people. It's really more than that. There's a list of people, all of whom may be unfamiliar to you. It's very much a test-tube baby again
BB: It sounds like this was done on something of a track-by-track basis, with the proper people called in as they were needed
SH: Well, that's really it. In today we have Doug Sinclair on bass on 2 tracks, we've brought in a lot of people - it's taken eight years this thing. I've done many projects in between. As you probably know, with the stuff I've been doing over the past few years, it's not necessarily been a priority to me that I wrote everything myself. There have been a number of projects that have been collaborations with either other writers of things which were already written. I mean, when you do a blues album for instance, it's not so much a writer's medium as an interpreter's medium. When I was doing the
Genesis Revisited project, obviously those songs were already written, so there again, an interpreter's medium.
There have been a lot things like that, and meanwhile the things I had written in rock and roll had been sidelined for some time. I would work on them for a while, and then stop and get on with something else. These days it's quite rare that I actually start and finish a project because other things happen.
BB: How far back does the material go for this album?
SH: Eight years. That's not to say that just because something is that old that it's not as good as something crafted yesterday. These took a long time in development. Cuckoo's Nest, for instance, took 10 years to produce. Maybe this will be my equivalent. This particular cuckoo's nest took forever; I needed all sorts of things: I needed personnel, I needed refreshed energy each time I went at it, I needed a clear head ... I also needed a clear song each time. One thing about doing an album like this over a long period of time when you're trying to be ... all things to that project ... you want it to sound like it was merely the product of a solo album as opposed to a group album.
I always used to feel that, in the main, when I heard group albums that were really good I thought "isn't that fabulous, obviously these people have been talking to each other and everyone's giving it the expertise they can in their particular area."
Now, there's something about me that likes work to be vastly detailed and I feel, in order to make up for the fact that there's no band as such, I have to have this conversation with myself. If I'm going to work with cellos, or a sample of them, I've got to find out what it is that motivates that particular sound, where does it find it's focus? What is it's strength, its character ... like an actor.
BB: So you're saying that you have to do the Jekyll and Hyde split personality thing.
SH: I think so, yes. I think you've got to have a lot of conversations with yourself so that nothing gets marginalized. You don't want the drums or the singer, or whatever to get marginalized since they've all got their point of view. It takes a long time. You've got "the guitar gods decree this" and "the drum gods want that".
I believe that it has pretty much found a focus. There are certain tracks on this album that I am very, very proud of. I'm very proud of the way they sound, and you wouldn't believe what I created them from.
BB: I haven't seen a complete track listing yet. What are the high points for you?
SH: For me "DARKTOWN" is a high point. There's a track called "DARKTOWN Riot" which was actually done very very quickly. It was using a sort of hip-hop rhythm, in fact. Roger King had released a CD with his partner, Steps, which is called "Beats n' the Hood", and, as I worked with Roger .... He was originally trained as a church organist so you can imagine that his background is everything from church organ to hip-hop and in some ways it parallels my interests.
BB: On another front, I must of course ask if there are tour plans?
SH: Well, I seem to involved so many recording projects at the moment that I not sure that touring is a reality for me at this point.
BB: It does sound like, from a personnel standpoint, this would be more difficult than most to take on the road.
SH: I think that if I was to take DARKTOWN on the road the word would be miming, to be honest. You've got so much music that was created by so many different people.
BB: Large production values, multiple tracks, etc.?
SH: Yes, very large production values, absolutely. If you were talking all hands on deck, you'd be talking about 100 singers, you would need an 80 piece orchestra, you'd need at least a couple of drummers and bass players ..... several of myself. It all becomes very difficult to do that authentically. To bring that authentically to people it would take, how can I put it, a stage show would need such a production that to put it across properly, you're not really concerned about what's live and what isn't. The lines have been blurred so much in the past few years.
BB: Heavy use of sampling, that sort of thing?
SH: Sure there's that, and there are so many things that everybody's doing, unless they're going out with just an acoustic guitar and being themselves, and I applaud that.
BB: You've managed to do the "whole nine yards" at this point. You've done the solo figure in the spotlight at a 400 year old Italian theatre, and then you've done the epic "Let's do Japan" shows with a very large presence.
SH: Yes, The Tokyo Tapes had very large production values and I must admit it did feel good to have all the lights working and all the rest, and I would like to have done more in that direction. But you know, the sky's the limit. Everyone wants to take Disneyland on the road, but I suspect that Disneyland is one thing and Hackettworld is another. I guess I am working more in the aural sphere.
I've tried to create with this an area where, when you listen to it, you can't really tell at times what instruments are producing the sounds. It's like compounds made from different basic elements. There's a lot of "twinning" of instruments. You get into trips and you get into quads and after a certain point you think you've tracked something to death, and it's still not right, and then you add just one little thing - like you'll add a little bit of subliminal mellotron brass, something on the edge, and suddenly it'll find a focus. I'll often end up using lots of different sounds. I mean, that's my whole thing basically; when you're experimenting with sounds, I love the fact that you can't really tell where they're coming from - like when I've combined violins and the guitar. Both are stringed instruments and when you combine them, like I did on Valley of the Kings on Genesis Revisited, you get an incredibly big prehistoric monster of a sound.
If I didn't know what was going on on this "DARKTOWN" album ... I'd be going nuts.
BB: Trying to figure out how it was done?
SH: Yeah, I'd be wanting to ask so many questions of the people who put it together that it would be ... it's hard to describe. If I was seeing a movie and I wasn't sure how the special effects were done, or whether something was real, or whatever; you come to a point where you realize that music can be constructed much the same way, where things don't happen in real time, and I can only borrow an aboriginal expression, they happen in dream time. We go back and overlay it with something else, and the things which happen sequentially have been created in reverse order. So the idea of performance as such goes out the window.
BB: As you work at becoming the noble advocate, taking on the percussion's cause, the bass, and so forth you kind of run the risk of losing a coherent "signature" sound don't you?
SH: Yes it is advocacy, the drummers and all, but sometimes you may embrace the idea of the guitar being used a percussion instrument. One of the better rhythm sections on DARKTOWN is on a track called "Dreaming with Open Eyes" where the actual drum sound is nylon guitar. And I'm particularly proud of the way it sounds because it's been processed. At the end of the day it makes a great drum, it has tremendous depth with the right processing. You try not to overlook the potential of each instrument, and end up using some of them slightly out of character.
I'm very proud of DARKTOWN. I think it's a very interesting sounding album for people who enjoy sound as opposed to people who merely enjoy songs. And I find that it's an album that satisfies on both levels for me. But then I've been living with it a long time, so that which is new to other people's eyes and ears is no longer new to me. I've played it to death in the car, as you can imagine over eight years. Nevertheless I think it sounds fresh. Production ideas are always easy to date, but writing, ideas can always be timeless.
BB: What else is going on in "Hackettworld" I gather that you are rather busy?
SH: I'm also working on an album with my
brother John on flute. It's an album for just flute and guitar, a duet album of classical pieces. Pieces that were originally written for piano which we've translated to guitar and flute.
I'm also going to be working on an album with Jim Diamond which is going to be songs that are largely songs that had been hits for other people, mostly based on standards. There may be the occasional original songs from either Jim or myself. Those are the 2 "duet" albums that I am doing. And I guess my role with both of these albums is more of a producers role.
BB: It sounds like you have developed something of a taste for the "directors chair", especially after doing Revisited.
SH: Oh yes. That brought me into contact with a lot of musicians, and it seems as if I gained a certain amount of respect from people in the "director's chair" or producer's chair. I was worried in fact that when I did Revisited that it would be perceived as retrogressive, but in fact it seemed to have the opposite effect. I was worried that I was going to end up being the curator in a museum of my own making. The idea was not to do Genesis Revisited 2-3-4-5-12, but to leave that behind now, and say yes I loved those numbers, weren't they wonderful in their day, and some of them that weren't quite as wonderful as they could be, and they'll be looked at and .... I've wrestled with that particular demon, if you like, and tried to move on.
BB: I thought I had heard that there was another classical project.
SH: I'm actually working on about four things at the moment. There's another project which is a classical guitar and orchestra album. That's really an attempt to write a decent guitar concerto, which has not, with the exception of Rodrigo, really been done.
BB: Hmmm, where does that leave "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the greater scheme of things?
SH: Really that was a series of extended guitar suites. It started as separate pieces ...
BB: There was a great deal on analysis on the web with people identifying different familiar themes. This new work will be more cohesive then?
SH: More cohesive with a deliberate development of themes from the word go. An attempt at long form, whereas Midsummer Night's Dream was a number of short form ideas. The new classical guitar/long form/concerto thing is basically written and recorded with orchestral sketches in mind. None of the orchestra has been added to the recording, we're just working with samples to get a feel for how it would sound.
BB: You seem to be on kind of a quest. Exploring all these different styles. Blues, solo classical guitar, straight on rock, and so forth. What's the driving force here?
SH: I could describe my approach; it's funny, I was watching TV yesterday and I saw Harvey Keitel on. This might sound strange, but I realized that before he came to prominence I'd seen him in lots of movies and to me he was an invisible actor - always totally convincing in every part. I never thought of him as a star, he just came across where you didn't question his part. Someone wrote to me recently and drew a parallel between a Gene Hackman movie and some of my stuff, and I was very flattered because again, you're talking about people that are character actors more than stars. You know that they are going to inhabit the part. The best performers do this. I feel Annie Lennox does this; when she sings a song she becomes possessed by it and personifies it. My approach has been to try to be invisible, that's why I want to move throughout all the forms and be closer to the spirit of all these very separate types of music. That's why you can never really afford to laugh at a particular form. It's only a young person who does that, who says "I don't like Jazz" or "I don't like country music" or this that and the other. There comes a point where I've always had to eat my words, because I've heard something in each of the genres that has totally blown me away and captured my imagination. I've had my heart ripped out by country music. When I was growing up I loved Roy Rogers and Slim Whitman and all the rest. Even opera, which I had dismissed for ages. Now, very occasionally,I find myself listening to a classical station and they will keep changing my mind about what opera is capable of.
BB: Hearing all of your comments it sounds like the motto you have tacked up on the wall of the studio says "Keep them guessing"?
SH: Actually, that hasn't really been the motivation. I don't actually sit down and thing "How am I going to confuse people?" I know I'll research sounds, and DARKTOWN is a research in that way. But projects just seem to fall to me as an extension of people that I know, relationships with people. I've long felt the need to work with friends. The idea of working with "stars" doesn't really appeal to me very much, because I often find them to be very inflexible, with an image to keep up, that sort of thing.
BB: You have worked some relatively legendary people over the years. Which reminds me of another question that seemed to keep appearing. Are there plans to remaster some of you back catalogue?
SH: The problem is that we don't have rights to a lot of the stuff. I don't even have rights to Voyage of the Acolyte. They need a tremendous amount of work. They need to be remastered and repackaged and it's not been a priority, but we're trying to negotiate with them. It's very difficult to even get a return phone call at times. But this is the cross that Billy Budis has to bear.
BB: I guess that it was in a conversation with Billy about Richie Havens that the idea of not just remastering some of the older tracks, but actually re-recording them came up.
SH: A kind of a "Hackett Revisited" is not entirely ... but again I don't want to be seen putting the curator's hat on and starting a rumour as regards that. There are various things that would stand a remix.
BB: Given your resources now it seems like there is a lot of potential.
SH: Yeah, but it's a lot different. I had a lot of personalities working with me in those days, but there are a lot of pieces that could do with tarting up, but there you go.
BB: And final bits of wisdom to be passed along?
SH: Well, all I can say is that I'm working on all fronts really, and trying not to spread myself too thin. And I think in a few weeks I will have an album finished with my
brother John. It's been a long time since we've worked together on something. He's become such a phenomenal player these days.
BB: I've always felt that those pieces you did together back in the early days were exceptional.
SH: He was a stunning young player, but now he can play outside the range of the flute. Much higher than other mere mortal flute players, with a tone that others can only dream about. The pieces we've just been working on are very very difficult to play.
BB: Did I hear correctly that you expect THIS album to be done in a few weeks?
SH: I've been working on it for the past six weeks or so, ... so I think it will be done in the next two or three weeks.
BB: How do you keep the pace?
SH: Wellll.... I work until the engineer falls over.
