Steve Hackett didn’t just play on six Genesis studio albums between 1971-77. He’s also twice now returned to that era as part of the Revisited projects, pulling apart those signature works even as he celebrates them.
So, Hackett’s opinion on a favorite Genesis album comes with much experience, consideration and passion: Selling England by the Pound, released in October 1973 as the third project to arrive from the group’s vaunted five-man lineup — and the penultimate recording before Peter Gabriel’s exit for a solo career.
“I like the worlds of ideas that were on it,” Hackett tells Rebel Music. “I kinda love all the albums, but Selling England by the Pound is the album where the guitar took off to lead the way to the other albums — and the album got ‘Firth of Fifth‘ on it and ‘Dancing with the Moonlit Knight,’ I think they were great moments.”
That said, Hackett’s reexaminations to his best-known music from the Genesis era — on 1996’s Watcher of the Skies: Genesis Revisited and 2012’s Genesis Revisited II, along with a series of concert souvenirs — has given him deeper insights both into what made those albums work, and what he could have done better.
“I could say my favorite Genesis album is the one that I’d be mixing myself,” Hackett adds, “because I’d get a chance to fix what I think needed fixing, make it in time and in tune, better sustain, better control, more guitar, all that stuff.”
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