Steve Hackett recalls his Genesis days - Portsmouth and Guildford dates

Steve joined Genesis at the beginning of 1971 and gained an international reputation as the guitarist in the band’s classic line-up alongside Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins. His intricate guitar work was a key element of Genesis albums from Nursery Cryme (1971) to Wind And Wuthering (1977) including the iconic Selling England By The Pound – plus The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway roughly at the mid-point of his Genesis years.

“It doesn't seem 50 years at all and then you keep on reminding yourself of the effects of time upon us. It seems more like 30 years. I always thought that bank managers retired at the age of 50 so 50 seems a significant number. But when I was 16 years old, I remember watching John Mayall and he was 33 and I just remember thinking that it was amazing that he was still able to get up there and do it!”

As for The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway: “At the time as an album it had its difficulties. We were losing our singer (Peter Gabriel).

"He was telling us that he was going to do this one last album with us… so there was that hanging over us. We were starting to have children and his wife was pregnant and had a very difficult pregnancy. He was torn between domestic pressures and being in the band and he decided that he was going to leave show business altogether. He said he was going to walk away and grow vegetables. I thought I would just soldier on and do solo work after that.

“But The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway on Broadway is still a great album. It might have been better if it had been a single album. For me I’d been desperate to get Genesis to do some completely atonal music but in the end perhaps I wished I hadn't. I don't think the more radical stuff was the best but when you're doing a concept album or an album driven by narrative as I prefer to say, I still think that the individual tracks should work on their own.

"I think a good track should be a good track but it should still be dependent on being part of the whole. There's the contextual element. But Genesis had the idea that a good song should have a good verse and a good chorus but we could not always agree what the verse was and what the chorus was. We were early songwriters, but I still think it was a great album. It was pioneering. The competitive side of Genesis was really working overtime and I think the result is there's so many great tunes. It covered four sides of vinyl, 90 minutes of stuff and I think the idea of creating a world of sound that people could lose themselves in was very much what it was all about. It was a work driven by a narrative and there was nothing wrong with that and I think as a band you're totally immersed in it.

"When you're constructing something, you see the nuts and bolts but the listener is not really thinking about the internal things. But I do think that the audience is far more forgiving.

“I joined the band in 71 and the album was completed in 74.”