Steve Hackett

Pimlico

Stephen Richard Hackett was born in Pimlico, London, on 12 February 1950, a day before Peter Gabriel. The family spent part of the 1950s in Vancouver, and he went to Sloane Grammar School in Chelsea. His father gave him a harmonica when he was two, and the first record he bought, at nine, was the Shadows' Man of Mystery. He took up the guitar at about twelve and taught himself, listening to Bach, Mario Lanza, the British blues of Peter Green and Danny Kirwan, Hendrix, the Beatles and King Crimson. He has said he fell in love with the sound of Segovia's playing.

Before Genesis he played in Canterbury Glass, Heel Pier, Sarabande and Quiet World, and he is on Quiet World's only album, The Road (1970).

Genesis

In December 1970 he placed an advert in Melody Maker for receptive musicians who wanted to get beyond stagnant musical forms. Peter Gabriel answered it, Gabriel and Tony Banks auditioned him, and he played his first Genesis show at City University, London, on 14 January 1971. Across six studio albums, from Nursery Cryme to Wind & Wuthering, he was the only member of that line-up who never sang lead. On Foxtrot (1972), one of the two Genesis records he rates highest, the band recorded his short solo guitar piece Horizons.

His first solo album, Voyage of the Acolyte, came out in October 1975 while he was still in the band. He left in 1977, as Genesis were mixing Seconds Out, and the split was announced on 8 October. He has said he needed autonomy, and that Banks told him he could not keep making solo albums and stay a member.

His own band

Please Don't Touch! followed in 1978, and with it his first touring band: his brother John Hackett on flute, Nick Magnus on keyboards, Dik Cadbury on bass, John Shearer on drums and Pete Hicks singing. That band made Spectral Mornings (1979) in a frozen Dutch winter, and Hackett has called it the first time he had a touring band of his own, as distinct from Genesis. It reached 22 in Britain, opened with Every Day, and remains, he says, his favourite of his solo albums. Defector (1980) and Cured (1981) closed his years on Charisma. Kim Poor, whom he married in 1981, painted the covers of Spectral Mornings and Bay of Kings.

Classical guitar

In 1983 he released Highly Strung and then Bay of Kings, his first album made entirely of classical guitar music. Charisma turned it down as commercially unviable, so it came out on Lamborghini Records, founded by Patrick Mimran, then the owner of the car company. It included a new solo version of Horizons, and a UK tour followed with just his classical guitar and John Hackett's flutes. Momentum (1988) was a second classical album, and the strand runs on through Sketches of Satie, Metamorpheus, Tribute and Under a Mediterranean Sky (2021). He has described this music as another side of the guitar, the opposite of rock and roll, more romantic and more personal.

Revisiting Genesis

In the mid-1980s he formed GTR with Steve Howe; their 1986 album reached 11 on the Billboard 200, and he left in 1987. Genesis Revisited (1996) and Genesis Revisited II (2012) began a long run of tours built on the 1971 to 1977 Genesis songs, including whole-album shows of Selling England by the Pound, Foxtrot, Seconds Out and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which have made him the main living performer of that music. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Genesis in 2010.

He is considered an early pioneer of two-handed tapping and sweep picking. Guitar World credits him with influencing Eddie Van Halen and Brian May, and Alex Lifeson and Steve Rothery both cite him; Rothery and Hackett made The Roaring Waves together in 2026. His memoir, A Genesis in My Bed, was published in 2020. He still tours, and only Firth of Fifth has been played more often at his shows than Every Day.