Steve Hackett - The Steppes
Keeping the happiness flowing, we'll continue the February blizzard conditions with a beard post par excellence. So what's a beard post?
A beard post is no big deal, really. It's just where I have something that consists of officially released material I don't necessarily want out front on the page, so I cook up something to occupy the frontfacing aspect on here and slip the thing or things subtly into the folder alongside. Or provide some links in the text to it you'd have to read through this babble to come across.
Today is one of those times where I use someone's birthday to sort of slide, in this case, a pretty wild companion compendium, shall we say, onto the web and into the world.
So anyway: if you know who Steve Hackett is -- and I can't see how anyone doesn't, Steve Hackett being one of the greatest guitar players currently alive for 50+ years now -- you know he started in Genesis way back in 1971, when Peter Gabriel (24 hours younger than Steve, and 76 tomorrow) answered his ad in the Melody Maker about wanting to surpass stagnant musical forms and whatnot.
And if you know the inside baseball of this stuff, you know that Genesis is, beyond argument, the Hall Of Fame band whose catalog is the most poorly -- you might say, pathetically -- represented in the world at large.
Earlier this year they put out a box set of one of their records that begins to maybe fix this issue, but the rest of their albums inhabit a netherworld of the music business that makes you just scratch the hair right off your head. To make it worse, their remaining catalog was recently sold, in a multi-million dollar deal, to a music conglomerate that may never reissue any of it in a halfway reasonable form worthy of the material.
Essentially the only iterations of their records -- comprising some of the most globally beloved music of our epoch, mind you -- in this century exist on ear-splattering CDs, and on vinyl irresponsibly made from those CDs, which feature perhaps the most offensive example of Noise Wars overmastering that may ever (or should ever) be. These were in box sets issued from 2007-2009, and if I were to tell you they were unlistenable travesties of the lowest order, I'd be underestimating their atrocity-level awfulness. By a lot.
These box sets -- which now command collectors'-level prices on Discogs.com -- thankfully also contained 5.1 surround mixes of everything. They somehow lacked the completely brickwalled, eardrum-frying mastering nonsense of the CDs and actually sound rather pleasant if you can make peace with Nick Davis's often-puzzling remixing choices.
So what do you do? Most folks don't have Surround Sound setups in their homes, and what about the car? If you're gonna pop Firth of Fifth into the CD player in the SUV and roll through the countryside like a Tony Banks piano intro, you're gonna need stereo downmixes of all of the G Golden Age albums from 1970-1984, aren't you? Who is gonna spend the weeks meticulously cooking it all down to 16/44 stereo for you? Is there an app for that, kids? Maybe we can just shout half-intelligible instructions into Chat GPT and trundle off for a bong rip or three?
Ah, there's the facial hair we were talking about, although Maestro Hackett never sported the full beard, so we'll have to settle for the vintage 1973 moustache today, apologies in advance. Anyway I was gonna sneak these into last October's Mike Rutherford 75 post, but what with the whole Genesis Gigaleak shenanigans that briefly took down The Movement site being super hot at that time, I decided to be discreet and wait until Steve Hackett turned 76. Which happens to have been today!
Anyhow... If you click this text block, you'll be taken to a folder that has all the goodies, up to and including wild compilations I made as companions to the proper LPs. These contain ridiculously accurate reconstructions of period singles and the unreleased, reconstituted album suites from A Trick of the Tail and Abacab, etc etc. Because I'm categorically insane, there's even a bonus compilation I made a bit later on right here.
So there's the secret face... what about the beard again? Did I mention Steve Hackett -- of all the erstwhile members associated with the Genesis brand, easily the one you'd cast as the biggest current torchbearer for their classic 1970s output -- is 76 today? Here he is 46 years ago on his Defector tour, electrifying Sheffield City Hall in a vintage home turf gig of splendidness.
Steve Hackett
Hallam Steppes
City Hall
Sheffield, UK
6.17.1980
CD1
01 FM intro/Slogans
02 Every Day
03 The Red Flower of Tachai Blooms Everywhere
04 Tigermoth
05 Kim
06 Time to Get Out
07 The Steppes
08 The Toast
09 Narnia
10 acoustic medley (incl. Lost Time In Cordoba, Blood On the Rooftops & Horizons)
CD2
01 Sentimental Institution
02 Jacuzzi
03 Spectral Mornings
04 A Tower Struck Down
05 Clocks - The Angel of Mons
06 Land of a Thousand Autumns
07 Please Don't Touch
08 The Show/It's Now or Never
09 Hercules Unchained
Total time: 1:32:46
Steve Hackett - guitars & vocals
Dik Cadbury - bass
Pete Hicks - vocals
Nick Magnus - keyboards
John Hackett - flute, guitar, bass pedals & vocals
John Shearer - drums & percussion
off-air Hallam Radio FM capture of indeterminate origin
sourced from the 2001 bootleg CD "Hallam Steppes" on the Tachika Records label
declipped, denoised & slightly retracked -- with acoustic tracks volume boosted -- by EN, February 2026
605 MB FLAC/direct link
605 MB FLAC/direct link
Of course, in keeping with the beardly theme of the day, I wouldn't dare place the 2CD mixtape of Steve Hackett's solo stuff -- covering his initial 1975-1983 post-G period -- I keep in my phone into that folder alongside the concert, no way absolutely not. I also didn't dare expand it by 9 tracks before not doing that, either. Never happened.
I'll be back to inundate the weekend with Piano Jazz, as we 'rach around the clock in honor of a recently-interred keyboard deity. But that's then... this is now, and now it's an amble up The Steppes in honor of Steve Hackett, born this day in 1950 and still out there Progging it up like someone a third his age!--J.
