“I’m happy to be releasing my ‘Seconds Out and More’ show. A spectacular night with a band on fire, tearing into that magical music and combining the true spirit of Genesis with a fresh virtuosic approach and an extraordinary sound under amazing lights. The show is a feast for both eyes and ears. The best of so many worlds.”
Thus says Steve Hackett, talking about his forthcoming ‘live’ release of last Autumn’s very successful tour, as part of his Genesis Revisited project, which saw Hackett reprising a ‘live’ album he performed on in 1977, leaving before the album was released, to become, as he put it, “the captain of my own ship”.
That Steve Hackett is now the undoubted keeper of the Genesis flame, doing a magnificent job keeping their classic seventies output alive and introducing the music to a generation of fans too young to have seen the seventies Genesis, is not in dispute. To do this, he’s surrounded himself with a band of top-drawer musicians whose ability to interpret the music of Genesis is extraordinary. On the original Seconds Out, Phil Collins did a masterful job putting across songs which Peter Gabriel had previously performed, particularly on tracks like ‘Carpet Crawlers’ – and on ‘Seconds Out 2021′ the mighty Nad Sylvan reprises this trick, projecting the music brilliantly, and his vocals are a highlight of the show.
It’s worth considering, while A Trick Of the Tail (ATOTT) had been released the previous year, demonstrating the bands creative juices hadn’t run dry, there was a degree of trepidation amongst fans wondering whether the post-Gabriel band would simply focus on newer songs and leave the older tunes behind. Seconds Out proved this wasn’t the case.
Seconds Out is a fascinating mix of the old and the new. The band open up with a new track from ATOTT, ‘Squonk’, and close with two new tracks from the same album, ‘Dance On A Volcano’ and ‘Los Endos’. All three songs have since gone on to become established favourites amongst Genesis fans. But, before they even get to this, the show opens with Hackett showing us he’s also a contemporary artist of some renown. He starts with ‘Clocks‘ from Spectral Mornings and also ‘Every Day’, then performs ‘Held In The Shadows’ and the powerful ‘Devil’s Cathedral’ – two tracks from his most recent album, Surrender Of Silence, and the short first set closes with the towering ‘Shadow Of The Hierophant’, with Amanda Lehman coming on to take the vocal duties.
After a short break, Nad joins the band onstage and they open with ‘Squonk’. The whole album was performed in exactly the same order as the original album, which heightened the enjoyment fans felt at hearing a classic album being performed by superlative musicians at the very top of their game, because you knew what was coming next, with classic tracks rolling seamlessly into one other .. ‘Carpet Crawlers’, ‘Afterglow’, ‘I know what I Like’, ‘The Lamb Lies Down’, all performed brilliantly. The biggest cheer of the night occurs when Nad sings “walking across the sitting room, I turn the television off,” which introduces the twenty-three-minute epic, ‘Suppers Ready’, consistently voted one of the greatest prog tracks of all time. An almost heart-stopping good version of the classic track ‘Cinema Show’ follows, with ‘Aisle Of Plenty’ concluding the album before a glorious concert concludes with two tracks from ATOTT.
The original Seconds Out was the last hurrah for Genesis as a prog rock band as after Hackett leaves the band, every subsequent album moves the band further away from prog and towards more mainstream acceptance. But Hackett has kept the flame alive and, on this ‘live’ album, he and his band give fans an absolute masterclass in how to perform some quite complex arrangements and make them accessible. If you’re a younger fan just getting into prog rock, this is an album you really should have.
