Recorded while he was still the guitarist in Genesis, Steve Hackett’s debut solo album Voyage Of The Acolyte – and its commercial success – gave him a confidence he had previously lacked. Along with what he saw as winds of change blowing through Genesis, it helped him to soon make the decision to follow his group “pal” Peter Gabriel out of the band.

Words: James McNair

Some solo careers are born of turmoil; a sudden, dramatic rift between an artist and the band in which they made their name. Steve Hackett’s solo debut album Voyage Of

The Acolyte wasn’t born like that. After its release in October 1975, the Genesis guitarist made two more albums with them: February 1976’s A Trick Of The Tail and December 1976’s Wind & Wuthering. Indeed, Hackett wouldn’t bow out of Genesis until after their May 1977 EP Spot The Pigeon.

“You have to remember that my experiences in Genesis were largely extremely positive,” Hackett says today. “In fact, when we were touring Selling England By The Pound, a bit of Foxtrot and a bit of Nursery Cryme, I felt like I was in the best band in the world. For me, Selling England… is the epitome of the form. It’s got elegiac lyrics and hugely accomplished songwriting.

I was thinking, ‘This is it. This is where I belong.’’’

It was while making the follow-up to Selling England…, the double album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, that Hackett tells Prog that his sense of belonging began to falter a little. The Lamb… was his fourth album with Genesis, and the one after which singer Peter Gabriel, who had brought Hackett to the band after seeing his ad in Melody Maker, left the group.

“I’m surmising here,” says Hackett, “paraphrasing, perhaps, but my memory of making The Lamb Lies antastic oyage Down… is that Peter didn’t really want to be part of Genesis any more. Composition by committee had become anathema to him, and his first wife, Jill, had had a difficult pregnancy. On top of that, William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist, had approached Peter about writing a screenplay, and I think Pete saw that as a new world of multimedia possibilities.”

The tarot-themed VoyageOfTheAcolyte.

Images: David Montgomery/Getty Images

To further complicate matters, when Friedkin sensed that his screenplay offer might spell the end of Gabriel and Genesis, he didn’t want that on his head. “So he dropped the idea,” says Hackett. “Then Peter came back and agreed to tour The Lamb Lies Down… and promote it. He also made it clear he’d leave the band after doing so.

“Maybe what Peter really wanted was to take some time off, be a family man and resume with Genesis later,” Hackett reflects. “But I wasn’t party to that information at the time. That was more a conversation he had with Mike [Rutherford] and Tony [Banks], who were his fellow founding members.”