Within a mere matter of months since releasing his autobiography, “A Genesis In My Bed,” and the concert collection, “Selling England By The Pound & Spectral Mornings: Live At Hammersmith,” Steve Hackett cranked out yet another project, “Under A Mediterranean Sky.”

Though it’s impossible to travel at the moment, the guitar great, with frequent co-creator Roger King, are giving listeners a virtual window to the gorgeous region, combining unplugged playing with ethnically-framed orchestrations.

Chicago Concert Reviews reconnected with the prolific musician about the instrumental passport, loving then leaving the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-inducted act (whose classic line-up also featured Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel and Mike Rutherford), switching to GTR (alongside Yes’ Steve Howe) and what he considers to be ideal summations of the distinctive Steve Hackett sound.

Give us a rundown of everything you’ve been working on during quarantine.

Steve Hackett: It’s been a very productive period. I’ve been working like a lunatic really. There’s been a live album, the autobiography and this acoustic/orchestral album, “Under A Mediterranean Sky.” I’ve been working on a new rock album to come out in the autumn, plus I’m doing an update of the book, so they’ll be another chapter or two. I’m looking forward to all of these things. The main thing I was looking forward to was getting back on the road, doing what we’re designed to do and what we passionately need to do, which is to play in front of people and entertain them.

How were you able to get into the Mediterranean mood without traveling?

Hackett: Well, I spent lots of time in the Mediterranean, not that I’m on holidays for most of my life. Most of my life is spent touring. I’ve visited so many spectacular places, some of which are on the touring map for musicians, but many which aren’t. For me, I’ve never played in Greece. I have never played in Egypt and I’m probably unlikely to be invited, but wouldn’t it be great one day to be able to do that? The fact is many of these places are not big rock & roll countries, and occasionally if you do get a tour, maybe I might get invited to do an acoustic guitar thing or something like that, which I could do there.

In recent years, I’ve been concentrating on doing progressive rock, which I think is the most radical form of rock there is because it begs the question, “what do you leave out of progressive rock?” It can include everything. It can include orchestral works, classical and world music. There are no limits. It’s inclusive music and it’s supposed to progress. It doesn’t just have to have a Hammond organ and a Mellotron in order to sound exactly as we did back in 1972. It’s moved on tremendously since then and I still, in a way, have a progressive spirit.

This marks your first acoustic album since 2008’s “Tribute.” Had the idea been brewing or was it simply the most practical way to record while you’re home?

Hackett: My wife, Jo, knew that I wanted to do an acoustic album and she knew I was playing a lot of guitar with different tunings, investing a lot of time in it cause it’s a passion. She said, “why don’t you do it with the same attitude as the rock albums you’ve done in recent times?” The last two rock albums had 20 people on each album from all over the world. She said, “it will make the pace different to have this exotic aspect.” It doesn’t have to be Baroque music or siesta-laden music. I do plenty of that, like “Bay Of Kings,” but we thought in a way we could make it more cinematic and take people places with this virtual journey to so many regions within the Mediterranean world.

It’s much more like the dynamism of a rock album then it is an acoustic album. I think the term “acoustic” is misleading really. Acoustic guitar, sure, it’s a huge feature. Then there’s the tar from Azerbaijan, the duduk from Armenia, there’s sax, the Arabian oud and the French lute. There’s a Peruvian charango that I’m using in either mandolin style or a little bit like a Greek bouzouki, but we’ve tried to paint picture of these various places. My father was a very fine painter and he did many landscapes.

I tried to do the same with music, particularly on this album where there’s a romantic place, so it provided a loose concept around the album. There are marvelous orchestrations and production from Roger King, and wonderful melodies, also written by my wife Jo. She’s been very active with the construction of videos, the album sleeve, the photographs and giving it a frame, which gives it a kind of exotic flavor that I think previous acoustic albums have not really had. They’ve had concepts as well, but this one trumps both to me. In lockdown, there’s a virtual journey going on. If you can’t travel to those regions, you can hear it in the music.

Tell us about a few of the tracks and their geographical influences.

Hackett: You’ve got one track based on Malta, which is “Mdina – The Walled City.” We were thinking of the sieges that happened around Malta over the centuries, and of course, the second World War. It was heavily bombed and people were starving there, so the opening track is that, which starts a symphony orchestra roaring away from the word “go.”

The track called “Sirocco,” for me, personifies and symbolizes the desert. I was thinking about our trips to Egypt and Jordan, being under the stars in the desert, getting up on a camel and doing the whole bit. I loved all of that, and of course, the sites that you see when you travel down the Nile in Egypt just stay with you. If I said for a lifetime, it’s several lifetimes. You’re just spellbound by it, so I got my notebook out the whole time and the album you hear is the result of that.

Even though this is entirely instrumental, what message are you hoping to convey?

Hackett: The subtext of music is always the idea of healing the differences between people, as well as re-energizing them physically. That’s what music does, so that’s the message. I think in a divided world, where the divisions seem to be getting larger and larger, not just in your country, but in my country with Brexit, this is a chance to put people together, and show that they can work together, and create something stunning, instead of being suspicious of the foreigner. It flies in the face of modern politics.

Do you have your sights on performing these selections live someday, possibly here in Chicago, or is it exclusively a studio collection?

Hackett: Some of it I have played live, but my intention is to go out and play the whole of “Seconds Out,” the live Genesis album from 1977 with the stuff that was already iconic, even then, arguably, in the late ‘70s. I will be doing that in its entirety, plus some solo work, whatever that might be. I look forward to doing that again cause so many of these Genesis tunes are my absolute favorites. That will be the second time I’ll be doing an album of Genesis in its entirety.

Earlier on, we were doing the whole of “Selling England By The Pound” and I think it sold the best of all my live albums. It’s lovely to be able to bring that album out in front of people in its entirety, plus a deleted scene in the shape of “Déjà Vu,” the track that Peter Gabriel kicked off back in the day, but we didn’t manage to finish it as a band. It got finished much later and I’ll perform that as part of that album. I give people full-length versions and take them backstage into an area that perhaps they were unaware of. We’ll do the same with “Seconds Out.” It isn’t just going to be snippets, abbreviations and segues. It’s gonna be the whole deal. When I do it, I do it right.

As far as the group goes, what was your goal with “A Genesis In My Bed”?

Hackett: I think the book was designed to answer quite a lot of questions that Genesis fans might have had, but also, to give a framework to what spearheaded Genesis, the ethos that existed in the 1970s and what it became in the 1980s. I talk about the era when Peter Gabriel was the lead singer and main motivator. Through him, I joined the band 50 years ago. It was January 1971 that I first started working with Genesis and that was an extraordinary time for me, but the book goes back much further of course.

When I joined the band, I was just about to turn 21. Peter Gabriel is actually one day younger than me. It’s a long time ago now, but I was trying to describe [the world] that we both grew up in. My experience was somewhat different from his as he was a bit of county boy really, but I grew up in London in the post-war bloom, when England was still trying to recover from masses of bomb damage and there was still rationing of food. So I was trying to describe what it was like to grow up in a London that was, perhaps, more akin to Charles Dickens than it was to the modern world…

What did your former band members think of the book?

Hackett: You know what, I haven’t heard a sausage from them because what you tend to get out of the Genesis guys is to privately congratulate you and publically denounce you. It’s a very competitive, very inward-looking, introverted band. It’s very odd, considering we worked together at one time. There’s huge divisions, even though we still talk socially, but there’s this air of competitiveness, which underpins it all. If they thought it was great, they certainly wouldn’t say so [laughs]. “Love your playing. I’m never going to talk about it in public” [laughs]. That’s how it goes because, “hey, you might get the Oscar and I won’t.”

What would you say was your peak in Genesis and also a lower point?

Hackett: Lower point, that’s difficult to say. I think there were many high points in Genesis. I think “Nursery Crime” had some great moments, “Foxtrot” had great moments, “Selling England By The Pound” had great moments and “Genesis Live” had some great moments, a summation of what we’d done up to that point. “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway” was more of a contest between punk meets classical music, two radical musical forms vying for supremacy in the same grooves, but nonetheless, there are some brilliant things on the album. The best of “A Trick Of The Tail” worked wonderfully well with tracks like “Dance On A Volcano” and “Los Endos” bookending the album. “Wind & Wuthering,” again, had some really strong things on it.

We didn’t always see eye to eye. It’s in the nature of groups not to do that, but I think that we managed to produce stunning albums. I didn’t want to do simpler music, but do music that was perhaps more detailed, more complex, more demanding and more surprising. I was talking earlier about progressive music being radical. The first time you hear one of these tunes, something like “Supper’s Ready,” you’ve got no idea where it’s going next. Of course, it’s well-known now, so if you do it to the letter, people know every note and every nuance, except I might change the solo at the end, heresy! I’ll do the well-known phrases, but then take it the mountains with other stuff. I love doing it and whatever it takes to bring it alive again.

You always seemed satisfied with your decision to leave Genesis, but did you ever regret it?

Hackett: No, absolutely not. I never regretted leaving Genesis. I think the work we did together was a high point for all of us. But if I was to draw a comparison to the work Peter Gabriel did subsequently, for me, it at least equals the stuff he did with the group, and in some cases, surpasses it. I would say the same for all of the individuals that worked with the band because there was a very hard working team of guys. Some of us have stuck at it like crazy. I don’t apologize for that and for doing lots of albums in different styles. I think that’s been a calling card, a little bit like a character actor to say, “well, I don’t have to do things in one style” and do an album that isn’t designed to be at the top of the charts everywhere.

If you do that, you’re playing a game. You’re doing stuff that’s accessible. It will be radio-friendly, but what it won’t be is radically new. I think to break the mold [is to] have someone like [Jimi] Hendrix burst onto the scene. People were going, “where did this Martian come from?” That’s what it should be. Setting aside the look, burning the guitars and doing it with your teeth is great, wonderful showmanship, a bit like Keith Emerson playing the organ upside down, whipping it, throwing knives and all that. He was a pal of mine. But at the end of the day, it’s gonna come down to the music. What’s the legacy? What’s left of it? It’s what everyone left on vinyl or on CD, so the quest continues.

The later version of Genesis is about to embark on “The Last Domino” Tour. How do you feel that line-up performs your material?

Hackett: Occasionally, they’ll play stuff that I wrote with the band and stuff we did together. When I saw the band at the beginning of the ‘80s, half the set was stuff that we performed together. I thought live it worked stunningly well and I think the beauty of well-written stuff is it will survive an altered team that does it, as my band does when we honor the early work. I’ve got a bunch of virtuoso players up there who are playing as if their life depends on it. [The sound is] full-on every bit as powerful as it was and I love what they do with it.

How do you look back on GTR?

Hackett: Interesting band. I’ve tried to reform it with Steve Howe, but he doesn’t seem to be interested so far. The rest of the guys were interested in doing it. The closest I’ve gotten so far is to do a re-record of “When The Heart Rules The Mind” with [Marillion’s] Steve Rothery, Amanda Lehmann and Roger King. I still love the song and felt it was absolutely wonderful. I think it was the best of what Steve Howe and I did. I’m still very proud of it, but to honor it, one has to do it in a different form. It’s not possible to turn the clock back and get everyone working cheek by jowl together. It just doesn’t work like that.

Which of your own projects do you feel best summarize Steve Hackett?

Hackett: I’m not just making this up, but I think this album, “Under A Mediterranean Sky,” shows the romantic side, the orchestral side, the chops of the player, all of that stuff. But I like to think there’s a simplicity with melodies that run throughout so that you just don’t have to listen to speed of performance. Light and shade hopefully contrasts.

Now in regards to rock albums, I would say “At The Edge Of Light,” the previous studio album, manages to say a lot of things that I was aiming at for years. I think that’s probably the most eclectic and most successful, certainly in chart terms, that I’ve done for a very long time, so I’m very proud of that. That’s just two of fairly recent brain children.

There’s lots of other albums. I don’t think I’m ashamed of anything that I’ve done with Genesis or outside of the band. You always try to make whatever you’re doing the best that you can do at the time. That’s what it’s all about for me, the joy of playing, just going all out and giving it everything, every time.

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For additional information on Steve Hackett visit HackettSongs.com.