BB:Lets start with the new "Genesis Revisited" album. What was the inspiration to do this project now?
That one got started as a result of an Italian tour with Julian Colbeck. The story is that basically there was a fan who said "I've got a few albums I'd like you to sign" So I signed them, he had just about every solo album I've ever made. I signed them all for him, and he turned to his wife and asked "Do you have the other bag?" and he pulled out another stack of albums, all Genesis ones, and very sheepishly asked if I would sign those. It seemed as if he expected a reaction of "The hell with those..." and I didn't have that reaction at all. It brought it home to me that people's perception was that I had discarded all of my past and I was trying to expunge it or exorcise it and all the rest.
As Julian and I were traveling back from Italy we were talking about that, and Julian made the remark that when he played with ABWH there were two versions of Yes doing Roundabout. He said the fans perception was that any version of Yes without Steve Howe in it wasn't the real thing, that Steve Howe was considered to be "the heart of Yes". And he said that could be the case for some people with myself and Genesis. We started talking about doing a show where we would play Genesis numbers, and we would try to involve a number of people from bands with sympathetic fans, all those bands like Yes, King Crimson, and the other bands that are mentioned in the same breath in the progressive field, if you like. The idea came up at that moment in time. There were quite a few tracks that Genesis had done which had great ideas and were great pieces of music, but I didn't feel that they sounded as good on record as they did live. So I ended up redoing them and spending a year and a half on it.

That long?

Yes. There's a version released in Japan at the moment, because the Japanese (Label) wanted it out straight away, virtually whether I was finished or not, so I crammed 6 months work into a month to try and bring it in on time.

Is there interest being shown in getting it released in the US and Europe?

Yeah, we are showing it to a few companies who showed a great deal of enthusiasm initially, but are now sitting on the fence. We are considering all of them, but I have been putting off doing anything because I spoke to Tony Banks and he said he would like to get involved,......and then changed his mind. Probably due to his work schedule. I've got a version of Los Endos that I've been working on that was going to have Tony on it. It seems that it won't have him on it now. (Note: Genesis Revisited is now released world-wide - TinK)

Your surprise at people's perception that Genesis was something of a taboo subject with you begs the question of whether it was a valid assumption in the past ; and if so, what had changed?
	You can spend a lifetime doing many different things, and perhaps be remembered for something you did a long time ago, something that has become very dear to people. From my point of view, I thought; if I'm going to be best remembered for this... I really feel as thought there are so many things going on; like the box, and definitive editions, and this that and the other, I felt like doing my own "Definitive Edition" and saying the things that I was really interested in. Like the sound of the Mellotron for instance. It sounded huge and wonderful, and never really did on record. I wanted to make sure it did. I recorded one and stuck an orchestra with it to make it sound as big and massive as possible. I also wondered what some of those tracks would sound like with a modern drum sound, and I thought well... perhaps it's not really possible to play complicated music with a sort of modern ambient sound and have it all come across. So I put that into practice with Bill Bruford on drums, and Chester, and Hugo Degenhardt as well.
There were various reason for going at it. The past: it's a bit like shadow boxing, you know. It's part of you, therefore you can't really learn to punch, but what you can do is perhaps enlarge the shadow to some degree. So I think what I'm doing is adding some detail to the shadow.

When looking back at the past, the one track that seems to inspire the most speculation about your feelings on the matter is Supper's Ready. Between the Gallo book's passage on your departure, and the presumably joking remarks from Tony to the effect that they "Mixed you out" of that piece. I wonder how you really feel about that song now?

I haven't done a version of that. I think that is a track heavily associated with Pete, (of course we have done it with Phil as well). Since it would take up in excess of 20 minutes of space, it would take a double album for it to be done. Then there's the fact that, as an instrumentalist, I chose stuff which had the greatest instrumental content in it. Whereas, although there's, not exactly a dearth of instrumental work in Supper's Ready, it's still mainly a lyric intensive, long piece of work. I think what tends to happen is if you say a little joke about something, it's taken quite literally. There's a lot of humor kicking around in there. And when Tony said they mixed me out he was joking, It's not quite true, it's British humor you see. I don't feel badly about the track. My own feeling is that, I was amazed: back in the old days it was the longest piece we had done, and when people were starting to write shorter numbers, we were starting to write longer numbers and I thought that people were going to find it hard to digest and I wasn't sure if people were going to enjoy it, with the obscure references and whatnot. But it seemed that the reverse was true, and that the people I thought would condemn it applauded it as a masterpiece. Really I think what the band was doing at that point was sticking together a lot of ideas from everybody to make the longest piece possible. It was also an exercise in bridgework, in terms of sections that linked one piece to another.

It seems to be perceived by many fans as the Magnum Opus of the band in that era.
I can see what you mean there. It becomes enshrined. I think that when you have a hand in its creation you tend to think of any of the music that you are working on as much more malleable by necessity and perhaps not a precious. It's almost like a patient that's being revived all the time. Sometimes you feel it slipping away from you and then it comes back into focus. If there is such a thing as a "group-soul" or -brain, it would have been at work on that song. You couldn't really say that it was any one person's song. It was very well received (eventually) in a live setting, and I always felt good about playing it. It was like introducing an old friend.
	I think there were many numbers that were like that. A number like Watcher of the Skies was not initially well-received, until the show became more theatrical. When we had our own lights, when the presentation took off, so did the song that was Watcher of the Skies. And yet, on record, for me, even with the live version (Genesis Live) by comparison to the way I remember it shaking the foundations of many buildings that we played it in, it didn't really have that depth, or weight....which is one of the reasons that I redid it. I'm still working on some of those ideas. I went to see a Genesis tribute band the other week, a band called Regenesis, and I could tell straight away what had been the favorite numbers. Because everything they played, obviously, was from the point of view of fans who had listened to it. And I met them all, and shook their hands, and so on. They did a fine job, and I realized what it was that the fans of a particular era wanted to hear.
From my point of view, going at that material again, I wanted to attack some of the songs that are perhaps not as well known or were not favorites because maybe they hadn't been brought entirely into focus. For example: For Absent Friends, which I did with entirely orchestral backing, and changed the metre of it and the pace of it, the whole thing. And people might say "Well why would you want to change THAT piece?" And I'd have to respond by saying that they'd have to hear my version of the song to hear what I wanted to change.

Does this renewed focus on the older works have a connection to the box set?

There's two answers to that. At the moment that I started doing this album of my own nostalgic stuff, I spoke to Pete Gabriel about a track which is called Deja Vu, and he said to me "I don't know if you know, but there's a boxed set planned, etc., and I'm resinging vocals, and this that and the other, and I don't know if you want to get involved..." I said that was news to me, but I didn't want anything put out that was substandard, so I offered to fix up some things myself... I wanted to HEAR IT for a start. Um...So I did get involved in that. Now, to answer your question more broadly; If there's any thread between all of it, it's the fact that I was feeling nostalgic at the same time they were. We were approaching it from different ends. Also, if there's any thread between that and all the other stuff I'm doing, it's that I want to work more with orchestras. At the same time that I did Genesis Revisited, it was the idea of several groups, PLUS an orchestra. And I'm also working on another acoustic thing...

A Midsummer Night's Dream?
Yes, that's it. I'm trying to do an EMI classical album with this. So basically, there's two things. Nostalgia is big at the moment. Plus the fact that; If it's always going to be hailed as a standard, Genesis stuff, then I might as well do my own versions. If any of the guys in the band want to get involved, that's fine, but basically I realized that from my point of view it's the music that drew me to it. In a way, this music is probably going to survive because it is actually bigger than the personalities of the individuals involved. And there are all these orchestral versions of Genesis music going around at the moment, AND the tributes... it's becoming a cottage industry. It's rather awkward you know? I mean, when I first was getting involved with this stuff years and years ago, I didn't know it was going to be like the "Tchaikovsky of Rock" or something. I thought that we would do this stuff and it would disappear. It's kind of like the Beatles, when they thought it would be gone 2 years down the line. And the dream goes on. Very nicely too, with the Beatles. I was touched by all that. So the short of it is that I've done what I am going to do on my own. There are several members of King Crimson,...John Wetton, ..and I'm talking to Ian McDonald, he may join me on something. The cast is not entirely defined because Los Endos seems to be a growth industry in itself.
The main thing is the spirit of the music. I think the cult of personality usually outweighs the value of the music, but if something is going to be hailed as a classic then it doesn't really matter if the Royal Philharmonic played Tchaikovsky or the Boston Pops. They go and do a version of something, and if it's instrumental, or at least largely instrumental then, you know... a drummer will impress his personality on it. You should hear Chester Thompson playing Dance on a Volcano, and Bill Bruford on Watcher of the Skies, or Hugo Degenhart on Los Endos...It's very colorful. And unlike most orchestral stuff, which can come out very frumpy, dry, and academic; this doesn't sound like that. When an orchestra is harnessed properly, you think of those bands that did it well, like the Beatles, or Procol Harum. I wanted it with that sort of sensibility ......I'm very proud of it.

You seem very enthusiastic about the Mellotron. Weren't you the one who "discovered" the Mellotron in Genesis? I seem to recall that from a previous interview.

Yeah, I was the one that was determined that Genesis should have a Mellotron and a light show. I've seen how powerful that can be, and it was brought to the band to give them orchestral depth. For all the lyrical stuff that the band was attempting, I felt that unless the group had the ability to sound like a big band, like an orchestra... unless it had that kind of...

Next best thing?

Yeah, the next best thing exactly, the idea of casting the listener out into space... People have described the Mellotron in very colorful ways, some of the descriptions have been very apt indeed; At one point the Mellotron had been described as a Frankenstein keyboard, put together from disembodied parts. But it was definitely alive. It was alive in a very strange way. It had a spooky quality about it which I think modern samplers don't seem to have. Many things that were done on it were never actually recorded. Bits that I heard other people do at various times, and tried to talk them into. It sounds amazing. And what's unreliable about it is the technology so we did a sample of it. We got one in the studio and we sampled everything that it did... before it blew up.

Do you have one yourself?

I don't have one any more. I used to for many many years, and then it just sat in a warehouse. Paul Weller now owns it.. It was the Mellotron 400, the interesting one. I think it was the "Mark II 400" that was the one that interested me the most. It was one of those big old beasts. They were notoriously unreliable live, but still... tremendous depth in the thing.

What did you end up doing for the box set?

I ended up fixing guitar on several things; Let me see,...Incidentlty, I should say that it looks like this box set is going to be put back a year because of legal problems. All I've done really is tarted up a few things that I felt should have sounded better. I did odd parts of The Lamb, Dancing With a Moonlit Night, Firth of Fifth, various other things. Mainly the live stuff.

With all of these projects, you must be incredibly busy. One of the most recurring questions that I was given before the interview was "when is he going to play in---Japan, or Argentina, or the US?"

I have been very busy recording, with not much appearing in public. It's possible that I might end up playing in Japan very shortly. I don't want to say who's likely to be in the band, but it's potentially an all-star lineup. I've been into such technically difficult stuff lately that it's hard to find people to play. I find I'm listening to Bach a lot these days, and I keep thinking there's no one around in rock that's that good.

Bach? B-A-C-H Bach?

Yes, B-A-C-H Bach. I'm taking my standards from... It's a thing about musicians, I don't know what it is , but you can talk to a musician one day, and they agree to something and then the following day you'll talk to them and it's as if you're talking to a different person entirely. That's the thing about live work. It's sometimes very hard to keep everything together.

The upcoming project, A Midsummer Nights Dream, is this a film score, an opera, what genre would you put it in?
	It's not a film... I don't know if you can claim to write a piece for classical guitar because I suppose that for it to be a classic you've either got to be dead or it has to be a hit. Heinrich Gorecki can write Symphony #2 and have Dawn Upshaw sing it and it's about the Holocaust and it becomes a hit. Then it becomes part of the classical repertoire. But what I'm doing is the equivalent of a Guitar Concerto, It's something for a guitar and orchestra and very much in a classical style some of which is a Baroque style and some of it is more recent. It is very romantic, but there are moments that are less than tranquil.
I saw a performance of The Rites of Spring, with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein, where it really came to life. It was just incredible, completely different from any other version of it. It ceased to sound like classical instruments and began to sound like pistons and pumps, you could see the fire and smell the steam. And that really what I think all music is about. It's alluding to something else, and when it has done it's job then it has conjured something else up.

One of the songs that has always been a standout for me in that vein is "The Virgin and the Gypsy". The vocals on that track are almost otherworldly. They seem to do what I have called, for lack proper schooling in music, chord inversions....

It's called vocal counterpoint. Funnily enough counterpoint is something that I've worked on very much with Midsummer Night's Dream. Where you've got a number of different melodies inhabiting the same space. With "The Virgin and the Gypsy" I had an idea of something really crossing the main vocal line. I worked in those days with Dik Cadbury who'd been trained as a counter-tenor, so my approach at that point was instinctive and his had been schooled. We did the harmonies together. Yeah, I'm particularly fond of that track, and in a way the idea of something based on a book or even from a title, was one that eventually hung together on very slender threads. It really is just an acoustic guitar just holding that together at times. It was and approach that came back much later with Guitar Noir, where you had a track that could become very big but you could take it right down to one note. Which is something that rock doesn't do most of the time. You get it in Jazz, and you get it in atmospheric music, and I really like the idea of music being that flexible. You can have click tracks and all that, but it takes bravery to pare it all back to that one note. You see so little of that. It's easy to go for bombast all the time.

Were you happy with the reception that "Guitar Noir" got?
	I think it is a very strange album. There were two schools of thought going on. One of which was music which could be played live, which was upbeat and accessible and all things extrovert. And then there was the other school of tremendously dark introverted, difficult to do, slender thread work, which is perhaps the better part of that album, a and perhaps the two come together in A Vampire with a Healthy Appetite, where it becomes very large AND very small.
But usually the twain didn't really meet...because you tended to have two distinctive styles. It was done over such a long period of time, you know? It was something that was completed very much in a vacuum. I felt to a degree whatever I did, I'd chosen a lonely path and I'd have to choose an even more lonely path in a way. I had gone through the label changes and building my own studio, and it took a lot of reorganizing to produce that album. There was a lot of stuff thrown away, and left on the shelf. I do actually work at a fairly frantic pace and that means that things do have to wait their time in order to get out there. I have a lot of ideas, and I can't help being very productive, and I also cant help the fact that the wheels of the industry turn quite slowly.

So far Mr. Budis has invoked the cloak of secrecy as regards a US or European release of the Revisited album. Can you shed any light on this?

Well, you'll be the first to know as soon as there's any real development. I kept quiet about this Genesis stuff for so long, but now there's actually something on the market, even if it's in a far flung corner of the globe, Japan, and I've never actually been there.

Really?

Yes. There's a tremendous amount of enthusiasm there. It seems to be my adoptive home at the moment. It'll be interesting to go there. What I find very interesting about the Japanese approach is that they want to know "technically" everything, they want to know "what equipment were you using?" and "why did you do that?".

You have spoken in the past about publishing some of your work in written form. Have there been any more developments there?

I've been working with guy called Theo Cheng, who'se family is from Hong Kong, and he's a classical guitarist, who also happens to play blues. He and I have spent many long hours getting stuff transcribed, and at some point when a publisher falls in line, we'll do a book. The wheels just turn very slowly, and I am very productive.

You almost say that like an apology.

I'm proud of it, but ...It's like they say "Who is this guy Steve Hackett? You mean he's got all these records?" It's like every wants this extreme justification these days. Things become progressively more corporate. We're not in the same spirit of the sixties, where it was "Hey yeah, walk in here and play your guitar, we'll give you a deal" and off you go. Now it's "Yeah..., well..., if you fulfill all of the above requirements to our satisfaction we'll definitely submit it to the next department." And THAT is the speed that it's all going at the moment Everyone claims to have gotten more successful,-sorry, more SENSIBLE, but in fact I wonder if that's the case. At the labels, no one wants to say "no" for fear of being "the person who turned down the Beatles", but then no one wants to say yes because if something fails they are held accountable. So everything moves slowly. I think these days if you undertake an album, and you manage to get it out 2 years later, than you're doing quite well. Gone are the days of a guy who does a record, and two weeks later the single is out in the shops. It just ain't like that no more.

Any words to the fans out there?

Well, you can't really beat the Beatles thing you know; "We'd like to take you home with us" we'd like to come and visit you, but at the moment were too busy making albums. Sorry about that.

Are there any plans to do a promotional tour for the new record?
You mean will I ever appear in public again? Count Dracula always has to arise from the grave. I've got the fangs in, and ready to have another go at it. I'll be out there again. It may be in Japan first of all. We've got to go through the ritual of getting the album released worldwide, before we can contemplate treading the boards.
I really do miss touring. What I say to people these days is the fact that I spend most of my money these days recording. I think you've got a choice these days, at least I have, And I say to myself " I can afford to make either a very good record and get everyone I want on it including an orchestra, (everything I do is at least partially self-funded), or I've got to spread it out over a record and a tour. I'm contenting myself with the fact that I'm making the best records that I can at this point in time. I'm just prioritizing one type of communication over another, but I DO want to get out there. All Dracula references aside, I'm not holing up anywhere. It is all productive. I have been working extremely long hours, and I've been extremely knackered recently. I turned vegetarian a few months ago, there you go - "the vegetarian vampire", and I think that might be having an effect.

"I remember, when we spoke in Twickenham you mentioned something about swearing off beer, Etc."

Yeah, I don't drink, I don't smoke, I'm teatotal, I don't even drink coffee, and I don't eat meat or fish at the moment, and I even help old ladies across the street.

"A regular Citizen Steve"

Yeah, this is just the opposite to the devil-may-care, who gives a monkeys....approach.

One of the tracks on Guitar Noir that seems to stand out as particularly different is 'Little America" Where did that one come from?
Little America, well... during the '92 tour, we traveled to a place called...I don't even remember what state it was in. We were just driving across America, and it may have been Nebraska for all I know....Julian Colbeck will remember even if I can't. And we passed a sign that said "Little America" which sounded intriguing. It turned out to be a hotel. We drew up, in the middle of the night, about three in the morning, and we checked into this place. They gave us a meal, it was wonderful. And they had these Huge televisions in all the rooms... so its LITTLE America with very BIG tv's, and Julian said "Little America" sounds like a wonderful idea for a song, especially since America is so big, kind of a contradiction in terms.
And I revived an idea that I'd used back in the days of Wind and Wuthering, when I wrote the majority of the lyrics for a track called Blood on the Rooftops, (in fact Phil came up with the title of the song). It was based on the idea of television, everything that happens in the song happens on the TV, all the levels of action take place on tv, so it's like channel surfing.

Chinese Elvis painted by Norman Rockwell ?

Yeah, it was the idea of the mixture of cultures, which is what America IS of course. So we thought long and hard about WHAT Little America could be, and I thought well, perhaps its this contradiction which seemed to find itself....or perhaps you could say the television symbolized the contradiction implicit in the title. So that gave me the idea. I remember turning on and watching, I think it was an Orson Wells movie, or it might have been a Fred Astair and Gene Kelly film, I seem to remember a preponderance of black and white films being shown on this tv.

So the lyrics came first?

Yes, the music came out of a jam that the band was playing in Montreal at the end of that tour. As we were doing a soundcheck, a certain kind of feel came up rhythmically while I was playing the guitar, kind of doing a trumpet impression, and it would have made a nice fusion number the way it was if somebody was recording it right then and there, but we weren't. So in order to reestablish that sort of spontaneous atmosphere, it became crafted and it became that song

It seemed very tight, very drum driven.

In fact that rhythm...It's like a half-time shuffle... which the Brazilians have a name for, it's called a Shorgi, and the reason they call it a Shorgi is because that's their interpretation of something from Scotland. And I realized that what it is- is kind of a Scottish reel or a jig, a 3/4 or a 6/8, but it's a half-time version of that, it becomes laid back. It personified by the kind of feel that Stevie Wonder got on "Isn't She lovely". I've come to the conclusion that the "trends" in music are driven primarily by prejudice of some sort, and I've reached the point where I'll work with any style you can think of, Baroque to Vaudeville. You name it I'm there.

With all the projects you are working on, has it become one of those Zen precepts; where the journey is more important than the destination?

Perhaps that's true. I just hope that, by the time I die, everything gets released. You know? I'll be lying on my deathbed and saying to somebody "Make sure that the tapes are released...".

So what is the paradigm, or the goal, if you will?

Initially it was to see if I could sketch in a number of styles, and now...I guess it's the same for me as any artist... "you can call me an idiot or you can call me a genius- you can call me what you want, but REMEMBER me!". That's what it's all about. And that might sound like a plea, but I think that's all that art is at the end of the day. That's all it is.

Review by Bill Brink for The Waiting Room. (Sept 14, '96).