Steve Hackett on the worst album he ever made: “Commercial pressures”
Everything about progressive music is about moving music forward. It’s kind of right there in the name; the progression of music usually triumphs over having a catchy single in the hit parade for most acts. While Steve Hackett always abided by that tradition, he admitted that he may have gone a little too far into trendy territory when putting together the album Cured.
Then again, Hackett didn’t necessarily need to prove his worth in the prog-rock realm. After coming into the fold in Genesis, he had already started to shape the group into something a lot more progressive than anyone could have dreamed of, complete with some of the first instances of tapping on the fretboard before Eddie Van Halen even dreamed of it.
Once Peter Gabriel left for a stellar solo career, though, Hackett knew that he couldn’t just phone it in throughout his own projects, either. Then again, despite exiting the group on good terms after Wind and Wuthering, Hackett already built up a reputation as a decent solo act in the prog sphere.
While records like Voyage of the Acolytes weren’t exactly going to set the world on fire, they seemed to exist in the same realm as Chris Squire’s solo material did. It was prog musicians making music only for themselves, but Cured does have an albatross hanging over it, and that albatross’s name is Phil Collins.
Despite being out of the group, Hackett’s management most likely saw Genesis veering towards pop territory and Collins’s solo debut, Face Value, and convinced Hackett to make something more in line with the times. That meant the drum machines came out in full force, with Hackett writing tunes that might have a solid chance of getting played on the radio.
For all of the commercial ideals, though, that can’t save an album from being terrible right out of the gate, with Hackett telling Louder, “I wouldn’t say that it was terrible or embarrassing or even badly executed, and it does have redeeming features that include ‘The Air-Conditioned Nightmare’, but in some ways I gave in to commercial pressures with that one. It’s very much of its time. The 1980s were a trying period for album artists that the record companies wanted singles from.”
Then again, even the most accessible progressive rock acts can find a way to shoehorn in a little bit of complexity here and there. For all of the strange movements on the album, ‘The Air Conditioned Nightmare’ is far and away the best track on the record, if only because Hackett sounds like he’s more sure of himself than anything that he had been working with.
If there’s anything to be taken from an album like Cured, though, it’s to let musicians make whatever the hell they want rather than shoehorn them into a particular sound. The reason why Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel crossed over so well was because it happened naturally, but when you try to force it, you end up with an album like this.
