In 1983 Steve Hackett stopped touring Britain with a full electric band. He did not start again until this album. To Watch the Storms is the record where he assembled the group he still plays with today — Roger King, Gary O’Toole and Rob Townsend have now been at his side for more than two decades — and walked back onto a stage after twenty years away from one. Everything he has done since begins here.

The short version

To Watch the Storms is Steve Hackett’s sixteenth studio album, released in 2003 on InsideOut. Thirteen tracks, just under an hour, with a special edition adding four more. The band is his live band: Roger King on keyboards, programming and vocoder — and, characteristically, also engineering, mixing and mastering the thing, plus co-writing three tracks — with Terry Gregory on bass and vocals, Gary O’Toole on drums and vocals, and Rob Townsend on brass, woodwind and whistles. Hackett sings and plays guitar, Optigan, harmonica, koto, rain stick, chimes and cuatro. Brother John takes the flute solo on Serpentine Song, and Ian McDonald — a founder of King Crimson — plays saxophone on Brand New. Kim Poor painted the cover, as she had since the beginning.

The band that stayed

The story of Hackett’s solo career up to this point is a story of bands he assembled and then lost: the Spectral Mornings group he dissolved after Defector; the trio that made Highly Strung; the Guitar Noir band that carried him through the nineties. This one he kept. Roger King had come aboard for Darktown in 1999 and by now was functioning as keyboard player, arranger, engineer, producer and co-writer — the same role Nick Magnus had filled twenty years earlier, but permanent. Gary O’Toole and Rob Townsend arrived for this record. All three are still there, on stage and on album after album, and that continuity is the single most important thing that ever happened to Hackett’s late career. It also explains why To Watch the Storms sounds like a group rather than a construction: the material was made by people who were about to go out and play it, and then did, for the first time in a decade.

The sound

Eclectic to the point of provocation, and better recorded than anything he had made in twenty years. There is a delicate late-seventies ballad, a circus waltz, a blues piano number that sounds like it was carried out of a bad nightclub, a King Crimson pastiche with real teeth, two acoustic classical guitar miniatures, a piece of Far Eastern world music and a pop song. Some of it is processed and electronic, carrying over from Darktown; more of it is warm, played and acoustic. Roger King’s production is the difference — clear, wide and unfussy, with none of the thin, apologetic quality that dogged the eighties albums. The vocals are the best of Hackett’s career, and the harmonies on Serpentine Song are, by fairly general agreement, the finest singing on any of his records. Nothing here is accidental. Whether the variety reads as richness or as restlessness is the thing everybody argues about.

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The songs

Strutton Ground opens with three minutes of intimate, unhurried beauty that could have come off a 1970s record, and it has converted more people to late Hackett than anything else he has written. Circus of Becoming has a lopsided fairground lilt and a whiff of Please Don’t Touch about it. The Devil Is An Englishman is the surprise: a cover of a Thomas Dolby song written for a Ken Russell film, done with canned voices and deliberately artificial instruments, and it is either the most entertaining thing here or the most irritating. Frozen Statues is blues piano. Mechanical Bride is the big one — six and a half minutes standing squarely in Twenty-First Century Schizoid Man territory, with ferocious guitar — and the neat irony is that a founding King Crimson member is on the album, though not on this track. Wind, Sand and Stars and The Moon Under Water are the acoustic guitar interludes, both lovely. Brand New is the catchy one, with Ian McDonald’s saxophone, and it runs straight into This World. Rebecca is a warm, well-made ballad. The Silk Road heads east. Come Away is an odd Celtic-Indian waltz recorded live. And Serpentine Song closes the album: dedicated to Hackett’s father, with John Hackett’s flute solo and vocal harmonies of real beauty, it is the most affecting thing on the record and arguably the best straightforward song he ever wrote.

Reception and legacy

Divided, and instructively so. The enthusiasts call it his best album since the seventies, better than Darktown, the finest thing he made in the 2000s. The detractors call it his weirdest release and a slog. Both camps single out the same two tracks: Mechanical Bride and The Devil Is An Englishman are simultaneously cited as the album’s peaks and as the reason people gave up on it — a rip-off and a masterpiece, a joke that lands and a joke that grates, depending entirely on who is writing. That pattern is familiar from Highly Strung, and it means the same thing here: the album is doing something risky and the risk does not pay off uniformly. What is not disputed is the playing, the production and Serpentine Song. Nor is the historical fact: this is the record that put Steve Hackett back on the road with an electric band and gave him the three musicians who would carry him through the next twenty years, all the way to The Night Siren and beyond.

The verdict

The best place to start with Hackett after 1980, ahead of Guitar Noir, and the album to hand anybody who assumes his career ended when the seventies did. Strutton Ground and Serpentine Song are the two you will keep. Mechanical Bride is worth the argument. The acoustic pieces are small and perfect. If the electronic textures and the odd novelty track put you off, that is a legitimate objection and you will not be alone in it. But this is a musician in his early fifties, twenty years past his last proper tour, making a genuinely ambitious record with a band he had just built and would never let go of again. It worked.

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