There is a piece of music on this album called Please Don’t Touch. Steve Hackett had written it for Genesis, and Genesis had left it off Wind and Wuthering to make room for something else. That, by the account usually given, was one of the reasons he walked. So he took the piece, made it the title track of his first album as a free man, and named the record after it. If you want to understand why an artist leaves a band at the peak of its success, start with that sentence and then play track eight.

The short version

Please Don’t Touch! is Steve Hackett’s second solo album and his first after leaving Genesis, released by Charisma in 1978. Hackett plays guitars, keyboards, percussion and, on one track, sings. His brother John Hackett covers flute, piccolo, bass pedals and keyboards, and John Acock co-produces and adds keyboards. The rest is a remarkable list of hired hands, most of them American: Chester Thompson and Phil Ehart on drums, Tom Fowler on bass, Dave Lebolt on keyboards, Graham Smith on violin, Hugh Malloy on cello. And three guest lead singers — Steve Walsh of Kansas, Richie Havens, and a then almost unknown Randy Crawford. Ten tracks, all of them roughly radio length. Kim Poor painted the sleeve.

Los Angeles and the singers

Freedom is the subject here as much as any song is. Hackett had spent six years inside a band with a fixed sound and a queue for the microphone, and the first thing he did on getting out was book a flight to Los Angeles and hire Americans. The stated ambition was to mix what he called white and black music — a phrase of its time, and a real intention: the album swings between English whimsy, symphonic prog, soul balladry and folk in a way no Genesis record could have. The one thing he would not do was sing. He did not trust his own voice yet, so he found three that he did. Steve Walsh came from Kansas, bringing that instantly recognisable American arena tenor. Richie Havens, who had opened Woodstock nine years earlier, brought gravel and warmth. And Randy Crawford, whom Hackett had heard in a club and who was still years away from being famous, brought a jazz-soul instrument that nobody expected on a progressive rock record. Chester Thompson, who had been drumming behind Genesis on the road, turned up too. It is the most crowded, most restless album of Hackett’s career, and that is the point of it.

The sound

All over the place, gloriously and sometimes exhaustingly. This is a man emptying his pockets: Narnia is symphonic pop with an American voice on it, Carry On Up the Vicarage is English music-hall filtered through a vocoder, How Can I? is a campfire folk song, Hoping Love Will Last is a soul ballad, and the title track is pure Wind and Wuthering-era instrumental Genesis. Critics then and now make the same complaint — too many styles, too many breaks, no through-line — and they are not wrong, they are just describing the design. The songs are short. There is no epic anywhere, which from the composer of Voyage of the Acolyte was a deliberate provocation. What holds it together is the guitar, and the specific cold, glassy choir sound that Hackett had already used on the last Genesis album and brings with him here like a piece of furniture from the old house.

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The songs

Narnia opens the album with Steve Walsh singing a lyric drawn from C. S. Lewis, and the effect is Kansas meeting Genesis, with acoustic guitar filling the space where Kansas would have put a violin. It has become one of the best-loved things Hackett ever recorded. Carry On Up the Vicarage is the strange one: a tribute to Agatha Christie, the title a pun on the old British comedy films, with Hackett taking the microphone himself and processing his voice into something small and sinister over children’s-playground sounds and Taurus pedals. Racing in A brings Walsh back. Kim is two minutes of flute and acoustic guitar written for Kim Poor, and it is the moment that most recalls Voyage of the Acolyte. How Can I? and Icarus Ascending are the Richie Havens tracks, the first a lovely folk song that would not have embarrassed Wind and Wuthering, the second the album’s closer. Hoping Love Will Last is Randy Crawford’s, a soul ballad with Hackett’s guitar sprinkled through it. Land of a Thousand Autumns runs under two minutes and leads straight into Please Don’t Touch, the instrumental that started all this: melodic, driving, and close cousin to Even in That Quiet Earth. The Voice of Necam is the ambient piece, all wordless choir and a beautiful acoustic passage, and it is many listeners’ favourite thing here.

Reception and legacy

It confused people in 1978 and it still does. Anyone arriving from Voyage of the Acolyte expecting more of the same found an album with no epics, three singers who were not Steve Hackett, and a stylistic swerve every four minutes. The recurring verdict is that it is scattered — that the great moments, and there are several, are marooned among experiments that do not come off. The counter-argument is that scatter was the entire objective: this is the sound of somebody using a freedom he had just paid dearly for, and it would have been a far duller record had he played it safe. Its standing has risen steadily. Narnia, Kim, Please Don’t Touch and The Voice of Necam are now fixtures of the story, Steven Wilson gave the album a surround mix decades later precisely because it is so densely layered, and the sequence that follows — Spectral Mornings, Defector — would not have existed without this act of clearing the decks first.

The verdict

The third Hackett album to buy, after Spectral Mornings and Defector, and worth every minute — but do not make it your first, and do not come to it straight from Voyage of the Acolyte expecting a sequel. Narnia is the way in. Please Don’t Touch is the reason the album exists and the best three and a half minutes on it. Kim and The Voice of Necam are quiet, small and permanent. Carry On Up the Vicarage will either delight you or send you across the room. Play it as what it is: the sound of a man who has just resigned, standing in a Los Angeles studio, doing every single thing his old band would not let him do.

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