Posted on by Christopher Sandford · 2 Comments

A truly progressive rocker

Genesis in 1973 (Steve Hackett second from right)

A Genesis in my Bed, Steve Hackett, Wymer Publishing, 208 pages, £13.99

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD enjoys the modest memoirs of a guitarist who has little to be modest about

While the likes of the capital’s O2 Arena brace themselves for the invasion of the Phil Collins version of Genesis next spring, or whenever it is we’re finally released from our collective house arrest, the band’s former guitarist Steve Hackett offers something that’s mercifully not as sugary. Residual 1960s peace and love might be at the core of Hackett’s long-awaited memoir A Genesis in my Bed – the title is taken from an excited American groupie’s exclamation on finding herself closeted with the author one night in his Midwestern hotel room – but there’s also a becoming modesty and a refreshing calm to this account of the unprepossessing kid with the goggly NHS specs who graduated from the bombed-out austerity of postwar London, where joy was in as short supply as fresh food, to flying the Atlantic on Concorde and packing them in at Madison Square Garden.

Odd as it might seem to the rest of us, Hackett makes it all sound like a perfectly logical progression in life, and it’s part of his book’s considerable charm that he treats the lows and highs (and more lows) with the same stoic good cheer, keeping a lid on any unseemly emotion. Steady on, you can almost hear Hackett say in these pages, we’re British – and you remember that the author grew up at a time when the country was more drilled and regimented than in any other era of its history, where ubiquitous gravy made everything taste alike and kids like young Hackett sat belted and shivering at night in their identical, redbrick houses furnished just like their granny’s. “Who has not felt,” wrote the social historian James Morris in 1962,

…the deadweight of that worn-out, disillusioned, smug, astigmatic, half-educated generation, weighing lumpishly upon the nation’s shoulders?

It was against this England that the Beatles and the Stones, with the likes of Genesis a half-step behind them, were in glamorous revolt. The latter made an only tentative start. Their debut single, a Bee Gees pastiche called “The Silent Sun”, conspicuously avoided any sales, and after recording their first album – entitled From Genesis to Revelation, and marketed in the ‘Religious’ section of most British record shops – the young band members all drifted off to university, convinced that their career was over.

They later gave it a second shot, and things finally took off when lead singer Peter Gabriel wandered on the stage of a boxing stadium in Dublin one night in 1972 while attired in his wife’s red cocktail dress and a fox’s head. Fleet Street ran a front-page photo of the event and the band’s fee doubled overnight as a result. Soon Genesis went on to cut their masterpiece Selling England by the Pound, and John Lennon was calling them one of his favourite bands, which was about as close to a papal blessing as you could get in their line of work.

Meanwhile, the 20-year-old Hackett had joined the lineup after placing an advertisement in the “For Hire” columns of Melody Maker, instantly bringing an astutely varied guitar sound – covering the waterfront from heavy-rock riffing to an exhilarating but plangent touch of acoustic – to the mix. His solo piece Horizons on the Foxtrot LP had a lightness of melody with which Bach might not have been disappointed. Genesis were fabulously lucky to have him, and between about 1970-75 the band invented a look and a sound that was plainly modern, eclectic, virtuosic, emotionally thoughtful and lyrically witty, with a larding of dystopianism and a refreshing aversion to the demands of playlist-pleasing, box-ticking blandness. It was their fusion of rock-band swagger with some of the technical prowess of a string quintet that informed dozens of lesser groups coming up behind them.  Whether Mars Volta and the rest recognise it or not, an awful lot of what they do is streaming Genesis.

Of course that isn’t to say it was all plain sailing at the time. Hackett’s tenure in Genesis from 1970-77 may have marked the band’s creative peak, but it was matched by a relentless, budget-conscious tour schedule and at best only break-even material rewards. Beyoncé might live in a house made of Cartier jewellery and swim in a pool filled with Cristal champagne and pink ice cubes, but down at the other end of the scale, for working performers life can be tough. Not the least of this book’s charms is the author’s enjoyably deadpan account of some of the Spinal Tap-like indignities of keeping the show on the road. At one early gig at Cheltenham Ladies College, he recalls, the well-heeled young audience members sat staring open-mouthed at the shaggy musicians playing before them, as though they had just crash-landed from Mars. At least they bothered to turn up on that occasion.

On other nights the five-piece band was almost larger than the paying crowd. Hackett writes of one show at a football stadium in Italy,

where the few stragglers who showed up were completely outnumbered by the heavily sedated inmates of a psychiatric hospital bordering the pitch. Trapped behind a high metal fence, the poor souls just stared glassy-eyed at our show. We felt about as welcome as a condom at the Vatican

Even after going on to play to 15,000 ecstatic fans at the Empire Pool, Wembley, Hackett simply packed up his guitar and got a lift back to his parents’ small flat in Pimlico where he was still living. That same general air of modesty pervades the book as a whole. Hackett is too honourable to really spill the beans either on his fellow band members or any of the various perks of life as a working musician. Unlike, say, the Motley Crue story, the book doesn’t aspire to a joyful cascade of indiscretions, although at one point the author admits:

I had some pretty strange encounters [with women], from the burlesque dancer and the female wrestling champion to the girl whose fantasy was a brutal night with Vincent Price

Hackett left Genesis essentially to pursue his own career, and true to his word he’s gone on to release an astonishing 25 or so solo albums as well as collaborating with everyone from the American folk singer Richie Havens to the Hungarian jazz-rock group Djabe. There are musicians whose last record is very like their first. Having learned their trade, mastered it for once and all, they practice it with little variation to the very end. Steve Hackett is very different. He will be remembered for being fearless in his single-minded pursuit of what he thought his evolving craft required. This is a quiet, wry, unvarnished, always compellingly fluent account of 50 years of assorted ups and downs in the entertainment world, with the supremely satisfying ending of a happily married man at the peak of his creative game. You should treat yourself to a copy immediately.

Posted on by Paul Garner · 2 Comments

Blake’s 7: moral darkness in outer space

Gareth Thomas as Roj Blake

PAUL GARNER pays tribute to an innovative sci-fi series which gave grim glamour to late Seventies and early Eighties evenings

In the dark winter months at the beginning of 1978 I began to regret signing up as a cub scout. We met on Monday evenings in the school hall, and, thanks to the vagaries of BBC scheduling, that was also when episodes of the brand-new science fiction series, Blake’s 7, were being broadcast. I remember hurrying home from all the ‘dyb-dyb-dybbing’, anxious that I was going to miss the beginning of the latest instalment.

For Doctor Who fans like me, the new series would help to fill the gaps between Saturdays when the TARDIS would whisk us off on another adventure. But if we expected Blake’s 7 to emulate the fantastical whimsy that characterized late-1970s Doctor Who, we were in for a shock. The BBC’s new ‘space opera’ was tonally very different and about to subvert all our cosy assumptions.

Creator Terry Nation claims to have pitched the series to BBC executives as “The Dirty Dozen in space”. Blake’s 7 is set in a dystopian, post-atomic future in which the Terran Federation controls the human population with a combination of drugs, mind control techniques and old-fashioned thuggery. The earth and its colonies are police states, with Stasi-like informers everywhere. Citizens can trust no one and betrayal is the order of the day. In the opening episode, we are introduced to Roj Blake (Gareth Thomas), a man who has been brainwashed and can remember nothing of his previous life as a resistance leader. When his former compatriots help him to break his conditioning they are mercilessly eliminated, and Blake is subjected to a show trial with trumped-up accusations of child molestation. It is hard-edged stuff.

Blake is convicted and sent on a transporter to a prison planet, Cygnus Alpha, but en route organises a rebellion and manages to escape with two of his fellow convicts. Kerr Avon (Paul Darrow) is a computer genius and embezzler and Jenna Stannis (Sally Knyvette) is a space pilot and smuggler. Commandeering an abandoned alien ship, the Liberator, with its master computer Zen (Peter Tuddenham), they mount a rescue bid, and on Cygnus Alpha recruit Olag Gan (David Jackson) and Vila Restal (Michael Keating). Vila is a thief and expert lock-breaker, Gan guilty of killing the Federation guard who had raped his girlfriend. Soon they are joined by Cally (Jan Chappell), a telepath from the planet Auron and lone survivor of an anti-Federation guerilla force. Pledging to destroy the Federation, the seven head off into space, hotly pursued by the leader of Space Command, Servalan (Jacqueline Pearce), and her psychopathic henchman, Travis (Stephen Greif in series one, Brian Croucher in series two).

Given this set-up, Blake’s 7 could easily have lapsed into two-dimensionality, but one of the most notable things about it is that nothing is cast in black and white. We are never entirely sure that the ‘good guys’ really are good guys. The Federation is ruthless and brutal, but the rebels are not averse to some ruthlessness and brutality of their own. The body count is unquestionably high whenever Blake’s crew are around, and not just on the Federation side. Blake himself seems fully prepared to risk the lives of others in pursuit of his political ideals, and his quarrelling followers often seem ready to abandon one another to save their own skins. They are at best anti-heroes. The most morally ambiguous of them all is Avon, whose obvious self-interest leads to some tense confrontations with Blake early in the series. Avon is not the kind of man on whom it would be wise to turn your back. Even Vila, for whom Avon shows some grudging affection, is not safe. In the episode Orbit, Avon is ready to throw Vila overboard so their shuttle can overcome the gravitational pull of the planet from which they are making their escape, and his stalking of Vila through the darkened corridors, while his companion cowers terrified in the shadows, is genuinely chilling. Avon’s callousness is also spotlighted in other episodes, such as Stardrive, in which he coldly sacrifices Dr Plaxton, and Rumours of Death, in which he seeks revenge against Shrinker, the man he suspects of murdering Anna Grant, the only woman he ever loved. Shrinker is soon reduced from sadistic torturer to quivering wreck, begging Avon for mercy, in a fantastic performance by guest actor John Bryans. But viewers are left wondering, with the crew of the Liberator, whether Avon is any less monstrous than the man he is punishing.

Jacqueline Pearce as Servalan, and Paul Darrow as Kerr Avon

Later episodes introduce changes to the regular line-up. At the end of series one, Orac, a flashing box of tricks with an irascible personality, is acquired by Blake and his companions from the computer genius Ensor. Midway through the second series Gan dies under falling masonry during a raid on Federation Central Control and at the end of the season Blake and Jenna go missing after bailing from the Liberator during an intergalactic conflict. With Blake’s departure, Avon appoints himself leader, and in the third series the crew is joined by Dayna Mellanby (Josette Simon), the daughter of a fugitive and revolutionary, and Del Tarrant (Steven Pacey), a defector from the Federation’s Space Academy.

At the end of the third series, Avon’s recklessness in the teeth of opposition from his fellow crewmembers leads to the destruction of the Liberator, along with Zen, and the unhappy survivors are trapped by Servalan on the planet Terminal. This was originally intended to be the climactic episode, but late in the day the decision was made to commission a fourth series. By this time the production office had already closed down and there was a scramble to reenlist cast and crew, and get a production line of scripts going, which accounts for much of the unevenness of the first half of series four.

The fourth and final series opens with Cally’s death in a booby trap left by Servalan. Then we are introduced to Soolin (Glynis Barber), an expert gunslinger whose parents had been murdered by hired mercenaries. The rebels acquire a new ship, Scorpio, along with its computer, Slave, and they establish a base from which to launch an offensive against the Federation. Meanwhile, Servalan, who by this time has been deposed as Federation president, takes on a new identity as Commissioner Sleer and resumes her vendetta against Avon and his crew.

Forty years on, Blake’s 7 remains loved by many, though it is difficult to regard it as high art. It has a reputation, not wholly undeserved, for looking cheap, though it must be remembered that it was made in the unionized days of the late 1970s, when budgets were stretched by rampant inflation and there was an ever-present threat of strike action bringing a halt to production. The clichés about dodgy special effects, wonky sets and quarries masquerading as alien worlds are clichés for a reason, and the constraints that faced the production team are often all too evident in what appeared on screen. Despite this, the series has a loyal fan following and conventions continue to be held annually, sadly with a dwindling number of original cast and crew as the years pass.

Inevitably, comparisons are made between Blake’s 7 and Doctor Who, though in reality the two programmes are very different. Blake’s 7 is darker, grittier and more clearly written for an older audience. There are references to sex, drugs and alcohol in Blake’s 7 that would never have been allowed in classic Who. Blake’s 7 is also much less reliant on aliens and monsters, preferring to concentrate on human drama and action. On the few occasions when Blake’s 7 does venture into monster territory the results are less than satisfying, object lessons in how ambition cannot always triumph over practicalities. Director Vere Lorrimer wisely keeps the Phibians lurking in the shadows in Orac, teasing the viewer with occasional glimpses of claw or tail, but on other occasions the programme makers are less circumspect, and, unfortunately, the giant insect in The Harvest of Kairos possesses all the menace of a pantomime horse and the climax of Moloch is rather spoiled by a laughable monocular glove puppet.

However, the play’s the thing, and the great strengths of Blake’s 7 are in characterization and story. The regulars turn in some magnificent performances, even if, at times, a certain amount of scenery-chewing is indulged. Paul Darrow’s Avon is beautifully crafted, dark, self-centred and cynical, with a nice line in sardonic asides, such as when he says of Tarrant that he “is brave, young and handsome; three reasons not to like him”. Michael Keating brings great humanity to his portrayal of Vila, whose cowardice and complaining could have been irritating in the hands of a lesser actor. Yes, Vila is often employed as comic relief (there are lighter moments, even in Blake’s 7), but he is not stupid, on one occasion feigning drunkenness so that he could pass on to his crewmates the solution to an intractable problem while making sure he didn’t have to endanger himself by dealing with it. From the outset, Jacqueline Pearce’s Servalan is deliciously sadistic and scheming, and one can’t help relishing her performance even when it goes over the top. Finally, special mention should be given to Peter Tuddenham, who manages to invest all the series’ computers with distinct personalities, from the detached logicality of Zen to the fussy obtuseness of Orac and the Uriah Heep-like obsequiousness of Slave.

There were some notable guest appearances too, including Roy Kinnear as the bumbling, avaricious security officer of a passenger liner in Gold, Aubrey Woods as a corrupt and flamboyant casino owner in Gambit, and Julian Glover as an unpleasant neurosurgeon and Federation informer in Breakdown. As in any long-running series, the scriptwriting hits highs and lows, but Blake’s 7 delivers many stand-out episodes and even the most mediocre often contain memorable lines.

Among my favourites are City at the Edge of the World, in which Vila almost gets the girl and we meet Bayban the Butcher (Colin Baker in pre-Doctor Who days), Terminal, a well-crafted and pacey episode, with a heartbeat soundtrack that sets a funereal tone, and Sand, in which Tarrant and Servalan are thrown together in unlikely fashion on a planet with a very strange and threatening lifeform. Nor are the scriptwriters above the shameless plundering of plotlines from classic fantasy literature, especially in the fourth series which gives us episodes based on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (Rescue) and H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau (Animals). Even Headhunter trespasses into the domain of Frankenstein, with its lumbering android grotesquely wearing the decapitated head of its creator.

Blake’s 7 ran from 1978 to 1981. Looking back now, one is struck by how unremittingly bleak it all was. Every series ended in some kind of catastrophe, and there was never any guarantee our heroes would even survive. In the final series, we witness Avon’s slow descent into paranoia and madness, culminating in the shocking denouement on the frontier planet of Gauda Prime. For more than two years, viewers had eagerly anticipated Blake’s return, but when he does finally reappear it is not the glad reunion for which we had hoped. Blake, battered and world-weary, stands once again face-to-face with Avon, only for his old comrade to shoot him in the stomach at point-blank range, under the tragic misapprehension that Blake has betrayed him. What follows is one of the most shocking endings to any television series, with all the Scorpio crew except Avon being gunned down in slow motion by jack-booted Federation soldiers. As Avon stands over the bloody corpse of Blake, with the guards closing in around him, he raises his gun and smiles. And that’s where the curtain falls, the closing credits breaking in with another volley of shots. There is no happy ending. The ‘good guys’ don’t always win.

Of course, fans of the programme have been endlessly inventive in coming up with scenarios in which their favourite characters survived or the story continued. Sequels have been written, new episodes recorded for radio, and there have been rumours for years about a television revival, although a reboot seems as far away as ever. But I can’t help feeling that the ending we got was the right one. The rebellion is ultimately a failure. The Federation is still in control, even expanding after the setback of the Andromedan war. And Servalan, who mysteriously makes no appearance in the finale, is presumably still out there and plotting her route back to power. It’s bleak, but anything more hopeful would rob Blake’s 7 of its soul.