LIVE ARCHIVE 04

This is a very good live album which demonstrates why Steve Hackett is considered as a very good composer and guitarist. His band is also very good, and they play very good songs from Hackett`s solo albums plus some songs which he played with GENESIS. Some of the arrangments to his songs and to the songs that he recorded with GENESIS are different, but they are still good. For example, in "Blood on the Rooftops" there is a sax playing a melody. From "Firth of Fifth" they only play the lead guitar section. "Please don`t Touch" is a brief version of this song.

I was curious to hear a live version of "Blood on the Rooftops", a song which GENESIS never played in concert. I don`t know if Hackett sang the lead vocals, but they sound good anyway.

Steve Hackett`s music maybe has some similarities with the music from CAMEL, but he also plays the guitar in different styles, sometimes being "soft" and in other times sounding "heavy". He knows how to apply electronic sound effects to his guitar to make it sound with a lot of different sounds, with "atmospheric" guitars, and of course, he also has a very good technique, very personal to play the guitar. I think that in GENESIS he wasn`t allowed to shine like he shines as soloist, IMO, his best years as musician should have been his years since he left GENESIS.