Steve Hackett and Steve Rothery team up on one record: here comes “The Roaring Waves”

Years after a mutual respect grew out of shared backstages, festivals and the occasional collaboration, Steve Hackett and Steve Rothery have finally turned their friendship into a joint recording project. The former Genesis guitarist and the Marillion founder will release “The Roaring Waves” on August 28, an album born out of a creative process that took almost eight years to complete.
Speaking about the collaboration, Hackett told Prog: “When you're friends first and the music comes after, you realise there's no competition, and something different starts to happen”.
The record brings together seven instrumental pieces inspired by Whitby, the coastal town in North Yorkshire where Rothery grew up. A place that left a deep mark on the musician's imagination: “In winter you could hear the roar of the waves during storms. Whitby was a very evocative place to live, a poetic and powerful place to grow up in”.

Although the idea dates back several years, the project took concrete shape in 2023, when the two guitarists began recording together at the Racket Club in Buckinghamshire, carving out time between their respective solo commitments. "Our approach was a bit old school, like the idea of friends getting together in a garage to play and hang out", Hackett said in a press release.
For Rothery, making the album also represents the fulfilment of a dream nurtured since his teenage years: "If you'd told my fifteen-year-old self, who was discovering Genesis and just starting to learn guitar, that one day this legendary guitarist would become a close friend of mine more than 40 years later, I would have fainted".

"The Roaring Waves" thus marks the meeting of two of the most iconic guitarists in British progressive rock, brought together in a work rooted as much in personal memory as in the genre's long history.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google