Squackett: Squackett

New project from Yes’s Chris Squire and Steve Hackett, once of Genesis.

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Having guested on some of Steve Hackett’s solo albums, it was a logical next step for the prog titans to form a mini-supergroup.

They’d suggested their name as a half-joke in interviews but have decided to stick with it – slightly unfortunate, as it sounds like some new mail order, compact version of the squash racket, but since the alternative was ‘Huire’, it’s understandable.

Apart from some clever vocoderising, Squackett sets sail upon its own seas as if little of import has happened in music since 1973. The keyboard layers and guitar tunings are silvery, the vocal deliveries unabashed and grandiose, with the lyrical themes straddling oceans, the elements and the soul of man, as evinced on titles such as Divided Self, Stormchaser and Tall Ships.

It’s redeemed by the pedigree and quality of Hackett and Squire, but is likely to be of interest only to their followers, as opposed to a wider audience.

David Stubbs

David Stubbs is a music, film, TV and football journalist. He has written for The Guardian, NME, The Wire and Uncut, and has written books on Jimi Hendrix, Eminem, Electronic Music and the footballer Charlie Nicholas.