THE SHOW

Good grief, how bad a single from one of my favourite artists can be. First, I like quite a lot all the early albums by Steve Hackett, definitely including Defector (1980) which contains some atmospheric stuff full of unique, timeless, English charm that I consider to be one of Hackett's trademarks -- witnessed already in the Genesis output, e.g. 'Blood on the Rooftops' from Wind & Wuthering. But Defector is notably more uneven than Steve's preceding solo albums, mainly due to some throwaway songs like 'The Show'. It is musically very mediocre pop song with a kitchy synth riff going on and on. And the lyrics that try to be satirical about rock business, they are hardly even slightly amusing.

I didn't know the B-side song 'Hercules Unchained' in advance, so I listened to it on YouTube. At first I wondered can this really be the right track, or is YouTube accidentally playing me some Slade or something in that vein instead. Noisy electric guitar sound walls of metallic rock'n'roll, and fast-tempo vocals like on the worst songs of Billy Joel (such as 'Still Rock'n'Roll to Me'). The best thing about this horrible song is its length of under three minutes. It has been included as a bonus on Defector's CD release. Frankly to me it would be a very negative, unwanted addition to a fairly nice album.

(One star reviews are very rare in my reviews list, because I prefer to write about music I can recommend to at least someone, but this was just a case of a quick ex tempore review, and if I yesterday gave two stars to a decent album just because I wasn't really turned on by it, this single is a plain one-star release for me.)