HORIZONS

I own as many as six live videos by Steve Hackett! I suppose those six are all there currently are on the market. The three best ones are The Tokyo Tapes, Somewhere In South America and Once Above A Time (all of which I rated with the full five stars!), but this film of a performance from the early 90's comes very close to those three masterpiece live videos! I must ask, how many great live videos can one and the same man make? Having six different live videos by Steve Hackett is obviously not essential, but having at least two of these DVDs in your Prog collection is truly essential!

I own the present one on VHS and my version is simply called 'Steve Hackett Live'. But I am pretty certain that the Horizons DVD as it is listed here has the exact same contents as my VHS. I will try to get my hands on the DVD instead. It has, after all, much nicer art work and the VHS format is clearly on its way out of history (all for the better, of course).

The set list of this show is great as it spans Steve's entire career from his days with Genesis up till and including his then most recent studio album Guitar Noir. In The Heart Of The City and Theatre Of Sleep are, however, the only two numbers taken from that album, and as far as I know these songs are not available on any other official live recording. There are many old Hackett classics here too like Camino Royale, Please Don't Touch, Every Day, Spectral Mornings and Clocks. Plus Genesis classics like In That Quiet Earth and the eternal Horizons - an acoustic instrumental that forever will be associated with Steve.

The performance is lively and energetic and leaves nothing to be desired, really! Still, I feel that this video is not quite as amazingly good as the more recent DVDs I mentioned above. My four-star rating here should be interpreted as 'excellent addition to your Prog collection in addition to The Tokyo Tapes, Somewhere In South America and/or Once Above A Time'! All of these DVDs are simply fantastic and any one of them would make an excellent starting point into Steve Hackett's interesting solo career.