Father Figure

Singer-songwriter and the voice of the Genesis Revisited shows, Nad Sylvan has moved further away from his onstage persona with his latest solo album, Monumentata. He reveals the story behind the intimate record that pays homage to his late father and finds him mixing up influences - from Pink Floyd and Keith Emerson to The Addams Family!

- Johnny Sharp

“Apologies if I seem a little tired,” announces Nad Sylvan. “I’ve been gardening all day.” Prog meets the singer-songwriter and Steve Hackett band vocalist via video call to a sunny conservatory at his home “in the wilderness” on the south-east coast of Sweden, where on the face of it, he’s living the kind of leisurely existence many a man in his mid-60s might enjoy. The difference is that this is a relatively rare day off from his day/ night job on regular tours and studio work with Hackett and, most recently, making Monumentata, his fifth solo album in 10 years.

You only need to look at Sylvan to know he hasn’t made his living as a horny-handed son of toil, and you might even guess he’s a regularly touring musician. He has that naturally skinny physical frame that’s rarely seen among sexagenarians outside the performing arts (the rock’n’roll tour diet can surely teach us all a thing or two), and there’s also that hair. Some performers, of course, have to adapt with weaves, ponytails and close crops. But some, like Nad Sylvan, retain an extraordinary body of locks that help preserve the essential image of a man born to bestride the stage.

Whether Sylvan ever expected to be treading the kind of boards he is now, is another question. He’ll be best known to Prog readers as the voice of the Steve Hackett band, and the man who has reimagined some of Peter Gabriel’s finest performances in Hackett’s Genesis Revisited band.

The latter series of tours and records in particular have proved successful beyond anyone’s expectations, with the result that Sylvan’s creative relationship with Hackett has lasted well over a decade. In the early 2010s, when the US-born Swede was touring with The Flower Kings’ Roine Stolt as Agents Of Mercy, the former Genesis man was making plans for a sequel to his 1996 Genesis Revisited album, and in 2012 he invited Sylvan to contribute to