STEVE LUKATHER

Growing up in Los Angeles with school friends Steve, Jeff and Mike Porcaro, Steve Lukather would play on thousands of records and become part of the legendary rock band Toto. We hook up with Luke to talk about how The Beatles sowed the musical seed, learn about his stellar career, and the stunning new solo album, I Found The Sun Again

- Neville Marten

First Guitar

“I had a Kay acoustic guitar. A piece of wood with strings on it, man. Five bucks maybe. I struggled to make this thing make noise. My parents made it into a lamp for my 21st birthday, as a joke, because at that point I had a hit record and all this stuff.”

Getting Better

All The Time “All of a sudden it made sense to me. My fingers all of a sudden went, ‘Yes, I know how to do this.’ And I started playing all the 1st position chords over and over. ‘Ding, ding, ding.’ I was like, ‘Wow, man, you’re a little teeny kid, you play chords.’ And then I got the bug and it all started from the germ of seeing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Everything happened in real time, from Meet The Beatles! to now. Then it was the British Invasion and it got bigger and bigger: you’ve got Beck, Page and Clapton, and then everything exploded. Jimi Hendrix then the prog rockers and then all of a sudden rock and jazz crashed into each other. And then funk. It’s sort of an amalgamation of all of that.”

School Of Rock

“Our school band had Jeff Porcaro and David Paich sitting in with us. We realised in high school we had to be as good as those guys. But we caught up real quick. We were so hungry for it. Mike Landau was in the band. We have known each other since we were 12 years old. We’re still the ‘neighbourhood kids’: ‘Oh, those two rascals up to no good.’