According to some interpretations of music history, there was always a bitter divide between punk rock and prog rock.

Not so, says former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett, who's looking over both his own career and that of his former band ahead of a visit to Glasgow to play the Clyde Auditorium on October 25.

"Despite the competition between punk and prog, or rather punk knocking prog back in the day, I think Genesis helped sow the seeds for punk," he says. "There were an awful lot of different styles of music then that we came up with. I'm pleased to be doing The Knife again [on his current tour] as it's all-out thrash and quite proto punk, so there's very little prog in there. It's rock with the head down."

The Knife, which appeared on Genesis's 1970 album Trespass and was written before Hackett joined the band, is one of the many Genesis numbers he'll be performing on his current jaunt.

Hackett has spent most of the past three years touring his Genesis Revisited show, where he performs revamped versions of older songs, and this will be its final fling before he returns to his solo work, with a new album slated for release early next year.

Not everything connected with Genesis has flown so smoothly, though. The group's history was recently examined in the documentary Together & Apart, and Hackett was annoyed to discover that the majority of his comments were left on the cutting room floor.

"We were working towards a common goal with the album [the R-Kive box set that's just been released] and we managed that. I'm proud of that and am happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with the band on that, but I don't see a world-class documentary coming out of it.

"There are still recriminations flying around as we speak, but I'm currently distancing myself from it and am disappointed, to say the least. There's no mention of my solo efforts on it, and the band know I feel marginalised by it. It's not quite been the stuff of dreams, more the stuff of nightmares."

Hackett's displeasure is understandable, given that since his departure from the group in 1977, he has enjoyed a lengthy and varied career. His interest in pushing musical boundaries would have been awkward fit in the chart-friendly juggernaut that Genesis became in the 1980s, and the 64-year-old's next solo record continues his interest in shifting between styles.

"I'm always questioning myself, and I don't think it's enough for an album to really be typically prog or typically metal or typically acoustic," he explains. "None of those things fulfil what I'm after, which is having a hybrid of styles without owing an allegiance to one particular flag."

That means his next record will feature traditional rock music instruments alongside the tar, an Azerbaijani instrument, and contributions from an orchestra. It should make up a diverse palate.

"I'm using the orchestra in a call and response way too, where you might have a folk song to begin with, then enormous drums kick in and then the orchestra. I'm always trying to have different energies and contrasts, so you have the more elemental aspects of the orchestra."

He explains: "I've been chipping away at this particular block for ages, as to whether we'll get an orchestra, some mainstream rock, something from the east, and I want to keep it shifting. I don't want an album sitting still, I want something that's full of surprises, whether you love it or hate it."

Of course, things have changed dramatically since Genesis were releasing epic concept albums like The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. There's a decent argument to be made that albums themselves are at their lowest ebb ever, and that's something Hackett agrees with, and is saddened by.

"I think albums have been devalued. If you're putting an album together and nearly every track is a potential single, then you're losing the album as a potential journey.

"I always had this idea that music can be like a film, it can be cinematic and there's so much more on offer as a performer or as a writer if you don't think in terms of airplay."

Steve Hackett plays the Clyde Auditorium on Saturday, October 25.