Steven Wilson has just returned for his encore when he hits the nail on the head:”When you’re an artist like me,” he says, “it makes it hard to choose songs for an encore. It’s not like I’ve had anything close to a hit.”
Then he adds with a smile: “It means I can play whatever the fuck I want.”
That’s all very well, of course—but you’ve got to have the courage and the skill to pull it off.
Luckily, Wilson and his band have both in abundance.
The show is split into two parts. The first is the new album. “The Overview” is as ambitious as it is unfathomable. Two songs, 46 minutes, and trying to work it out is as hard as any Rubik’s Cube—but what can’t be argued is that both “Objects Outlive Us” and its title cut are sensational. Brilliantly conceived and wonderfully executed—from the music to the incredible visuals—it just feels big. They take a break after. “It’s quite demanding on us,” confirms Wilson. And it’s not exactly plain sailing afterward.
Wilson loves analogue synthesisers, but as he explains to the audience, they break easily—and his two are “basically furniture at this point,” as he puts it.
This has direct consequences, as it means a change to the setlist. “Luminol” kicks things off instead of what had been played at other shows, but once they’ve started, “What Life Brings” lightens things a little.
Actually, there are a lot more smiles than you might expect. You probably didn’t imagine that he’d have a staring contest with drummer Craig Blundell during Porcupine Tree’s “Dislocated Day”—but he did, as well as playing its stunning solo.
Before that one, he’d gone back to his early solo work for “No Part of Me” and “Remainder of the Black Dog”, and both are welcome in this synth-less 90 minutes.
“Impossible Tightrope” (which Wilson reckons is the “hardest song we play”), “Harmony Korine”, and a transcendent “Vermillioncore” get us to that encore he’d talked about.
And the songs he chose? Well, I’m one of the lucky ones—because I did get one of my favourites. “Pariah” is a brilliant song. Perhaps not your typical Wilson track, but then, does such a thing even exist?
You can debate that after listening to “Ancestral”, which features a closing riff heavier than anything Opeth did a month or two ago on the same stage, as Randy McStine whips up a wall of noise.
He continues to astound and enthral—but it was ever thus. There’s no one you can really compare Steven Wilson to, but you can say this:
If the Oxford Dictionary defines a maverick as “an unorthodox or independent-minded person”…
Watch these two hours and 40 minutes and tell me it doesn’t apply. Steven Wilson simply creates music in ways that most of us can’t even understand—let alone dream of.
