British musician Steven Wilson has spent the best part of twenty years on an uphill slope to mainstream exposure. Leading the much-missed Porcupine Tree for the first 100 years of his career, after putting them on ice and embarking on a successful solo jaunt he has continued to draw in audiences and earn a well-deserved reputation for quality music and having a formidable live show.
Tonight, his tour in support of new 'progressive pop' album To The Bone brings him and superbly talented solo band back to home shores. Having previously graced beautiful European cities, where better to progress to than Coventry?
In the first of many highlights of this damp Thursday evening, the venue allow for a seat swap for a few extra quid after your correspondent got the seating map the wrong way round and happily paid £40 for the back centre seat, instead of the front. Shelling out on the night results in being four rows from the front, sadly resulting in some of the impact of the impressive new visuals diminishing somewhat.
The Butterworth Hall is something of a large lecture theatre - the stage is about a foot off the ground, and there is a greater sensation of the performers and audience being in the same room, rather than the usual physical gap between both parties.
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| Pictured: record audience numbers |
The setlist follows the same rough outline as previous tours: two main sets split by a twenty-minute piss break and some extra songs tacked on in the encore. It's generous in length, covering around 19 songs and indicating the same thoughtfulness Wilson gives to his music and which songs to show off - some mainstays of previous setlists face off against a smattering of new To The Bone material: Nowhere Now and Pariah kick things off, after a short film, Israeli musician Ninet Tayeb appearing on the new projection system, with the cinematic epic Pariah and the sliding tackle of People Who Eat Darkness, with another winning accompanying video from animator Jess Cope.
The very show itself is an inherent bonus, as Wilson already has the Midlands area 'covered' with an upcoming date at the prestigious Birmingham Symphony Hall, providing some relief to Coventrians sick of decades of venturing to neighbouring Birmingham to see a show. It's strange however that Wilson continues (self-deprecatingly and with self-awareness, however) to express personal preference for standing shows and the greater freedom of enthusiam-expression that they allow - yet every show on this leg is seating-only.
Surely every major region has a more rough-and-ready sticky-floored sweatbox to accommodate (step forward, Wolves Civic) to balance out the swankier ones (good morrow, Symphony Hall), and Wilson could have trod the boards barefoot in, say, the Academy - offering as it would a combination of standing and seating.
Anyway.
Wilson gets around this somewhat by instructing the audience to stand for the grinningly defiant 'Permanating', where middle-aged curmudgeons get a boogie on and the stage - and the rest of the room - becomes a huge disco. It's so much fun you almost want a chunk of the show to carry on in the same vein. Wilson however faces a difficult task whenever he hits the road in choosing the right combination of material from his seemingly never-ending back catalogue, a rapidly expanding world that grows in size faster than you can get into it. Indeed, he has more hours of music to his name than there are people in the world.
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| Rubbish pic added to fill space |
He always rises admirably to the task, however, and somehow manages to make unlikely bedfellows stand shoulder to shoulder in the set without any loss of theme, quality, or momentum. The much-loved Porcupine Tree track Arriving Somewhere... But Not Here opens the second set before the aforementioned Permanating and by some weird musical voodoo the two are unquestioningly Wilsonian yet are some of the most wildly different examples of Wilson you could place together.
As the man himself points out later, when doing a Billy Brag-style rendition of Even Less using just an electric guitar and none of his cohorts, there are tons of songs his slightly younger fans (i.e. under 40) never got the chance to hear, and they all his songs anyway, so Wilson continues to pepper his setlists with well-recieved renditions of Porcupine Tree tracks, slotting in surprisingly well alongside his solo material.
In celebration of Deadwing and In Absentia having long-awaited reissues on vinyl, surprising inclusions of The Creator Has a Mastertape and Heartattack in a Layby also appear - sounding so damn powerful you suddenly realise there are no barriers to what Wilson can draw from his extensive back catalogue (Storm Corrosion material has been played, never forget). Can we expect some Bass Communion on the next tour?
To The Bone's predecessors Hand.Cannot.Erase. and the 41/2 EP continue to survive into the new era with the deployment of instrumental Vermillioncore later in the evening, with Ancestral and Home Invasion/Regret #9 making welcome appearances during the opening set, continuing to feel at home just about anywhere despite being removed from the wider context of the Hand.Cannot.Erase. album. The sprawling Regret #9 guitar solo originally laid down by Guthrie Govan (in one take, legend has it) continues to be a litmus test for the prowess of Wilson's latest stringsman, and new recruit Alex Hutchings ably proves his worth on it.
Porcupine Tree's memory refuses to budge as the deathless (ha) Lazarus adapts well to the new visual presentation and the monolithic, lumbering beast of Sleep Together stomps around the room and erodes the vibrational integrity of the architecture with its downtuned power. While the prospect of the band ever functioning again continues to fadeaway (pun intended), Wilson's solo lineups continue to knock out impressive and satisfying renditions.
Song of I, Detonation and The Same Asylum As Before round out the rest of the second set, being Wilson's first ever 'sexy' song, another prog winner and a balls-out rocker respectively. The former gains more power in a live setting and continues to show off the new projection system and Detonation showcases the band's enviable tightness yet again.
The aforementioned just-Wilson Even Less finishes proceedings before the inevitable The Raven That Refused to Sing forms the habitual closing number. A Spinal Tap moment where the video fails to load on three attempts brings everything back to Earth a little, but without diminishing the show in any way - rather, an inadvertent opportunity to remind all present that for all the musical virtuosity and presentational bells and whistles, things can actually go wrong. It is quickly forgotten as one of Wilson's very best compositions draws an unforgettable evening to a close, and yet another unmissable tour by Steven Wilson gets properly underway.
