Barefootin' - Steven Wilson at Palais des Congrès de Paris

© Marjorie Coulin - https://www.facebook.com/marjoriecoulinphotography/

I don't want to get, like, all down and gloomy and stuff, but the beginning of 2016 has been utterly depressing for music fans. That having said, the deaths of Lemmy on December 28, David Bowie on January 10 and Glenn Frey eight days later, could have been accepted by the wider world as, simply, any other 70, 69 or 67-year-olds getting caught short by nature's cruelty.

The difference is that their passing has drawn attention to the inevitable dwindling of a generation of performers who came out of the post-Elvis, post-Beatles boom, and introduced us to 'event' music. The Daily Telegraph's Neil McCormick described this age as the "Twilight of the Rock Gods", forcing us to respect that those responsible for the music that defined the latter third of the 20th century won't be around forever, and that those who safely survived their 27th summer are now becoming old men.

And thus, we accept Paul McCartney's hair dye, Pete Townshend's deafness, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards' arthritic hands and even John Lydon reaching 60, as those of us who came of musical age in the 1970s and 1980s creep into our own fifth and sixth decades, with fond memories of buying their records and listening to them from start to finish as we embraced their enduring greatness, rather than a fleeting stardom.

Luckily, however, there are still plenty of acts out there who continue to resist the lazy acceptance that we live in a Spotify age and "the kids today" are only interested in Autotuned singles streamed for as long as their attention span allows.

Because, thankfully, there are still artists like Steven Wilson who take time to write and record songs with the highest application of craftsmanship, who care about how it is packaged and presented, and who believe in putting on shows that leave the audience departing from the venue having been emotionally, aurally and visually satisfied. No surprise, then, that the 48-year-old Wilson is someone who grew up in an era when buying, say, ELO's Out Of The Blue, wasn't regarded as an ironic guilty pleasure, but an all-embracing experience, of which the music and artwork were all part and parcel of the same theatre.

Having been writing and recording professionally since he was 15, Wilson has built up a formidable reputation in the industry, via his band Porcupine Tree, and via myriad side projects that have spanned everything from industrial European metal to ambient drone music, as well as being entrusted by King Crimson, Yes, Tears For Fears, XTC and others to produce surround sound remixes of their classic recordings.

While he has been saddled with the "prog rock" label for much of his career, Wilson's most recent albums in particular - The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories), last year's Hand. Cannot. Erase and its recently released coda, the "mini album" 4½ - have demonstrated a arch talent for material that would give Coldplay or U2 a run for their money, in terms of melodicism, musicianship, textures and, yes, even hooks.

'Prog' is, in any case, a gross misnomer. Bowie was prog. Sgt. Pepper was arguably the birth of prog. But at some point in time 'prog' became a label with an angle. A recent review in The Guardian said that Wilson is "so progressive that much of his material doesn’t sound very prog at all". Well, exactly. What does 'prog' really mean when you actually listen to the music? With Wilson, the difference is that he simply doesn't get regarded in the same breath as Chris Martin, Dave Grohl or Bono.

But whether Wilson is merely accepting or tolerant of his status, it seems to pass him without obvious  concern. He has spent long enough being successful without being fashionable, respected by peers and even many of those now who created the very ground that Wilson treads. This, he does noticeably without socks and shoes on the stages of venues like the Palais des Congrès, a vast auditorium contained within a multipurpose concrete structure comprising a shopping mall and corporate exhibition space a single-kilometre straight walk down Avenue de la Grande Armée from the Arc de Triomphe.

As someone who takes the risk of tetanus or worse in his stride by performing barefoot Wilson is a remarkably grounded individual, and clearly contented to dance to his own tunes. The very antithesis of manic rock star diva, his philosophy is driven by a love of music - listening to it, collecting it, writing it, recording it, performing it. Not only has this brought him into close proximity of the very legends who inspired him to begin with, but has given him the respect to draw on the cream of session players for his albums and tours.

And thus, for this, his umpteenth solo tour since putting Porcupine Tree on hiatus in 2010, Wilson has gathered around him longtime stalwarts Nick Beggs on bass and Adam Holtzman on keyboards, Dave Kilminster on lead guitar and the supremely talented Craig Blundell on drums, a relative newomer to the Wilson gang. I strongly advise you to look them all up on Google to see just what sort of quality Wilson can attract to his side.

With Wilson there are no distractions of warm-up bands. After a very classy and respectful compilation of Bowie songs as the audience takes their seats, noticeably reflecting the early and Berlin eras of The Dame's career, the show is split into two parts - the first half comprised of Hand. Cannot. Erase. in its entirety, and then a second half featuring odds and sods from Porcupine Tree as well as the 4½. 

The Hand. Cannot. Erase. album - easily Wilson's most successful to date, and rightly so - followed a common construct of his by being losely based around a concept, the story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a London woman who died alone in her flat but whose body wasn't discovered for almost three years. This may sound very dark, but the album played with the variety of Wilson's songwriting. 1 First Regret 3 Years On acts like a traditional orchestral overture, building from video of an east European housing estate and sound effects of children playing to an emerging, pulsing sequenced tone, that cues a surging blast of guitar, that settles down to a beautiful melodic section of Wilson's voice and Kilminster's jangling Telecaster.

As the 'album' progresses, Wilson's knack for both pop and indie hooks is underlined. Hand. Cannot. Erase. chugs busily along, with epic, sweeping finishes, before the the voice of Kathryn Jenkins is heard over a drum machine, intoning 80s alt references like Dead Can Dance and This Mortal Coil, as the haunting opening of Perfect Life, a song equally between this very mechanical introduction and a beautiful chorus arrangement of Wilson and Beggs' voices in harmony, with Holtzman, Kilminster and Blundell providing a huge bed underneath it.

© Simon Poulter 2016

For Routine we are introduced to the Israeli singer/actress Ninet Tayeb, acting out the song's kitchen sink drama with Wilson as a duet. Tayeb (a connection of Wilson's via his work with Israeli superstar Aviv Geffen) returns to the 'story' intermittently, in between full-on band workouts and more gentler passages of the song.

In this piece alone any newcomer to Wilson's work would experience what I think his music is all about - a tapestry of light and shade, gentle vocals and epic blasts of hard rock, and a hairs-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck impact that leaves you wanting a sitdown.

It's easy to understand why journalists have bluntly branded Wilson a fan of Genesis, and he'll hate me for pointing this out, but there is much about the Hand. Cannot. Erase. album that is reminiscent, in a respectful way, of A Trick Of The Tail or Wind And Wuthering. He certainly knows Genesis (and even contributed to Steve Hackett's Genesis Revisited II album), but the influence is more infused than deliberate. Small things, such as the 12-string sound at the end of Routine, Beggs' work high up the neck of his bass on Perfect Life, or the ever-changing topography that on paper sounds mad but made real comes together with a breathtaking landscape.

With Home Invasion Regret #9, however, the band thunders into heavier territory, with complex guitar riffs, Holtzman letting his jazz keyboard chops rip as he leads the band into a funky groove, and Blundell opening up the traps by lending a very satisfying 'voice' to the rhythm.

Things calm down considerably with the acoustic-led Transience and Ancestral, with its 'Massive Attack-meets-60s spy film' vibe, before the first half is completed - as the album does - with the Happy Returns - Ascendent -- Here On arc, and its emotionally charged finale that closes the story.

Wilson may not possess a rock star ego, thankfully (and indeed none of his troupe, either), he nonetheless conforms to character by emerging from the interval with a generously-proportioned, Dude-sized White Russian in one hand to open the second half with Drag Ropes, a track from the 2012 debut album of Storm Corrosion, Wilson's project with Opeth's Mikael Åkerfeldt. In the excellent (if slighty sterile) ambience of the auditorium, it jumps about from pastoral choral passages to folky bits, accopanied by an extremely spooky animated video in the style of those Czechoslovakian films they used to show during schools programming on the BBC.

Next, Porcupine Tree's delightfully grungy Open Car noticeably gets some of the balding, greying scalps of the Parisian audience nodding in head banging-lite, before Wilson returns to his solo material and, first, My Book Of Regrets from the 4½ package, followed by the compelling Index and it's disturbing theme of an unhinged individual who collect "things"...

Wilson then returns vicariously to his tribute to David Bowie by performing Lazarus - his own song by that name, not Bowie's now meaning-laden track, but one with an uncanny reference to Bowie himself. It won't be the last Bowie nod of the evening, either, as Wilson and Tayeb later duet faithfully on Space Oddity as a further tribute, with Holtzman and Kilminster adding wonderfully respectful touches on organ and guitar, to render the audience in rapturous appreciation. Despite its apparent simplicity, Space Oddity is far from easy to pull off without sounding like a bad school concert cover. Since trying it out for the first time on the German leg of his tour, Wilson & Co absolutely nail it.

© Simon Poulter 2016

Tayeb returns for Don’t Hate Me, a song originally recorded by Porcupine Tree in 1998 and reproduced on the 4½ album as a call-and-response duet between Wilson and the Israeli singer. It's another rock-solid example of how it's hard to understand how Wilson has been largely ignored by the mainstream music media, including radio. It is followed by Vermillioncore, another 4½ track, and a thundering instrumental, one that wouldn't be out of place on a film soundtrack. If you've ever listened to the soundtrack album for Heat, you'll understand how Wilson's sense of the cinematic wouldn't be out of place in a film.

For all his absence from daytime radio, cover features in Q or Uncut, or showcase appearances on Jools Holland's Later..., there is little in Wilson's latterday catalogue that warrants references to obscurity. That said, there is nothing that suggests Wilson has compromised on what he loves for the sake of being more commercial. It's just, whether he knows it or not, he is, today, and I suspect always has been, gifted with a knack for combining rock and melody, sometimes in an unusual way, but never in a way that justifies the mystification generated by Wilson's lack of stratospheric stardom.

© Simon Poulter 2016

The final two songs underlined this perfectly. The Sound Of Muzak, a track from Porcupine Tree's In Absentia album, has the sort of energy that propelled Foo Fighters, Stone Temple Pilots and Soundgarden to their stadium-consuming greatness - anthemic without being bombastic, audience-inviting without prompting pop god cheese.

Wilson closes the show with a song that, I notice, genuinely moves people to tears: The Raven That Refused To Sing, title track of his well received third solo album which was a collection of seven elongated songs built around Edgar Allen Poe-like stories of the supernatural. Illustrated by another powerful film by animator Jess Cope, The Raven live tells a ghostly story of sibling loss with eminent grace, but also with a controlled sense of epic, building to its closing chorus of "Sing to me raven, I miss her so much. Sing to me Lily, I miss you so much" with the entire ensemble playing to their limit, leaving everyone in the Palais des Congrès - band included - emotionally spent but supremely satisfied.

Save for a 15-minute interval, Wilson and his band have been on stage for close to three hours. It's as strong a reflection of Wilson's work ethic as everything.

If, to follow Neil McCormick's hypothesis, we are now in the twilight of the rock gods, we shouldn't forget that there are those, like Wilson, who will be following, bringing with them the same investment in their work, never stopping recording, never stopping touring, applying themselves on others projects and side activities of their own.

This is how it always used to be. So glad that someone is keeping this particular torch aflame.