Cinema for the ears: Steven Wilson’s The Harmony Codex

Let me toot my own horn a little: in his memoir Limited Edition Of One, polymath musician, songwriter and producer Steven Wilson mentions me in a section about David Bowie (he traces his love of The Dame to the purchase, by my parents, of a copy each of The Laughing Gnome for our respective birthdays in 1973, which are only eight days apart, having known each other since infancy thanks to our mums meeting at post-natal clinic).

The only reason I mention this, apart from showing off, is that the same book contains a short story written by Wilson called The Harmony Codex. “Dystopian sci-fi,” he described it recently to the NME. “Like a lot of my music, it had a very dreamlike quality”. 

As the story was coming together Wilson was also working – in his customary restless manner – on his seventh full solo album under his own name. “As I was writing the story I was beginning to develop the initial ideas for this record [which has just been released and takes its name from the short story]. It felt logical to have a narrative feel to the songs, to match the cinematic quality of the music,” he continued in his NME interview. “It made sense to write an imaginary soundtrack for that short story, writing music based on its characters and ideas.”

The result is a multidimensional experience that is Wilson’s best solo record to date. But before I get into that, a little context: he has been at this game a very long time, producing his first music while still at school in Hemel Hempstead, and very quickly started building a music career via various projects and outfits like No-Man (with Tim Bowness) and Bass Communion. In the process he has explored myriad genres from trip-hop to jazz, ambient to prog rock (most notably with Porcupine Tree). His last solo album The Future Bites featured a spoken vocal appearance from no less than Sir Elton John, and its predecessor To The Bone included the ABBA-esque Permanating. None of this is pastiche, but a reverence and love for the panoply of popular music including, yes, pure pop (don’t get him going about The Rubettes…).

Despite all this, the standard line is to describe Wilson as one of those artists who people who know, know (implying that those who don’t, won’t). His reputation has been augmented further by becoming the go-to producer of multi-channel remixes of classic albums from everyone from King Crimson and Jethro Tull to Chic and ABC. And yet, if you sat opposite him on the Tube many probably wouldn’t recognise him as someone who has and does sell out arenas.

Die-hard fans, who packed out Wembley Arena last November (notably on my birthday) for a temporarily reformed Porcupine Tree concert indicated the level of fanaticism that follows Wilson around the world. “I’m in the enviable position of having a fanbase who almost expect me to do the unexpected,” he told the NME. “If they feel like I’m making concessions to the music industry, they spot it a mile off and rightly pick me up on it.”

A cute sentiment, but Wilson is also in the enviable position of being able to do exactly whatever he wants. With each solo album since 2008’s Insurgentes he has continually changed the complexion of his music, confounding those still of the stubborn view that he is a prog rocker in the tradition of bands like King Crimson and Genesis. In truth, Bowie has probably been his touchstone, just simply for never conforming to any one genre, and never standing still, either. And that’s quite a feat in itself.

“I always talk about people like Bowie and Zappa and Neil Young and Kate Bush as being role models, in the sense of how they conducted their careers - that constant sense of reinvention and confronting audience expectations,” he told that august organ The Spectator a couple of years ago (the interview’s standfirst contained the line “The most successful musician you’ve never heard of”). 

“At the same time, I’m also conscious that it was easier for them, because I live in the age of social media. The problem with social media is that you get a response within five minutes of doing anything. You release a new song into the world, which might be different to anything you’ve done before, and literally within minutes you have an incredible wave of feedback, much of which will be negative. And I’ve come to like that. Maybe I’m a masochist. I prefer that to the indifference that most bands who just recycle everything over and over again get. Like the fans will go, ‘We love this. More of the same’. I feel that’s too easy and too lazy.”

Lazy he has never been. Peter Gabriel has been working on i/o, his first album of brand new songs for 21 years and it still hasn’t seen the light of day as a complete work. I actually can’t count how much material Wilson has released in that time.

A limited edition of one - Steven Wilson
Picture: Hajo Mueller

You certainly wouldn’t call The Harmony Codex “more of the same”. Whereas The Future Bites took a knowing lurch into pop, it’s successor is still accessible but with more musical tangents, and arguably more interesting for it. Inclination opens the record with a pulsing drum beat reminiscent of the aforementioned Gabriel’s stunning work on The Last Temptation Of Christ soundtrack, and builds over four minutes into something similarly rooted in the desert heat of The Holy Land. It is more electronica than anything, with Slovak guitarist David Kollar performing a guitar solo that defies the laws of ‘soaring’ axe work in traditional rock music.

It is notable that for a musician who, in Porcupine Tree and the first part of his solo career drove an at-times heavy, metal-like thrash, electric guitars are used sparingly and texturally throughout The Harmony Codex. In their application, guitars are just some of the brushes in the artist’s jar, not driving songs but contributing to their palette.

Into this, Wilson has put together an extraordinary collection of guest musicians, contributing something distinctive to the different directions each song takes. Pink Floyd/David Gilmour alum Guy Pratt adds bass to the single What Life Brings (which also features longtime Wilson cohort Craig Blundell on drums). Another regular collaborator, keyboard player Adam Holzman (son of legendary Elektra Records boss Jac Holzman) pops up throughout the album, most prominently on Impossible Tightrope, a frenetic jazz-rock workout which harks back to Wilson’s third solo release, The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories). Another member of that album’s cohort, Theo Travis, provides a bonkers sax solo.

A calmer moment is provided by Rock Bottom, a duet with another of Wilson’s closest musical friends, the Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb (who also co-wrote it), and it is a beautiful, if slightly dark, love song which is also emblematic of the entire album’s exquisite production. It is in this regard that you recognise Wilson’s professed desire to create “cinema for the ears”. It’s no wonder, either, that he has invested a great deal of effort in the use of spatial audio technologies, and publicised the album’s release with a series of listening sessions around the world in which lucky punters were exposed to its full multidimensional effect.

I can’t begin to imagine what The Harmony Codex’s title song – for me an absolute highlight – must have sounded like in those listening environments. At almost ten minutes in length, it is a dreamlike experience, invoking the short story that inspired it. It reminds me greatly of Vangelis’s music for – yes, another film  - Blade Runner, and includes ethereal electric piano from Holzman as well as the first of two spoken word contributions on the album from Wilson’s delightful wife Rotem. It is as enigmatic as it is transporting. It is also unconventional, an ambient moment in the middle of an album, rather than the ‘slow one’ that traditionally ends it. “Part of this record is confidence from having done this for a long time now,” Wilson explained to the NME, “which means I can think ‘No, fuck it! I can put a 10-minute ambient piece on the same record as an acoustic song and an electronic pop song.’ It’s good to embrace that.”

The song that does end the ten-track album is Staircase, an epic, reflective track that warrants the involvement of Holzman and Blundell again, as well as Nick Beggs, another member of Wilson’s touring bands (and currently on the road with Howard Jones), who combine to create a song that both typifies past approaches (i.e. prog-ish) as well as Wilson’s drive to expand. 

It, too, is cinematic in its expanse, drawing reference to the Dutch conceptual artist MC Escher’s never-ending staircase (suggested in the album artwork). Written from a perspective that, I suspect, all of us in our mid-50s ponder on – the journey that has taken us to now – it also provides commentary on modernity: “Plagued by poor health/But you stockpile more wealth/Congratulate yourself/A sense of proportion/An act of extortion/There's too much distortion/You sink in stages/As you're approaching middle ages (You're up to here in debt)” trills its third verse. It ends with another appearance from Rotem Wilson, again speaking as the album oozes into another dreamscape facilitated by vintage synths (including the ARP 2600 that was a staple of the 70s).

For those who want more of The Harmony Codex there is more: an expanded edition includes remixes by, among others, Manic Street Preachers and Tears For Fears’ Roland Orzabal, underlining the point that for all of Wilson’s apparent anonymity, he can command the attention and involvement of some very heavy hitters indeed. 

It’s only what is deserved. He’s hardly flown under the radar these last thirty-odd years, and while some of that has probably suited him, to be at this stage of a career and still producing albums of this ingenuity, ambition and immersion, and not resorting to a lazy covers project, deserves commercial success as much as the acclaim that continues to come Wilson’s way.

The Harmony Codex is out now on Virgin Records

The worst thing Mrs. Beggs has ever heard

Trifecta - Adam Holtzman, Nick Beggs, Craig Blundell
Picture: Hajo Müller

Nick Beggs, it could be said, takes a somewhat alternative approach to the art of record promotion. “My wife says it’s the worst thing she’s ever heard,” he says of his better half’s view of his new album project, adding: “I want that printed on the front of the record: ‘Ann Beggs - worst thing I’ve ever heard’. Great! Listen to the reaction. Own it!”

Beggs is in ebullient mood talking about Fragments, the debut recording from Trifecta, the trio formed by Beggs, keyboard player Adam Holtzman and drummer Craig Blundell while they were on touring duties with Steven Wilson. The basic pitch - that I am, frankly, wary to describe on the basis of Mrs. B’s verdict - is that they are something of an experimental jazz collaboration born out of extended jams the three musicians noodled away at during soundchecks with Wilson, squirrelling the results away on their phones for future use. Much of the material grew out of Blundell playing something in an odd time signature which intrigued Holtzman enough to take it away to play with at home, which Beggs would find himself doing as well. 

“We’d go into some wormholes,” Beggs says. “We’d split the atom, you know? We were rolling around, playing with different times and weirdness. And it’s not going to be for everyone.” Which is where his wife’s blunt view comes into play. “She’s a Northerner," he explains. “What can I tell you?”. 

The Wilson soundchecks became Trifecta’s sandpit. “Steven doesn’t like wasting time in them - two, three songs at the most before he’s off to preserve his voice. Adam, Craig and I would then hang back and start making a racket. It pissed everyone off because the road crew wanted to turn everything off and go and have their dinner, but we’d be having our ‘jazz club’. I was recording it on my mobile, these little vignettes, and we all agreed that there was something going on.” That didn’t mean that everyone in the touring party thought that what the three were creating was to everyone’s taste, but that didn’t dissuade them from driving forward. “It takes quite a lot of willpower to do that,” Beggs stresses. “When everyone’s saying, ‘Fuck off! That sounds shit!’ Everyone’s an A&R man!”.

‘Writing on the road’ has long been a rock and roll tradition, and thus Fragments began to form while the tour for Wilson’s 2017 album To The Bone progressed. “We just thought, ‘Now, hang on a minute. There’s something here’,” says Beggs. “I’d listen back to these things and send them little bits and say, ‘Listen to this. Listen to what’s happening at one-minute-twenty-three-seconds’. And I’d get back ‘Wow! That’s great - that’s an idea there. Let’s extrapolate it.’ Which is what we did. We started file sharing on the road, just saving the ideas, logging them in the dictaphone of life. When we all got home we all started to expand on these ideas.” This was where the individual creativity kicked in. 

Trifecta’s outline premise might stray dangerously close to Spinal Tap’s Jazz Odyssey, but by Beggs’ own admission it is simply the result of three like-minded good friends having fun and coming up with 15 pieces of intriguing, funky yet still highly accessible “fission” music. “It’s like fusion, only less efficient and more dangerous,” he jokes, referring to the genre that emerged in the late 1960s when the likes of Miles Davis (with whom Holtzman worked), his guitarist John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra appeared to imbibe Jimi Hendrix’s freeform blues and, along with characters like Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, started to experiment with jazz as only a nominal root. “If you want a buzz statement,” Beggs says of Trifecta with slight reluctance, “it’s a cross between Weather Report and King Crimson. That’s the way I’d see it…but it is a little bit crass to say that because there’s a lot more to it. There are a lot of touch points, a lot of musical influences.” 

Holtzman, Beggs and Blundell
with Steven Wilson and Dave Kilminster

Beggs’ journey to this point starts, more or less, as a founder-member of Kajagoogoo and key contributor to their uber-hit Too Shy’s radio-monstering rhythms, before embarking on a prolific - some might even say restless - career playing bass and Chapman Stick (more of which later) with former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett, Howard Jones, King Crimson and his good friend Wilson, as well as in his own side projects, like Ellis, Beggs & Howard and The Mute Gods. 

He is also a gifted artist, a talent given legs in the last year via another sideline during lockdown of accepting commissions. It has provided a particular perspective on the approach Trifecta has taken. “You can’t just always do the same thing,” he says. “You can’t paint the same picture over and over. You’ve got to make the landscape interesting for the listener. I do, anyway, because I always look at everything like a visual. We were taking all these different ideas and painting different pictures with them.

Fragments is predominantly instrumental but it is far from a series of extended jams, spread over the album’s 45-minute playing time - “just three mates having a laugh”, as Blundell recently described to Prog magazine. “There’s a lot of influences,” Beggs tells me. “One track, Have You Seen What The Neighbours Are Doing? is a response to a track by Ween [featuring drummer Marco Minneman, Beggs’ Mute Gods cohort) called Too Many People In The Neighbourhood. I just loved that track and the idea of it.  It was weird and quizzical and brilliantly executed with a great production aspect to it, so I thought ‘I’m going to write a track that’s a direct response to that’. And it’s really fucking weird.”

Fragments’ sole track with a vocal on it is Pavlov’s Dog Killed Schrodinger’s Cat, originally conceived by Beggs for The Mute Gods. “Adam took it somewhere completely different,” he says. “When I wrote it, it was up-tempo. Adam completely changed the arrangement. When I first played it to him, he said ‘Just give me a little while with it’ and within a few days he’d come up with this really mellow Fender-Rhodes version that just suited the song perfectly. That’s why you work with great musicians, isn’t it? Because they know what to do.” 

As the only immediately commercial track on the album, Pavlov’s Dog… intentionally serves as a seduction to the exotic mix thereafter. “I was talking to [Adam and Craig] about how we should format the record, whether we wanted songs or instrumentals,” reveals Beggs. “We all agreed that we should have one song with lyrics to act as a shoehorn for the fan base or indeed anyone who was interested in it. If it could seduce them into a false sense of security by hearing this semi-pop song, then they’d might want to hear the rest of the record, which is not really anything like it,” he adds, emphasising the contrarian approach the trio have taken.

Picture: Richard Purvis

Another track, The Enigma Of Mr. Fripp, draws inspiration from the King Crimson co-founder’s distinctive guitar sound, which Beggs appropriates on the Chapman Stick, a somewhat esoteric 10-stringed instrument of which he is one of the few exponents (Crimson and Peter Gabriel alumnus Tony Levin being one of the others). The Stick effectively allows bass and harmonic scales to be covered at once, much like all 88 keys on a piano. 

“It’s as symphonic as a piano,” says Beggs. “When I first saw Tony Levin playing it, I didn’t know what the hell was going on either.  I had to listen to the records to sort of distil it. That’s the great thing about the Chapman Stick: it gives any musician - not just bass players - range, because it’s not a bass instrument. It gives any musician the opportunity to expand their understanding and their skillset and do something in an unusual way. There’s loads of really amazing bass players out there,  but not many people using the Stick, though.”

It’s one of the many things that makes the likeable Beggs stand out as unique and at ease in his own skin as any I’ve encountered in the music industry. That said, the experience of the last 18 months rankles, with cancelled tours including the latest with Wilson, which would have seen him playing a sellout show at the O2 Arena, amongst major venues. “All my commitments are up in the air,” he says. “I’ve had two tours cancelled. I have no idea what’s going to happen. None of us do. And, you know, the music industry was coughing up blood before [Covid]. So what it’s actually going to mean for live music and the feasibility of touring, I have no idea. You know, it’s very difficult to take a band out on the road.”

In particular, Beggs doesn’t seem Trifecta touring: “Adam lives in New York and visas are expensive.  Going to Europe is going to be a no-no until the government decides to get its finger out of its arse and do something about it. I don’t really see how and when and if we’d be able to take Trifecta on the road. I’d love to. I really like the idea of doing some kind of filmed performance. I like that idea. But, again, how realistic that is, I have no idea at the minute. We will do another Trifecta album, though, because it was too easy and too much fun. Maybe another two, I have no idea. I like to keep an open mind.” As indeed should the listener. And, possibly, Ann Beggs, though I’m going to shy away from confronting her on it.

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.