The future is here, finally, and it bites

In a week in which the UK passed the grim milestone of 100,000 coronavirus deaths, pretty much all other bets are off. Least of which, any carping about being denied life's simpler pleasures. You could, I suppose, measure the COVID timeline in terms of what has been curtailed and when.Take, for example, No Time To Die, the new Bond film: originally scheduled for November 2019, then shunted by reshoots to February last year, it was then kiboshed altogether by the emerging pandemic. The latest date, we're told, is this October. 

But whereas the Bond producers will easily earn their investment back, the music industry has been faring less well. There’s been no shortage of releases over the last ten months - many recorded stoically in home studio lockdown - but it’s live performance that artists seem to make their money from these days. Which means that if you’ve got an ambitious album and tour concept, these last few months will have been frustrating. 

Take, then, Steven Wilson, whose sixth solo album, The Future Bites, is finally released today. When I first spoke to him about it, it was the autumn of 2019, and the album was, by then, mostly ‘in the can’, bar some final tweaks. The next Christmas, when we met, he was justifiably excited by the concept being developed for the album, which would roughly follow a theme of commenting on the trappings of modernity (including online shopping - ironically before it became such a lifeline), and the ambitious, multimedia approach that would accompany its release. And then the virus struck, pushing back, first, the album's release, and then an extravagant tour that would see him headline London’s O2 Arena. 

That, in itself, was a massive milestone in his solo career. Because, let’s face it, you don’t just get to play the O2 if you don’t have the chops - or the audience - to fill it. Sadly, rescheduling has forced the O2 gig to be cancelled altogether, but a new tour will commence in September that will see Wilson play major cities, including a date at the legendary Hammersmith Apollo. It is, though, heartbreaking, as The Future Bites represents, without doubt, Wilson’s most adventurous breakthrough to date - in a more-than 30-year career that has seen him responsible for more albums than I can actually count, what with his Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, No-Man and numerous, relentless other projects. That’s a big claim, I know, but hear me out.

First, though, the history lesson, because I realise that I’ve been prattling away about someone you may not have even heard of. Which is, Wilson admits with heavy reluctance, par for the course. As a piece in The Times today points out, he may well be the most successful British rock star who can go shopping at his local Waitrose without being asked to pose for a selfie. And, yet, I’ve witnessed punters camped outside Parisian theatres hoping for a glimpse of him, or standing en masse in restaurants to raise their wine glasses in adulation. 

Despite this, however, and despite his last album, To The Bone, reaching number three in the UK (kept off the top by two blokes named Ed Sheeran and Elvis Presley…), and despite even selling out the Royal Albert Hall three nights running on the album’s tour, Steven Wilson is still the rock star you’ve never heard of. Mainstream radio even gives him a giant swerve, which I find baffling. To The Bone represented a change of direction, not only with a new record company (Universal offshoot Caroline International) and better promotion (which even saw him appearing in an extended live interview on BBC Breakfast), but with a record that blatantly embraced Wilson’s love of 80s pop. There was even an ABBA-esque single, Permanating, which delightfully confounded the fans that had followed him from the era of his proto-prog band Porcupine Tree, which had sort of evolved from an at-home bedroom project and into one of the more sizeable touring forces of the 1990s and early 2000s. 

However, that P-word - “prog” - may well be the sprig of garlic that keeps radio programmers at bay. He is unashamed of his association with the form (the oft-told story of his upbringing is that his first two musical influences were the Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon and Donna Summer’s Love To Love You Baby, gifts exchanged by his parents, Maureen and Mike, one Christmas). As an adult, his professional sideline remixing albums for King Crimson and Yes has maintained further links to the genre. However, he has also produced multichannel versions of albums by Roxy Music, XTC, Ultravox and Tears For Fears, revealing more than just an ear for more expansive pop.

Which brings us, kind of, to The Future Bites. Before getting into its thematic concept, it is a markedly different album to much of what Wilson has been known for. But not all. While Porcupine Tree may have been born out of a teenage soup of long hair and Home Counties rock guitar, Wilson’s own interests were being spread across an eclectic range of styles, some of which manifested themselves in the No-Man group with long-term friend and collaborator Tim Bowness. On his adolescent bedroom wall in Hemel Hempstead there was a poster of Prince who, along with David Bowie, has been a constant figure in his musical DNA. While his professional music direction would take a somewhat avant-garde rock route, electronic music would always be in his listening palette. Which is why the first thing you notice about The Future Bites is just how unlike a rock album it is. Throughout, it delivers atmosphere over bombast, restrained drum machine beats over epic tom-tom crashes, and while Wilson has always been quite deft at melodic songwriting, melodicism drives the textures of all nine tracks.

What also drives them is the underlying theme: the modern world. Wilson is, like me, 53 (we were actually born a week apart), but don’t mistake that statement for some prematurely aged fellow railing at things. The theme is more a reflection on the Internet age and how online behaviour pervades every aspect of life, from our perception of news to our absorption of information, how we relate to culture and even our addiction to online consumerism. Such a premise could sound dystopian, I agree, but the narrative Wilson puts forward is wry and observational. And it blends seamlessly with a musical approach that surely - surely - must place him more than ever onto the mainstream radar. In this regard, one track stands out for its employment of one Elton Hercules John, arguably pop’s most extravagant consumer, who Wilson arranged - through a friend of a friend - to have intone a series of consumer durables for Personal Shopper, a pulsing EDM track that offers a delightfully cynical take on online impulse buying. “Buy for comfort, buy for kicks/Buy and buy until it makes you sick”, Wilson sings, before Sir Elt kicks in with a shopping list that includes sunglasses, teeth whitener and even - cheekily - deluxe edition box sets…of which I confess to being guilty of…

Purist fans might baulk at the apparent absence of guitars on the album (there are, in fact, plenty, it’s just that they’re not turned all the way up to 11), but you get a sense that in being more atmospheric - and electronic - Wilson has given himself more room to move within. Thus, King Ghost is lush and reflective. On the other hand, 12 Things I Forgot chimes in with a snappy line in acoustic guitar accompaniment to a beautiful, strident pop song about regretful reminiscence. 

Both, however, bring out the best in co-producer David Kosten (aka Faultline), whose own solo work as well as production for Bat For Lashes and Everything Everything has accentuated a gift for texture. There are shades here, too, and in the background, of some of the myriad influences that play on Wilson’s ear, perhaps, labelmate Tame Impala on the scintillating Man Of The People (which, add Neil Tennant, could give the Pet Shop Boys a serious run for their money) or, at a squint, the funk of Wilson’s teenage hero, Prince, on Self IQ.

I may, in this review, have given the impression that The Future Bites is some wild departure from Wilson’s usual fare, and it is indeed another tonal shift. Some of his hardcore fans might rankle at that, but anyone who’s been paying close attention to his career will have noticed that change has been constant. Some changes, he’ll admit, have been more subtle than others, but he has never accepted the view that he is beholden to any one form of music, even if that dreaded ‘P’ word follows him everywhere. 

If there is any sort of compromise, it’s on the closing song, Count Of Unease. It’s what I call a proper closing song. I used to have this theory that, when putting albums together, artists would always programme them so that the final track of the record provides a sunset, a touch of autumnal melancholy. As a teenager, I would hear that final track fading out and feel sad that the whole experience was over. I later found out that, in the pre-digital days, how a vinyl record was sequenced owed more to the physics of certain types of songs requiring more plastic to accommodate bass and rhythm. I still don’t understand the science, so I will gladly settle for the notion that the closing song is indeed a farewell. Count Of Unease is that song, and to bridge to my previous point, is eminent of both the electronica throughout The Future Bites, but also the aural clues that have been there in Wilson’s music, right from the beginning. For all Porcupine Tree’s flights of prog-meets-metal grandeur, there were also lighter-touch moments of atmos and grace. 

Here is just that. But, rather than representing closure, it sets Wilson up for the next record (work of which is, I gather, already in progress), and the first strokes on a blank canvas that remind those just coming to his music that there are no rules to hit. He will always do whatever he damn well likes, and is all the more interesting for it.

I remember when this was all Fields

It seems so long ago that I can’t actually remember exactly when it was. But somewhere in the second half of last year I was driving back from my girlfriend’s one Monday morning, listening to Mary Anne Hobbs’ BBC 6 Music show, when I thought I'd stumbled across a new single from Talking Heads, or at least David Byrne. The slightly awkward white funk was there, the somewhat strangulated vocal too, and most of all, an absolutely compelling rhythm. Rarely have I made note of the release date of a parent album on the basis of one single track, and so far ahead of time, but Hobbs’ declaration that Field Music’s Only In A Man’s World would be out on a full album in early 2020 was enough to chalk it up in anticipation.

So, here in the present, the album Making A New World has arrived, and it is a genuine delight, heard from a certain perspective. There’s a concept behind it, too, but I’ll come on to that later. My starting point, however, is as always the music: here the brothers Brewis have tapped into a veritable suitcase of influences, a subtle evolution of their last fifteen years making music with a discernibly old head on it. Whether the influences I’m about to come on to were conscious in the Brewis brothers’ thinking is not clear, but from the beginning of Making A New World there are some exceedingly comforting (to these ears at least) nods to the late '70s and early '80s. The aforementioned Only In A Man’s World is one of two songs which could have been companion tracks to the Heads’ Once In A Lifetime. Talking Heads were often regarded by sniffy critics as one of those ‘clever-clever’ bands, professional smartarses who produced songs with complex themes, complex structures, or complex instrumentation. Bands like Steely Dan, Supertramp, Genesis (in the post-Gabriel, pre-MTV days) and XTC, bands that wouldn’t fit any one categorisation - neither pop nor rock, New Wave, prog or anything else, even if the music press tried to pin labels on them. Well, guess what? There’s no shame in that. Which is why, lazily, I’ll end up resorting to comparisons when it comes to Field Music’s latest effort.

Making A New World is, according to the band themselves, “pretty much a concept album about the aftermath of the First World War”, which sounds ominously like another Roger Waters exorcism of the father he lost to German guns at Anzio but in fact, lyrically, the record is about the social impact of The Great War. Indeed, the album wasn’t meant to be an album at all, but instrumental elements of an Imperial War Museum exhibition about the conflict. That original staging plays a key role in the sequencing of Making A New World which, in the traditions of prog rock’s great concept albums, is a 19-song continuous cycle of tracks of varying lengths (from one coming in at just 41 seconds to the longest at just over four minutes), with a varying topography of time signatures driving the entire 42-minute album through a variety of tempos and timbres. This concept is not, however, what warms me to it, as clever a narrative as it offers up. No, it’s the musical return to the music I was listening to as I entered teenage that makes Making A New World so enjoyable. While it may be set in 1919, the musical tonality is set in 1979. From the outset, dark stabs of Yamaha CP80 piano recall Talk Talk, or Peter Gabriel’s glorious third album, while the vocals on Coffee Or Wine, Best Kept Garden and Between Nations immediately resonate 10cc (a band, by the way, deserving of far greater reflection - and, as an aside, I’m excited to hear that Liam Newton’s long-out of print book, 10cc: The Worst Band In The World, is getting a re-release next month). XTC’s Sgt. Rock appears, in spirit, on Nikon Pt.2, a 55-second coda to Nikon Pt.1, a brace of tracks which reflect on what happened to those who came back from the war in France. In fact, everywhere there are nods and ticks of familiarity. Whether by accident or by design, I don’t care, as the entire piece is just so satisfying.

Of course, if you naturally loathe concept albums, or the era of music I’ve referred to and the bands therein, then Making A New World, is not for you. But since I was schooled in exactly that music, this album didn’t just serve up a plate of piping hot comfort food nostalgia, but restored my faith that bands do still exist who can produce instrumentally rich albums that warrant a complete listen from start to finish, and can maintain the listener’s interest no matter what tangents it might indulge itself in.

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.