Enmore Theatre, Sydney
Friday November 9, 2018 :
Steve Wilson has just toured Australia for the fifth time with many fans flocking to see him on this his, “To The Bone” world tour. Wilson cemented his place in Progressive Rock as the front man for the band, Porcupine Tree, however despite being nominated four times for a Grammy, he has been called “the most successful British artist you’ve never heard of”. That said it is the self-taught composer, producer, audio engineer, guitar and keyboard player’s overall place in music, that made him such a special performer as JON VAN DAAL reveals.
To better get to know Steven Wilson, one has to know where his influences lie. Wilson spent his youth listening to his father’s prog rock bands such as Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield et al but also his mother’s disco music such as Donna Summer amongst others. It gave him a well-rounded grasp of popular music and as he grew up, he sampled everything from Miles Davis to Frank Zappa. When you add to this his father’s pastime of engineering home-made studio equipment, it led Wilson to a fascination for recording as he started multi-tracking with a pair of cassette machines.
In previous appearances, Wilson’s coiffure was styled like a hairy helmet with a super long fringe that fell across his bespectacled eyes. This time around his hair was much shorter but his trademark fringe remained. As life imitates hair, his rock performances are matched by his four Grammy nominations for recording surround sound versions of various albums over the past eleven years. Definitely beyond the fringe.
From this teenage progressive rock cum metal background, the now 51-year-old has moved on to the recording of a plethora of more pop orientated solo music over the last decade. To The Bone is his thirteenth solo opus in this ten year span and is supported with a world tour that ends in Kiev, Ukraine next March. The Sydney stop was at the Enmore Theatre and I am the first to admit that this was one hell of a show.
When it comes to both album and live production, Wilson is a master and as such the sound on the night was simply awesome, in the words of Spinal Tap – “the sound went to eleven”. I’ve easily seen 100 different gigs at the Enmore venue however this concert was simply the best that I’d ever heard there. Standing in front of the right-hand speaker stack, every time drummer Craig Blundell hit the kick drum I FELT it, as it seemed to literally wrap around my heart – I do not joke.
The reason why I was standing in front of the speaker stack was because the audience was a seated one with no pit out front, so I needed to be less of a nuisance than normal. At past Steve Wilson shows, down the front the audience has been standing with those seated behind, so this was arse about, a fact not lost on Wilson himself. “Seeing all of you seated in front of me makes me think I am playing at a retirement home”, he quipped. “Of all the places in the world, the last place I thought I’d be playing in front of a seated audience would be Australia”, he went on to say to a hail of cheers. On the night Wilson was to be extremely chatty spending up to ten minutes before some songs explaining the nuances and background to how that track came about.
For this tour Steve Wilson bought back two 2016 tour players, Nick Beggs (bass, mellotron and stick ) and Adam Holzman (keyboards and synthesizers) along with aforementioned drummer Blundell and guitarist Alex Hutchings. Having started the “To The Bone” tour in late January, the five piece ensemble played incredibly tight and ended up delivering their songs in two sets with a short encore. Prior to the performers coming on stage, a video of images and words was screened with said images being shown a number of times. The accompanying words changed from aptly coined descriptions to appearing again with more ironic words being shown.
Once the musicians filed on stage, the opening song was the second track from the title album Nowhere Now with Wilson uttering the first line, “Six feet underground, we move backwards now.” On his own website Wilson explained that this line to the song is about the human race being in a state of devolution, but the chorus is from the perspective of a spaceman floating in space, looking down at the beauty of Earth and seeing a much wider and more positive perspective and, I suppose, a more personal one. With more of a pop intro the song was a nice way to slip into the first set.
This was followed by a single from the To The Bone platter, the third track ‘Pariah’. It opened with a spacey synthesizer intro followed by strumming guitars and the words to accompanied on screen by the female vocals of Ninet Tayeb (an Israeli musician, singer-songwriter, composer, DJ, model and actress). ‘Pariah’ meanders along until about the three-and-a-half-minute mark when Wilson, with Fender Stratocaster in hand, is joined by Hutchings in a guitar driven crescendo to the song that left the audience fulfilled.
In sheer contrast, the introductory squealing sounds of a Mellotron, played by Beggs, starts the song ‘Home Invasion’ with Wilson on bass and all the players joining in with a cacophony of odd timed notes filling the room. The song moves into a Holzman lead jazz keyboard vibe and then onto a slower pace as the vocals kick before Holzman again takes the lead at the keys of the Minimoog Voyager to introduce the song ‘Regret #9’. His deft fingers ring out an anthem of classic Moog noodlings that really define what prog rock is all about and left this scribe in awe of Wilson’s musical writing ability.
This musical masterpiece was followed by one of the aforementioned verbal song intros. “Hands up those people that were at the Brisbane concert last night”, he uttered. A small number of hands go up in the first few rows to which he adds. “Well don’t spoil the punch line for this guitar joke”. He followed that up with another question. “How many people here are under the age of 25”, to which a large number of fans cheered.
“Well that is a lot better than Brisbane, I thought I was at a Pensioner’s night out (or words to that effect)”, he said in a repugnant way. “Well this bloke over here (Nick Beggs to his right) actually had a hit single in the ’80s while my friend up the back (Holzman) actually played with Miles Davis”, to which a huge cheer went up. “You wait until the second set – then we’ll get you up and dancing”, he went on to say.
“So back to the question – anyone under the age of 25, listening to popular music would probably never heard of this – a guitar”. “This is a 1963 Fender Stratocaster played by the likes of Jimmy Page, Peter Townsend (and others) and most recordings these days do not include guitars at all”, he continued.
He then rips into the opening bars of the Porcupine Tree song ‘The Creator Has a Mastertape’ with the Fender in full cry before drummer Blundell lays down a nice groove with the rest of the players coming over the top to kick the song up a gear. Dials were tweaked and pandemonium ensues every second minute of set with Wilson’s lyrics talking about said master tape being left in a taxi and Wilson, like the musicians around him, worked himself into the ground. I must say It was good to go back in time with Wilson to the start of the millennium.
After that fine example of master chops, the song was followed by another track from To The Bone – ‘Refuge’. With a piano and synthesizer playing quietly in the background Wilson explains the plight of someone sleeping rough, on beds of straw with nowhere else to go. In typical prog fashion the song meanders along building and building until Wilson passes the baton on to Alex Hutchings who lets loose with a wonderful guitar solo that fills the entire room. Simply amazing.
One has barely had time to catch their breath when the band moves into ‘The Same Asylum As Before’. Wilson’s vocals have a higher falsetto style intro with the video screen in the background showing a person with a paper machete head running around the forest. Offsetting this visual tom-foolery is the wonderful sound of twin guitars opening the song, in fact this is a very guitar driven track with Wilson and Hutchings playing off each other and is pulled off with lots of dexterity.
At this point we come to, what for me, was the highlight of the evening – the playing of the Hand Cannot Erase track, ‘Ancestral’. When this album came out in 2015, I didn’t really like this track but slowly it started to draw me in. Even though I heard it almost two years to the day on Wilson’s previous tour, then it didn’t have the same effect on me as tonight’s rendition. The first half of the song has rather low-key vocals and then morphs from just another song to sheer, absolute brilliance as the five musicians play to the top of their game. With tempo moving from fast to faster Wilson, like a demented conductor, in turn points to each individual player for their involvement as their individual chops take the song to the zenith of progressive rock music. Nearly all popular music is played in four, four time, then you have odd timed progressive music and at the extreme end – odd timed progressive music played at the very peak of musical ability. The band then received rapturous applause as they filed off stage for the end of the first set.
During the break, in anticipation of a “livelier set”, many of those standing at the back of the room moved to the front of the stage including myself. The second set opened with the Porcupine Tree song, ‘Arriving Somewhere But Not Here’. Even though Wilson was the only player from the original PT line up on the night, the song was played with the same dexterity as the original. “I believe that this is the first time that this track has ever been played down here”, Wilson uttered to the crowd to which he received thunderous applause.
From that high, we then heard another long verbal intro to the next song. “I have always loved all sorts of music since I was a young boy”, Wilson explained. “While my father would play Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells my mother was listening to Donna Summer and I loved everything about both styles of music. Since then I have tried to write the perfect pop song but have never been satisfied. That was until I wrote the next song, ‘Permanating’, to which he began playing.
This upbeat little ditty saw Wilson playing on piano accompanied by Blundell in a lively display of pure pop. Though not really my cup of char, it had most of the punters tapping their feet in unison. ‘Song of 1’, another To The Bone album track followed with Blundell again opening in his very capable way. With a video playing with the outlines of multiple femme fatales in the background the song proceeds from standard guise into a fully experimental piece with plenty of guitar feed back and strange noodlings – the total opposite to ‘Permanating’.
Wilson then pulls out his acoustic guitar and begins uttering the lyrics to Porcupine Tree’s melancholy ‘Lazarus’ almost in an effort to slow down this speeding quintet. Capably played again, as it was in the same place on Porcupine Tree’s first tour of Australia in 2008, the crowd seems to again catch their breath in what has been a rolling roadshow of advanced musical dexterity. Once this brief look at PT nostalgia has passed, we move back into ‘Detonation’.
To the sound of background tapping and Hutchings’ guitar, Wilson launches into the song about terrorism and like many songs on this album, it moves from a standard song format into a free form version of prog-fusion. Wilson begins moving his head left and right like a robot, as he is capably backed up by the foursome behind him. Certainly, Holzman’s jazz background is shines through in the middle of the song, as then each guitarist takes turns playing lead and rhythm, with the whole shebang being played in front of a video of marching androids.
That said, the video used in the following song, ‘Vermillioncore’ is truly weird as a person’s body is filmed like it’s trapped in a kaleidoscope – with mirrored images being used two, four and indeed multiple times. This almost distracted me from this fantastic instrumental song with a solid rhythm section being ably assisted by the twin guitars and keys. This track was certainly a visual and sonic feast for the senses.
The final song of the second set was from the Porcupine Tree’s album Fear Of A Blank Planet, ‘Sleep Together’. From the odd sounding opening synth sound (thought to be recorded with two oscillators synced) this is really a very unique piece of music and I was always in awe of just how well the original band played it, in particular drummer, Gavin Harrison. Well I needn’t have worried on the night as Craig Blundell (of Frost) had all the drum and cymbal parts down pat – indeed the entire ensemble played their hearts out and were duly rewarded by the crowd as they left stage for the second time.
Earlier in the night, Wilson had warned that they had an 11pm curfew, and as it was 10.50 at this stage I knew that only a short encore would thus ensue. As the cheering got louder and the time became shorter the five musicians returned to the stage. Yet again, Wilson launched into an extended description of the frontal song To The Bone, the hymn like – ‘Song of Unborn’. With the clock ticking down Wilson, seated on a stool with acoustic guitar at hand, was accompanied by the piano notes of Holzman in the back ground.
A rather soft song, his words were coloured by a video background of something that visually looked right out of a fairy tale as the lyrics caution an unborn baby about the scary world outside the womb. Ultimately, a message of hope is sent to the child as Wilson sung the chorus, “Don’t be afraid to be alive.” Well I for one was glad to be alive as that night I exited the Enmore edifice – this concert had delivered so much in only eighteen songs.
Reviewer and Photographer : Jon Van Daal
Set 1:
Nowhere Now
Pariah
Home Invasion
Regret #9
The Creator Has a Mastertape
Refuge
The Same Asylum as Before
Ancestral
Set 2:
Arriving Somewhere but Not Here
Permanating
Song of I
Lazarus
Detonation
Vermillioncore
Sleep Together
Encore:
Song of Unborn
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