Cardiff on a colder-than-it-looks evening in March. It’s the second night of Steven Wilson’s UK tour and even though my schedule is a complete mess during March and April, I’m already wishing I’d been able to book more dates. Having listened to little else but the new ‘Hand. Cannot. Erase’ album for the last couple of weeks, I have a feeling that I’m going to want more than just this one show.
On the day of the concert, ‘Hand. Cannot. Erase’ is at #7 in the UK album charts and with five star reviews across the spectrum it seems set for even higher placings. It’s a concept album, inspired by the tragic story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a young woman who died in sad and mysterious circumstances in London. Mysterious because her body lay undiscovered in her flat, with the television playing and letters piling up behind the door, for three years. Sad because her corpse was found next to a pile of wrapped Christmas presents, gifts for friends and family who didn’t seem to notice she was missing.
Likewise, Steven Wilson is such a self-effacing and modest artist that he could walk down just about any High Street with barely a flicker of recognition, much like anyone in Coldplay who isn’t Chris Martin. And St. David’s Hall itself is quite hard to pin down on a chill, blustery evening when you just want to get indoors quickly. It’s a first class concert hall sandwiched between a shopping arcade and a Starbucks, so unprepossessing you could walk right past it – and we almost do because of the total absence of posters outside the concert hall. The invisible artist performing a new album devoted to an invisible heroine, performed in an invisible building. I suppose it has a certain symmetry.
Even when we get inside the building it still isn’t obvious where we’re meant to go. It’s only after traversing three flights of escalators that I finally hear the sound of the crowd waiting to get inside the auditorium so I can stop worrying about being in the wrong place. I always get nervy before a show in case something happens to disrupt the long awaited experience and it’s worse tonight because I bought tickets on the day of release, so I’ve literally been waiting months and my anticipation is at boiling point. Sometimes, I think I want things too much.
Steven Wilson may be in the Top Ten of the UK album charts as we mingle outside the auditorium but his audience tonight is heavily old school prog, with emphasis on the ‘old’. It’s been quite some time since many of my fellow concert goers sat behind a school desk, mind, and when they did, log tables and Latin were probably still a key part of the curriculum.
But as any fule kno’, whilst prog rock artists have a stereotypical image that is permanently set to ‘Rick Wakeman, 1974’ (tall, thin, capes, long hair, a bit like Legolas without the ears), their contemporary audience is….how shall we put this….a little more towards the dwarf end of the prog rock scale. There are lots of bald heads and lots of beards and not much hair to be seen anywhere. I would estimate the average age to be around mid-forties with a male/female ratio of about nine to one. The women that are here mostly seem to fit into the category of “reluctant girlfriends” although one or two are wearing Gallifrey t-shirts and look like they work at CERN. But typically the audience is just lots of single guys and anoraks. Literally, single blokes wearing anoraks.
The buildup to the band coming onstage is a long video installation of the wall of a tower block with dozens of windows. Speeded up to show the hours of day and late afternoon fading into twilight and nightfall, we see curtains open and close, lights switch on and off, the ceaseless tick and tock of life. All except one. Without any need for introduction, the audience knows the terrible story as to why that singular apartment shows no sign of life. The hum of the city segues beautifully into 3 Years Older, which is as haunting and captivating as it is on the record.
What is less apparent from the music is Steven Wilson’s self deprecating wit on-stage as he introduces the next song: “Last time I was in Wales, Man were the up and coming band. There were three people in the audience and a distressed badger called Henrietta.” Well things have certainly changed since then, although if Henrietta is here tonight, she’s keeping quiet about it.
There’s a change of theme for ‘Perfect Life’. This is one of the more interesting tracks on the album, a spoken word poem overlaid onto a beautifully sung lament. The video montage is a couple of girls playing in a meadow that touches me deeply because it reminds me very much of my own daughters. Along with the Jess Cope-animated ‘Routine’ (see postscript below), the visuals (to me) don’t quite gel with the grittier, urban mood of the album as a whole.
The show mostly features the new album interspersed with some older tracks and favourites from his previous release ‘The Raven That Refused To Sing’. One of the great things about Steven Wilson is that he isn’t afraid to surround himself with virtuoso players to interpret his ideas and in Marco Minnemann, Nick Beggs, Adam Holzman and Guthrie Govan, he has assembled a formidable team. When this band rock, they really rock, but their sound (probably aided by the concert hall acoustics) is very clear and precise. To paraphrase the words of Jon Anderson, they can play a lot of notes and the notes are good notes too. I can’t stop watching Guthrie’s hands as they create their intricate patterns on his guitar. His playing is so fluid and beautifully captures the intimate, tender spirit of Steven Wilson’s mysterious heroine, never more so perhaps than in the beautiful finale to ‘Happy Returns/Ascendant Here On…’
As I leave St.David’s Hall I can’t help but reflect that it’s sad that the mainstream media hasn’t really picked up on what a talented and thought provoking musician we have in our midst. Instead, we get wall to wall boy bands and girl groups and endless variations on a theme of talented nobodies waiting to be discovered. But when we already have a bona fide musical talisman creating the best music of his career, outside of the cognoscenti and the broadsheet music reviews, who knows? The retreat from intellectualism in popular culture is a disturbing fact of modern life these days but it still frustrates me that artists like Steven Wilson just don’t get a much broader hearing. It’s like we have more choice than ever through the multitude of channels at our disposal and less choice than ever because the fragmentation defies and bewilders. And so you end up with the safe, soggy centre of X Factor and ersatz platitudes – ‘believe in yourself’, ‘work hard and you will achieve your dreams’. The fact that I’m thinking about whether Joyce Carol Vincent ever had dreams and ambitions shows the power of Steven Wilson’s music. Tonight has been a truly brilliant performance from an artist in top form. I’m already looking forward to the next tour!
Postscript – September 2015
Writing this postscript in September after watching Steven Wilson’s Autumn shows at the Albert Hall, my opinion hasn’t really changed about the visual effects for ‘Perfect Life’ and ‘Routine’ not really fitting well with the concept of the album overall. But at the London shows, Ninet Tayeb, the Israeli artist who sings on the album, gave the first ever live performance of ‘Routine’ and just about broke the heart of everyone in the audience. ‘Routine’ is a powerful study of loss and anguish that certainly stands out on the album, but heard live its impact is truly astonishing. When you have a singer, male or female, who can put themselves right out in front of such a strong band of musicians and soar effortlessly above them, it’s bound to send shivers down your spine. Such is the tremendous alchemy of live performance when artist and audience bond in that magical space of giving and receiving a special unique moment. And seeing this elfin woman on the stage unleash such a massive eruption of femininity and passion as the song reached its crescendo is a moment that will live with me for a long time to come. Even now, closing my eyes, I can hear her anguish spiralling around the high arched ceiling of the Albert Hall, almost expecting the roof to come crashing down in the face of such an onslaught. Which is not say the performance was out of control or just some kind of weird or wild shriek; the vocal was sung, the melody was intact, and the emotion was almost unbearable. I just hope Steven Wilson’s future plans include some kind of Blu-Ray of these shows as I could watch and hear Ninet Tayeb sing over and over again.