Soft Machine return with a new line-up, and their thirteenth studio album, sixty years since the band was formed.
The number thirteen is unlucky for some, but the latest version of Soft Machine obviously don’t think so. In some cultures, the number is considered a symbol of change, regeneration or growth. Thirteen is the title of the band’s thirteenth album. The record has thirteen tracks, the longest of which is thirteen minutes. The band was co-founded by Daevid Allen, who was born on 13 January and died on 13 March. And the record is due out on Friday 13 March (what could be luckier than that?)
The album marks another chapter in Soft Machine’s complicated history over the last six decades. The band was formed in 1966 by Mike Ratledge, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Daevid Allen. They were founder members of the Canterbury Scene, starting as a psychedelic band, and maintaining a regular residency at the UFO Club in London alongside the Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. Later, they became a progressive rock and jazz rock band. None of the founder members is still in the band; over the decades, the band has had over 30 members. The latest iteration of the band was formed in 2025, with John Etheridge on guitar (celebrating his 50th anniversary with the band!), long-standing member Theo Travis on sax, flute and keyboards, and new members Fred Thelonious Baker (bass) and Asaf Sirkis (drums).
Soft Machine luminary Robert Wyatt has endorsed Sirkis,
‘As far as I can see there’s nothing he can’t do when he puts his mind to it.. his kit skills just keep expanding but what really get to me are his ethereal, haunting compositions.’
Sirkis returns the compliment with Waltz for Robert, a haunting track that starts with gentle guitar chords and film noir flute that has the feel of Don’t Hate Me by Steven Wilson on which Theo Travis also plays. Travis’ flute playing becomes more florid, even as the guitar chords remain melancholy. Fred Thelonious Baker provides lovely fretless bass.
Sirkis also wrote the superb opening track Lemon Poem Song, with an atmospheric, gently aspirational chord sequence overlaid by John Etheridge’s filigree guitar work. Sirkis also shows what a stunningly virtuosic drummer he is, a worthy addition to the band.
The new version of the band has one song credited to all the band members, Pens to the Foal Mode, which was recorded live in the studio as a completely free group improvisation with no overdubs: all flute loops were recorded in real time. It’s a spacey track, with some dystopian guitar from John Etheridge. Seven Hoursalso starts with some free improvisation: this all bodes well for the band’s forthcoming tour which begins on 12 March.
Baker’s first composition for the band is Turmoilwhich begins with dense guitar, and a King Crimson sense of impending doom, with unsettling fuzz bass from Baker and an angular melody from Travis on sax. The track barely holds itself together, but virtuosic drumming from Sirkis just about keeps this superb song from falling part: a nightmarishly delicious vision that perfectly matches its title.
The bulk of the composing duties fall to Travis, who contributes nearly half of the tracks. He describes Open Roadas a ‘rocky track’ which fits his philosophy that melody is important. Like Lemon Poem Song, this track features an emotive chord sequence that underpins Travis’ long-limbed earworm of a melody. The sax solo is reminiscent of the work of the great Dick Parry, most famous for his work with Pink Floyd. Etheridge’s guitar solo has something of the feel of David Gilmour but with added intricacy. Fans of progressive rock will be pleased to note that the Mellotron is not just any Mellotron; this is Steven Wilson’s Mellotron. As Travis recounted to Sid Smith in Prog, Wilson let him use his Mellotron in return for Travis guesting at Wilson’s 2025 show at the Palladium.
The centrepiece of the album is Travis’ composition The Longest Night, which Smith describes in his sleeve notes as ‘prog-leaning’, perhaps because of its 13-minute length. This is an epic in King Crimson mode, which casts back to long-form, contemplative instrumentals from albums like Lark’s Tongue in Aspic (1973) and Starless and Bible Black (1974). There’s a lovely moment late in the track which is reminiscent of Ian Anderson’s flute playing, with a King Crimson bass line creeping up underneath. But this isn’t prog rock pastiche. Pete Whittaker provides some excellent work on organ, and Sirkis’ drumming is simply stunning. Travis provides pleasingly melodic sax lines. Etheridge played his extended solo live in the studio, worried afterwards that it was too long. Travis told Smith,
‘I don’t think [Etheridge] would mind me saying that he regards this as his best solo moment, and he’s made a lot of records over the years.’
The album ends with Daevid’s Special Cuppa, another tribute to a founder member of Soft Machine. Travis worked with Daevid Allen, who last played with the band in 1967, as a member of Gong from 1999 to 2009, and in 2001 he recorded Allen playing ‘glissando guitar’ in the studio. Travis has written a gorgeous song around Allen’s shimmering guitar, featuring the evocative sound of the duduk, an Armenian traditional instrument which he played on Aeolus: one hour duduk meditation, another collaboration with Wilson. The track ends with Allen’s ghostly guitar rising into the ether, coming full circle 60 years later.
Performers
John Etheridge Electric guitar Theo Travis Tenor and soprano saxes, flute, alto flute, Fender Rhodes piano, electronics, piano (track 1), Mellotron, Electronics Fred Thelonious Baker Fretless bass guitar Asaf Sirkis Drums and percussion, piano (track 6)
Daevid Allen (recorded in 2001) glissando guitar (track 13) Pete Whittaker Organ (tracks 2,5), Fender Rhodes piano (track 2) Nick Utteridge Gong (track 5)
Tracks 1 Lemon Poem Song (Sirkis) (3.27) 2 Open Road (Travis) (7.30) 3 Seven Hours (Travis) (5.12) 4 Waltz for Robert (Travis) (4.19) 5 The Longest Night (Travis) (13.08) 6 Disappear (Sirkis) (3.55) 7 Green Books (Etheridge) (5.46) 8 Beledo Balado (Etheridge) (4.32) 9 Pens To The Foal Mode (Baker, Etheridge, Sirkis, Travis) (2.42) 10 Time Station (Travis) (2.46) 11 Which Bridge Did You Cross (Travis) (2.49) 12 Turmoil (Baker) (5.30) 13 Daevid’s Special Cuppa (Travis) (3.10)
Thirteen is released on Dyad Records through Proper on Friday 13 March. Soft Machine’s 32-date tour begins in Coventry on Thursday 12 March.
Read on…
Theo Travis plays on Steven Wilson’s Overview Tour…
The first time I reviewed Manchester Collective was when they played at the White Hotel in Salford over six years ago. Over 150 posts later (not all of them reviews of Manchester Collective!) I have seen them several times at the RNCM, Stoller Hall and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, and at a late-night Prom at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
Last night was the first time I have seen the Collective at Manchester’s Aviva Studios. Rakhi Singh, Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director, described the Collective as ‘a shapeshifting ensemble’, varying in size and forces for each concert. Whatever the venue, and whatever the nature of the group, they never cease to delight and inspire, and to introduce us to new repertoire (including new commissions) as well as juxtaposing old and new music in surprising and thought-provoking ways.
On Sunday evening, Singh was a warm, passionate communicator, introducing the pieces to us and explaining technical terms where necessary. She promised us ‘a really beautiful programme.’ She didn’t break her promise. She led a string quartet consisting of Singh on first violin, Donald Grant on second, Ruth Gibson (viola) and Alice Neary (cello).
The concert began with Summa by Arvo Pärt. The piece started life as a setting for choir of the Nicene Creed (also known as the Credo in the Latin Mass), the central statement of Christian faith. Sunday evening’s version was for string quartet, gently lilting, contemplative and ritualistic. The Collective’s performance was quietly mesmeric. Behind them, four lights resembled stained-glass windows in a church, reinforcing the piece’s religious feeling.
Singh said that Pärt’s piece had an ‘ancient quality’ that made it hard to know whether it was old or new (the original version was written in 1977). The oldest piece in the concert was written in 1680, and the most recent was completed ‘five or six days ago.’ The 17th-century piece was Henry Purcell’s Fantasia in C Minor, Z. 738. It was paired with the first movement of Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No. 2, which was first performed on 21 November 1945 at a concert marking the 250th anniversary of Purcell’s death.
The Purcell piece felt both starkly modern and ancient. Purcell was writing in a style that was already out of fashion: fantasias for viol consort were no longer being written. The Collective, playing without vibrato to emphasise the startling false relations (deliberate dissonances where two notes clash) that make this music feel so modern. Their playing was beautifully poised, with elegant ornamentation. The slow passages were doleful in the style of the earlier composer John Dowland, who described himself in a song title as Semper Dowland Semper Dolens (Always Dowland, Always Doleful). The middle, faster section was perfectly controlled.
The Collective performed the Britten movement with the same intensity as the Purcell. According to Hugh Morris’ programme note, Britten himself saw a clear link between his work and that of Purcell, which was characterised by ‘clarity, tenderness and strangeness.’ Britten was in his early 30s in 1945 when he wrote the string quartet, basking in the success of his opera Peter Grimes, which has since become part of the standard repertoire (Opera North is bringing it to Lowry in Salford in March). This is music written by a young man at the height of his powers and creative confidence, celebrating the ‘strangeness’ of Purcell, with something of the austerity of that music but also at times a quiet ecstasy. The Collective skilfully brought out the false relations in Britten’s music and the piece’s contrasting joy and anguish.
Mica Levi is probably best known for their film scores for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) and The Zone of Interest (2023), which won major international awards. They are also known as member of the experimental pop band Good Sad Happy Band, originally known as Micachu and the Shapes. Singh introduced their 2015 composition You Belong to Me, as an example of how a non-classical composer uses instruments in a different way. Hugh Morris traced a link back to Pärt’s’ economy of musical gesture,’ and ‘the idea of spinning large fabrics out of tiny fibres.’
Levi’s piece began with fluttering of the upper strings, like a bird hopping from one tree to another. A low melodic section felt like an ominous creature that suddenly ground to a halt. A repeated two-note phrase, surrounded by filigree decoration from the upper strings, had the sensibility of electronic dance music, with the timbre changing as if a filter had been applied to a synthesiser. A single note was thrown around the players, with a bass line that could have come from dance music, that suddenly changed. There was a stunning moment when we entered a new world in a completely different key. A discordant chord contained false relations of the type we heard in the Purcell. Little fragments of melody were thrown around, like snatches of distant memory. For a while, it felt as if we were stuck in an endless labyrinth, with horrifying cello glissandi. A stunning piece, perfectly executed.
Singh introduced the second half by saying that if the first half had been grounded, then the second half was mostly ethereal. We began with the new commission, Poems of Consciousness, by the young British composer Jasmine Morris. The work, in her words,
‘examines how language, music and consciousness interact, and how meaning arises from both what is spoken and what remains unsaid.’
The first movement, Half in a dream, half in the snow, seemed to follow on from the Levi piece, with fractured harmonics, snatches of themes and unsettling glissandi. The space between the notes felt as important as the notes themselves, and the failure to communicate seemed an important driving theme. The Decay of the Angel unravelled with fragments of melody beamed from outer space, music from beyond the cosmos, or melodies heard in a fever dream. There were occasional snatches of night music as in Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). The final movement, Fingerprints on the Dragonfly in Amber, felt more grounded as we briefly returned to Earth, the lower string lines weaving together with romantic flourishes. There were more false relations, and at the end, we seemed to be briefly back in space.
In the final piece, we were back on Earth but looking up to space. John Luther Adams was an environmental activist before he became a composer. His piece Canticles of the Sky gave the concert its title: the first movement is called Sky with Four Suns, and the other movements depict the sky with four moons, with nameless colours, and finally with endless stars. The music is drawn from Adams’ large-scale choral work Canticles of the Holy Wind, with sixteen choral parts condensed into a string quartet.
Sun dogs (Parhelia) on a sunny arctic morning; Svalbard: Source: Wikimedia Commons
The four suns and four moons of the first two movements are phenomena seen at the Arctic Circle: refractions of light through frozen particles in the air that create the impression of additional suns or moons, like mirages in the sky. The four lights behind the performers became suns and then moons.
Singh had a lovely way of describing each movement of the piece beginning and ending in silence, as if the music had always been there and the string quartet was joining in. This called to mind the concept of ‘Music of the Spheres‘, in which the movement of celestial bodies creates music that only the soul can hear.
In his notes, the composer wrote that ‘All sounds should be legato’, and it felt as if the bows of the Collective never left their instruments. The music was tonal, slow-moving and almost ritualistic, taking us back to the opening music by Arvo Pärt, except – appropriately – where there were more false relations. As the music morphed slowly, the concentration was evident on all four players’ faces. The overall effect was mesmerising, like experiencing the sun rising on a distant planet. At the end, the audience remained silent for several seconds, as if contemplating what they had just heard. This was a superb concert, imaginatively programmed with a clear narrative thread, a compelling mix of the old and the new.
Repertoire
Arvo Pärt Summa Henry Purcell Fantasia in C Minor, Z. 738 Benjamin Britten String Quartet No. 2, I. Mica Levi You Belong to Me Jasmine Morris Poems of Consciousness (World premiere tour; Manchester premiere) John Luther Adams Canticles of the Sky
Performers
Rakhi Singh Violin Donald Grant Violin Ruth Gibson Viola Alice Neary Cello
Manchester Collective perform Sky With the Four Suns at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Thursday 12 February
In the early years Steven Wilson’s band, Porcupine Tree, were often compared to Pink Floyd and Wilson himself admitted the importance of that musical influence. He later distanced himself from the Floyd, moving towards a more distinctive sound. It is not surprising that he came to be regarded as a new hero in the genre of Progressive Rock, even though again he has often tried to distance himself from that label.
Wilson grew up not only listening to TheDark Side of the Moon but also to Love to Love You Baby by Donna Summer, produced by disco and electronic dance music pioneer Giorgio Moroder. So the fact that his latest album The Future Bites™ heavily features electronics and very little electric guitar should not come as a surprise, although some of his fans have been upset by the change of direction.
Wilson announced a while ago that he would be working with producer David Kosten, who makes dance music and electronica under the name Faultline, which suggested that another change in direction was coming. Wilson doesn’t like standing still or repeating himself musically, which means that over his very long and varied career he has written music which could be defined as…psychedelia, space rock, trip-hop, jazz fusion, progressive rock, progressive metal, pop, ambient, art rock, alternative rock, pop rock, drone music and trance. What unites Wilson’s music in all these different styles is his searching musical intelligence, a gift for melody, the willingness to innovate even at the risk of alienating some of his fans, and the ability to write songs that sound sophisticated yet familiar. Like the film director Stanley Kubrick, one of Wilson’s cultural heroes, he likes each piece of work to be different from anything else he has produced.
What is rather surprising is that Wilson admitted in a recent interview to promote the new album that he is no longer inspired by the guitar,
I got to the point where I would sit with a guitar on my knee and I didn’t know what else I could do…I’ve done everything with this thing.
He has spent the last few years collecting vintage keyboards, which he installed in his new studio. Most of the songs on the new album are built around these keyboards, rather than around the guitars that feature heavily in most of his music to date.
Steven Wilson’s new studio (Twitter)
Wilson’s new album which feels very contemporary from a musical point of view; previous solo albums have sometimes been consciously nostalgic, such as the superb 2013 album The Raven That Refused to Sing which referenced the peak of 1970s progressive rock story-telling, and To the Bone (2017) which was influenced by 1980s art rock. His current abandonment of the guitar as his main instrument perhaps reflects its demise in the 21st century – and certainly the demise of the guitar band. It will be interesting to see whether the increase in guitar sales during lockdown will lead to new guitar bands being formed.
But if Wilson has moved on from the guitar at present, one of the themes of the album has troubled him for many years: the way that the human brain has evolved in the internet era. He first explored the possible negative effect of the technology 25 years ago, with Porcupine Tree, in the song ‘Every Home is Wired’ on the album Signify and on Fear of a Blank Planet in 2007.
The other major theme of the album is consumerism, the urge to buy vastly overpriced ‘designer’ products. He set up a website selling products branded with the TFB™ logo, mostly items which would usually be inexpensive. The site was a well-executed concept, a sarcastic joke, although some of the products were genuinely for sale such as volcanic ash soap. The branded toilet rolls suddenly took on an unexpected and highly ironic resonance during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic when there were shortages of toilet paper in the UK and elsewhere.
The opening pair of tracks Unself and Selfare a bitter commentary on self-identity in the age of social media. Unself, which is only a minute long, starts with a gently-strummed acoustic guitar, sounding distant as it’s drenched in echo, perhaps a nostalgic nod to Wilson’s past as a guitarist. The instruments fall away and his solo voice is brought sharply into focus with the words ‘the self can only love itself’, leading to the industrial funk and pulsating sequencers of Self, a fierce critique of the effects of social media,
Self sees a billion stars But still can only self-regard
Richard Barbieri, former keyboard player with Japan and Porcupine Tree provides atmospheric soundscapes on the track.
King Ghost is one of the most beautiful songs Wilson has ever written, with poetic lyrics, haunting synthesiser lines, and soaring falsetto vocals which create an atmosphere of sparkling luminosity perfectly matched by Jess Cope in the official video.
12 Things I Forgot shows that one of the things that Wilson has not forgotten is how to write simple, catchy pop songs just as he did with Porcupine Tree (‘Lazarus’ from Deadwing and ‘Trains’ from In Absentia), on his solo albums (‘Pariah’ from To the Bone) and with Blackfield (pick almost any song).
Eminent Sleaze is crisp, dystopian, industrial funk, similar in style to the equally satisfying ‘Song of I’ from his last album To the Bone. The song features very few electronic instruments. It includes cameos from Nick Beggs on bass and Chapman Stick, Adam Holzman on keyboards, and strings from the London Session Orchestra. Yet the production cleverly combines these elements to create an electronic sound. The central character, as shown in the official video, encapsulates Wilson’s fears that social media and technology companies have more power now than politicians; the title of the song is a play on the term éminence grise, the hidden power behind politicians.
Politicians don’t escape Wilson’s searching gaze either. In Man of the People he adopts the point of view of a member of the family of a politician who has been damaged by a scandal, the long-suffering partner who stands beside them with a fixed smile for the cameras. It’s a gentle, poignant song which shows some degree of sympathy for the victims who stay with the disgraced politician even though they know that the love and trust they receive are fake. The song includes some of the most powerful lines on the album,
Ambition froze me out
Like a demonic winter.
The centre-piece of the album, both in terms of concept and length, is Personal Shopper. It’s a powerful satire, urging us to buy things we don’t need and can’t afford, to ‘have now, pay in another life’. It has the melancholy disco feel of Steven’s most recent album with no-man, love you to bits.
The middle section of the track includes a list of pointless items which the modern consumer can buy, read out by perhaps the most famous shopper of all, Sir Elton John. The list of possible items to buy has been approved by Sir Elton himself – for instance he rejected a reference to ‘mobile phone skins’ as he doesn’t own mobile phone himself so wouldn’t buy a cover for it. The list includes obvious examples like ‘designer trainers’ and ‘monogrammed luggage’, but also ‘deluxe edition box sets’. Ironically, Wilson has released a deluxe edition of this album, limited to 5000. This is done with great self-awareness of course. Wilson has also admitted that he does enjoy shopping, including buying box sets…
In Follower the target is social media again, and in particular social media influencers. It’s the most direct song on the album, and the one that sounds most like a conventional rock song, showing Wilson’s anger at the influencers with their needy cry ‘Oh follow me, follow me’. These lines show Wilson’s view of the vitriol that the internet (or more accurately the people that use it) can generate.
Future biting
Millions spiting
Wilson has often ended his albums, both as a solo artist and with Porcupine Tree, with a transcendent ballad. For instance in 2002 he ended In Absentia, one of Porcupine Tree’s heaviest and most disturbing albums, with the beautiful solo ballad ‘Collapse the Light Into Earth’ (recently revisited in one his Future Bites Sessions recorded in lockdown). After the fury and satire of much of the rest of the album Count of Unease plays a similar role. Wilson plays all the instruments here, except for the ‘drone’ credited to co-producer David Kosten. It’s a lovely end to the album.
On The Future Bites, Wilson seems to have found a new musical language as he stares the future in the face. As is always the case with his work, the album is superbly recorded and produced. Where it differs from much of his previous work is that he has eliminated the signs of musical virtuosity that were so spectacularly and thrillingly present before, and has created music that serves his message as directly and compellingly as possible. Does that mean his music is no longer ‘progressive’? Perhaps in the narrow sense of the musical genre that is Prog Rock, this album marks a departure, but in terms of Steven’s musical journey, this album shows that he is continuing to make progress, constantly moving forward into the future.
This review was originally published at 7.16 pm on 29 January 2021, and republished with minor amendments on 12 January 2026 at 09.53 am to mark the fifth anniversary of the album’s release.
How a magnificent new book helped me rediscover the maverick’s music
*****
The Cover of ROCK and ROLE by Joe Banks published by Kingmaker Publishing.
Often, the route to discovering new music is fairly conventional; there’s no Damascene moment. I found The Cure and Joy Division (and many other bands) by listening to John Peel on BBC Radio One. I discovered The Beatles and Pink Floyd by listening to my older brother’s records (1967-1970 and The Dark Side of the Moon).
Very rarely, pure serendipity can introduce you to music that changes your life. As I have previously described on this blog, I found the music of Steven Wilson by chance when I was making a radio programme about high-quality music production.
On Tuesday, 26 September 1978, Peter Hammill supported Brand X at Manchester Apollo. I went to that gig, probably because I had heard of Brand X through their connection with Genesis drummer Phil Collins, although by then Collins had left the band.
I hadn’t heard of Peter Hammill before I saw him live. I was puzzled that several audience members left after he played. I stayed on to watch Brand X, who were very good. It was only later, when I saw Hammill supporting Marillion in London and the same thing happened again, that I realised some fans had come only to see him, even though he was the support act.
Poster for the Peter Hammill Tour in 1978 with Brand X: ‘The Odd Couple Tour’
At the Manchester gig, I bought the concert programme, and on the back was a picture of a half-shaved Hammill, Janus-like, with one half of his face in the past and the other in the future, promoting his new album, The Future Now, released that month. My programme is long lost, but I still remember his avowed intention to, in his words, ‘carry on’ (I remember the italics, too).
My father, the most important musical influence in my life, came to pick me up from the Apollo. He was as bemused as I was by the strange image. But there was something about Hammill that resonated deeply in my adolescent mind. I quickly became an avid fan, buying all the records I could by Hammill as a solo artist and with his band Van der Graaf Generator.
The music we hear as teenagers often resonates with us for the rest of our lives. There’s more time to listen to music at that age, and our intellectual and emotional influences are more plastic than later in life when adult commitments take over. Nostalgia is powerful. Listening back to the music we loved then, can we be sure it’s good music now? Can we be objective? Does it even matter?
So it came as a surprise to me (and to my friends, family and everyone else that knows me) that I found another artist, Steven Wilson, who had an equally profound effect on me. This was about 40 years later, long past the time when I should still have been discovering new, contemporary music. After I met Wilson about ten years ago, I bought all his solo records and his Porcupine Tree recordings. Something about his music touched my soul.
There was a time when vinyl was as popular as a 90-minute drum solo. When we moved house 30 years ago, we were short of space and seduced by the ‘perfect sound forever’ that CDs promised. We sold our turntable and our vinyl. This included my collection of Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf LPs. We kept a few records for the sake of nostalgia, even though we could no longer play them. So I kept my copy of Sgt. Pepper, a couple of albums by The Cure… and Sitting Targets by Peter Hammill…
When I was writing my first-ever blog for this site, How I Found Steven Wilson in 2019 (later updated), words from Peter Hammill came into my mind, like the Ghost of Progressive Past,
I’ve got every one of your records, man, Doesn’t that mean that I own you? 'Energy Vampires' by Peter Hammill from The Future Now (1978)
It was late at night in my writing/listening room, and I had to stop to remind myself of the track whose lyrics were lodged deep in my brain. Once again, Hammill spoke to my soul.
I'm not selling you my soul Try to put it in the records But I've got to keep my life my own
In 2023, I began a new series on my blog called Off the Beaten Track. The first post was a review of Burn the Worldby Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate. But it wasn’t long before Peter Hammill’s work floated back into my consciousness with Autumn and A Louse is not a Home, and more recently Mr X (Gets Tense)/Faculty X. I was also lucky enough to see Hammill playing live in Manchester last October.
My interest in Hammill has been further revived by Father Christmas, who kindly brought me a copy of the new book ROCK and ROLE – The Visionary Songs of Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator by Joe Banks, and the multi-CD box set Peter Hammill The Charisma & Virgin Recordings 1971-1986. Who knew that St Nick (no relation) was a fan of progressive rock?
Reading the Introduction to Banks’ superb book, it’s striking how similar the careers of Steven Wilson and Peter Hammill have been. If you went through the Introduction and replaced Hammill’s name with Wilson’s, many of the statements would remain true:
Both artists have passionate fans, in Hammill’s case described by Banks as ‘true believers.’
Both fronted groups for whom they wrote the music and lyrics (Van der Graaf and Porcupine Tree, respectively.)
Both have pursued successful solo careers but have sometimes returned to perform, record, and play live with their bands.
Both have created music that pushes boundaries and challenges listeners. Try Hammill’s ‘Magog (In Bromine Chambers)’ from In Camera (1974), a ten-minute, frankly terrifying essay in musique concrète, which Banks describes as ‘a bold move even by Hammill’s standards.’ Compare anything under Steven Wilson’s Bass Communion. In prog, no one can hear you scream.
Both artists have been categorised as progressive rock, but that doesn’t do them full justice:
They can write epic prog songs, full of portentous concepts.
They can write art-rock songs.
They can write gorgeous, heartfelt ballads with memorable melodies.
They share a certain cynicism about the world, particularly organised religion and politics. Their lyrics are thoughtful and intelligent, covering a wide range of topics, from the profoundly personal to biting social commentary.
They share, in Banks’ words on Hammill,
“[an] unquenchable creative spirit, consistently pushing at the boundaries of what’s possible.“
The Love Songs (1984) by Peter Hammill
Both artists, recognising that their music isn’t the easiest to assimilate, have released compilation albums which are intended to introduce listeners to ‘the more accessible side’ of their music.
Wilson released Transience in 2016, which included a cover of Alanis Morissette’s Thank You and various radio edits.
Hammill released The Love Songs in 1984, with re-recorded versions of ballads from his previous albums. Banks describes it as ‘a misstep, both artistically and commercially… some of the songs sound positively traumatised by the experience.’ I added to my parents’ trauma by briefly modelling my dress sense on Hammill’s as seen on the cover of the album (see above), complete with white boots. Fortunately, no photographic evidence is available of my sartorial misstep.
Banks’ book is arranged chronologically, with historical context provided for each release, starting with The Aerosol Grey Machine, released by Van der Graaf in 1969 and ending with Hammill’s solo album A Black Box from 1980; the ‘classic years’ when Hammill and his band were signed to the Charisma label. The final chapters address key themes in Hammill’s songs from the seventies, his poetry and prose, and pen portraits of Hammill. The section on the post-Charisma years (of which there are now 45!) sensibly picks landmark albums from those times, including (pleasingly) the aforementioned Sitting Targets, my copy of which has now been reunited with a new turntable….
Sitting Targets, once again sitting on a turntable where it belongs
The book is beautifully illustrated throughout. It includes footnotes, chronological lists of releases and Radio/TV recordings, references and an index, all of which make it easy to navigate the book and Hammill’s extensive career. It’s nicely bound too, rather than just glued together, making it easy to fold flat without causing it a spinal injury.
The most fascinating and valuable aspect of the book is the detailed analysis of each album and each song, with subtly colour-coded pages to make them easier to find. I should declare a professional interest here. This blog, as well as my book on Porcupine Tree and my forthcoming book on Steven Wilson, often attempts a detailed, track-by-track analysis of an artist’s work. As Banks wisely says,
“This is, of course, an entirely subjective exercise, and other interpretations are always available.“
Agreed! It’s fascinating for me to compare Banks’ interpretations of Hammill’s songs with my own. I was amused to read that ‘attempting to describe the music’s flow in detail’ for a song like A Louse is not a Home is a ‘fool’s errand.’ Reader, I went off on that errand…
Banks often comes up with a lovely turn of phrase which perfectly sums up the mood of a song, such as his description of the opening of A Louse,
“With vocal and bass piano in perfect unison, Hammill delivers the opening line – “Sometimes, it’s very scary here” – in a lugubrious, Bela Lugosi voice, a horror show host introducing the midnight movie.”
Banks says that (like Steven Wilson), Hammill has always remained true to his artistic vision, which has always been more important to him than selling records. He does a superb job of reminding us of the unique quality of Hammill’s vision and his astonishing singing voice. The level of detail and insight Banks brings to his analysis will be extremely valuable to long-term fans, but his clarity and enthusiasm will also appeal to curious, open-minded music fans who don’t know Hammill’s music. Banks does what all good music writers should do – make us want to listen to the music he is writing about.
Peter Hammill: A visionary
The design and layout of the book are a model for a music book. Let’s hope that Kingmaker Publishing, founded in 2019, Prog magazine journalist/Big Big Train manager Nick Shilton and Big Big Train founder Greg Spawton, publish more like this in future.
This is a book to treasure, to savour like a bottle of vintage Port, to dip into as you listen to each album and each song. The new box set, Peter Hammill The Charisma & Virgin Recordings 1971-1986, makes a perfect companion.
Peter Hammill The Charisma & Virgin Recordings 1971-1986
Deluxe re-issue of Porcupine Tree’s 2005 album casts new light on a classic
*****
The cover of Deadwing by Lasse Hoile
Deadwing is the second album in a run of three classic releases from Porcupine Tree, starting with In Absentia in 2002 and ending with Fear of a Blank Planetin 2007. It was released in the middle of that sequence, in 2005. The Deluxe Edition, released on CD in March 2023, is housed in a handsome hardback book of around a hundred pages, including photos and artwork by Lasse Hoile and Mike Bennion, and detailed articles by Stephen Humphries.
In 2017, the band’s singer, guitarist and main songwriter Steven Wilson remastered the album for release on vinyl, and that mix was included for the first time on CD. The first CD contains the full album and the second CD includes five B-sides. The third has 13 demos, the first seven of which were recorded by Wilson, the eighth by Wilson and drummer Gavin Harrison and the rest by the full band with Richard Barbieri on keyboards and Colin Edwin on bass. The generous fourth disc is a Blu-Ray which includes: a new documentary Never Stop the Car on a Drive in the Dark – the Making of Deadwing directed by Jeremy George; the album and B-sides remastered in high resolution stereo (96/24 LPCM); a 5.1 surround sound mix including four B-sides; a concert video recorded for the German Rockpalast television series at Live Music Hall, Köln, Germany in November 2005.
The Deadwing film script
The cover of the Deadwing script by Steven Wilson and Mike Bennion. Source: Twitter/X @PorcupineTree
Many of the songs on the album relate to a film script of the same name, written by Wilson and the director Mike Bennion, with whom Wilson had previously collaborated, writing music for several TV commercials directed by Bennion. The film of the Deadwing script was never made, although it did resurface in 2020 in a new, simpler version called And No Birds Sing. A short teaser (featuring a brief cameo of Wilson as a rough sleeper) was released on YouTube in September of that year, but to date the film hasn’t been completed.
And No Birds Sing (Teaser). Directed by Mike Bennion, produced by Gaby Whyte Hart, sound design by Steven Wilson
In the meantime, the Deadwing album was released partly to help the film get made – Wilson and Bennion were having difficulty creating any interest in their script. The irony is that the album, as Wilson admits in the fascinating documentary included in this Deluxe Edition, is based on a script for a film no one has ever seen and on characters known only to Wilson and Bennion. Wilson enjoys the irony, but does admit that the problem – if there is one – is that the album is therefore impenetrable both ‘lyrically and conceptually.’ What has made the album even more difficult to interpret – until now – is that it has never been entirely clear which of the songs on the album relate to the film script. Wilson admits that around half of the nine tracks on the album are taken from the script, including the title track, Lazarus, Open Car, and Arriving Somewhere But Not Here. He gives tantalising glimpses of the film’s plot, admitting to Humphries, for instance, that the eerie spoken words on the title track ‘Like a cancer scare/In a dentist’s chair’ are taken directly from the script. The images and photography, which are extensively and beautifully presented in the lavish book, are also almost entirely based on the film script.
In the documentary, Wilson refers to the two main characters in the script, David and Elizabeth. David works in a sound studio in Soho, London. The first 15 pages of the Deadwing script were posted online, and can now be found here. In those pages, David is seen working on the sound for a video and is horrified when he glimpses a small boy who appears mysteriously in one of the scenes he is editing. He later meets Elizabeth on a Tube train platform – it’s unclear who she is, although we are told that she is a young woman in her late twenties, with a long red coat and red high heels.
A fascinating revelation made by Wilson in the documentary is that David is the only survivor of a religious cult after the rest of them died in a mass suicide twenty years before the start of the film. He fled the cult as a child, and the opening scene of the film script shows a three-year-old boy running, barefoot, through the woods at night wearing a nightshirt. Just before this, we see the boy’s mother singing a lullaby to him; are we to assume that his mother was a member of the cult and died in the mass suicide? The song Lazarus seems to be a dialogue between the boy and his dead mother – David is mentioned by name in the song, ‘My David, don’t you worry.’
Wilson has often written about religion in his lyrics for Porcupine Tree, and Halo on this album is about the holier-than-thou attitude of a born-again Christian,
I’m not the same as you Cause I’ve seen the light
Wilson has also had a fascination with religious cults. The track Last Chance to Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled (Lightbulb Sun 2000) features real spoken word footage from the leader of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult, 39 of whom committed suicide in March 1997 in the tragic belief that they had left their bodies to return to the ‘Level Above Human in Distant Space.’
Wilson revisited the theme in The Blind House (The Incident 2009), which is again based on a real-life case, when a police raid in 2008 on the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas led to the release of 400 children, some of whom had married the polygamist cult leader who is now serving a lengthy prison sentence for sexual activities with minors. It’s intriguing that, in the interview with Humphries, Wilson says the ghosts of the dead cult members are now returning to reclaim David. This combines Wilson’s scepticism about religion (inherited from his scientist father, as Wilson says in his book Limited Edition of One (Constable 2022), with his love of ghost stories – as shown on his solo album The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories) from 2013, which is based on a series of ghost stories that Wilson wrote.
Despite the revelation about David and the cult from which he escaped, Wilson admitted to Humphries that using a film script that very few people have ever seen (although Barbieri and Edwin did read it when recording the album) could make the album ‘a little unrelatable.’ He said that ‘nobody knew who David was’. We may have to wait until the film is released to find out more about him.
But the film script is not crucial to an understanding of the album and an appreciation of its emotional resonance. In a revealing section of the documentary, Wilson says that songs like Lazarus have universal themes, such as childhood nostalgia and regret, lyrical themes which have continued to haunt his solo albums including The Raven … and Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015). He modestly fails to mention the fact that the success of Lazarus (with over 26 million plays on Spotify it’s the band’s third most popular song, and Wilson has played it live around 500 times) is partly due to the gorgeous melody and the vocals which are delivered with sweet sincerity. Critics may agonise over the exact meaning of a lyric, whereas listeners may respond to the emotional truth of a song which is revealed as much by the music as by the words.
The demo tracks
Another revelation – perhaps more startling – is that Lazarus originally contained extra material as can be heard on the demo version on CD2. From around 2:25 to 3:10 there’s a very strange bridge section which sounds completely incongruous, much more like the early psychedelic pastiches of Porcupine Tree when the band was still Wilson’s solo project. It’s a very unusual lapse of judgment on Wilson’s part – most of his demos are very similar to the final versions, but in this case Andy Karp from the record company said that the demo version of the song ‘suddenly went haywire with a real curveball of a middle part.’ Karp and the band’s manager Andy Leff shared the same reaction to the middle section. Their role was to turn a good piece of art into a great piece of art, just as the poet Ezra Pound did when editing T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land (1922).
Another, more subtle but equally important difference between the demo and the final version of a song is Arriving Somewhere But Not Here. The demo begins with two minutes of ethereal choirs and the sound of a church organ. As Barbieri says in the documentary, Wilson asked him to add his distinctive sound design to the opening of the track, replacing the demo version with a ‘slowly building backdrop’ that leads much more effectively to the ‘dramatic moment’ when the main guitar theme first appears. Barbieri adds the ticking of a grandfather clock, electronic bleeps, backwards piano and a synth patch called Arab Soft Synth to create a richly enigmatic soundscape which creates, as he told Humphries, a ‘serene but portentous mood.’
The other demos are mostly versions of tracks which appear on the final album or as B-sides which are already reviewed in detail in On Track … Porcupine Tree. The B-sides on CD 2 are also covered in the book, mostly as tracks on the Stars Die compilation (see pages 130 – 132). There are however four new demo songs in the Deluxe Edition which aren’t reviewed elsewhere:
Godfearing (Wilson) [04:57]
This track has been available for about ten years on Wilson’s SoundCloud account, where he says that he’s not sure which album it belongs to, ‘while it shares lyrical themes with the songs on In Absentia, one of the melodies seems to relate to another piece from [the] Deadwing era.’ It now seems he has decided that it belongs to Deadwing.
This is an archetypal Porcupine Tree track from the band’s later era, with opening metal riffs that could have been written by the Swedish prog metal band Opeth (with whom Wilson was working around this time); lovely delicate vocals in the verses contrasting with an epic earworm of a chorus; a very heavy riff that could have come from Deadwing; a contemplative section with heavily echoed piano; imaginative use of hammered dulcimer and a taste of Mellotron … all beautifully combined into less than five minutes. It’s good that the track has finally found a home on an official release.
Vapour Trails (Wilson) [03.53]
Not to be confused with the single Vapour Trail Lullaby which was written before the sessions for In Absentia but wasn’t released until 2010, when it was given away as a single with copies of Wilson’s solo DVD Insurgentes.
The song is a reminder (if one is needed) of Wilson’s supreme ability to write a simple, heartfelt ballad – recent examples include 12 Things I Forgot from his solo album The Future Bites(2021), Of The New Day from the Porcupine Tree album Closure / Continuation (2022), and What Life Brings from his solo album The Harmony Codex(2023).
Its status as a demo is shown by the slightly strained vocals, and the very simple arrangement mostly based around strummed acoustic guitar. But there’s some lovely George Harrison-like guitar later in the song, and at 3:30 there’s a heart-stopping moment when the instruments briefly drop out, leaving emotive multi-layered vocals hanging in the air like perfume.
Instrumental Demo 1 (Porcupine Tree) [05.19]
This is one of five demos featuring the complete band. Wilson had previously presented the band with songs as completed demos on which he played and sang all the parts, but on Deadwing, he was beginning to relax control a little and allow other band members into the writing process. On the main album, Halo and Glass Arm Shattering are written by the whole band, and The Start Of Something Beautiful is co-written with Gavin Harrison.
This song is notable for a typically melodic, wide ranging bass line from Colin Edwin in the verse, robust and intelligent drumming from Harrison, some spacious soundscaping from Barbieri, and rocky guitar from Wilson.
Instrumental Demo 2 (Porcupine Tree) [05.23]
Harrison says that the danger of a whole band writing together in a room is that they end up playing for half an hour in E major, but this song features an uplifting and imaginative sequence of key changes from around 1:15 which lift the song beyond the most basic of demos. With more work, this could have been turned into a classic Porcupine Tree song. From around 3:30 Wilson shows off his skills as a guitarist and at 4:00 Barbieri adds evocative keyboards.
The surround sound mix
The Deluxe Edition provides an opportunity to hear Deadwing in a surround sound mix in 5.1 only – it was much later that Wilson began to mix in the more immersive and sophisticated Dolby Atmos format. The first Porcupine Tree album to benefit from 5.1 surround sound was In Absentia, mixed by Elliot Scheiner. Wilson worked with Scheiner on the 5.1 mix of Deadwing and by the next album Fear of a Blank Planet (2007) he had learned the art so well that his surround sound mix was nominated for a Grammy award, as was his mix of the next album The Incident (2009). Wilson has since become the go-to surround sound mixer for classic albums by bands such as King Crimson, Roxy Music, Jethro Tull, Yes, Gentle Giant, XTC and Tears For Fears. More recently he mixed his latest solo album The Future Bites (2021) and the new Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation (2022) in Dolby Atmos as well, adding more precise placement of instruments in the surround sound picture and height information as well.
The 5.1 mix provides a coherent, immersive experience that creates a unique sound world, strengthening some of the weaker tracks by drawing them into a creative whole. Backing vocals become much better defined in the surround sound image. Heavy metal guitar riffs are visceral. Fizzing synths that are hidden in the stereo mix lurk menacingly. Excellent use is made of the rear speakers, with the spoken word passages in the title track leaping out to startle the listener.
Two tracks in particular benefit from the mix. Mellotron Scratch brings out the song’s beauty and pain. The bass drum at the start is much more prominent, the syncopated rhythm creating a deliciously uneasy effect. The harmony voices are gorgeous. Later in the song, guitars and drums join in a sudden, robust moment as the bass drum returns.
The final track, Glass Arm Shattering, offers a gentle easing of tension after the visceral onslaught of much of the rest of the album. In stereo, the simplicity of the track is what is most noticeable after the proggy polyrhythms of the previous track, Start Of Something Beautiful. The surround sound mix turns the track into more of an epic, a climax like Eclipse, the closing track of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. The track begins with nostalgic vinyl crackles, which lead to lush drums and electronics. Slide guitars in the rear speakers add to the richness of the picture, and the multi-layered vocals take the listener to a new heights of emotion. The track ends with a touch of subtle humour, the sound of a stylus in a crackly groove on a record circling around the surround sound image turning the whole room into a vast record player.
Conclusion
Deadwing is a transitional album. It consolidated the distinctive Porcupine Tree blueprint, a hybrid of progressive metal riffs, melodic strength and rich vocal harmonies that had been a feature of the previous album, In Absentia. What Deadwing lacks compared to that album is conceptual coherence. The next album, Fear Of A Blank Planet, used the same musical formula and added a very strong concept, making it the band’s masterpiece. But Deadwing does include two classic Porcupine Tree tracks, Arriving Somewhere But Not Here and Lazarus, and most of the other material is strong. The Deluxe Edition adds a great deal to the enjoyment of the album, an insight into the creative process and an excellent surround sound mix.
This post was originally posted on 10 April 2023 and updated and reposted at 12.46 on 20 December 2025
1 Deadwing [09:46] 2 Shallow [04:17] 3 Lazarus [04:19] 4 Halo [04:39] 5 Arriving Somewhere But Not Here [12:02] 6 Mellotron Scratch [06:57] 7 Open Car [03:44] 8 Start Of Something Beautiful [07:43] 9 Glass Arm Shattering [06:08]
CD2 B-Sides
1 Revenant [03:05] 2 So Called Friend [04:49] 3 Shesmovedon [04:55] 4 Mother And Child Divided [05:00] 5 Half Light [06:38]
CD3 Demos
1 Arriving Somewhere But Not Here (demo) [13:03] 2 Godfearing (demo) [04:57] 3 Lazarus (demo) [04:10] 4 Open Car (demo) [05:08] 5 Vapour Trails (demo) [03:53] 6 Shallow (demo) [04:15] 7 Deadwing (demo) [10:35] 8 Mother And Child Divided (demo) [05:02] 9 Instrumental Demo 1 [05:19] 10 Halo (demo) [04:50] 11 Instrumental Demo 2 [05:23] 12 So Called Friend (demo) [05:01] 13 Glass Arm Jam [04:19]
Blu-ray
Documentary Film, Rockpalast Broadcast & Extras 1 Never Stop the Car on a Drive in the Dark (Deadwing documentary [54:20] 2 Lazarus (promo video) [04:19] 3 Deadwing (remastered album 96/24 LPCM stereo) [59:37] 4 Deadwing B-sides (96/24 LPCM stereo) [25:25] 5 Deadwing 5.1 surround sound mix (including 4 bonus tracks) 48/24 (2005 by Elliot Scheiner and Steven Wilson) [59:37] 6 Additional 5.1 mixes of B-sides Revenant, Mother and Child Divided, Half-Light and Shesmovedon [19.47] Rockpalast WDR TV broadcast: 7 Intro [00:35] 8 Blackest Eyes [04:33] In Absentia 9 Lazarus [03:58] Deadwing 10 Futile [02:31] In Absentia bonus track 11 Interview [06:02] 12 Mother And Child Divided [04:50] Deadwing B-side 3 So Called Friend [05:00] Deadwing B-side 14 Arriving Somewhere But Not Here [12:24] Deadwing 15 Sound Of Muzak [05:06] In Absentia 16 Interview 2 [01:20] 17 Start Of Something Beautiful [07:24] Deadwing 18 Halo [05:03] Deadwing 19 Interview 3 [03:35] 20 Radioactive Toy [06:05] On The Sunday Of Life 21 Trains [07.18] In Absentia
References
Never Stop the Car on a Drive in the Dark – the Making of Deadwing directed by Jeremy George Deadwing: The History and track-by-track by Stephen Humphries (Deadwing book) Twitter/X @PorcupineTree – first draft of Deadwing Script Limited Edition Of One – How To Succeed In The Music Industry Without Being Part of The Mainstream by Steven Wilson with Mick Wall (Constable, an imprint of Little, Brown April 2022) Godfearing on Steven Wilson’s SoundCloud account
The Cover of The Overview by Steven Wilson, designed by Hajo Müller
His Eighth Solo Album
The Overview is Steven Wilson’s eighth solo album, released on 14 March 2025. It charted at number three in the UK, the fourth of Wilson’s albums (as a solo artist or with his band Porcupine Tree) in a row to reach the UK top five. On his website, Wilson described the album as ‘a Kubrickian journey into the darkness of outer space.’
Steven Wilson. Image credit: Kevin Westerberg
The Overview Effect
The album takes its title from the Overview Effect, a term coined by author and space philosopher Frank White in his book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution to describe the cognitive shift experienced by astronauts looking back on the Earth from space.
“[The Overview Effect] is the experience of seeing first hand the reality that the Earth is in space, a tiny, fragile ball of life, “hanging in the void,” shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. The experience often transforms astronauts’ perspective on the planet and humanity’s place in the universe. Some common aspects of it are a feeling of awe, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.”
Frank White
The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (First Edition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987)
White, who interviewed astronauts about their experiences, wrote that during the initial stages of the Space Program, it was thought that, ‘All the astronauts have religious or spiritual experiences and that they all had their lives fundamentally changed… The reality is far more complex than that.’ He quoted the astronaut Don Lind, who said that having spoken to many other astronauts, he concluded that space travel would intensify previously held religious convictions but wouldn’t make someone religious.
The Blue Marble. The Earth Seen from Apollo 17. Source: Wikimedia Commons
One of the most strikingly negative reactions to travelling into space, mentioned by Wilson in several interviews, was – ironically – from Captain Kirk, the actor William Shatner. In his 2022 book, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder, he wrote that when he was in space, he experienced profound sadness and grief. Eventually, this became a profound feeling of hope, inspiring him to say that we should ‘rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us.’
“There was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing… Everything I had expected to see was wrong… The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.“
Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria Books, 2022)
William Shatner as Captain Kirk. Source: NBC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wilson coined his own phrase for the Overview Effect, ‘cosmic vertigo’, meaning a sense of the fragility of the Earth, and the insignificance of our lives in relation to the vastness of the cosmos. The existential struggle to make something of our lives, to make them signify something, is a recurring theme in Wilson’s lyrics, going back to Signify (Porcupine Tree, 1996). He told Dave Everley of Prog that ‘Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo.’ As an atheist, he said that to give life meaning, humankind had invented religion.
‘The Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesn’t matter, and it’s a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.’
Steven Wilson
Wilson’s solution to the apparent futility and insignificance of our lives, and of the Earth in relation to the vastness of the universe, is not to embrace religion or misery. He told Musicwaves magazine that, ‘The Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesn’t matter, and it’s a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.’
Frank White wrote, ‘ The impact of the [Overview] Effect is not limited to space travellers alone.’ Wilson described the profound awe and sense of insignificance he experienced when he visited the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in the Atacama Desert, Chile, in early 2025. At the album launch at IMAX in London in February 2025, a photo of Wilson standing next to the telescope was exhibited on the vast screen, and Wilson was a tiny orange dot wearing a hi-vis jacket. Reflecting on the Overview Effect led him to consider our insignificance and how it shapes our sense of perspective. During the roundtable discussion at the album launch, he said he could have called the album ‘Perspective … but it’s not as good a title as The Overview.’
The Gap Between Releases
The gap between the release of Wilson’s previous album, The Harmony Codex, in September 2023 and the release of The Overview was just under 18 months, a relatively short period considering the gap between his previous solo albums was around two to three years. He told Paul Sinclair of Super Deluxe Edition that there was a pragmatic reason for this. The Harmony Codex was his first album after COVID, and he felt that the previous album, The Future Bites, had been ‘very divisive amongst my fans.’ He didn’t book a tour supporting The Harmony Codex because he wasn’t sure how people would react to the album. By the time he realised that the album had gone down well, it was too late to book a tour for 2024. He decided that in the meantime, he might as well make another record.
The Concept
While he was looking for a concept, Wilson met up with Alex Milas, Editor-in-Chief of Metal Hammer and founder of Space Rocks. This organisation describes itself as ‘a celebration of space exploration and the art, music, and culture it inspires.’ Wilson’s original idea was to collaborate with Milas on an exhibition or an installation for which he created the music. Then Milas mentioned the Overview Effect.
The idea immediately appealed to Wilson. As a teenager, he had a fascination with space. He used to go out on summer evenings to gaze up at the stars. He enjoyed space films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1972), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He wrote tracks about space on some of his previous albums, particularly for Porcupine Tree. At the IMAX album launch, he said that in a ‘split-second moment’ during his conversation with Milas, he had the title and the concept and heard the music in his head.’ He saw it as a ‘piece of cinema for the ears.’
He told Stephen Humphries of Under The Radar that he had written several albums about ‘planet Earth and human beings and the way we engage with each other.’ It was time to ‘write an album about something bigger than us.’
Humphries asked him why he was ‘asking these bigger questions’ now. Wilson admitted that perhaps he was having ‘my own existential crisis… of wanting more perspective on my own life’. Even so, he found it ‘fascinating’ to consider the vast numbers and distances in the universe. He told John Earls of NME that having a concept for the album before he started writing it led him to produce something that ‘intuitively felt like something long-form, analogous to a novel or a film.’
‘This record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.’
Steven Wilson
Wilson told Dave Everley, ‘This record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.’ Wilson has an uneasy relationship with the genre. His previous three albums certainly strayed from prog rock. To the Bone was an art-rock record with only one long track, ‘Detonation’; it also contained a happy pop song, ‘Permanating.’ The Future Bites was resolutely electronic. Its longest track, ‘Personal Shopper’, was more like dystopian disco than prog. That album brought some of the best reviews of his career, ‘from the more indie, hipster people that hadn’t really paid attention to me before’, but it also lost some of his core prog audience. To an extent, he has always enjoyed challenging his prog audience, but he also respects that audience. Although the album does mark a return to prog rock, it’s far from the loving, nostalgic homage to prog of his 2013 solo album The Raven that Refused to Sing (and other stories).
The album’s structure
The album is divided into two long tracks of about 20 minutes each, ‘Objects Outlive Us’ and ‘The Overview.’ Wilson told The Prog Report that an album with only two long tracks was ‘a wilfully uncommercial gesture’ and that ‘the reason there are two pieces is I’m old and I still think in terms of vinyl.’
Wilson referenced other records with the same structure, such as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells(1973), Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way (1969) and Tangerine Dream’s Rubycon (1975). He told Tobias Fischer of Tonefloat Magazine that he has always liked ‘great double albums with just one track per side.’ He referred to Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973 UK, 1974 US) by Yes, which he remixed in 2016, as a ‘much maligned record, but I love it.’
Writing the Album
Wilson told Anil Prasad of Innerviews that ‘the idea and title came before I had written a single note of music… It’s nice when something this strong falls into your lap.’ The album almost wrote itself. Wilson wrote it in the order we hear it, and the lyrics came last.
At a Q&A session at Cultplex in Manchester in February 2025, Wilson told John Robb that ‘one doorway led to the next’, and that the album flowed out of him, ‘it doesn’t always work that way.’ It took Wilson only eight weeks to record the album at his home studio. The process was quite different from recording The Raven That Refused to Sing in a studio, surrounded by other musicians. He played all the bass parts, as he did on the most recent Porcupine Tree album, Closure/Continuation(2022). When he toured with Porcupine Tree, Nate Navarro played the bass parts. When he toured The Overview, the bass parts were played by Nick Beggs.
The Musicians
As with all his albums, except the very early ones with Porcupine Tree, Wilson used real drummers rather than using electronic drums or playing them himself. For the first side of the record, he used Russell Holzman, son of his regular keyboard player, Adam Holzman. Wilson said he wanted a drummer with no apparent connection to progressive rock, or even to rock music in general. Holzman plays drums for the American singer Caroline Polachek. Wilson had seen his renditions of classic drum and bass breaks on Instagram. On the second side, Wilson brought in his regular drummer, Craig Blundell, partly because of his experience as a prog rock drummer with Steve Hackett, but also because of his wide-ranging knowledge of multiple musical genres.
OBJECTS OUTLIVE US
No Monkey’s Paw
The opening describes an eerie meeting on a misty moor. Wilson refers to two ghost stories that may have occurred on the moor (recalling the ghost stories on which his 2013 album The Raven that Refused to Sing is based) but says that neither happened here.
First, there is ‘no ghost on the moor’/no open window’. This appears to reference Kate Bush’s 1978 song Wuthering Heights, set ‘Out on the wily, windy moors’, when the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw haunts Heathcliff at his window. Bush, of whose music Wilson is a huge fan, memorably sings,
‘Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy I’ve come home, I’m so cold Let me in your window.’
Second, there is ‘no monkey’s paw’. The Monkey’s Paw is a ghost story by the English author W.W. Jacobs, first published in 1902. It describes a magical monkey’s paw, which provides three wishes that lead to unforeseen and terrible consequences. According to the story, the holy man who put the spell on the paw, ‘wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.’
The Alien on the Moor. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
Instead, Wilson’s protagonist looks beyond Earthbound ghost stories and into space, encountering an alien on the moor. The alien pointedly says, ‘Did you forget I exist?’ The protagonist blames the alien for playing ‘too hard to get.’ In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, Wilson said the reference to the alien is ‘a bit tongue in cheek’, but that there was a ‘serious point’, which is that we spend too much time looking down at our digital devices, and not enough time looking up ‘with a sense of awe’ at the sky and the stars, as he did when he was a child. We have lost our sense of curiosity and wonder and are obsessed with chasing likes and followers on social media, a central theme of Wilson’s 2020 album The Future Bites. The theme that technology has changed the course of human evolution, and not necessarily for the better, goes back to Fear of a Blank Planet, the 2007 album Wilson wrote for Porcupine Tree.
The track opens with Wilson singing in a gorgeous falsetto, showing how strong his upper register has become since he started developing this part of his vocal range on The Future Bites. His voice is bathed in echo, evoking the ethereal rather than the Earthbound. His voice is gentle and intimate, beautifully contemplative, enriched by the sound design and spacey effects created by Randy McStine, who also plays guitar and sings backing vocals on the album. Wilson plays the soft-edged bass line on an acoustic bass. The alien’s voice is Wilson’s own, transposed to a lower register using the same effect as on ‘King Ghost’ from The Future Bites.
The Buddha Of The Modern Age
The Buddha of the title refers to Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. According to Buddhist teaching, the Buddha will be succeeded by Maitreya, sometimes referred to as ‘The Buddha of the modern age.’ Wilson’s lyrics refer to a contemporary Buddha, who is ‘barely paid minimum wage’ for doling out ‘truth and healthy karma.’ Wilson says his teaching is ignored. In a poetic line, he refers to humanity ignoring the truths revealed by the wise men of the past, who are now mere shadows to us, ‘the blurred photos of the ghosts of men’.
The lyrics in this section are the most personal on the album. Wilson is rarely so open and direct. He told Anil Prasad of Innerviews, ‘I’ve always been slightly wary of being too preachy or holier than thou,’ but he feels so strongly about the effect of meat eating not just on animals but on the planet that he’s ‘becoming a little more forthright about my veganism.’
‘Slaughter our sacred cow To stuff our stupid mouths Already fit to burst Still the insatiable thirst To kill over and over’
Wilson is highly critical of what he sees as the failure of our stewardship of the planet, which we regard as ours to treat however we want. The phrase ‘insatiable thirst’ refers to our appetite for food, our obsessive consumerism, and our destruction of the planet, ‘We interlopers, the inferior species/Wallow in our own faeces.’
The Destruction of our Planet. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
The track begins with a resolute piano motif which matches the stridency of Wilson’s opinions, soon joined by drummer Russell Holzman on icy cymbals – the first time we hear him on the album. Randy McStine and Willow Beggs soon join him on rich, layered backing vocals. Willow is a singer-songwriter and the daughter of bass player Nick Beggs. The backing vocals are reminiscent of those on Porcupine Tree songs like ‘Heartattack in a Layby’ from In Absentia (2002), which ends with 38 tracks of multi-tracked voices. The song builds to a climax, with thundering drums, then drops away on the word ‘try’, creating a moment of compassion for humanity as a gentler piano melody ends the track.
Objects: Meanwhile
Steven Wilson – Objects Outlive Us: Objects: Meanwhile. Video by Miles Skarin
The lyrics for this section were written by Andy Partridge of the English rock band XTC, who also wrote the lyrics for the title track of Wilson’s 2017 album To The Bone (2017) and for his 2018 single How Big the Space. Wilson’s admiration for Partridge dates back to XTC’s formation of the fictitious band The Dukes of Stratosphear, which inspired Wilson to form his own fictional band, Porcupine Tree, which eventually became a real band.
Wilson has said that Partridge and Ray Davies of the Kinks are the best at describing everyday lives in their lyrics. While writing The Overview, he was remixing XTC’s 1984 album The Big Express in surround sound. The Big Express is a concept album about life in Swindon, a town in Wiltshire in the southwest of England. The song that interested Wilson particularly was ‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’. Partridge told Todd Bernhardt of XTC’s Blogs that ‘there’s a little vein of [Welsh poet] Dylan Thomas in there.’ Wilson told Stephen Humphries of Under the Radar that the song has ‘some of the most divine Little England observational lyric writing.’
He told Dave Everley of Prog that he rang Partridge with a challenge, ‘I want smalltown soap operas juxtaposed with cosmic phenomena.’ He wanted to put our ordinary lives in perspective – a central theme of the album – by providing links or contrasts with what was happening ‘meanwhile, on the other side of the universe.’ The two men entered a productive dialogue. Wilson was fascinated by Partridge’s comment that the lyrics make a significant difference in how you produce a track, particularly the vocals.
A Teenager with his First Telescope. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
Partridge fulfilled the brief perfectly. Events on Earth are sometimes linked with cosmic events,
‘As you queue at the bank for an hour ’Cause a solar flare blew out the power.’
Sometimes people on Earth are oblivious to the effect of cosmic events,
‘The driver in tears ‘bout his payment arrears Still nobody hears when a sun disappears In a galaxy afar.’
Sometimes the link is metaphorical,
‘Her shopping bag broke, sending eggs and flour crashing Down to the ground like star clusters smashing.’
One of the verses refers to a ‘teenager with his first telescope’, which reflects Wilson’s nostalgia for his own teenage years, looking up at the sky, fascinated with space, before smartphones were invented. Robert Smith of The Cure shares that nostalgia. The track ‘Endsong’ from Songs of a Lost World (2024) was inspired by his memories of looking up at the sky with his father around the time of the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969. In another verse, a young man cleaning cars wonders, ‘Is there life on Mars?’, the title of David Bowie’s 1973 single.
Some of the politics from To the Bone creeps in. That album addressed what some have described as a ‘post-truth’ world. Partridge’s lyric describes humans bickering about ‘fences’ – petty disputes between neighbours, and about ‘borders’ – between countries, often leading to war. The lyric wryly states that it’s best not to think about those disputes, an understandable reaction to the conflicts that have blighted the early years of the 2020s. There is deep sarcasm in the line, ‘It’s better to live without facts.’
The track begins with a clear statement of a central musical theme. It’s a 19-note piano motif that restlessly snakes back on itself, returning every three beats to the same note (F#). It sounds straightforward when broken down into three-note segments, but the complete theme helps restore Wilson’s prog credentials due to its length. Wilson told Prasad that the basic melody is like a Shepard Tone, ‘in that it constantly ascends in whole tones.’ A Shepard Tone is an auditory illusion in which a repeated musical pattern appears to be constantly rising even though it remains in the same octave. Examples are the end of Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’ from Meddle (1971) and Hans Zimmer’s score for Christopher Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk.
‘A bit of a masterpiece.’ Variations by Andrew LLoyd Webber
Wilson said the 19-note motif returns in different musical forms throughout Objects Outlive Us, like the use of the leitmotif (leading motif) in Richard Wagner’s operas or the musical formula in the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, such as his massive opera cycle Licht (Light) (1977 – 2003). Wilson also referred to repeated themes in Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells(1973) and Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’. He told Humphries that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1978 album Variations, which repeatedly used a theme by the composer Niccolò Paganini, was ‘overlooked… [but] I think it’s a bit of a masterpiece, actually.’ The second track on the album was used as the theme tune for the television arts series The South Bank Show, which ran on ITV from 1978 to 2010, before moving to Sky Arts.
After three statements of the 19-note theme, the central song of Objects Outlive Us begins, with an earworm of a melody. It’s decorated with Floydian sliding guitars and a plucked string theme played by Wilson. McStine provides gorgeous backing vocals that evoke the sound of Electric Light Orchestra (ELO).
At around 3:30, there’s a blistering bass solo in the unusual time signature of 12/8. Each beat in the bar is divided into three semi-quaver (sixteenth note) triplets instead of the more usual two quavers (eighth notes). Perhaps surprisingly, Wilson plays it on an acoustic bass guitar. It’s heavily distorted and put through an amp with lots of overdrive. As Wilson repeats the bass riff, the track takes flight in the proggiest section of the album so far, as McStine adds an extra guitar line above the bass in the style of the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) bands of the late 70s and early 80s, such as Iron Maiden and Saxon. At around 4:45, the track stalls as a metaphorical handbrake is applied, then rouses itself with a drum flourish into a spacey instrumental before the vocals return. At 6:00, the 19-note theme returns, now in a driving, much heavier version for full band, followed by a gentle piano version that takes us back to the beginning of this section.
In the sleeve notes, Wilson describes Theo Travis’ saxophones in the track as ‘Jaxonsaxes’, named after David Jackson, who played saxophone with Van der Graaf Generator, often playing two at once. His nickname is ‘Jaxon’. He worked on many of their albums, including a long run of classic albums in the 1970s.
The Cicerones/Ark
The archaic word ‘cicerones’ is from the word ‘cicerone’, meaning a tour guide, derived from the name of the great Roman orator, Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC). The track’s title comes from a short story, The Cicerones, by the English writer Robert Aickman (1914 – 1981). The protagonist, John Trant, visits the Cathedral of Saint Bavon (presumably Saint Bavo) in Belgium. He begins a self-guided tour using a guidebook but soon meets various strange figures who act as his guides to the increasingly macabre sights of the cathedral. There’s a creeping sense of unease and the surreal. The eerie atmosphere builds in the same way as in Thomas M. Disch’s short story Descending, which inspired Wilson’s previous album and short story The Harmony Codex. The Cicerones was filmed for Film Four in 2002, in a short starring Mark Gatiss (The League of Gentlemen, Sherlock, Bookish). In the context of the track, the title refers to the guides who lead the remnants of humanity into space, following the planet’s destruction so graphically described earlier in ‘The Buddha Of The Modern Age.’
Leaving the Planet. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
The Ark represents a new start, like Noah’s escape from the Flood in his ark with two of each animal. Compared with the relaxed rhyming couplets of Partridge’s lyrics in the previous section, the lyrics of this section are breathless, broken up into short sections. It’s a technique that goes back to ‘Open Car’ from Porcupine Tree’s Deadwing (2005). After the withering invective of ‘The Buddha Of The Modern Age’, only a few who warned about Earth’s destruction survived. It’s easy to miss the story – and the message – here amongst the turbulence of the lyrics. Humanity is leaving the Earth, which is now destroyed and reduced to dust. Ironically, when Prasad asked Wilson if he would rather live on Mars, he replied, ‘Mars is a planet of red dust. Earth is incredibly diverse, geographically, ecologically, and climate-wise.’
Wilson plays all the guitar parts at the beginning of this section. It starts with a gently contemplative acoustic guitar part, gorgeously recorded, that wouldn’t have been out of place on one of his early solo albums. After a rich keyboard wash, at about a minute in, the 19-note theme returns in a version for band and piano, and the section builds to a climax with repeated melody, with a similar feel to ‘Eclipse’, the epic finale to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). It’s also the emotional climax of the album’s first half, sung with gathering, hymn-like intensity, marking the historic significance of our decision to leave Earth after destroying it. The epic guitar solo marks the beginning of our journey to the stars, to begin a new life on the other side of the universe.
Cosmic Sons of Toil
The title of this instrumental section is intriguing. Wilson told Stéphane Rousselot of Amarok Magazine that it’s just a play on words. Perhaps he was thinking of the phrase ‘Horny-handed sons of toil.’ That phrase was first used by Lord Salisbury, three times British Prime Minister in the nineteenth century. The manual labourers described by Salisbury, with their horny (calloused) hands, have now been replaced by cosmic labourers. Perhaps that interpretation is incorrect, but as Wilson told Rousselot, ‘That’s the fun of analysis.’
This section is more up-tempo after the stately, anthemic pace of previous sections. The spacey electronic noises, sounding like a cosmic ray gun, are provided by the ARP 2600 analogue synthesiser. In a YouTube Reel, Wilson described it as ‘perfect for a space-themed album… It sounds like Hawkwind in 1973.’ The track begins with a tumbling, repeated piano theme, soon joined by jerky, melodic bass and frenetic guitar. The guitar solo at around 0:45 is the first of two on the album by Randy McStine. The solo is agitated, fragmented and unusual. McStine also plays guitar on the rest of the track. At around 2:00, there’s a funky, jerky, distorted guitar riff, a variation on the fuzzy bass theme we heard earlier, with agitated drumming from Russell Holzman. At around 2:45, the track becomes so frenzied that it falls over itself. The whole section describes an out-of-control spacecraft hurtling through space. It’s reminiscent of the scenes in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar, where the spaceship struggles to fly as it creaks, groans, and shudders, reminding us that interstellar travel is difficult.
No Ghost on the Moor/Heat Death of the Universe
The first part of this section, ‘No Ghost On The Moor’, is a reprise of the opening section, with the same lyrics and melody, but we are now on the other side of the universe. The alien has taken us as far away from Earth as possible, and in this new context, Wilson is joined by a conventional rock band. The lyrics take on a new meaning, becoming achingly tender and emotional. Wilson’s recurring nostalgia for childhood has been replaced by an existential nostalgia for the Earth we have left far behind. His previous anger about the reckless destruction of the Earth has been replaced by deep empathy for the human condition and the fragility of life
The Heat Death of the Universe. Image created by AI.
The second part of this section is an instrumental. The ‘Heat Death of the Universe’ – also known more prosaically as the Big Chill or the Big Freeze – refers to the scientific hypothesis about the ultimate slow demise of the universe. Eric Betz of Astronomy.com described it as a,
‘Long and frigid affair… the day when all heat and energy is evenly spread over incomprehensibly vast distances. At this point, the universe’s final temperature will hover just above absolute zero… the existence of our entire species registers as but a brief ray of sunlight before an infinite winter of darkness.’
The guitar solo at around 2:00 is McStine’s second on the album. Wilson told McStine that he didn’t want a classic rock solo of the kind played by David Gilmour on ‘Comfortably Numb’ from Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall. This is no reflection on the quality of Gilmour’s playing – he told Roie Avin and Geoff Bailie of The Prog Report that the ‘Comfortably Numb’ solo is the ‘greatest guitar solo of all time.’ McStine’s solo sounds like a synthesiser rather than a blues guitar, and the tone breaks up intermittently rather than constantly as it would with conventional distortion. Russell Holzman’s languid drumming creates a feeling of gravitas beneath.
A Scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Touring Club Italiano
At around 2:45, there’s a lovely harmonic turn and some filigree decoration reminiscent of the great Guthrie Govan. As the guitar solo fades to nothing, the track descends into noise. Wilson told Rousselot this was a nod to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the use of ‘very atonal music’ to describe both ‘wonder’ and the feeling that the universe is ‘terrifying… an immense void of death and nothingness.’ He told John Robb at the launch of the album in Manchester that there was a ‘nod to Ligeti’. Wilson is referring to the orchestral piece Atmosphères (1961) by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, used by Kubrick in the film. The piece uses the technique he called micropolyphony, with large numbers of tiny musical themes woven together to create a constantly shifting composition with no discernible rhythm or melody. This music reminds us of, in Wilson’s words to Humphries, ‘the blackness and death of space… So you get an orchestra.’ The track ends with a wall of noise, a technique he uses compellingly on his first solo album, Insurgentes (2008), when noise rock brutally obliterates the end of various tracks. The track ‘Get All You Deserve ends with Ligeti-like noises. Wilson told Prasad that sounds from the most recent record by Bass Communion (his ‘ambient/noise /experimental project’), The Itself of Itself (2024), fed into this section of the track.
THE OVERVIEW
Steven Wilson – The Overview: Perspective (Official Video) by Miles Skarin
Perspective
Perspective begins with radio transmissions from deep space. They sound like the opening of another space rock song, ‘Astronomy Domine’ from Pink Floyd’s 1967 album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In March 2024, Wilson said in a YouTube interview with Rick Beato that one of his favourite albums, by Pink Floyd – ‘still my favourite band’ – is Ummagumma (1969), which includes a live version of the song (although without the spoken words). When The Piper was released, Pink Floyd were managed by Andrew King and Peter Jenner. The latter read out the names of planets, stars and galaxies through a megaphone.
‘Perspective’ includes spoken word commentary from Wilson’s wife Rotem, just like the two previous albums, The Harmony Codex and The Future Bites. She names various cosmic phenomena and their sizes. Wilson used a website called scaleofuniverse.com to provide scientific facts.
A megametre = 10^6 = 10⁶ = ten to the power of six = ten with six zeroes = 1,000,000 m = a million metres
A gigametre = 10^9 = 109 = ten to the power of nine = 10 with nine zeroes = 1,000,000,000 m = a billion metres
According to the Scale of the Universe website, Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, over twice as big as our moon. It’s 5,268,000 metres in diameter. Callisto is Jupiter’s second largest moon, 4,821,000 metres in diameter.
Size beyond one megametre Ten to the power of six Ganymede, Callisto
A still from The Overview Film by Miles Skarin
Rotem’s voice is tuned down in pitch. Wilson told The Rockonteurs podcast that he wanted her voice to sound dispassionate, and ‘emotionally flat… to recite these scientific facts.’ He had in mind HAL, the talking computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the spacecraft Discovery One, who memorably says, ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.’
The red camera eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Source; Wikimedia Commons
What intrigues Wilson is not just the scientific facts about the space phenomena that Rotem describes, but also the effect such facts have on human consciousness. In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, he said that the sense of perspective shows who and what we are in relation to the vastness of the universe. He referred to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series and the Total Perspective Vortex. This machine allows the user to take in the whole universe, by extrapolating ‘the whole of creation… from one small piece of fairy cake.’ Built to annoy his wife, when the inventor turned the machine on, she saw ‘in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it… to [the inventor’s horror] the shock completely annihilated her brain.’ Despite this, the inventor had proved to his satisfaction that ‘the one thing [we] cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.’ The machine was later used as a punishment; the first person to survive it was the Betelgeusian, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who promptly ate the fairy cake.
The opening music is the most electronic on the album, following on from the more electronic sound of parts of The Future Bites and The Harmony Codex. Wilson told John Earls of NME that it’s something that the English electronic duo Autechre might have produced. Wilson isn’t the first musician to use electronic music on a prog rock album. Pink Floyd opened The Dark Side of the Moon with ‘On the Run’, which used the VCS3 analogue synthesiser to create the electronic sequence. Roger Waters can be seen manipulating the synth sounds, cigarette in hand, on Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii (1972; re-released in 2025 as Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII with new mixes by Wilson).
EMS Putney VCS 3 Synthesiser, of the Type Used by Pink Floyd on The Dark Side of the Moon. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The fiercely rhythmic, jerky synth tracks and electronic drums – all played and programmed by Wilson – contrast with Rotem’s deadpan delivery of scientific facts. At the same time, they create a futuristic soundscape that suggests that science is more dominant on the second side of the album. Wilson told Dave Everley of Prog that Objects Outlive Us is more of a ‘human’ story, whereas in Everley’s phrase, the title track ‘evokes the sparseness and coldness of space.’ At around 2:00, slower, more human-sounding chords begin to take over. We hear Wilson’s voice at around 2:30, albeit partly stripped of its humanity in a wordless vocalise, transposed up an octave, so that it sounds more like a synthesiser than a human voice.
A Beautiful Infinity I/ Borrowed Atoms/A Beautiful Infinity II
The protagonist is now on the other side of the universe, reflecting on his life back on Earth. He considers the time it takes light to travel long distances across space to reach the Earth; we see stars as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. There’s a strong parallel with Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. The line ‘Each moment for me is a lifetime for you’ could apply to the film’s plot. It stars Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a widowed former NASA test pilot who leaves a devastated Earth on a mission to find other habitable planets, leaving his young daughter Murph behind. Cooper and his crew travel remarkably close to a black hole called Gargantua. The scientific adviser to the film, Kip Thorne, wrote in his 2014 book The Science of Interstellar that time reaches a complete halt at the surface of a black hole.
When Cooper travels near Gargantua, he ages only a few hours while Murph, on Earth, ages eight decades. There’s a profoundly moving moment when he receives a transmission from his daughter, and he realises that he has missed 23 years of his daughter’s life. They are now the same age. When he left Earth, she was a child. Wilson encapsulates the emotion of this moment in the simple but deeply poetic line, ‘Back on Earth, my loving wife’s been dead for years.’ Although the title track concentrates on science, there is room for humanity, too. The protagonist’s distance from Earth puts everything in perspective: ‘what seemed important [is] now like dust inside the squall.’ There’s perhaps an echo of the dust storms in Interstellar, which make Earth uninhabitable.
‘A Beautiful Infinity I’ is the first time we hear Craig Blundell on drums. He plays in a more robust, rockier style than Russell Holzman on Objects Outlive Us; both drummers are superb. Wilson’s vocals are treated with a delay effect; the final part of each phrase is repeated, ‘from here… from here… from here.’ Pink Floyd used this effect on ‘Us and Them’ from The Dark Side of the Moon to add emotional depth. Wilson used the same effect on ‘Arriving Somewhere But Not Here’ on Deadwing (2005).
The slide guitar adds to the Floydian feeling of the track, but the guitar solo isn’t Gilmour-esque. Wilson asked Niko Tsonev to play the solo – his only solo on the album – in a style that combined the classic with the contemporary. The acoustic guitar, played by Wilson, is an Ovation in Nashville tuning. He used the same guitar and tuning on ‘Chimera’s Wreck’ from the 2022 Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation. He told Amit Sharma of Total Guitar that he used his Ovation guitar in Nashville tuning – the lowest four strings are tuned up an octave, creating ‘a very crystalline, musical box kind of tone.’
‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’
The ‘Borrowed Atoms’ section begins at around 2:40 with a piano break. The delicate musical backdrop of piano and synthesiser accompanies one of the most poetic moments on the album, with the words ‘The clouds have no history’, and ends ten lines later with the words ‘Is this a dream?’ Wilson’s lyrics express profound complexity in simple language. He reverses the ‘pathetic fallacy’, a poetic device where human emotions or characteristics are attributed to nature. (A good example is I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, which describes the daffodils as human dancers, ‘tossing their heads in sprightly dance.’) Wilson does the opposite, stressing that nature has no human emotion: ‘The clouds have no history/And the sea feels no sorrow.’ This is another aspect of the album’s perspective theme. Nature ignores us, so we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. Wilson says our atoms are just ‘borrowed’; when we die, they return to the universe. This is ambiguous – if our atoms are only ‘borrowed’, we are insignificant, but we should also take good care of our atoms, as we only have temporary stewardship. Wilson’s meditation on the nature of selfhood ends with a moving expression of existential angst, warmly sung, ‘Is this a dream?’
‘A Beautiful Infinity II’ begins at around 4:00 with the words ‘There’s no reason for any of this.’ Wilson’s personal view – with which some would disagree – is that the universe was created out of chaos, not by design or by a supreme being,
‘There’s no reason for any of this Just a beautiful infinity No design and no one at the wheel Just an existential mystery.’
The idea of no one being at the wheel is reminiscent of ‘The Creator has a Master Tape’ from the Porcupine Tree album In Absentia (2002). We discover that ‘the creator had a master tape’, which suggests design, only to find that – ironically – ‘he left it in a cab.’
After the massed backing vocals of Wilson and Randy McStine, there are some whimsical, almost scatting vocals from Wilson at around 4:05, in the same style as on ‘Harridan’, the opening track of Closure/Continuation. At around 5:00, McStine closes the track with a richly analogue Moog solo.
Infinity Measured In Moments
This section is the climax of side two. Rotem Wilson returns, reciting another list of space statistics to create a further sense of awe about the vastness of the universe. Blundell’s drumming here is impressive. He adds subtle shifts to the rhythmic patterns, building the track’s epic feel and bringing a human element to the electronic parts. The track is built around arpeggiating analogue synth patterns, just as Wilson built up the title track on The Harmony Codex. Wilson’s vocals are warm and rich, multitracked in unison rather than complex harmonies, as often in his Porcupine Tree songs. McStine provides backing vocals and a guitar solo at 2:15, combining an angular, modern feel with a classic, uplifting rock solo.
The Inner Sleeve of In Absentia by Lasse Hoile
It’s followed by handclaps (Wilson) and ukulele (McStine). Porcupine Tree fans may recall a similar effect on ‘Trains’ (In Absentia, 2002), a fan favourite with over 39 million plays on Spotify at the time of writing. There is some very Peter Hook-style bass in this section. Wilson is a massive fan of Hook’s former band Joy Division, listing the band’s debut single Transmission (1979), in his book Limited Edition of One as one of his top 100 tracks. At around 3:20, the track reaches a climax with Adam Holzman’s Moog solo, the first real opportunity Holzman has on the album to show the warmth and virtuosity of his jazz-tinged playing, which was a highlight of The Overview Tour that came to London in May 2025.
Permanence
The final section of the album is a contemplative instrumental, beautiful, ambient and ethereal. We are now floating in space, billions of light-years away from Earth. The encounter with the alien on the moor at the beginning of the album now seems an infinite time ago.
Theo Travis. Photo by Mariia Korneeva
Theo Travis plays the soprano sax solo. Travis worked on some of Wilson’s solo albums, and the two worked together on Travis’ 2024 solo album Aeolus. That album is a one-hour Theo Travis piece for duduk; the instrument Travis played on ‘Beautiful Scarecrow’ on The Harmony Codex. Wilson produced the recordings and created soundscapes from Travis’s alto flute playing. The album is gentle, meditative, introspective and quietly mesmerising. Travis’s playing has the same effect on ‘Permanence.’
The section begins with the evocative sound of the electric piano, processed through a reverse echo. Two new instruments are added. The first is the celeste or celesta, a keyboard instrument that looks like a small upright piano. Like a piano, a hammer is operated by pressing a key, but instead of striking strings, the hammer hits a metal plate like that of a glockenspiel. Appropriately, in the context of this track, the name means ‘celestial’ or ‘heavenly.’ The second instrument is the Moog synthesiser on which Wilson created a sound like the theremin.
In the film by Miles Skarin, we move gradually closer to a green shoot of life. An out-of-focus creature gradually comes into focus. Our old friend, the alien from Objects Outlive Us, intently investigates the green shoot. We hadn’t forgotten that the alien exists. There is hope after all.
This post was updated at 17.27 on 29 December 2025 to correct the explanation of the terms megametre and gigametre, which had incorrectly referred to kilometres (km) rather than metres (m)
This post was further updated at 14.00 on 30 December 2025 to add details of the relative sizes of Ganymede and Callisto
Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Omnibus Edition, Boekerij 2018) Avin, Roie and Bailie, Geoff, Steven Wilson on The Overview, the upcoming tour, the future of AI, and more. (Interview) (The Prog Report Podcast, 7/3/2025) Beato, Rick, Steven Wilson Discusses His Favorite [Sic] Albums (Rick Beato 2, YouTube 24/03/34) Bernhardt, Todd, Andy discusses ‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’ (XTC’s Blog, 17 February 2008) Betz, Eric, The Big Freeze: How the universe will die (Astronomy.com) Earls, John, Steven Wilson: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo” (NME 18/02/25) Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) Fischer, Tobias, Interview with Steven Wilson/ Porcupine Tree (Tonefloat Magazine, undated) Humphries, Stephen, Steven Wilson on “The Overview” Space, the final musical frontier (Under the Radar, 21/2/2025) Kemp, Gary and Pratt, Guy, Gary Kemp album special with Steven Wilson (The Rockonteurs, YouTube 26/01/25) Prasad, Anil, Steven Wilson Cosmic Perspectives (Innerviews, 25/02/25) Robb, John, Steven Wilson: ‘The Overview’ Audio-Visual Experience + Q&A (Cultplex Manchester, 26/02/25) Rousselot, Stéphane, Interview – Steven Wilson (Amarok Magazine, 4/3/2025) Sharma, Amit, Steven Wilson on Porcupine Tree’s triumphant return and his love of “guitar players that can play one note and break your heart” (Total Guitar, August 2022) Shatner, William and Brandon, Joshua, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria Books 2022) Sinclair, Paul, Steven Wilson: The SDE interview: SW on his new album, The Overview (Super Deluxe Edition, 17/03/25) ‘Struck’, Steven Wilson (February 11st [sic] 2025 (MUSICWAVES, 11/2/2025) White, Frank, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (First Edition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987) Wilson, Steven, Limited Edition of One (Constable, April 2022)
Images from The Overview film by Miles Skarin of Crystal Spotlight
With typical sarcastic humour, Peter Hammill named his eighth solo album pH7, when it would have been more logical to name it PH (Peter Hammill) 8.He wrote,
As a measure of acidity/alkalinity pH7 signifies perfect neutral balance; but these recordings are neither neutral nor balanced. The album is, therefore, both jokey and in disguise.
Mr X (Gets Tense) and Faculty X are the last two tracks on the album. It was recorded at Hammill’s home studio, Sofa Sound, in spring 1979 on 8-track analogue tape and mixed at Rockfield Studios in Wales. Other artists who used the Studios in the 1970s included Hammill’s own band Van der Graaf Generator (VdGG), Hawkwind, Mike Oldfield, Queen, Rush… and Showaddywaddy.
The two tracks segue into one ten-minute track, showing Hammill reaching towards the kind of ‘epics a la VdGG’ he had previously avoided in his solo work. The following year, he released his ninth solo album, A Black Box, which features Flight, a seven-part epic that’s nearly 20 minutes long.
It’s easy to see why Mr X is getting so tense. The song opens with the radio news suddenly bursting in: the Sun is crashing to Earth, threatening humanity’s destruction. Mr X seems to represent a normal person (‘the norm, the average… what is this?’) The story may end with his being ‘the last residual/Holder of the torch, conscience of all men.’ He is caught up in the ultimate existential crisis, wondering whether the world will end ‘under fire’ or ‘under ice.’ It’s unclear what humanity’s role is in the end of the world, but Hammill makes it clear that the devastation is man-made. We can’t stop the Earth’s imminent destruction,
The apparatus rolls, no-one here can stop it Too busy learning more – always knowing less
The track begins with what Hammill describes as ‘loads of loops and stuff… sheer exuberance’, until a piano joins with an awkward, angular and supremely proggy riff, reflecting Mr X’s unease. A blistering bass line almost bursts through the speakers. Hammill’s voice initially sounds a little whimsical. Throughout these two tracks, and indeed throughout his whole recorded output, his voice is remarkably theatrical: the ‘Hendrix of the Voice’. Perhaps only David Bowie, particularly in his live performances, has matched Hammill in his supreme theatricality.
The classical violinist, Graham Smith, who joined VdGG in 1977 and appeared on The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome, provides anguished howls and resonant two-note riffs. Hammill’s voice eventually becomes so passionate that it cracks into falsetto on the words ‘under ice.’ A drumless instrumental passage follows, with dystopian guitar loops. The weirdly heavy drums (Hammill described them as ‘pretty strange’) rouse themselves as the vocals return with even more intensity, accompanied by manic backing vocals from Hammill himself. The track almost becomes unhinged with a babel of voices on the words, ‘Lord, deliver us from Babel’, and a repeated riff that threatens insanity. We enter a strange world of electronic loops, somewhere beyond time and space.
Peter Hammill’s Logo
The next track, Faculty X, starts relatively calmly with a brief moment of optimism, and florid flute flourishes from David Jackson, a long-term member of VdGG and a frequent collaborator with Hammill on his solo albums. But the protagonist soon begins to fall apart again. There is some dense wordplay in the following lines,
Motes in the eye, portcullis is shut… A skull isn’t much Of a c-c-castle to live in
The ‘motes in the eye’ recall Jesus’ parable of the mote and the beam in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, Chapter V). The mote is a speck of dust in the eye, and the beam is a large piece of wood. The parable’s meaning is that before trying to correct the minor faults of others, we should correct our own major faults. Hammill was brought up as a Catholic, specifically as a Jesuit, so would no doubt have been aware of the parable.
He plays on the word ‘mote,’ which sounds like ‘moat,’ the deep ditch that surrounds a castle. He develops the castle imagery further – the castle is the skull, home of human consciousness. The portcullis, the vertical gate into the castle, is shut, suggesting that the protagonist’s consciousness is closed off to new ideas. Hammill stutters on the word ‘castle’, an unusual effect in music, most famously used in The Who’s 1965 single My Generation,
Why don’t you all f-f-fade away (talkin’ ’bout my generation) And don’t try to dig what we all s-s-say (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
There are various explanations why The Who adopted this style, but in Hammill’s case, it seems to emphasise the protagonist’s paranoia.
In a previous song on the album, written by his former VdGG band-mate, Chris Judge Smith, Hammill sang that it’s Time for a Change, but that song doesn’t offer any solutions except self-expression,
“Please, sir, if that’s alright, ‘I’d really rather like to learn how to be me“
Faculty X offers a much more detailed solution to the desire that ‘The change has got to come. The solution is Faculty X,
It won’t be the drug It won’t be the sex It’s got to be the Faculty X
So what is ‘Faculty X’? The word ‘faculty’ is used here in the sense of a mental power, rather than a university department, although Hammill does hint at the latter meaning in the lines, which suggest a university governing body,
I think I’ll have to go, Go for the governing body My consciousness elects.
Hammill cryptically writes that the song ‘takes Colin Wilson’s work as its basis.’ The website Colin Wilson Online: The Phenomenology of Excess includes an article about Faculty X and an interview, which explicitly mentions Hammill’s song and The Black Room from Hammill’s second solo album Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night (David Bowie and Mark E Smith of The Fall are also mentioned as fans of the theory). Wilson launched the concept in a lecture in 1967. Encyclopedia.com describes it as ‘a latent power in human beings enabling awareness of a higher reality beyond immediate sense perception.’
Colin Wilson and Faculty X
The English philosopher and novelist describes ‘faculty x’ as ‘not a sixth sense, but an ordinary potentiality of consciousness.’ It’s the ‘ability to grasp reality’ – the ‘reality of other times and places’. It’s exemplified by Proust’s ‘madeleine moment’ in Swann’s Way from A la recherche du temps perdu.A memory of a French ‘madeleine’ cake from Swann’s childhood is triggered so strongly that he exists in both realities at the same time. Wilson writes, ‘Faculty X is the key to all poetic and mystical experience.’
Colin Wilson in Cornwall, 1984. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Faculty X begins with a highly compressed piano sound, hopeful yet slightly ominous. Hammill’s piano and Jackson’s flute are soon joined by Smith’s violin and Jackson’s sax. For a moment, it appears that VdGG are back together again. Hammill’s call for change becomes increasingly insistent. The references to alternative philosophies from ‘seer, sages, prophets, obscurantist tracts’ are accompanied by a sarcastic violin melody which casts doubt on their value compared to Faculty X.
The track descends into a moment of quiet contemplation, as Hammill’s aggressive call for change suddenly becomes tentative, ‘Still, I hope that the change will come’, with a sweet, almost sentimental violin. The track gradually regains its urgency, with a dramatic and stunningly rhythmic return of Hammill’s vocals in the half-spoken words,
‘Meanwhile, I don’t know, I think I’ll Have to go.’
The final minute of the song, after all the pent-up energy of the two tracks, is truly cathartic. We get a deeply personal insight into Hammill’s creativity. He ‘plucks all these characters out of thin air’ and infuses them ‘with meaning as much as I dare.’ Finally, he reaches a moment of complete calm, using the metaphor of swimming back to shore while waiting for the wave to carry him. A gorgeous ending to a pair of remarkable songs.
Peter Hammill: The Charisma and Virgin Recordings 1971 – 1986 (Charisma/Virgin/Universal Music Recordings 2025)
Both tracks are now available in revelatory remixes, in stereo and 5.1 surround sound by Stephen W. Tayler, who has also created surround sound mixes for Van der Graaf Generator, Be-Bop Deluxe, Bill Nelson’s Red Noise, Marillion, Renaissance, Barclay James Harvest, The Moody Blues, Hawkwind and Camel. Tayler has remixed pH7 and The Future Now in surround sound as part of the mammoth box set The Charisma and Virgin Recordings 1971 – 1986.
Sources:
Peter Hammill’s website: sofasound.com Colin Wilson Online: The Phenomenology of Excess
The Cover of The Overview by Steven Wilson, designed by Hajo Müller
This is an analysis of the first half of Steven Wilson’s eighth solo album, The Overview. For an introduction to the album, click here. Analysis of the second half of the album to follow.
OBJECTS OUTLIVE US
No Monkey’s Paw
The opening describes an eerie meeting on a misty moor. Wilson refers to two ghost stories that may have occurred on the moor (recalling the ghost stories on which his 2013 album The Raven that Refused to Sing is based) but says that neither happened here.
First, there is ‘no ghost on the moor’/no open window’. This appears to reference Kate Bush’s 1978 song Wuthering Heights, set ‘Out on the wily, windy moors’, when the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw haunts Heathcliff at his window. Bush, of whose music Wilson is a huge fan, memorably sings,
‘Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy I’ve come home, I’m so cold Let me in your window.’
Second, there is ‘no monkey’s paw’. The Monkey’s Paw is a ghost story by the English author W.W. Jacobs, first published in 1902. It describes a magical monkey’s paw, which provides three wishes that lead to unforeseen and terrible consequences. According to the story, the holy man who put the spell on the paw, ‘wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.’
The Alien on the Moor. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
Instead, Wilson’s protagonist looks beyond Earthbound ghost stories and into space, encountering an alien on the moor. The alien pointedly says, ‘Did you forget I exist?’ The protagonist blames the alien for playing ‘too hard to get.’ In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, Wilson said the reference to the alien is ‘a bit tongue in cheek’, but that there was a ‘serious point’, which is that we spend too much time looking down at our digital devices, and not enough time looking up ‘with a sense of awe’ at the sky and the stars, as he did when he was a child. We have lost our sense of curiosity and wonder and are obsessed with chasing likes and followers on social media, a central theme of Wilson’s 2020 album The Future Bites. The theme that technology has changed the course of human evolution, and not necessarily for the better, goes back to Fear of a Blank Planet, the 2007 album Wilson wrote for Porcupine Tree.
The track opens with Wilson singing in a gorgeous falsetto, showing how strong his upper register has become since he started developing this part of his vocal range on The Future Bites. His voice is bathed in echo, evoking the ethereal rather than the Earthbound. His voice is gentle and intimate, beautifully contemplative, enriched by the sound design and spacey effects created by Randy McStine, who also plays guitar and sings backing vocals on the album. Wilson plays the soft-edged bass line on an acoustic bass. The alien’s voice is Wilson’s own, transposed to a lower register using the same effect as on ‘King Ghost’ from The Future Bites.
The Buddha Of The Modern Age
The Buddha of the title refers to Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. According to Buddhist teaching, the Buddha will be succeeded by Maitreya, sometimes referred to as ‘The Buddha of the modern age.’ Wilson’s lyrics refer to a contemporary Buddha, who is ‘barely paid minimum wage’ for doling out ‘truth and healthy karma.’ Wilson says his teaching is ignored. In a poetic line, he refers to humanity ignoring the truths revealed by the wise men of the past, who are now mere shadows to us, ‘the blurred photos of the ghosts of men’.
The lyrics in this section are the most personal on the album. Wilson’s lyrics about his views are rarely so open and direct. He told Anil Prasad of Innerviews, ‘I’ve always been slightly wary of being too preachy or holier than thou,’ but he feels so strongly about the effect of meat eating not just on animals but on the planet that he’s ‘becoming a little more forthright about my veganism.’ Here’s an example of the anger he feels,
‘Slaughter our sacred cow To stuff our stupid mouths Already fit to burst Still the insatiable thirst To kill over and over’
Wilson is highly critical of what he sees as the failure of our stewardship of the planet, which we regard as ours to treat however we want. The phrase ‘insatiable thirst’ refers to our appetite for food, our obsessive consumerism, and our destruction of the planet, ‘We interlopers, the inferior species/Wallow in our own faeces.’
The Destruction of our Planet. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
The track begins with a resolute piano motif which matches the stridency of Wilson’s opinions, soon joined by drummer Russell Holzman on icy cymbals – the first time we hear him on the album. Randy McStine and Willow Beggs soon join him on rich, layered backing vocals. Willow is a singer-songwriter and the daughter of bass player Nick Beggs. The backing vocals are reminiscent of those on Porcupine Tree songs like ‘Heartattack in a Layby’ from In Absentia (2002), which ends with 38 tracks of multi-tracked voices. The song builds to a climax, with thundering drums, then drops away on the word ‘try’, creating a moment of compassion for humanity as a gentler piano melody ends the track.
Objects: Meanwhile
The lyrics for this section were written by Andy Partridge of the English rock band XTC, who also wrote the lyrics for the title track of Wilson’s 2017 album To The Bone (2017) and for his 2018 single How Big the Space. Wilson’s admiration for Partridge dates back to XTC’s formation of the fictitious band The Dukes of Stratosphear, which inspired Wilson to form his own fictional band, Porcupine Tree, which eventually became a real band.
Wilson has said that Partridge and Ray Davies of the Kinks are the best at describing everyday lives in their lyrics. While writing The Overview, he was remixing XTC’s 1984 album The Big Express in surround sound. The Big Express is a concept album about life in Swindon, a town in Wiltshire in the southwest of England. The song that interested Wilson particularly was ‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’. Partridge told Todd Bernhardt of XTC’s Blogs that ‘there’s a little vein of [Welsh poet] Dylan Thomas in there.’ Wilson told Stephen Humphries of Under the Radar that the song has ‘some of the most divine Little England observational lyric writing.’
He told Dave Everley of Prog that he rang Partridge with a challenge, ‘I want smalltown soap operas juxtaposed with cosmic phenomena.’ He wanted to put our ordinary lives in perspective – a central theme of the album – by providing links or contrasts with what was happening ‘meanwhile, on the other side of the universe.’ The two men entered a productive dialogue. Wilson was fascinated by Partridge’s comment that the lyrics make a significant difference in how you produce a track, particularly the vocals.
A Teenager with his First Telescope. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
Partridge fulfilled the brief perfectly. Events on Earth are sometimes linked with cosmic events,
‘As you queue at the bank for an hour ’Cause a solar flare blew out the power.’
Sometimes people on Earth are oblivious to the effect of cosmic events,
‘The driver in tears ‘bout his payment arrears Still nobody hears when a sun disappears In a galaxy afar.’
Sometimes the link is metaphorical,
‘Her shopping bag broke, sending eggs and flour crashing Down to the ground like star clusters smashing.’
One of the verses refers to a ‘teenager with his first telescope’, which reflects Wilson’s nostalgia for his own teenage years, looking up at the sky, fascinated with space, before smartphones were invented. Robert Smith of The Cure shares that nostalgia. The track ‘Endsong’ from Songs of a Lost World (2024) was inspired by his memories of looking up at the sky with his father around the time of the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969. In another verse, a young man cleaning cars wonders, ‘Is there life on Mars?’, the title of David Bowie’s 1973 single.
Some of the politics from To the Bone creeps in. That album addressed what some have described as a ‘post-truth’ world. Patridge’s lyric describes humans bickering about ‘fences’ – petty disputes between neighbours, and about ‘borders’ – between countries, often leading to war. The lyric wryly states that it’s best not to think about those disputes, an understandable reaction to the conflicts that have blighted the early years of the 2020s. There is deep sarcasm in the line, ‘It’s better to live without facts.’
The track begins with a clear statement of an important musical theme. It’s a 19-note piano motif that restlessly snakes back on itself, returning every three beats to the same note (F#). It sounds straightforward when broken down into three-note segments, but the complete theme helps restore Wilson’s prog credentials due its length. Wilson told Prasad that the basic melody is like a Shepard Tone, ‘in that it constantly ascends in whole tones.’ A Shepard Tone is an auditory illusion in which a repeated musical pattern appears to be constantly rising even though it remains in the same octave. Examples of its use are at the end of Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’ from Meddle (1971) and Hans Zimmer’s score for Christopher Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk.
‘A bit of a masterpiece.’ Variations by Andrew LLoyd Webber
Wilson said the 19-note motif returns in different musical forms throughout Objects Outlive Us, like the use of the leitmotif (leading motif) in Richard Wagner’s operas or the musical formula in the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, such as his massive opera cycle Licht (Light) (1977 – 2003). Wilson also referred to repeated themes in Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells(1973) and Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’. He told Humphries that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1978 album Variations, which repeatedly used a theme by the composer Niccolò Paganini, was ‘overlooked… [but] I think it’s a bit of a masterpiece, actually.’ The second track on the album was used as the theme tune for the television arts series The South Bank Show, which ran on ITV from 1978 to 2010, before moving to Sky Arts.
After three statements of the 19-note theme, the central song of Objects Outlive Us begins, with an earworm of a melody. It’s decorated with Floydian sliding guitars and a plucked string theme played by Wilson. McStine provides gorgeous backing vocals that evoke the sound of Electric Light Orchestra (ELO).
At around 3:30, there’s a blistering bass solo in the unusual time signature of 12/8. Each beat in the bar is divided into three semi-quaver (sixteenth note) triplets instead of the more usual two quavers (eighth notes). Perhaps surprisingly, Wilson plays it on an acoustic bass guitar. It’s heavily distorted and put through an amp with lots of overdrive. As Wilson repeats the bass riff, the track takes flight in the proggiest section of the album so far, as McStine adds an extra guitar line above the bass in the style of the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) bands of the late 70s and early 80s, such as Iron Maiden and Saxon. At around 4:45, the track stalls as a metaphorical handbrake is applied, then the track rouses itself with a drum flourish into a spacey instrumental before the vocals return. At 6:00, the 19-note theme returns, now in a driving, much heavier version for full band, followed by a gentle piano version that takes us back to the beginning of this section.
In the sleeve notes, Wilson describes Theo Travis’ saxophones in the track as ‘Jaxonsaxes’, named after David Jackson, who played saxophone with Van der Graaf Generator, often playing two at once. His nickname is ‘Jaxon’. He worked on many of their albums, including a long run of classic albums in the 1970s.
The Cicerones/Ark
The archaic word ‘cicerones’ is from the word ‘cicerone’, meaning a tour guide, derived from the name of the great Roman orator, Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC). The track’s title comes from a short story, The Cicerones, by the English writer Robert Aickman (1914 – 1981). The protagonist, John Trant, visits the Cathedral of Saint Bavon (presumably Saint Bavo) in Belgium. He begins a self-guided tour using a guidebook but soon meets various strange figures who act as his guides to the increasingly macabre sights of the cathedral. There’s a creeping sense of unease and the surreal. The atmosphere builds in the same way as in Thomas M. Disch’s short story Descending, which inspired Wilson’s previous album and short story The Harmony Codex. The Cicerones was filmed for Film Four in 2002, in a short starring Mark Gatiss (The League of Gentlemen, Sherlock, Bookish). In the context of the track, the title refers to the guides who lead the remnants of humanity into space, following the planet’s destruction so graphically described earlier in ‘The Buddha Of The Modern Age.’
Leaving the Planet. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
The Ark represents a new start, like Noah’s escape from the Flood in his ark with two of each animal. Compared with the relaxed rhyming couplets of Partridge’s lyrics in the previous section, the lyrics of this section are breathless, broken up into short sections. It’s a technique that goes back to ‘Open Car’ from Porcupine Tree’s Deadwing (2005). After the withering invective of ‘The Buddha Of The Modern Age’, only a few who warned about Earth’s destruction survived. It’s easy to miss the story – and the message – here amongst the turbulence of the lyrics. Humanity is leaving the Earth, which is now destroyed and reduced to dust. Ironically, when Prasad asked Wilson if he would rather live on Mars, he replied, ‘Mars is a planet of red dust. Earth is incredibly diverse, geographically, ecologically, and climate-wise.’
Wilson plays all the guitar parts at the beginning of this section. It starts with a gently contemplative acoustic guitar part, gorgeously recorded, that wouldn’t have been out of place on one of his early solo albums. After a rich keyboard wash, at about a minute in, the 19-note theme returns in a version for band and piano, and the section builds to a climax with repeated melody, with a similar feel to ‘Eclipse’, the epic finale to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). It’s also the emotional climax of the album’s first half, sung with gathering, hymn-like intensity, marking the historic significance of our decision to leave Earth after destroying it. The epic guitar solo marks the beginning of our journey to the stars, to begin a new life on the other side of the universe.
Cosmic Sons of Toil
The title of this instrumental section is intriguing. Wilson told Stéphane Rousselot of Amarok Magazine that it’s just a play on words. Perhaps he was thinking of the phrase ‘Horny-handed sons of toil.’ That phrase was first used by Lord Salisbury, three times British Prime Minister in the nineteenth century. The manual labourers described by Salisbury, with their horny (calloused) hands, have now been replaced by cosmic labourers. Perhaps that interpretation is incorrect, but as Wilson told Rousselot, ‘That’s the fun of analysis.’
This section is more up-tempo after the stately, anthemic pace of previous sections. The spacey electronic noises, sounding like a cosmic ray gun, are provided by the ARP 2600 analogue synthesiser. In a YouTube Reel, Wilson described it as ‘perfect for a space-themed album… It sounds like Hawkwind in 1973.’ The track begins with a tumbling, repeated piano theme, soon joined by jerky, melodic bass and frenetic guitar. The guitar solo at around 0:45 is the first of two on the album by Randy McStine. The solo is agitated and fragmented and unusual. McStine also plays guitar on the rest of the track. At around 2:00, there’s a funky, jerky, distorted guitar riff, a variation on the fuzzy bass theme we heard earlier, with agitated drumming from Russell Holzman. At around 2:45, the track becomes so frenzied that it falls over itself. The whole section describes an out-of-control spacecraft hurtling through space. It’s reminiscent of the scenes in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar when the spaceship flies with difficulty as it creaks, groans and shudders, reminding us that interstellar travel is difficult.
No Ghost on the Moor/Heat Death of the Universe
The first part of this section, ‘No Ghost On The Moor’, is a reprise of the opening section, with the same lyrics and melody. The difference is that we are now on the other side of the universe. The alien has taken us as far away from Earth as possible, and in this new context, Wilson is joined by a conventional rock band. The lyrics take on a new meaning, becoming achingly tender and emotional. Wilson’s recurring nostalgia for childhood has been replaced by an existential nostalgia for the Earth we have left far behind. His previous anger about the reckless destruction of the Earth has been replaced by deep empathy for the human condition and the fragility of life
The Heat Death of the Universe. Image created by AI.
The second part of this section is an instrumental, The ‘Heat Death of the Universe’ – also known more prosaically as the Big Chill or the Big Freeze – refers to the scientific hypothesis about the ultimate slow demise of the universe. Eric Betz of Astronomy.com described it as a,
‘Long and frigid affair… the day when all heat and energy is evenly spread over incomprehensibly vast distances. At this point, the universe’s final temperature will hover just above absolute zero… the existence of our entire species registers as but a brief ray of sunlight before an infinite winter of darkness.’
The guitar solo at around 2:00 is McStine’s second on the album. Wilson told McStine that he didn’t want a classic rock solo of the kind played by David Gilmour on ‘Comfortably Numb’ from Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall. This is no reflection on the quality of Gilmour’s playing – he told Roie Avin and Geoff Bailie of The Prog Report that the ‘Comfortably Numb’ solo is the ‘greatest guitar solo of all time.’ McStine’s solo sounds like a synthesiser rather than a blues guitar, and the tone breaks up intermittently rather than constantly as it would with conventional distortion. Russell Holzman’s languid drumming creates a feeling of gravitas beneath.
A Scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Touring Club Italiano
At around 2:45, there’s a lovely harmonic turn and some filigree decoration reminiscent of the great Guthrie Govan. As the guitar solo fades to nothing, the track descends into noise. Wilson told Rousselot this was a nod to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the use of ‘very atonal music’ to describe both ‘wonder’ and the feeling that the universe is ‘terrifying… an immense void of death and nothingness.’ He told John Robb at the launch of the album in Manchester that there was a ‘nod to Ligeti’. Wilson is referring to the orchestral piece Atmosphères (1961) by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, used by Kubrick in the film. The piece uses the technique he called micropolyphony, with large numbers of tiny musical themes woven together to create a constantly shifting composition with no discernible rhythm or melody. This music reminds us of, in Wilson’s words to Humphries, ‘the blackness and death of space… So you get an orchestra.’ The track ends with a wall of noise, a technique he uses compellingly on his first solo album, Insurgentes (2008), when noise rock brutally obliterates the end of various tracks. The track ‘Get All You Deserve ends with Ligeti-like noises. Wilson told Prasad that sounds from the most recent record by Bass Communion (his ‘ambient/noise /experimental project’), The Itself of Itself (2024), fed into this section of the track.
Images from The Overview film by Miles Skarin of Crystal Spotlight Prasad, Anil, Steven Wilson Cosmic Perspectives (Innerviews, 25/02/25) Bernhardt, Todd, Andy discusses ‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’ (XTC’s Blog, 17 February 2008) Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) Rousselot, Stéphane, Interview – Steven Wilson (Amarok Magazine, 4/3/2025) Betz, Eric The Big Freeze: How the universe will die (Astronomy.com) Avin, Roie and Bailie, Geoff Steven Wilson on The Overview, the upcoming tour, the future of AI, and more. (Interview) (The Prog Report Podcast, 7/3/2025) Robb, John, Steven Wilson: ‘The Overview’ Audio-Visual Experience + Q&A (Cultplex Manchester, 26/02/25)
This is an analysis of the second half, and title track, of Steven Wilson’s eighth solo album, The Overview. For an introduction to the album, click here. For an analysis of the first half of the album, ‘Objects Outlive Us’, click here.
Perspective begins with radio transmissions from deep space. They sound like the radio transmissions at the opening of another space rock song, ‘Astronomy Domine’ from Pink Floyd’s 1967 album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In March 2024, Wilson said in a YouTube interview with Rick Beato that one of his favourite albums, by Pink Floyd – ‘still my favourite band’ – is Ummagumma (1969), which includes a live version of the song (although without the spoken words). When The Piper was released, Pink Floyd were managed by Andrew King and Peter Jenner. The latter read out the names of planets, stars and galaxies through a megaphone.
‘Perspective’ includes spoken word commentary from Wilson’s wife Rotem, just like the two previous albums, The Harmony Codex and The Future Bites. She names various cosmic phenomena, and their distances from Earth. Wilson used a website called scaleofuniverse.com to provide scientific facts. The distances involved are hard to comprehend – see below:
A megametre = 10^6 = ten to the power of six = ten with six zeroes = 1,000,000 m = a million m
A gigametre = 10^9 = ten to the power of nine = 10 with nine zeroes = 1,000,000,000 m = a billion m
Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System and Callisto is Jupiter’s second largest moon:
Size beyond one megametre Ten to the power of six Ganymede, Callisto
A still from The Overview Film by Miles Skarin
Rotem’s voice is tuned down in pitch. Wilson told The Rockonteurs podcast that he wanted her voice to sound dispassionate, and ‘emotionally flat… to recite these scientific facts.’ He had in mind HAL, the talking computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the spacecraft Discovery One, who memorably says, ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.’
The red camera eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Source; Wikimedia Commons
What intrigues Wilson is not just the scientific facts about the space phenomena that Rotem describes, but also the effect such facts have on human consciousness. In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, he said that the sense of perspective shows who and what we are in relation to the vastness of the universe. He referred to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series and the Total Perspective Vortex. This machine allows the user to take in the whole universe, by extrapolating ‘the whole of creation… from one small piece of fairy cake.’ Built to annoy his wife, when the inventor turned the machine on, she saw ‘in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it… to [the inventor’s horror] the shock completely annihilated her brain.’ Despite this, the inventor had proved to his satisfaction that ‘the one thing [we] cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.’ The machine was later used as a punishment; the first person to survive it was the Betelgeusian, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who promptly ate the fairy cake.
The opening music is the most electronic on the album, following on from the more electronic sound of parts of The Future Bites and The Harmony Codex. Wilson told John Earls of NME that it’s something that the English electronic duo Autechre might have produced. Wilson isn’t the first musician to use electronic music on a prog rock album. Pink Floyd opened The Dark Side of the Moon with ‘On the Run’, which used the VCS3 analogue synthesiser to create the electronic sequence. Roger Waters can be seen manipulating the synth sounds, cigarette in hand, on Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii (1972; re-released in 2025 as Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII with new mixes by Wilson).
EMS Putney VCS 3 Synthesiser, of the Type Used by Pink Floyd on The Dark Side of the Moon. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The fiercely rhythmic, jerky synth tracks and electronic drums – all played and programmed by Wilson – contrast with Rotem’s deadpan delivery of scientific facts. At the same time, they create a futuristic soundscape that suggests that science is more dominant on the second side of the album. Wilson told Dave Everley of Prog that Objects Outlive Us is more of a ‘human’ story, whereas in Everley’s phrase, the title track ‘evokes the sparseness and coldness of space.’ At around 2:00, slower, more human-sounding chords begin to take over. We hear Wilson’s voice at around 2:30, albeit partly stripped of its humanity in a wordless vocalise, transposed up an octave, so that it sounds more like a synthesiser than a human voice.
A Beautiful Infinity I/ Borrowed Atoms/A Beautiful Infinity II
The protagonist is now on the other side of the universe, reflecting on his life back on Earth. He considers the time it takes light to travel long distances across space to reach the Earth; we see stars as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. There’s a strong parallel with Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. The line ‘Each moment for me is a lifetime for you’ could apply to the film’s plot. It stars Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a widowed former NASA test pilot who leaves a devastated Earth on a mission to find other habitable planets, leaving his young daughter Murph behind. Cooper and his crew travel remarkably close to a black hole called Gargantua. The scientific adviser to the film, Kip Thorne, wrote in his 2014 book The Science of Interstellar that time reaches a complete halt at the surface of a black hole.
When Cooper travels near Gargantua, he ages only a few hours while Murph, on Earth, ages eight decades. There’s a profoundly moving moment when he receives a transmission from his daughter, and he realises that he has missed 23 years of his daughter’s life. They are now the same age. When he left Earth, she was a child. Wilson encapsulates the emotion of this moment in the simple but deeply poetic line, ‘Back on Earth, my loving wife’s been dead for years.’ Although the title track concentrates on science, there is room for humanity, too. The protagonist’s distance from Earth puts everything in perspective: ‘what seemed important [is] now like dust inside the squall.’ There’s perhaps an echo of the dust storms in Interstellar, which make Earth uninhabitable.
‘A Beautiful Infinity I’ is the first time we hear Craig Blundell on drums. He plays in a more robust, rockier style than Russell Holzman on Objects Outlive Us; both drummers are superb. Wilson’s vocals are treated with a delay effect; the final part of each phrase is repeated, ‘from here… from here… from here.’ Pink Floyd used this effect on ‘Us and Them’ from The Dark Side of the Moon to add emotional depth. Wilson used the same effect on ‘Arriving Somewhere But Not Here’ on Deadwing (2005).
The slide guitar adds to the Floydian feeling of the track, but the guitar solo isn’t Gilmour-esque. Wilson asked Niko Tsonev to play the solo – his only solo on the album – in a style that combined the classic with the contemporary.’ The acoustic guitar, played by Wilson, is an Ovation in Nashville tuning. He used the same guitar and tuning on ‘Chimera’s Wreck’ from the 2022 Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation. He told Amit Sharma of Total Guitar that he used his Ovation guitar in Nashville tuning – the lowest four strings are tuned up an octave, creating ‘a very crystalline, musical box kind of tone.’
‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’
The ‘Borrowed Atoms’ section begins at around 2:40 with a piano break. The delicate musical backdrop of piano and synthesiser accompanies one of the most poetic moments on the album, with the words ‘The clouds have no history’, and ends ten lines later with the words ‘Is this a dream?’ Wilson’s lyrics express profound complexity in simple language. He reverses the ‘pathetic fallacy’, a poetic device where human emotions or characteristics are attributed to nature. (A good example is I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, which describes the daffodils as human dancers, ‘tossing their heads in sprightly dance.’) Wilson does the opposite, stressing that nature has no human emotion: ‘The clouds have no history/And the sea feels no sorrow.’ This is another aspect of the album’s perspective theme. Nature ignores us, so we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. Wilson says our atoms are just ‘borrowed’; when we die, they return to the universe. This is ambiguous – if our atoms are only ‘borrowed’, we are insignificant, but we should also take good care of our atoms, as we only have temporary stewardship. Wilson’s meditation on the nature of selfhood ends with a moving expression of existential angst, warmly sung, ‘Is this a dream?’
‘A Beautiful Infinity II’ begins at around 4:00 with the words ‘There’s no reason for any of this.’ Wilson’s personal view – with which some would disagree – is that the universe was created out of chaos, not by design or by a supreme being,
‘There’s no reason for any of this Just a beautiful infinity No design and no one at the wheel Just an existential mystery.’
The idea of no one being at the wheel is reminiscent of ‘The Creator has a Master Tape’ from the Porcupine Tree album In Absentia (2002). We discover that ‘the creator had a master tape’, which suggests design, only to find that – ironically – ‘he left it in a cab.’
After the massed backing vocals of Wilson and Randy McStine, there are some whimsical, almost scatting vocals from Wilson at around 4:05, in the same style as on ‘Harridan’, the opening track of Closure/Continuation. At around 5:00, McStine closes the track with a richly analogue Moog solo.
Infinity Measured In Moments
This section is the climax of side two. Rotem Wilson returns, reciting another list of space statistics to create a further sense of awe about the vastness of the universe. Blundell’s drumming here is impressive. He adds subtle shifts to the rhythmic patterns here, building the epic feel of the track and bringing a human feel to the electronic parts. The track is built around arpeggiating analogue synth patterns, just as Wilson built up the title track on The Harmony Codex. Wilson’s vocals are warm and rich, multitracked in unison rather than complex harmonies, as often in his Porcupine Tree songs. McStine provides backing vocals and a guitar solo at 2:15, which combines an angular, modern feel with the classic uplifting rock solo.
The Inner Sleeve of In Absentia by Lasse Hoile
It’s followed by handclaps (Wilson) and ukulele (McStine). Porcupine Tree fans may recall a similar effect on ‘Trains’ (In Absentia, 2002), a fan favourite with over 38 million plays on Spotify at the time of writing. There is some very Peter Hook-style bass in this section. Wilson is a massive fan of Hook’s former band Joy Division, listing the band’s debut single Transmission (1979), in his book Limited Edition of One as one of his top 100 tracks. At around 3:20, the track reaches a climax with Adam Holzman’s Moog solo, the first real opportunity Holzman has on the album to show the warmth and virtuosity of his jazz-tinged playing, which was a real highlight of The Overview Tour that came to London in May 2025.
Permanence
The final section of the album is a contemplative instrumental, beautiful, ambient and ethereal. We are now floating in space, billions of light-years away from Earth. The encounter with the alien on the moor at the beginning of the album now seems an infinite time ago.
Theo Travis. Photo by Mariia Korneeva
Theo Travis plays the soprano sax solo. Travis worked on some of Wilson’s solo albums, and the two worked together on Travis’ 2024 solo album Aeolus. That album is a one-hour Theo Travis piece for duduk; the instrument Travis played on ‘Beautiful Scarecrow’ on The Harmony Codex. Wilson produced the recordings and created soundscapes from Travis’s alto flute playing. That album is gentle, meditative, introspective and quietly mesmerising. Travis’s playing has the same effect on ‘Permanence.’
The section begins with the evocative sound of the electric piano, processed through a reverse echo. Two new instruments are added. The first is the celeste or celesta, a keyboard instrument that looks like a small upright piano. Like a piano, a hammer is operated by pressing a key, but instead of striking strings, the hammer hits a metal plate like that of a glockenspiel. Appropriately, in the context of this track, the name means ‘celestial’ or ‘heavenly.’ The second instrument is the Moog synthesiser on which Wilson created a sound like the theremin.
In the film by Miles Skarin, we move gradually closer to a green shoot of life. An out-of-focus creature gradually comes into focus. Our old friend, the alien from Objects Outlive Us, intently investigates the green shoot. We hadn’t forgotten that the alien exists. There is hope after all.
This post was updated at 18.02 on 29 December 2025 to correct the explanation of the terms megametre and gigametre, which had incorrectly referred to kilometres (km) rather than metres (m)
Beato, Rick, Steven Wilson Discusses His Favorite [Sic] Albums (Rick Beato 2, YouTube 24/03/34) Kemp, Gary and Pratt, Guy, Gary Kemp album special with Steven Wilson (The Rockonteurs, YouTube 26/01/25) Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Omnibus Edition, Boekerij 2018) Earls, John, Steven Wilson: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo” (NME 18/02/25) Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) Images from The Overview film by Miles Skarin of Crystal Spotlight Beato, Rick, Steven Wilson Discusses His Favorite [Sic] Albums (Rick Beato 2, YouTube 24/03/34) Kemp, Gary and Pratt, Guy, Gary Kemp album special with Steven Wilson (The Rockonteurs, YouTube 26/01/25) Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Omnibus Edition, Boekerij 2018) Earls, John, Steven Wilson: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo” (NME 18/02/25) Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) Sharma, Amit, Steven Wilson on Porcupine Tree’s triumphant return and his love of “guitar players that can play one note and break your heart” (Total Guitar, August 2022) Wilson, Steven, Limited Edition of One (Constable, April 2022)
The Overview is Steven Wilson’s eighth solo album, released on 14 March 2025. It charted at number three in the UK, the fourth of Wilson’s albums (as a solo artist or with his band Porcupine Tree) in a row to reach the UK top five. On his website, Wilson described the album as ‘a Kubrickian journey into the darkness of outer space.’
The Overview Effect
The album takes its title from the Overview Effect, a term coined by author and space philosopher Frank White in his book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution to describe the cognitive shift experienced by astronauts looking back on the Earth from space.
“[The Overview Effect] is the experience of seeing first hand the reality that the Earth is in space, a tiny, fragile ball of life, “hanging in the void,” shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. The experience often transforms astronauts’ perspective on the planet and humanity’s place in the universe. Some common aspects of it are a feeling of awe, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.”
Frank White
The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (First Edition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987)
White, who interviewed astronauts about their experiences, wrote that during the initial stages of the Space Program, it was thought that, ‘All the astronauts have religious or spiritual experiences and that they all had their lives fundamentally changed… The reality is far more complex than that.’ He quotes the astronaut Don Lind, who said that having spoken to many other astronauts, he concluded that space travel would intensify previously held religious convictions but wouldn’t make someone religious.
The Blue Marble. The Earth Seen from Apollo 17. Source: Wikimedia Commons
One of the most strikingly negative reactions to travelling into space, mentioned by Wilson in several interviews, was – ironically – from Captain Kirk, the actor William Shatner. In his 2022 book, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder, he wrote that when he was in space, he experienced profound sadness and grief. Eventually, this became a profound feeling of hope, inspiring him to say that we should ‘rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us.’
“There was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing… Everything I had expected to see was wrong… The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.“
Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria Books, 2022)
William Shatner as Captain Kirk. Souce: NBC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wilson coined his own phrase for the Overview Effect, ‘cosmic vertigo’, meaning a sense of the fragility of the Earth, and the insignificance of our lives in relation to the vastness of the cosmos. The existential struggle to make something of our lives, to make them signify something, is a recurring theme in Wilson’s lyrics, going back to Signify (Porcupine Tree, 1996). He told Dave Everley of Prog that ‘Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo.’ As an atheist, he said that to give life meaning, humankind had invented religion.
‘The Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesn’t matter, and it’s a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.’
Steven Wilson
Wilson’s solution to the apparent futility and insignificance of our lives, and of the Earth in relation to the vastness of the universe, is not to embrace religion, or misery. He told Musicwaves magazine that, ‘The Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesn’t matter, and it’s a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.’
White wrote, ‘ The impact of the [Overview] Effect is not limited to space travellers alone.’ Wilson described the effect of profound awe and a feeling of insignificance when he visited the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) in the Atacama Desert in Chile in early 2025. When completed, the ELT will be able to see further into space and further back in time than any previous telescope. At the album launch at IMAX in London in February 2025, a photo of Wilson standing next to the telescope was exhibited on the vast screen, and Wilson was a tiny orange dot wearing a hi-vis jacket. Thinking about the Overview Effect led him to consider our insignificance and how that creates a sense of perspective. During the roundtable discussion at the IMAX album launch, he said he could have called the album ‘Perspective … but it’s not as good a title as The Overview.’
The Gap Between Releases
The gap between the release of Wilson’s previous album, The Harmony Codex, in September 2023 and the release of The Overview was just under 18 months, a relatively short period considering the gap between his previous solo albums was around two to three years. He told Paul Sinclair of Super Deluxe Edition that there was a pragmatic reason for this. The Harmony Codex was his first album after COVID, and he felt that the previous album, The Future Bites, had been ‘very divisive amongst my fans.’ He didn’t book a tour supporting The Harmony Codex because he wasn’t sure how people would react to the album. By the time he realised that the album had gone down well, it was too late to book a tour for 2024. He decided that in the meantime, he might as well make another record.
The Concept
While he was looking for a concept, Wilson met up with Alex Milas, Editor-in-Chief of Metal Hammer and founder of Space Rocks. This organisation describes itself as ‘a celebration of space exploration and the art, music, and culture it inspires.’ Wilson’s original idea was to collaborate with Milas on an exhibition or an installation for which he created the music. Then Milas mentioned the Overview Effect.
The idea immediately appealed to Wilson. As a teenager, he had a fascination with space. He used to go out on summer evenings to gaze up at the stars. He enjoyed space films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1972), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He wrote tracks about space on some of his previous albums, particularly for Porcupine Tree. At the IMAX album launch, he said that in a ‘split second moment’ during his conversation with Milas, he had the title and the concept and heard the music in my head.’ He saw it as a ‘piece of cinema for the ears.’
He told Stephen Humphries of Under The Radar that he had written several albums about ‘planet Earth and human beings and the way we engage with each other.’ It was time to ‘write an album about something bigger than us.’
Humphries asked him why he was ‘asking these bigger questions’ now. Wilson admitted that perhaps he was having ‘my own existential crisis… of wanting more perspective on my own life’. Even so, he found it ‘fascinating’ to consider the vast numbers and distances in the universe. He told John Earls of NME that having a concept for the album before he started writing it led him to produce something that ‘intuitively felt like something long-form, analogous to a novel or a film.’
‘This record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.’
Steven Wilson
Wilson said to Everley, ‘This record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.’ Wilson has an uneasy relationship with the genre. His previous three albums certainly strayed from prog rock. To the Bone was an art-rock record with only one long track, ‘Detonation’; it also contained a happy pop song, ‘Permanating.’ The Future Bites was resolutely electronic. Its longest track, ‘Personal Shopper’ was more like dystopian disco than prog. That album brought some of the best reviews of his career, ‘from the more indie, hipster people that hadn’t really paid attention to me before’, but it also lost some of his core prog audience. To an extent, he has always enjoyed challenging his prog audience, but he also respects that audience. Although the album does mark a return to prog rock, it’s far from the loving, nostalgic homage to prog of his 2013 solo album The Raven that Refused to Sing.
The Album’s Structure
The album is divided into two long tracks of about 20 minutes each, ‘Objects Outlive Us’ and ‘The Overview.’ Wilson told The Prog Report that an album with only two long tracks was ‘a wilfully uncommercial gesture’ and that ‘the reason there are two pieces is I’m old and I still think in terms of vinyl.’
Wilson referenced other records with the same structure, such as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells(1973), Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way (1969) and Tangerine Dream’s Rubycon (1975). He told Tobias Fischer of Tonefloat Magazine that he has always liked ‘great double albums with just one track per side.’ He referred to Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973 UK, 1974 US) by Yes, which he remixed in 2016, as a ‘much maligned record, but I love it.’
Writing the Album
Wilson told Anil Prasad of Innerviews that ‘the idea and title came before I had written a single note of music… It’s nice when something this strong falls into your lap.’ The album almost wrote itself. Wilson wrote it in the order we hear it, and the lyrics came last.
At a Q&A session at Cultplex in Manchester in February 2025, Wilson told John Robb that ‘one doorway led to the next’, and that the album flowed out of him, ‘it doesn’t always work that way.’ It took Wilson only eight weeks to record the album at this home studio. The process was quite different from recording The Raven That Refused to Sing in a studio, surrounded by other musicians. He played all the bass parts, as he did on the most recent Porcupine Tree album, Closure/Continuation (2022). When he toured with Porcupine Tree, Nate Navarro played the bass parts. When he toured The Overview, the bass parts were played by Nick Beggs.
The Musicians
As with all his albums, except the very early ones with Porcupine Tree, Wilson used real drummers rather than using electronic drums or playing them himself. For the first side of the record, he used Russell Holzman, son of his regular keyboard player, Adam Holzman. Wilson said he wanted a drummer with no obvious connection to the world of progressive rock, or even rock music in general. Holzman plays drums for the American singer Caroline Polachek. Wilson had also seen his renditions of classic drum and bass breaks on Instagram. For the second side, Wilson brought in his regular drummer Craig Blundell, partly because of his experience as a prog rock drummer with the likes of Steve Hackett, but also because of his wide-ranging knowledge of multiple musical genres.
Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) ‘Struck’, Steven Wilson (February 11st [sic] 2025 (MUSICWAVES, 11/2/2025) Sinclair, Paul, Steven Wilson: The SDE interview: SW on his new album, The Overview, (Super Deluxe Edition, 17/03/25) Humphries, Stephen, Steven Wilson on “The Overview” Space, the final musical frontier, (Under the Radar, 21/2/2025) Earls, John, Steven Wilson: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo” (NME 18/02/25) Avin, Roie and Bailie, Geoff Steven Wilson on The Overview, the upcoming tour, the future of AI, and more. (Interview) (The Prog Report Podcast, 7/3/2025) Fischer, Tobias, Interview with Steven Wilson/ Porcupine Tree (Tonefloat Magazine, undated) Prasad , Anil, Steven Wilson Cosmic Perspectives (Innerviews, 25/02/25) Robb, John, Steven Wilson: ‘The Overview’ Audio-Visual Experience + Q&A (Cultplex Manchester, 26/02/25)
