The Overview is Steven Wilsonโs eighth solo album, released on 14 March 2025. It charted at number three in the UK, the fourth of Wilsonโs 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 โa Kubrickian journey into the darkness of outer space.โ
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, โhanging in the void,โ shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. The experience often transforms astronautsโ perspective on the planet and humanityโs 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, โAll the astronauts have religious or spiritual experiences and that they all had their lives fundamentally changed… The reality is far more complex than that.โ 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 wouldnโt 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 โ ironically โ 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 โrededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us.โ
“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, โcosmic vertigoโ, 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 Wilsonโs lyrics, going back to Signify (Porcupine Tree, 1996). He told Dave Everley of Prog that ‘Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo.โ As an atheist, he said that to give life meaning, humankind had invented religion.
โThe Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesnโt matter, and itโs a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.โ
Steven Wilson
Wilsonโs 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, โThe Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesnโt matter, and itโs a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.โ
White wrote, ‘ The impact of the [Overview] Effect is not limited to space travellers alone.โ 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 itโs not as good a title as The Overview.’
The Gap Between Releases
The gap between the release of Wilsonโs 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 โvery divisive amongst my fans.โ He didn’t book a tour supporting The Harmony Codex because he wasnโt 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 โa celebration of space exploration and the art, music, and culture it inspires.โ Wilsonโs 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 โsplit second momentโ during his conversation with Milas, he had the title and the concept and heard the music in my head.โ He saw it as a โpiece of cinema for the ears.โ
He told Stephen Humphries of Under The Radar that he had written several albums about โplanet Earth and human beings and the way we engage with each other.โ It was time to โwrite an album about something bigger than us.โ
Humphries asked him why he was โasking these bigger questionsโ now. Wilson admitted that perhaps he was having โmy own existential crisis… of wanting more perspective on my own lifeโ. Even so, he found it โfascinatingโ 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 โintuitively felt like something long-form, analogous to a novel or a film.โ
โThis record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.โ
Steven Wilson
Wilson said to Everley, โThis record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.โ 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, โDetonationโ; it also contained a happy pop song, โPermanating.โ The Future Bites was resolutely electronic. Its longest track, โPersonal Shopperโ was more like dystopian disco than prog. That album brought some of the best reviews of his career, โfrom the more indie, hipster people that hadn’t really paid attention to me beforeโ, 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, itโs 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, โObjects Outlive Usโ and โThe Overview.โ Wilson told The Prog Report that an album with only two long tracks was โa wilfully uncommercial gestureโ and that โthe reason there are two pieces is Iโm old and I still think in terms of vinyl.โ
Wilson referenced other records with the same structure, such as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells(1973), Miles Davisโ In a Silent Way (1969) and Tangerine Dreamโs Rubycon (1975). He told Tobias Fischer of Tonefloat Magazine that he has always liked โgreat double albums with just one track per side.โ He referred to Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973 UK, 1974 US) by Yes, which he remixed in 2016, as a โmuch maligned record, but I love it.โ
Writing the Album
Wilson told Anil Prasad of Innerviews that โthe idea and title came before I had written a single note of music… Itโs nice when something this strong falls into your lap.โ 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 โone doorway led to the nextโ, and that the album flowed out of him, โit doesnโt always work that way.โ 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) โStruck’, 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 โThe Overviewโ Space, the final musical frontier, (Under the Radar, 21/2/2025) Earls, John, Steven Wilson: โIโve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar soloโ (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: โThe Overviewโ Audio-Visual Experience + Q&A (Cultplex Manchester, 26/02/25)
Nearly 60 years since first playing in Manchester, Hammill is still a supreme communicator and a powerful performer
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‘The hits just keep on coming’, quipped Peter Hammill early in his set at the RNCM in Manchester this evening. In 2013, when Guy Garvey interviewed Hammill for a documentary, The Art of Sequencing, which I produced for BBC Radio 4, he asked whether he would sequence his albums by starting with the hits. โWhat hits?!โ replied Hammill. Although not known for chart success, Hammillโs music, both as a solo artist and as leader of Van der Graaf Generator, has been part of the fabric of many lives and internal imaginative landscapes over several decades. The RNCM Concert Hall was packed with appreciative fans, who listened in spellbound silence, mesmerised by the power and conviction of Hammillโs performance.
Last time Hammill was in Manchester, in February 2022, he performed with Van der Graaf Generator, but this time he took the brave but ultimately justified decision to perform completely solo, alternating between piano and guitar. His instrumental playing was compelling, as was his guitar playing on an acoustic guitar. He had to keep retuning his guitar as he hit it so hard. The RNCMโs Steinway grand piano survived his pounding, even in the early highlight, The Lie (Bernini’s Saint Theresa) from The Silent Corner and the Empty Stage (1974), which starts with the line, โGenuflection, erection in churchโ, still startling over 50 years later. Twenty years ago, he was described as โthe Hendrix of the voiceโ, and his instrument has inevitably changed as he reaches the latter half of his seventies, but it remains remarkably powerful, and his artistry and ability to communicate remain gloriously intact.
Hammill was always wise beyond his years, a deep and poetic thinker, but now some of his lyrics have gained added resonance as time passes. In Autumnfrom Over (1977), he wrote,
So here we are, alone – Our children have grown up and moved away. Living their own lives, they say… It all seems very strange to me.
He was a young man when he wrote these prescient words, with which many in the audience would no doubt have deeply empathised. And the grim ending to Still Life from the 1976 Van der Graaf album of the same name, when Hammill embraces death, perhaps means more to Hammill and his fans now. Despite these sentiments, this was a life-affirming experience. Hammill seemed genuinely surprised to reflect that he played his encore, Afterwards, from Van der Graafโs debut album The Aerosol Grey Machine in Manchester 57 years ago in 1968, when the Hendrix of the voice supported the Hendrix on guitar. Two well-deserved standing ovations confirmed that the audience shared Hammillโs evident pleasure in performing for us.
“We look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is.” Miles Skarin
A still from The Overview film directed by Miles Skarin
Miles Skarin makes music videos for Steven Wilson and his band Porcupine Tree. He also designs websites such as Stevenwilsonhq with his brother, Rob Skarin. Miles has recently made a full-length animated film to accompany Wilson’s latest solo album, The Overview. The film has been shown during the tour to support the new album, and the track Objects: Meanwhile from the first song on the new album Objects Outlive Us has been released as an official video.
Nick Holmes Music has been given an exclusive insight into the making of the new film with Miles Skarin [MS].
Nick Holmes Music: How did you first meet and work with Steven?
MS: We go back about ten years or so. We originally started out as massive Porcupine Tree fans. We made the fan site starsdie.com. Being big fans of Porcupine Tree, Steven Wilson, and the other progressive rock bands at the time, we made a couple of fan sites. We really wanted to know everything about Steven and Porcupine Tree, and where the music was coming from because we just loved it so much. A lot of these bands hadn’t really taken off on social media at the time.
Miles Skarin
My brother wrote a load of the news articles for the website. I did a lot of the design work. And then one day we had an e-mail that dropped into the inbox. That was Steven saying, “Hey, you guys are doing this really well, do you want to come on board and help us out?” Which was incredible as fans, to have that message just land in your inbox, it was a fantastic day. And so we just jumped at the chance. We redesigned Steven’s website and tried to boost his presence on social media, and we’ve been helping with that ever since.
Nick Holmes Music: Didn’t he say at the time that your website was doing better than his?
MS: I think that was what he said. I think it was just because we were putting way more content onto our website. One of the things that we were thinking about was that every now and again you’d have an album release. And then after the album cycle there would be nothing posted online. Maybe a year, two years later, thereโd be another album and maybe there’d be some press.
Steven always did incredible box sets. There was always a massive wealth of artwork and stuff to complement the music. So it was just a way of keeping fans engaged with Steven, even outside of the album cycles. And also while on tour as well, making sure to post photos and updates from live shows and just build that online community.
We had a forum at one point which we really enjoyed doing because it was bringing fans together and talking about the music that we loved. Through that process we met a few more people in the progressive rock space, record labels like Inside Out Music, Sony and Kscope; Steven was on working with those guys through Blackfield and his own releases at the time.
Nick Holmes Music: How did you feel when you saw your film on a massive screen at BFI IMAX in London at the premiere of The Overview?
MS: Oh wow. It’s just the peak, isn’t it? As a filmmaker, it doesn’t get better than that, surely. It was such an incredible experience, to see your work on a screen that’s the size of a building is something that I didn’t think I’d ever experience. As I was delivering the DCP file you take to give to the cinema to put it on the screen, the projectionist, Michael, took me up into the projection room at the back of the IMAX. And that’s cinema history, because you’ve got all of Christopher Nolan films; these huge spools of film, and they’re just labelled with handwritten notes saying โTenetโ, โInceptionโ and โInterstellar.โ it was just an absolutely wonderful experience to know that my film was going to be on the same screen.
I feel so fortunate and lucky to have to have been able to do it and it’s all thanks to Steven, for creating the music and placing his trust in me to do a film, hopefully that does some sort of justice to the incredible music that he produces.
Nick Holmes Music: Steven himself has often talked about his albums or individual tracks being like a film and even described his last solo album The Harmony Codex as โcinema for the yearsโ Was The Overview always going to be a soundtrack for a film? Is that how he saw it?
MS: I think he always saw it as a piece that was two halves, side one and side two. When we were talking about visuals for it, one of the things that we were talking about was if you’ve got two 20-minute-long songs there isn’t really a concept of singles. So the idea of doing a promotional single didn’t really apply. Of course we went with the Objects Outlive Us section Objects: Meanwhile as a single.
Steven Wilson – Objects Outlive Us: Objects: Meanwhile
MILES SKARIN ON THE SHAPES IN ‘OBJECTS MEANWHILE’
“The shapes in Objects Meanwhile are constellations, connecting the stars into these shapes. The first one we see are constellation shapes based on the real star positions but later on we see this effect in 3D, where we see the connections forming between a โpoint cloudโ of stars.“
From the start, Steven wanted there to be visual material, a film to go across the entire audio, which is such an incredible challenge to have to try and think about, because especially in my style, which is animation that’s a big undertaking. It was always from the start, โlet’s make a film, let’s make a movie for this.โ
Nick Holmes Music: How much scientific research did you do for the film?
MS: I’ve always loved space. I’ve always been aware of space, been aware of missions into space and where we are in space, and galaxies and solar systems. So I think there’s a lot of knowledge I had already accumulated about space. I really wanted to build that kind of idea of scale into the film as well, because that was what we were trying to produce from the start, the idea of perspective.
And so I was looking up scales in numbers of how large planets are on Wikipedia. You can search any star or planet and it will tell you in astronomical units how large that planet or star is. And the numbers get big very quickly. I tried putting all those numbers into my computer software thinking, โthis will be great. I’ll just put all the numbers in and then I can just pull the camera out and that would show me the scale.โ But it starts to glitch physically on the screen. It can’t work out the coordinates for the polygons and the shapes you’re making to exist in a space that large because the computers can’t handle the sheer size of it.
So I was trying to find out as much as I could about space, and trying to keep it very scientific in a way. But as soon as I realised it was going to need a certain level of artistic direction, because the software couldn’t handle it, I had to kind of deviate. But I did definitely try to keep as much of the scientific information there, and I was also looking into different phenomena and objects in space; one of them is called a magnetar, which is these incredibly dense stars which have a very strong magnetic field. And it’s fascinating reading about these objects in space that just don’t seem real. And yet they are out there somewhere. It was very enjoyable doing that.
Sunrise seen from space. Illustration inspired by the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Image by Michael Melchinger. Source Wikimedia Commons
Nick Holmes Music: Tell me about the visual language of the film. How much were you influenced by space films like 2001 or Interstellar, which are fantastic films visually?
MS: Those films are incredible. I would say those films would be my main inspiration and reference points for The Overview. I remember watching Interstellar in the cinema and being absolutely blown away by it, not just visually from how it depicts space, but also the performance of the actors as well, and the emotion, and the effect that time dilation would have on people experiencing it. They did that very, very well.
I guess our challenge was to try and create a new visual language. But the person I have to thank for most of that is Hajo [Mรผller] who had already created all this incredible artwork. It’s so stark and beautiful in the way that he’s used real imagery and texture to create the pieces. I love the large format images that Hajo produced to really give you that sense of a wide screen or cinematic format. He sent through a load of the artwork quite early in the process. His artwork by the time that I was really working with it was already mostly there and just incredible images. I was looking at that and thinking he’s done it, he’s created the visual language of The Overview and if I can even get a small piece of that into my film then I’ll be happy because I love his work.
Nick Holmes Music: You have said the biggest challenge was to convey the scale of space?
MS: I think the main piece that really shows the scale would be Perspective, the first section of the second half. We’ve got Rotem [Wilson]’s voice, speaking through these incredible numbers such as ten to the power of twelve. But what does that mean? And so one of the things we were talking about was by putting up that number onto the screen, do people know that that’s going to be? The number of zeros that are at the end of these numbers, your brain can’t process it that well. And so when we were thinking of showing the scales, I had to split up those sequences and of course it has to be stylized to the music as well.
But there’s one moment where you can see the sun and you can see the different rings of the orbits of our planets in our solar system. And the camera bounces back and bounces forward quite fast. One of the things that I’m not sure if people quite catch is that our Sun just shrinks by a huge amount and then these absolutely colossal stars that are the next scale up swirl into the frame. So even on a 4K screen, placing these objects next to each other, our Sun suddenly becomes minuscule against these larger stars out there. So it’s actually very difficult to have a reference point when you’re looking at these sorts of visuals in a way that really puts it in perspective for us humans to understand.
‘The combination of analogue electronics and my wife Rotemโs narration, accompanied by Miles Skarin’s brilliant visuals depicting the sheer enormity of our known universe and the idea of cosmic vertigo, is proving to be an incredible high point of the current live show.’Steven Wilson on The Overview: Perspective (1 July 2025)
The other part of the film that talks about scale is the section called Cosmic Suns of Toil which is midway through the first half. For that we’ve got the camera that just pulls back and goes through all the different layers of space. I wanted to frame our solar system and then what’s outside of our solar system. This is where I was doing my research on what these layers are, if I set a course for the stars and kept going, what objects would I move through. As you get outside of our solar system, there’s The Local Bubble, and The Local Cluster.
It’s amazing to consider that there’s so many other stars and solar systems out there, and then it just keeps going and keeps going until we can’t see any further because light can’t travel. There’s a certain amount of light that it can travel compared to how fast the speed of light is and that’s elapsed. Then eventually at the end of that section, Cosmic Suns of Toil, we reach the edge of the Cosmic Web, which is these, almost like strand filaments of the matter of galaxies.
And then what’s on the outside? We don’t know. So we have a slightly more abstract, stylized section and then we just dive straight down. The thing that I find amazing about that is it’s set up to be relative scale, not absolute scale. So when the camera flies straight back through the Local Cluster of our solar system and then back onto Earth, all of that’s over in about like three or four frames of video. Itโs incredible that we cross so much distance in the space of a millisecond.
The Alien on the moor
Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a bit more detail about the film? It starts off with the alien, saying, โDid you forget I exist now?โ Steven himself has said that’s slightly tongue in cheek. How do you feel about the alien? There’s a beautiful section at the end of Part I, where the alien is floating around in space. What’s your reaction to that alien?
MS: I feel like it’s a great way to introduce where we are right now as a species. I think the key takeaway from the film is that we look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is. I don’t know how many people in the modern age are looking up at space and thinking, “I know what’s up there and I know what that means about where I am.”
MILES SKARIN ON THE DESIGN OF THE ALIEN
“The alien design came from Hajo [Mรผller‘s] artwork… thereโs the image of the alien, so using that as reference we designed it as a 3D modelled character. The image in Hajoโs artwork had lots of earthy textures over it, so our first design used only these same materials for quite a flat, matte look. Steven Wilson then suggested that it needed to look more alien and like it had just crawled out of the muddy depths of the moor, and that influenced the more organic looking final design of the alien and the animation at the start of Objects Outlive Us.”
Every time I go outside and walk down to the end of my road at night, and I’ve got stars above me, I’m always looking up and thinking, โthat’s all right there.โ I feel like that’s a great moment to start the record and say we’re not looking at humans this time around. We know we’re looking out at space, but then we are looking back at what that means for the human race.
A teenager with his first telescope
And there with his first telescope A teenager stands full of hormones and hope As he squints at the night, like a painting of light He doesn’t suppose that a black hole implodes In a trillion years from now.
The section Objects Meanwhile, discusses a black hole swallowing an entire galaxy. And when you think, were there people in that galaxy, did they know what was about to happen to them and if so, what would they be thinking? We get wrapped up in things that maybe we should have a little bit more perspective on. If every single human on planet Earth was able to recognise that we are all just trapped on a rock that’s being flung through space, maybe we’d have a different worldview. But the human race is so complex, I’m not going to go there.
Nick Holmes Music: Talking of the human race, The Buddha of The Modern Agefeatures a series of man-made disasters that lead to the destruction of the Earth?
MS: That section is looking at humans and what we’re doing on Earth before we go out into space. We meet the alien, and then after that we are presented with Earth. It’s not meant to be a future version of Earth. It’s meant to be a current version of Earth. I think it’s very easy to look at dystopian scenes of natural disasters, wars and climate change and think this is all set 20 years in the future, and we’ll work it out, we’ll be fine.
But actually, this stuff is happening now. It’s interesting that while all of these events are playing out and things are getting more and more serious, is enough being done by the human race to really set us on a course where we’re not just going to end up in that dystopian world of Interstellar, a global food crisis and dust storms that swirl around the planet, to the point where the planet is not habitable anymore. Are we barrelling towards that future, and is it too late to stop it? Thereโs a lot of those classic narratives tied up in that section.
But of course presenting it in such a stark way on screen and moving through all of those environments is one way of really showing this is the state of things right now. Of course it’s dramatized a little bit with animation, and at the end you’ve got all of the figures stampeding and falling off a cliff. I mean take what you want from that.
The message of that section is that maybe the human race could be doing more, but then of course the human race is massively complex in itself. And there’s a lot of problems we need to work out. And I don’t think I’m the person to be able to offer the answers; but hopefully collectively, we can put differences behind us and actually try to work out these things.
‘And now in her old wedding bed/A lady will dream that her husband is dead/ Of course he’s alive/He’ll be back around five’
Nick Holmes Music: Objects: Meanwhile is a very literal and specific description of small-town England with lyrics by Andy Partridge, contrasted with what’s going on in other galaxies. I was interested to see that you turned it into something almost magical with all these shimmering figures, but it’s not a detailed rendition of the lyrics.
MS: The lyrics tell a story, but I’m very mindful about not just taking the lyrics and putting that into visuals. The lyrics tell such a wonderful story and the way it flows from scene to scene, I felt that had to be the way forward for that section. And by setting these small sequences but made out of stardust and put them into these cosmic-looking scenes, I hopefully created a quite a nice way of showing that.
That was one of the things we were talking about first. Stevenโs note was he wanted to have everyday objects presented as though they were like a nebula or a galaxy out in space. So I was trying to build different ways of showing that. We had a Nebula Generator [which digital artists use to create configurable space nebula effects]. I could put a 3D model into it, and then it would render it as a galaxy or a nebula out in space.
Her shopping bag broke sending eggs and flour crashing Down to the ground, just like star clusters smashing.
And I wanted there to be moments like the opening where the shopping bag falls and then the flour spreads out and there’s stars inside of that. I really wanted it to look like we were seeing like the birth of a galaxy or the birth of stars or something like that, where an event on Earth has a parallel to events out in space, visually at least.
Nick Holmes Music: There are some very abstract instrumental sections on The Overview. How did you decide to illustrate those, because there are no stories in those sections?
MS: A lot of the designs come from Hajoโs artwork. There are various sections and we wanted to have a journey, especially in the section, where we’ve got Randy McStine’s fantastic guitar solo, just after the Ark sequence where we go into an alien planet and we see the ghost on the moor again. For that sequence, I really wanted to put the viewer into that environment. And the idea there is that we had launched ourselves towards the end of the galaxy into the end of the universe, and now we’re flying back and landing on some other planet somewhere else. That was definitely trying to bring in as many of the colourful possibilities that alien worlds could have and just trying to realise that, and trying to show what it could look like.
I think a lot of these things were so influenced by films that we’ve seen already and designs that have been made, but also there’s probably limits to what we can imagine these alien worlds would look like because we are only influenced by what we see directly around us.
Nick Holmes Music: And in Perspective where Rotem Wilsonโs spoken words provide all the perspectives of sizes of planets and galaxies, how much were you drawing on real images and how much was your imagination?
MS: The James Webb Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope have been taking some absolutely fantastic images which are available online where artists can use them. That was a massive resource to be able to look at and get inspiration from.
But for all of the scenes in โPerspectiveโ, especially the ones where we’re going through nebulas and the larger cosmic objects, what I’m doing there is creating what is called a Pyro simulation which creates these kind of smoke effects. And that is driven off images and source material that’s taken from these incredible pictures of space.
And because they’re only two-dimensional images that we’ve got from these telescopes, what I wanted to be able to do is create that, but in a 3D space so I can fly a camera through it and we can see there’s some depth to it. I’m sure there’s probably some very technical way we could scientifically accurately do that. But imagine there’s just a slice of the photo or the image of that galaxy or that nebula, and then smoke starts to rise from both sides of that piece of paper that then creates this 3D object that I can then fly a camera into. I can then scatter stars inside of that as tiny little spheres that can then emit light, and that creates the effect of this 3D nebula.
Nick Holmes Music: Iโm going to ask a slightly less serious question now, but I have to say when I saw Steven as an astronaut, which obviously he was very excited about, I had this image of Buzz Lightyear.
MS: Yes! [laughs] One of the early notes that Steven gave me was that we didn’t want it to almost come across like an action figure, floating in space; but the actual range of motion you get in those space suits, there is only a certain amount of movement that you can do in zero gravity. But we added a little bit more movement into the character to try and hopefully reduce any sort of, ‘Look, it’s Buzz Lightyear floating out in space.’
That was really good fun. I think the idea for came from Steven – looking across the Earth initially and then just being pulled across time and space and then experiencing the entirety of everything in a flowing strand across the screen, and what that’s meant to represent is the passage of time in this thin thread that’s going across space. Steven falls into that thread and then visits the earth and all these different places and then falls in and out of that in space, which is quite disorientating in a way for him.
Nick Holmes Music: Steven has been quite open about his fear of flying, but has also said that on balance, he probably would go into space given the opportunity. Would you go into space if you had the chance?
MS: I would probably share his fear of flying in a way, because I guess I think about it too much. You’re being rocketed in a tiny little capsule across the sky. But we’ve got ways of managing it, and everything’s tested. And when we know that the technology works, it’s amazing. We’ve had so many years of space exploration that it’s now coming to a point where weโve commercial astronauts going up and experiencing space. You don’t have to be a NASA-trained astronaut, you need a lot of money at the moment, but maybe one day it will be a point where we can maybe think about doing that, and maybe going on a trip to the moon won’t be something out of The Jetsons. It would be achievable for most people and a regular occurrence.
To answer your question, I think I’d have to think very carefully about whether I did it or not. I guess I like having my feet on solid ground. But I think if I were given the opportunity, I don’t think I’d be able to pass it up, because not many people get to experience something like that. So I probably would be saying yes.
Nick Holmes Music: The final section, ‘Permanence,’ with Theo Travisโ beautifulsaxophone solo. Can you describe what’s happening visually there? Is there a green shoot of hope?
MS: At the end, we’ve just had the Infinity Measured in Moments section, which is such a huge crescendo to the piece. There’s so much going on in that section and everything’s building up, and then we get this very soft end to the film where we’re floating in space.
After the visual onslaught of the ending section, because it is quite a lot and it is intended to make the viewer feel dizzy, it is blurry in sections where it is difficult to focus on it. That section was meant to be a ride through space where we can really just take a moment to consider the frame and see this asteroid that we’re flying down onto, and in the background of that scene, we have a huge black hole. And so we’re just one of the rocks that’s orbiting this black hole. Inevitably, these rocks are going to be sucked into that black hole and shredded.
And then as we reach the surface, we have this green shoot of life appearing in a place where it really shouldn’t. We really wanted to have some sort of ending where it wasn’t all about space as a cold, dark place, where it’s about death and nothing exists out there. I would like to think that there is more life out there and that the chances of there being life are quite high, especially when you look at how many solar systems and planets are out there. We wanted to leave it with somewhat of a positive view after diving into the darker aspects of it.
Nick Holmes Music: It’s also a very Steven Wilson way to end an album, isn’t it? So many of his albums with Porcupine Tree and his solo albums end on a gentle, quiet track rather than in a very loud climax. Is it a technique which he employs a lot?
MS: Well, thereโs always been the really big epic tracks at the end of Steven Wilson albums, but yes, it’s going in the opposite direction and putting something quiet has been very effective as well. It just feels like you’ve got that moment to just sit back and take in what you’ve just heard.
Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a more general question? Are you a musician? Because watching it again, it struck me how clever the editing is, and how beautifully it matches the pace, the rhythm, and the emotion as well. But from a technical point of view you’re matching the music really well. Where does that come from in your background?
MS: When I was at school, I took music, but mainly music technology and production rather than a classical musical education. I was a kid who was trying to learn as much as I could on guitar, but I found all of the photography, video production, and animation side, and that’s what I ended up doing more music production than guitar. But I still play from time to time, and I still want to try and do something musically because I’ve been so fortunate to work with a lot of my musical heroes.
At some point, maybe I’ll decide to give music another shot. But it’s interesting you mentioned that, because I spent a lot of time listening through the music and finding the moments and following the music, and a lot of the time I find that as a filmmaker, you normally have to build your narrative structure, but what I’ve found is that the musicians have done that job for me. They’ve done the hard job of working out the journey that they’re taking the listener on; all I’m doing is just putting visuals to that story that they’ve already produced. As long as I can follow where the music is going and the moods and the styles of it, then I guess that’s all I need to know musically.
Nick Holmes Music: How would you sum up the narrative of The Overview?
MS: I think the main thing with The Overview, as Steven will say as well, is the idea of having perspective on what we’re doing and our legacy on Earth. What if an alien was looking down at Earth, what would they see and what would they think about us and the way that we live?
It’s a story of sustainability and trying to really protect the home that we all have and trying to forge a path towards being a sustainable human race where we’re able to live in harmony with the planet. A lot of people have had that same dream. But we have to make that align with the way that civilization has to run; we’re going to be consuming a certain number of resources for the human race to exist.
But I think that as long as decisions are being made, we’re consuming the right resources in terms of animals, forests that we’re cutting down, what we’re putting in the oceans. It’s an environmental message, but also an animal rights message as well, where I think that humans, hopefully at some point in time, can look at our impacts on the world and hopefully see a nicer world around us.
Nick Holmes Music: But I think, as you’ve touched on, it’s also a very human message about perspective, isn’t it?
MS: Yes, definitely that. We all get wrapped up in our own lives and everything can feel very overwhelming. You look at the news these days and it’s difficult to think we’re heading in the right direction. We are all just floating on a rock that’s flying through space. And as long as we can just be nice to each other – and I know that’s quite a naive thing to say – but maybe that is the way that we have to look at the world, to take each problem as it comes and make the most empathetic response where we’re understanding our fellow humans on the planet, but also our fellow species on the planet, looking at animals and making sure that we’re providing the best world for us all to live in.
I feel like these days we have the technology to make a better world. And so it saddens me when I see that decisions are being made that are not maybe for the greater good of the planet, and it’s more just to make a bit more money, which only benefits a certain few.
I think there’s a lot of complexity in the human race, but I think that there’s definitely a message in The Overview, which is perspective; let’s try and forge a good path forward.
Nick Holmes Music: Is there anything you would like to add?
MS: I should also mention that I was assisted by my good friend Jack Hubbard, who helped me out with a lot of the more technical visual effects. We both worked on the film, and we were both there at the BFI IMAX show, and it was just an amazing thing to be able to share that experience with someone who has supported me massively over the years on pretty much every single project.
Jack is a visual effects artist who works at Framestore, one of the largest visual effects houses in London. He’s a very good friend and heโs always up for a challenge and he was amazing in answering a lot of the more technical visual effects questions because he uses a more advanced 3D software than I do.
Part of the process of putting it into the cinema is that you have to follow a certain amount of spec and quality control to be able to put it in that sort of environment. And so a lot of what I’ve been learning about in terms of video production and filmmaking is how to produce content to that kind of high-resolution, high-quality scale, and of course Steven works with Dolby Atmos and all of the high-end audio standard. So throughout the production of The Overview, I was really keen to bring that kind of high res, high end workflow towards the visuals as well.
Jack works in high end visual effects for TV, film, and advertising. I try to bring as many of those workflows from these high-end visual effects productions into the work that I do, which is much smaller scale, but it’s amazing what anyone can now access on YouTube software that’s freely available. And you can just follow these same standards and quality processes that feature films go through.
We had a test day at the Dolby showroom in London, where we screened the first version of the film and listened to it back in the Atmos mix. And it was fascinating talking to them about the Dolby Vision and the Dolby Atmos standards that they produce, the high-end HDR imagery. And then also the high-resolution surround audio.
Maybe that’s next on my list of things to do, to try and work out how I produce the highest quality image possible. I know that if you’ve got a Dolby Vision capable TV, there is a way that we could start to create a version of The Overview so that future projects could be Dolby Atmos, but also Dolby Vision as well. I’d love that.
Nick Holmes Music: Thank you very much for your time, and for spending so long talking to me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.All stills from the film provided courtesy of Miles Skarin, with thanks.
This post was edited on 2 August 2025 to include details about the design of the alien and the shapes in ‘Objects Meanwhile’ provided by Miles Skarinand again on 4 August 2025 to add a link to the Official Video for The Overview: Perspective.
The Cover of the Uncertainty Principle by Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate
Malcolm Galloway is the lead singer, songwriter, guitarist and keyboard-player of London-based prog rock band Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate, with bass player Mark Gatland.
Nick Holmes Music met with Galloway in London to discuss the band’s latest album The Uncertainty Principle and the band’s annual Prog the Forest festival, which takes place at the Fiddler’s Elbow in London. (For a review of last year’s festival, see here.)
Malcolm Galloway
Nick Holmes Music: You have just announced another Prog the Forest festival for December 2025. Tell me about last yearโs event.
MG: It’s our annual environmental charity fundraiser. We raise funds for the World Land Trust. This charity works in collaboration with local partners and local communities to buy threatened land that’s environmentally significant. It puts it into a legally protected permanent trust so that it can be used for the benefit of local communities and the environment. This has an impact on the climate. They focus on strategically important areas, for example, providing bridges between two isolated bits of ecosystem that may not, in isolation, be sustainable. But if there’s a small but significant bridge between them, it can then become a much more thriving ecosystem.
The organisers of this event are Mark Gatland and me from Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate and Chris Parkins, the London Prog Gigs promoter. He’s a wonderful promoter of independent progressive music in London. I think he’s one of the main driving forces behind the resurgence of independent new progressive music in London. Last year was our sixth year and the most financially successful to date. We raised enough to protect 26.25 acres of threatened habitat.
So, we’re really pleased, and we’re delighted with all the performers who so kindly gave their time and talents to the event. We’re very fortunate to get such extraordinary musicians agreeing to come and play our little festival. We’ve developed so we’ve got an audience that is aware of the event and regularly comes and seems to be very, very supportive of the musicians. I really enjoy the atmosphere there.
Nick Holmes Music: It felt very supportive. Several of the musicians, after playing their set, hung around to listen to the other sets.
MG: Yes. There are quite a few musicians who come along even in years when they’re not performing.
Nick Holmes Music: It felt to me also like an artistic success – you had everything from solo jazz flute to something bordering on heavy metal, to acoustic covers of Rush songs.
MG: One of the lovely things about being involved in this kind of event is that we can put on things that we want to listen to. Also, the prog audience, from our experience, is open-minded and I really like that.
We know that if we put on a band that’s let’s say, veering into the more metal area or one that’s more folky or acoustic, or that uses skulls as percussion instruments – the wonderfully theatrical Spriggan Mist – the audience will appreciate them.
One year, we had John Etheridge, who is obviously very familiar to prog audiences from his prog work, but he was doing a set with Vimala Rowe, a wonderful jazz singer. And so, we feel that although there’s a centre of gravity in prog rock for the event, the idea is for it to be progressive in a wide sense, and it really aims to be quite diverse.
I was certainly pleased with the range and the diversity we had last year, and I like the idea that people might hear a genre they’ve never heard before and come away thinking, ‘I didn’t expect to like that. I now really want to go and check that out.’
Nick Holmes Music: I spoke to a couple of members of the band Mountainscape. They told me their set was mild by their standards, and that they can play much, much heavier than that. Did you ask them to do that?
MG: We didn’t ask them to, but it’s an interesting question. To what extent do you tailor your set according to the event? When we’re thinking about our sets at other events, we’re certainly aware of what kind of event it is. We’ve done things like art galleries, where we play a different kind of set compared to playing at something like a metal festival. But when we’re doing prog festivals, we feel able to have quite a broad palette that we can include in the event.
I don’t think we’ve ever tried to suggest to any of the performers what they do or don’t do. But I could also understand if they know the kind of event it is, they might have prog and more metal elements, and they might then focus more on the prog elements.
Nick Holmes Music: Thinking of the Hats Off Set at Prog the Forest, you’ve adapted some of your sets to the fact that you didn’t have a keyboard?
MG: Itโs just a practical consideration. I’m probably better at the keyboard than the guitar, realistically, but the guitar is much easier to carry because it tends to be a bit lighter. I don’t particularly like playing a non-weighted keyboard, it’s not what I’m used to under the fingers. On the other hand, weighted keyboards are beyond my lifting capacity. And because I can’t drive, if we’re playing in a venue that has a keyboard, I’ll probably include some keyboard parts, not necessarily songs where the keyboard is a focus on the album, but I’ll do some more solos on keyboard rather than guitar.
Sometimes we do sets where we perform a first half keyboard-oriented and a second half guitar-oriented, such as at the Camden Club. They’ve got a nice keyboard there.
Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate at the Camden Club, London
Nick Holmes Music: Tell me about recording the new album, The Uncertainty Principle.
MG: The way that Mark and I work, it’s an iterative process, so I will send him a version of a mix, and he will come back with suggestions, and point out for instance where I’ve accidentally turned off a track. So, for example, we had a track which was going quite well, and I spent lot of time spent trying to get rid of digital clicks that seem to arise, horrible mouth noises that I don’t like. I managed to get rid of them, but in doing so I’d accidentally deleted half the guitar solo. So then I had to go back to try to find out where it went. Thatโs the process until we gradually get to a point where weโre both happy.
Nick Holmes Music: Who has the final say?
MG: We’ve not had anything where we have particularly disagreed so far. That hasn’t been an issue, it tends to be consensual. I think, though, that Mark will often be the one saying, ‘That’s fine, you don’t need to keep tinkering.’ Thereโs a temptation to keep making tiny changes, but that comes with the risk of accidentally creating bigger mistakes than the problem Iโm trying to fix.
Once we think all the tracks are finished, then we’re checking that the levels on each track sound right compared to each other, or if anything stands out as being a different kind of sonic world, where we might need to go back and change that in the mix, even if it worked for that song in isolation. We want things to work for the album as whole as well, so a little bit of compromise and balancing at that point.
Nick Holmes Music: When you reach that stage where it’s almost done, do you ever either radically change the running order, or even drop a track? Steven Wilson on The Future Bitesdropped a track at very short notice. And for the new Cure album, Songs of a Lost World, Robert Smith got as far as printing the lyrics and then dropped the track Bodiam Sky so if you buy the physical album, the lyrics for that missing track are still there.
MG: That’s interesting. We’ve never done anything that late. Normally we have to cut down the amount of material that we want to include to what fits on a CD.
This also feeds into why we haven’t got any releases on vinyl. There are two main reasons. One is that for obscure bands with limited potential sales, the unit cost becomes probably more than 10 times the price of a CD.
The other reason is that because of the length of our albums, each one would have to be a double album. It would be a lovely thing to have and stick up on the wall, but it would be quite expensive for anybody to buy.
We normally have more material than we can fit, so we’re having to trim things and drop things, but we also work hard to make sure that there’s a flow and shape to the albums. So, we had a track, Helgoland [that later became the B-side of the single Between Two Worlds] that we both like, but just in terms of the shape of the album, it made more sense not to include it. It was an instrumental and in terms of the narrative of the album, it would have meant overbalancing one part of the album in terms of instrumentals versus vocal tracks. Although you have an affection for the things you’ve created, you also don’t want to make the album less strong by forcing in things that don’t fit.
The other aspect is the packaging because we’re an independent nano label. When I say a record label, I don’t mean anything very commercial. It means my laptop, my very creaking 10-year-old laptop, and stuffing envelopes. It’s not particularly glamorous.
We design all the artwork and the packaging, and it always comes as a pleasant surprise to me with these very complicated-looking Photoshop templates, trying to make sure that the right bit of the booklets, where it all gets glued, overlap so that actually everything lines up. I don’t find that at all intuitive. Mark and I design these together, and then he does a little mock-up with glue and scissors to check that what we’re sending off to the printers isn’t going to come back looking like complete rubbish, hopefully.
Thatโs also an iterative process. I’ll write something and send a draft to Mark, ‘OK, well, there’s a spelling mistake here, and oh, there’s a space before a comma here. You need to get rid of that’, magnifying these things on the screen and trying to find these tiny little things without accidentally making it worse.
The cover of Between Two Worlds, released as a single on 29 January 2025
Nick Holmes Music: Tell me about a track that you have played live a few times, Between Two Worlds.
MG: Itโs by far the least twiddly and complicated and technical song on the album. It’s just me with a piano, plus some strings and a very subtle synth pad. We found it the most difficult one to record. I think people might assume that the more complicated stuff is the hardest, but that isn’t necessarily the case, when something is very exposed, like in that song where it’s quite quiet and the voice doesn’t have anything to hide behind.
To me, it’s quite an emotional song. It’s about somebody being in an MRI scanner. I don’t know if you’re familiar with how MRIs work, but itโs all based on quantum physics. The whole theme of the album relates to quantum physics, the uncertainty principle. It sounds very abstract and unreal, but every day thousands of people are having scans that are affecting their lives with this technology that builds a picture of what’s going on inside your body based on flipping the spin of your hydrogen nuclei. And it just sounds so science fiction. It doesn’t sound like a real thing, but it’s just so routine and we don’t often think about it.
The back story that I had for the song was a person who has had cancer, has had treatment, has had a rough time and is having a scan to find out whether it’s spread or whether the treatmentโs been successful. Itโs the Schrรถdinger’s Cat idea. If you’re in a closed system, and something happens at a random quantum level, can it be said from the outside to have happened, not happened, or both at the same time?
The nature of certain things at the quantum level is extremely counterintuitive. It sounds a bit ridiculous but there does seem to be good evidence for it, although not necessarily on a macroscopic level.
In the context of the song, the whole Cat thing is meant to be metaphorical. I think it was originally used as a criticism of the theory rather than a way of advocating for it. Just because something can happen at the level of a tiny particle doesn’t mean it happens for a person or a cat.
But as an analogy, we’ve got somebody inside a scanner, and these results are being generated on a computer somewhere. Until somebody looks at them, they exist between these two future selves.
I’ve had some experiences, but not quite as terrible as that on a personal level, situations where, depending on how a binary choice goes, that’s outside of your control, your life takes one path or another. So that song was inspired by the awful uncertainty of people in that kind of situation, including far too many family and friends.
We did a version that we really liked, except it was done on a real acoustic piano and it had a very squeaky sustain pedal, so itโs got this really emotional stuff going on and all this ‘squeak, squeak.’ I spent ages trying to edit it out the squeak, which was probably a waste of time because it just made it sound artificial. If you had lots of drums and synthesisers and twiddly guitar solos, you probably could have hidden that I’d removed the squeak.
So I then tried with a home electric piano, which was better, but I probably sing better standing up, and I can’t do that while I’m playing the piano. So I was trying to do the piano part first, then do the vocal on top of it. But then it’s a song that’s meant to be quite fluid rather than just sticking to a metronome. So then I tried to record it, piano first without a metronome, then sitting the vocals on top, but trying to concentrate on remembering what the piano was about to do while singing distracted me from the meaning of the words.
And then we tried it on guitar, and that came close to being used as a guitar and voice version. However, it still didn’t quite feel like what we wanted. Then we tried bigger arrangements, and then it felt like it was overblown. In the final version, some subtle strings are blended in, but it is largely voice and piano.
We went through quite a few different key change options because the lowest parts of the song fit my voice in the morning, and the later parts of the song I can only really do in the evening, but ideally you want it to be more of a one take feel, so we had to find a compromise that was near enough for both bits.
Nick Holmes Music: Tell me about the title track, The Uncertainty Principle.
MG: It starts ominously, and when we play it live, we don’t do much other than the harmonised vocal in that initial section. Then the guitars and bass come in, and it gets a bit more hectic. It ends with a solo that isn’t the usual kind of solo I would do. There are certain things that your fingers are comfortable with, and you can do that kind of thing without really thinking about it. And then there are other things where you write it.
Most of my solos take a more intuitive approach, but this one was more written, choosing specific notes. So that was a bit of a challenge to remember to play the right notes rather than just the usual blues scales.
Nick Holmes Music: Did you create that solo by comping it together from lots of different versions, or did it just flow as you wrote it?
MG: I built up the idea of it, and then it was done in one take. I think the whole melody was in one take.
Nick Holmes Music: Does the new album have a concept or a narrative structure?
MG: It starts with Certainty, which is kind of a scene-setting song about the change in the philosophy of science, when the idea of uncertainty, being an inherent property of reality, became mainstream science. We extrapolate from that into uncertainty in more interpersonal and psychological aspects, which I acknowledge is a scientific liberty, but it’s still the idea that certainty in various fields has been shown to be a less reliable interpretation of reality than is typically assumed.
I think you could argue that there is an increasing understanding of the unreliability of our own introspection in psychology, our certainty about ourselves. Freud gets credited with pioneering an emphasis on our unconscious drives, although he wasn’t the first person to address unconscious influences in human behaviour.
If you look at false memories, it shows how we can be fairly easily manipulated into being pretty certain of things that are demonstrably not true. So uncertainty in its various manifestations is the overriding theme, and the first song introduces that theme.
Everything Changed develops the uncertainty principle theme. Then we have an instrumental, The Ultraviolet Catastrophe, a very dramatic name. It describes emission spectra not fitting the theoretical model of classical Physics. It doesn’t sound very catastrophic. In Physics, I’m a layperson. I have an interest in the history of science, and the philosophy of science but I’m not a Physics expert, but basically at the beginning of the 20th century, you had predictions that were made based on the understanding of Physics at the time, which were completely incompatible with what was being found by experiments, and this was seen to be a catastrophe.
The Cover of Copenhagen, released as a single on 11 June 2024
Then it moves to Copenhagen and we’re moving chronologically as the album goes on. The song is about the disputed conversation during WW2 between Werner Heisenberg, head of the German nuclear programme and his former mentor Niels Bohr.
The next song is the title track The Uncertainty Principle. So we’ve taken the character of Heisenberg from Copenhagen. A few years later, he’s being hunted by Moe Berg, the American spy and former professional baseball player, who was sent to attend a public lecture Heisenberg gave in Zurich at which he was supposed to decide whether to assassinate him, based on how close he was to developing a nuclear bomb.
Quite why a former professional baseball player who then become a spy is in a position to judge from a public lecture whether or not somebody is on the verge of building nuclear bomb, seems to be quite a bizarre thing. But Berg turns up in Zurich with his pistol in his jacket and with his mission, and he decides not to assassinate Heisenberg. We now know in retrospect that they weren’t particularly close to developing the bomb.
Throughout the album we have that recurrent theme of decision making under conditions of uncertainty. All that was influenced by my work in medicine in the past, where I was involved in teaching about misdiagnosis, where these issues of certainty and confidence were a major issue in misdiagnosis. And there are references in the lyrics throughout the album to lyrics of earlier songs on the album for the same characters.
Then we have another instrumental, Cause And Effect (But Not Necessarily In That Order).
Then we move forward a few years to The Think Tank. The song was very loosely inspired by the experiences of Daniel Ellsberg, who worked for a think tank called the RAND Corporation set up in the 1950s. It was a company set up by the American Air Force originally. It was one of the first think tanks where the government employs them to do research on strategic things. And one of their jobs was designing nuclear war planning.
Ellsberg wrote about his experiences of working in that industry, and he described the feeling that it seemed like an ordinary, nice office job in an academic environment. Everyone’s very polite and friendly, very sympathetic and full of empathy. But then, a few minutes later, their job is working out where to target the missiles at particular towns on the other side to maximise casualties.
He described an experience where he suddenly had that sense of being outside of yourself, looking and thinking, what am I doing? What are we doing here? All these very normal, nice people using their very powerful minds to try and plan how to wipe out hundreds of millions of people. And so later on, he became a whistleblower.
The song was very loosely based on his description of his experience of that jarring disconnect of doing something he thought was monstrous in a very normal office environment. This was planning for an atrocity that, fortunately, so far hasn’t happened, but perhaps you can imagine people involved in other atrocities, where within that group they’re empathic to each other, and in other ways act in a way we would consider very normal. It is easy for us to divide the world into us and them, and to accept or even contribute to appalling actions against the people we donโt see as โusโ. The danger of dehumanising others is a recurrent theme in our songwriting.
But that individual song is quite playful sounding, even though the thematic material obviously isn’t very playful; it’s got a kind of retro, rocky type of feel, but not going back all the way to the 50s, which is when the actual song idea is set.
The Cover of One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov) released as a single on 5 April 2025
One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov) is definitely not playful sounding, but it’s maybe got a bit more of an 80’s rock type feel with the twiddly guitars and that kind of production. I know that the story isn’t set in the 80s, but on the other hand the difference in time between now and then is similar to the difference in time when I was growing up versus the events in the stories that we’re talking about. So that sense of sounding like it was made a few decades previously was an aesthetic choice aiming to reflect the setting of the story.
One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov) is about the Soviet submariner who refused to fire a nuclear weapon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That takes us to the end of the historical narrative, and we have a bit of a pause with an instrumental. And then we come to a sort of fictional now with the โbetween two worldsโ of the person in an MRI machine, bringing together an element of the quantum story, plus something much more personal than what’s been in the rest of the album.
Nick Holmes Music: So, you’re going into fiction, but in Between Two Worlds are you also drawing on your past experience and your teaching?
MG: Iโve had a lot of experience unfortunately of cancer-related things in terms of family bereavement and friends, and also having been a cancer doctor, and I have had lots of scans for various things myself, though I’m not claiming I’ve had anything as awful as a lot of people in that kind of situation. But those were the influences that went into that song.
And then the last song is Living with Uncertainty. I know a lot of our thematic content is on the darker side, but we try to end the albums, I’m not saying with a happy ending, but at least with a glimmer of hope, we don’t just make it completely depressing.
Living with Uncertainty is meant to round it off and it does have some lyrical quotes from earlier in the album. It’s about acknowledging that living with uncertainty is an inherent part of life. It’s difficult – it’s very comforting to grab onto something and say, ‘well, I’m certain of this, regardless of any evidence’, but the song aims to argue that we don’t have to think we’ve always got all the answers.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be intellectually curious and trying to find things out. I’m very pro science, but it would be a fundamentally unscientific approach to think that you can always be certain. In most things in life, I suspect if we questioned, why might we be wrong rather than always looking for ways to justify that we are right, we might get along with each other better as a species.
Nick Holmes Music: Does that bring a kind of peace then, if you can reconcile yourself to that?
MG: I would say it’s something I aspire to rather than necessarily achieve. I’m not some kind of entirely calm guru; I’m a very anxious person. If I lived in the way that the song would suggest, I’d probably be happier than if I lived in the way that I usually manage. So, I’m certainly not preaching, saying you should be like me, but I do consciously try to challenge my own assumptions.
It’s very easy to think people are excessively certain of things. But it’s very rare that people apply that to people they agree with, or to themselves. It’s very easy to say – whichever political viewpoint you have, or whichever your preferred genre of music, or any kind of polarising thing – ‘that person is wrong to be really sure of themselves’, but not to apply the same principle to the people you agree with.
“We look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is.” Miles Skarin
A still from The Overview film directed by Miles Skarin
Miles Skarin makes music videos for Steven Wilson and his band Porcupine Tree. He also designs websites such as Stevenwilsonhq with his brother, Rob Skarin. Miles has recently made a full-length animated film to accompany Wilson’s latest solo album, The Overview. The film has been shown during the tour to support the new album, and the track Objects: Meanwhile from the first song on the new album Objects Outlive Us has been released as an official video.
Nick Holmes Music has been given an exclusive insight into the making of the new film with Miles Skarin [MS].
Nick Holmes Music: How did you first meet and work with Steven?
MS: We go back about ten years or so. We originally started out as massive Porcupine Tree fans. We made the fan site starsdie.com. Being big fans of Porcupine Tree, Steven Wilson, and the other progressive rock bands at the time, we made a couple of fan sites. We really wanted to know everything about Steven and Porcupine Tree, and where the music was coming from because we just loved it so much. A lot of these bands hadn’t really taken off on social media at the time.
Miles Skarin
My brother wrote a load of the news articles for the website. I did a lot of the design work. And then one day we had an e-mail that dropped into the inbox. That was Steven saying, “Hey, you guys are doing this really well, do you want to come on board and help us out?” Which was incredible as fans, to have that message just land in your inbox, it was a fantastic day. And so we just jumped at the chance. We redesigned Steven’s website and tried to boost his presence on social media, and we’ve been helping with that ever since.
Nick Holmes Music: Didn’t he say at the time that your website was doing better than his?
MS: I think that was what he said. I think it was just because we were putting way more content onto our website. One of the things that we were thinking about was that every now and again you’d have an album release. And then after the album cycle there would be nothing posted online. Maybe a year, two years later, thereโd be another album and maybe there’d be some press.
Steven always did incredible box sets. There was always a massive wealth of artwork and stuff to complement the music. So it was just a way of keeping fans engaged with Steven, even outside of the album cycles. And also while on tour as well, making sure to post photos and updates from live shows and just build that online community.
We had a forum at one point which we really enjoyed doing because it was bringing fans together and talking about the music that we loved. Through that process we met a few more people in the progressive rock space, record labels like Inside Out Music, Sony and Kscope; Steven was on working with those guys through Blackfield and his own releases at the time.
Nick Holmes Music: How did you feel when you saw your film on a massive screen at BFI IMAX in London at the premiere of The Overview?
MS: Oh wow. It’s just the peak, isn’t it? As a filmmaker, it doesn’t get better than that, surely. It was such an incredible experience, to see your work on a screen that’s the size of a building is something that I didn’t think I’d ever experience. As I was delivering the DCP file you take to give to the cinema to put it on the screen, the projectionist, Michael, took me up into the projection room at the back of the IMAX. And that’s cinema history, because you’ve got all of Christopher Nolan films; these huge spools of film, and they’re just labelled with handwritten notes saying โTenetโ, โInceptionโ and โInterstellar.โ it was just an absolutely wonderful experience to know that my film was going to be on the same screen.
I feel so fortunate and lucky to have to have been able to do it and it’s all thanks to Steven, for creating the music and placing his trust in me to do a film, hopefully that does some sort of justice to the incredible music that he produces.
Nick Holmes Music: Steven himself has often talked about his albums or individual tracks being like a film and even described his last solo album The Harmony Codex as โcinema for the yearsโ Was The Overview always going to be a soundtrack for a film? Is that how he saw it?
MS: I think he always saw it as a piece that was two halves, side one and side two. When we were talking about visuals for it, one of the things that we were talking about was if you’ve got two 20-minute-long songs there isn’t really a concept of singles. So the idea of doing a promotional single didn’t really apply. Of course we went with the Objects Outlive Us section Objects: Meanwhile as a single.
Steven Wilson – Objects Outlive Us: Objects: Meanwhile
MILES SKARIN ON THE SHAPES IN ‘OBJECTS MEANWHILE’
“The shapes in Objects Meanwhile are constellations, connecting the stars into these shapes. The first one we see are constellation shapes based on the real star positions but later on we see this effect in 3D, where we see the connections forming between a โpoint cloudโ of stars.“
From the start, Steven wanted there to be visual material, a film to go across the entire audio, which is such an incredible challenge to have to try and think about, because especially in my style, which is animation that’s a big undertaking. It was always from the start, โlet’s make a film, let’s make a movie for this.โ
Nick Holmes Music: How much scientific research did you do for the film?
MS: I’ve always loved space. I’ve always been aware of space, been aware of missions into space and where we are in space, and galaxies and solar systems. So I think there’s a lot of knowledge I had already accumulated about space. I really wanted to build that kind of idea of scale into the film as well, because that was what we were trying to produce from the start, the idea of perspective.
And so I was looking up scales in numbers of how large planets are on Wikipedia. You can search any star or planet and it will tell you in astronomical units how large that planet or star is. And the numbers get big very quickly. I tried putting all those numbers into my computer software thinking, โthis will be great. I’ll just put all the numbers in and then I can just pull the camera out and that would show me the scale.โ But it starts to glitch physically on the screen. It can’t work out the coordinates for the polygons and the shapes you’re making to exist in a space that large because the computers can’t handle the sheer size of it.
So I was trying to find out as much as I could about space, and trying to keep it very scientific in a way. But as soon as I realised it was going to need a certain level of artistic direction, because the software couldn’t handle it, I had to kind of deviate. But I did definitely try to keep as much of the scientific information there, and I was also looking into different phenomena and objects in space; one of them is called a magnetar, which is these incredibly dense stars which have a very strong magnetic field. And it’s fascinating reading about these objects in space that just don’t seem real. And yet they are out there somewhere. It was very enjoyable doing that.
Sunrise seen from space. Illustration inspired by the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Image by Michael Melchinger. Source Wikimedia Commons
Nick Holmes Music: Tell me about the visual language of the film. How much were you influenced by space films like 2001 or Interstellar, which are fantastic films visually?
MS: Those films are incredible. I would say those films would be my main inspiration and reference points for The Overview. I remember watching Interstellar in the cinema and being absolutely blown away by it, not just visually from how it depicts space, but also the performance of the actors as well, and the emotion, and the effect that time dilation would have on people experiencing it. They did that very, very well.
I guess our challenge was to try and create a new visual language. But the person I have to thank for most of that is Hajo [Mรผller] who had already created all this incredible artwork. It’s so stark and beautiful in the way that he’s used real imagery and texture to create the pieces. I love the large formats images that Hajo produced to really give you that sense of a wide screen or cinematic format. He sent through a load of the artwork quite early in the process. His artwork by the time that I was really working with it was already mostly there and just incredible images. I was looking at that and thinking he’s done it, he’s created the visual language of The Overview and if I can even get a small piece of that into my film then I’ll be happy because I love his work.
Nick Holmes Music: You have said the biggest challenge was to convey the scale of space?
MS: I think the main piece that really shows the scale would be Perspective, the first section of the second half. We’ve got Rotem [Wilson]’s voice, speaking through these incredible numbers such as ten to the power of twelve. But what does that mean? And so one of the things we were talking about was by putting up that number onto the screen, do people know that that’s going to be? The number of zeros that are at the end of these numbers, your brain can’t process it that well. And so when we were thinking of showing the scales, I had to split up those sequences and of course it has to be stylized to the music as well.
But there’s one moment where you can see the sun and you can see the different rings of the orbits of our planets in our solar system. And the camera bounces back and bounces forward quite fast. One of the things that I’m not sure if people quite catch is that our Sun just shrinks by a huge amount and then these absolutely colossal stars that are the next scale up swirl into the frame. So even on a 4K screen, placing these objects next to each other, our Sun suddenly becomes minuscule against these larger stars out there. So it’s actually very difficult to have a reference point when you’re looking at these sorts of visuals in a way that really puts it in perspective for us humans to understand.
The other part of the film that talks about scale is the section called Cosmic Suns of Toil which is midway through the first half. For that we’ve got the camera that just pulls back and goes through all the different layers of space. I wanted to frame our solar system and then what’s outside of our solar system. This is where I was doing my research on what these layers are, if I set a course for the stars and kept going, what objects would I move through. As you get outside of our solar system, there’s The Local Bubble, and The Local Cluster.
It’s amazing to consider that there’s so many other stars and solar systems out there, and then it just keeps going and keeps going until we can’t see any further because light can’t travel. There’s a certain amount of light that it can travel compared to how fast the speed of light is and that’s elapsed. Then eventually at the end of that section, Cosmic Suns of Toil, we reach the edge of the Cosmic Web, which is these, almost like strand filaments of the matter of galaxies.
And then what’s on the outside? We don’t know. So we have a slightly more abstract, stylized section and then we just dive straight down. The thing that I find amazing about that is it’s set up to be relative scale, not absolute scale. So when the camera flies straight back through the Local Cluster of our solar system and then back onto Earth, all of that’s over in about like three or four frames of video. Itโs incredible that we cross so much distance in the space of a millisecond.
The Alien on the moor
Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a bit more detail about the film? It starts off with the alien, saying, โDid you forget I exist now?โ Steven himself has said that’s slightly tongue in cheek. How do you feel about the alien? There’s a beautiful section at the end of Part I, where the alien is floating around in space. What’s your reaction to that alien?
MS: I feel like it’s a great way to introduce where we are right now as a species. I think the key takeaway from the film is that we look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is. I don’t know how many people in the modern age are looking up at space and thinking, “I know what’s up there and I know what that means about where I am.”
MILES SKARIN ON THE DESIGN OF THE ALIEN
“The alien design came from Hajo [Mรผller‘s] artwork… thereโs the image of the alien, so using that as reference we designed it as a 3D modelled character.ย The image in Hajoโs artwork had lots of earthy textures over it, so our first design used only these same materials for quite aย flat,ย matte look. Steven Wilson then suggested that it needed to look more alien and like it had just crawled out of the muddy depths of the moor, and that influenced the more organic looking final design of the alien and the animation at the start of Objects Outlive Us.”
Every time I go outside and walk down to the end of my road at night, and I’ve got stars above me, I’m always looking up and thinking, โthat’s all right there.โ I feel like that’s a great moment to start the record and say we’re not looking at humans this time around. We know we’re looking out at space, but then we are looking back at what that means for the human race.
A teenager with his first telescope
And there with his first telescope A teenager stands full of hormones and hope As he squints at the night, like a painting of light He doesn’t suppose that a black hole implodes In a trillion years from now.
The section Objects Meanwhile, discusses a black hole swallowing an entire galaxy. And when you think, were there people in that galaxy, did they know what was about to happen to them and if so, what would they be thinking? We get wrapped up in things that maybe we should have a little bit more perspective on. If every single human on planet Earth was able to recognise that we are all just trapped on a rock that’s being flung through space, maybe we’d have a different worldview. But the human race is so complex, I’m not going to go there.
Nick Holmes Music: Talking of the human race, The Buddha of The Modern Agefeatures a series of man-made disasters that lead to the destruction of the Earth?
MS: That section is looking at humans and what we’re doing on Earth before we go out into space. We meet the alien, and then after that we are presented with Earth. It’s not meant to be a future version of Earth. It’s meant to be a current version of Earth. I think it’s very easy to look at dystopian scenes of natural disasters, wars and climate change and think this is all set 20 years in the future, and we’ll work it out, we’ll be fine.
But actually, this stuff is happening now. It’s interesting that while all of these events are playing out and things are getting more and more serious, is enough being done by the human race to really set us on a course where we’re not just going to end up in that dystopian world of Interstellar, a global food crisis and dust storms that swirl around the planet, to the point where the planet is not habitable anymore. Are we barrelling towards that future, and is it too late to stop it? Thereโs a lot of those classic narratives tied up in that section.
But of course presenting it in such a stark way on screen and moving through all of those environments is one way of really showing this is the state of things right now. Of course it’s dramatized a little bit with animation, and at the end you’ve got all of the figures stampeding and falling off a cliff. I mean take what you want from that.
The message of that section is that maybe the human race could be doing more, but then of course the human race is massively complex in itself. And there’s a lot of problems we need to work out. And I don’t think I’m the person to be able to offer the answers; but hopefully collectively, we can put differences behind us and actually try to work out these things.
‘And now in her old wedding bed/A lady will dream that her husband is dead/ Of course he’s alive/He’ll be back around five’
Nick Holmes Music: Objects: Meanwhile is a very literal and specific description of small-town England with lyrics by Andy Partridge, contrasted with what’s going on in other galaxies. I was interested to see that you turned it into something almost magical with all these shimmering figures, but it’s not a detailed rendition of the lyrics.
MS: The lyrics tell a story, but I’m very mindful about not just taking the lyrics and putting that into visuals. The lyrics tell such a wonderful story and the way it flows from scene to scene, I felt that had to be the way forward for that section. And by setting these small sequences but made out of stardust and put them into these cosmic-looking scenes, I hopefully created a quite a nice way of showing that.
That was one of the things we were talking about first. Stevenโs note was he wanted to have everyday objects presented as though they were like a nebula or a galaxy out in space. So I was trying to build different ways of showing that. We had a Nebula Generator [which digital artists use to create configurable space nebula effects]. I could put a 3D model into it, and then it would render it as a galaxy or a nebula out in space.
Her shopping bag broke sending eggs and flour crashing Down to the ground, just like star clusters smashing.
And I wanted there to be moments like the opening where the shopping bag falls and then the flour spreads out and there’s stars inside of that. I really wanted it to look like we were seeing like the birth of a galaxy or the birth of stars or something like that, where an event on Earth has a parallel to events out in space, visually at least.
Nick Holmes Music: There are some very abstract instrumental sections on The Overview. How did you decide to illustrate those, because there are no stories in those sections?
MS: A lot of the designs come from Hajoโs artwork. There are various sections and we wanted to have a journey, especially in the section, where we’ve got Randy McStine’s fantastic guitar solo, just after the Ark sequence where we go into an alien planet and we see the ghost on the moor again. For that sequence, I really wanted to put the viewer into that environment. And the idea there is that we had launched ourselves towards the end of the galaxy into the end of the universe, and now we’re flying back and landing on some other planet somewhere else. That was definitely trying to bring in as many of the colourful possibilities that alien worlds could have and just trying to realise that, and trying to show what it could look like.
I think a lot of these things were so influenced by films that we’ve seen already and designs that have been made, but also there’s probably limits to what we can imagine these alien worlds would look like because we are only influenced by what we see directly around us.
Nick Holmes Music: And in Perspective where Rotem Wilsonโs spoken words provide all the perspectives of sizes of planets and galaxies, how much were you drawing on real images and how much was your imagination?
MS: The James Webb Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope have been taking some absolutely fantastic images which are available online where artists can use them. That was a massive resource to be able to look at and get inspiration from.
But for all of the scenes in โPerspectiveโ, especially the ones where we’re going through nebulas and the larger cosmic objects, what I’m doing there is creating what is called a Pyro simulation which creates these kind of smoke effects. And that is driven off images and source material that’s taken from these incredible pictures of space.
And because they’re only two-dimensional images that we’ve got from these telescopes, what I wanted to be able to do is create that, but in a 3D space so I can fly a camera through it and we can see there’s some depth to it. I’m sure there’s probably some very technical way we could scientifically accurately do that. But imagine there’s just a slice of the photo or the image of that galaxy or that nebula, and then smoke starts to rise from both sides of that piece of paper that then creates this 3D object that I can then fly a camera into. I can then scatter stars inside of that as tiny little spheres that can then emit light, and that creates the effect of this 3D nebula.
Nick Holmes Music: Iโm going to ask a slightly less serious question now, but I have to say when I saw Steven as an astronaut, which obviously he was very excited about, I had this image of Buzz Lightyear.
MS: Yes! [laughs] One of the early notes that Steven gave me was that we didn’t want it to almost come across like an action figure, floating in space; but the actual range of motion you get in those space suits, there is only a certain amount of movement that you can do in zero gravity. But we added a little bit more movement into the character to try and hopefully reduce any sort of, ‘Look, it’s Buzz Lightyear floating out in space.’
That was really good fun. I think the idea for came from Steven – looking across the Earth initially and then just being pulled across time and space and then experiencing the entirety of everything in a flowing strand across the screen, and what that’s meant to represent is the passage of time in this thin thread that’s going across space. Steven falls into that thread and then visits the earth and all these different places and then falls in and out of that in space, which is quite disorientating in a way for him.
Nick Holmes Music: Steven has been quite open about his fear of flying, but has also said that on balance, he probably would go into space given the opportunity. Would you go into space if you had the chance?
MS: I would probably share his fear of flying in a way, because I guess I think about it too much. You’re being rocketed in a tiny little capsule across the sky. But we’ve got ways of managing it, and everything’s tested. And when we know that the technology works, it’s amazing. We’ve had so many years of space exploration that it’s now coming to a point where weโve commercial astronauts going up and experiencing space. You don’t have to be a NASA-trained astronaut, you need a lot of money at the moment, but maybe one day it will be a point where we can maybe think about doing that, and maybe going on a trip to the moon won’t be something out of The Jetsons. It would be achievable for most people and a regular occurrence.
To answer your question, I think I’d have to think very carefully about whether I did it or not. I guess I like having my feet on solid ground. But I think if I were given the opportunity, I don’t think I’d be able to pass it up, because not many people get to experience something like that. So I probably would be saying yes.
Nick Holmes Music: The final section, ‘Permanence,’ with Theo Travisโ beautifulsaxophone solo. Can you describe what’s happening visually there? Is there a green shoot of hope?
MS: At the end, we’ve just had the Infinity Measured in Moments section, which is such a huge crescendo to the piece. There’s so much going on in that section and everything’s building up, and then we get this very soft end to the film where we’re floating in space.
After the visual onslaught of the ending section, because it is quite a lot and it is intended to make the viewer feel dizzy, it is blurry in sections where it is difficult to focus on it. That section was meant to be a ride through space where we can really just take a moment to consider the frame and see this asteroid that we’re flying down onto, and in the background of that scene, we have a huge black hole. And so we’re just one of the rocks that’s orbiting this black hole. Inevitably, these rocks are going to be sucked into that black hole and shredded.
And then as we reach the surface, we have this green shoot of life appearing in a place where it really shouldn’t. We really wanted to have some sort of ending where it wasn’t all about space as a cold, dark place, where it’s about death and nothing exists out there. I would like to think that there is more life out there and that the chances of there being life are quite high, especially when you look at how many solar systems and planets are out there. We wanted to leave it with somewhat of a positive view after diving into the darker aspects of it.
Nick Holmes Music: It’s also a very Steven Wilson way to end an album, isn’t it? So many of his albums with Porcupine Tree and his solo albums end on a gentle, quiet track rather than in a very loud climax. Is it a technique which he employs a lot?
MS: Well, thereโs always been the really big epic tracks at the end of Steven Wilson albums, but yes, it’s going in the opposite direction and putting something quiet has been very effective as well. It just feels like you’ve got that moment to just sit back and take in what you’ve just heard.
Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a more general question? Are you a musician? Because watching it again, it struck me how clever the editing is, and how beautifully it matches the pace, the rhythm, and the emotion as well. But from a technical point of view you’re matching the music really well. Where does that come from in your background?
MS: When I was at school, I took music, but mainly music technology and production rather than a classical musical education. I was a kid who was trying to learn as much as I could on guitar, but I found all of the photography, video production, and animation side, and that’s what I ended up doing more music production than guitar. But I still play from time to time, and I still want to try and do something musically because I’ve been so fortunate to work with a lot of my musical heroes.
At some point, maybe I’ll decide to give music another shot. But it’s interesting you mentioned that, because I spent a lot of time listening through the music and finding the moments and following the music, and a lot of the time I find that as a filmmaker, you normally have to build your narrative structure, but what I’ve found is that the musicians have done that job for me. They’ve done the hard job of working out the journey that they’re taking the listener on; all I’m doing is just putting visuals to that story that they’ve already produced. As long as I can follow where the music is going and the moods and the styles of it, then I guess that’s all I need to know musically.
Nick Holmes Music: How would you sum up the narrative of The Overview?
MS: I think the main thing with The Overview, as Steven will say as well, is the idea of having perspective on what we’re doing and our legacy on Earth. What if an alien was looking down at Earth, what would they see and what would they think about us and the way that we live?
It’s a story of sustainability and trying to really protect the home that we all have and trying to forge a path towards being a sustainable human race where we’re able to live in harmony with the planet. A lot of people have had that same dream. But we have to make that align with the way that civilization has to run; we’re going to be consuming a certain number of resources for the human race to exist.
But I think that as long as decisions are being made, we’re consuming the right resources in terms of animals, forests that we’re cutting down, what we’re putting in the oceans. It’s an environmental message, but also an animal rights message as well, where I think that humans, hopefully at some point in time, can look at our impacts on the world and hopefully see a nicer world around us.
Nick Holmes Music: But I think, as you’ve touched on, it’s also a very human message about perspective, isn’t it?
MS: Yes, definitely that. We all get wrapped up in our own lives and everything can feel very overwhelming. You look at the news these days and it’s difficult to think we’re heading in the right direction. We are all just floating on a rock that’s flying through space. And as long as we can just be nice to each other – and I know that’s quite a naive thing to say – but maybe that is the way that we have to look at the world, to take each problem as it comes and make the most empathetic response where we’re understanding our fellow humans on the planet, but also our fellow species on the planet, looking at animals and making sure that we’re providing the best world for us all to live in.
I feel like these days we have the technology to make a better world. And so it saddens me when I see that decisions are being made that are not maybe for the greater good of the planet, and it’s more just to make a bit more money, which only benefits a certain few.
I think there’s a lot of complexity in the human race, but I think that there’s definitely a message in The Overview, which is perspective; let’s try and forge a good path forward.
Nick Holmes Music: Is there anything you would like to add?
MS: I should also mention that I was assisted by my good friend Jack Hubbard, who helped me out with a lot of the more technical visual effects. We both worked on the film, and we were both there at the BFI IMAX show, and it was just an amazing thing to be able to share that experience with someone who has supported me massively over the years on pretty much every single project.
Jack is a visual effects artist who works at Framestore, one of the largest visual effects houses in London. He’s a very good friend and heโs always up for a challenge and he was amazing in answering a lot of the more technical visual effects questions because he uses a more advanced 3D software than I do.
Part of the process of putting it into the cinema is that you have to follow a certain amount of spec and quality control to be able to put it in that sort of environment. And so a lot of what I’ve been learning about in terms of video production and filmmaking is how to produce content to that kind of high-resolution, high-quality scale, and of course Steven works with Dolby Atmos and all of the high-end audio standard. So throughout the production of The Overview, I was really keen to bring that kind of high res, high end workflow towards the visuals as well.
Jack works in high end visual effects for TV, film, and advertising. I try to bring as many of those workflows from these high-end visual effects productions into the work that I do, which is much smaller scale, but it’s amazing what anyone can now access on YouTube software that’s freely available. And you can just follow these same standards and quality processes that feature films go through.
We had a test day at the Dolby showroom in London, where we screened the first version of the film and listened to it back in the Atmos mix. And it was fascinating talking to them about the Dolby Vision and the Dolby Atmos standards that they produce, the high-end HDR imagery. And then also the high-resolution surround audio.
Maybe that’s next on my list of things to do, to try and work out how I produce the highest quality image possible. I know that if you’ve got a Dolby Vision capable TV, there is a way that we could start to create a version of The Overview so that future projects could be Dolby Atmos, but also Dolby Vision as well. I’d love that.
Nick Holmes Music: Thank you very much for your time, and for spending so long talking to me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.All stills from the film provided courtesy of Miles Skarin, with thanks.
***** Steven Wilson’s Epic Return to Solo Performance
Steven Wilson last performed as a live solo act in England seven years ago at the Royal Albert Hall in London, in a series of three concerts, one of which was later released as the concert film Home Invasion. That tour supported his fifth studio album, To the Bone, released in 2017. Since then, he has released three solo albums: The Future Bites (2021), The Harmony Codex (2023) and The Overview, released earlier this year. He tried twice to tour The Future Bites, but was twice thwarted by COVID-19.
In the meantime, to the surprise of many, he returned in 2022 with a new Porcupine Tree studio album, Closure/Continuation. Recent tours have been in support of that album โ he played at Wembley Arena in London in late 2022, and at Castlefield Bowl in Manchester the following summer. He now has two touring bands: Porcupine Tree with Gavin Harrison on drums, Richard Barbieri on keyboards and Nate Navarro on bass; his solo band with Craig Blundell on drums, Nick Beggs on bass, and Adam Holzman on keyboards. The only common denominator, apart from Wilson himself, is the versatile American guitarist and backing vocalist Randy McStine.
Wilson did a short solo performance of tracks from The Harmony Codex at EartH in Hackney to mark the release of that album, but apart from that, this concert marks his return to his home town to play a solo gig. And he seems very happy to be home. Modestly describing himself as the worst musician in his band (if thatโs true, thatโs only because heโs surrounded by a group of phenomenal musicians), he acts as lead vocalist, and sometimes guitar and keyboard player. At other times, heโs more like the leader of a jazz band, bringing the other musicians in and at one point joining Beggs in a forensic but benign examination of Blundellโs drumming.
And the jazz analogy doesnโt end there. We are lucky enough to see the jazz saxophonist, flautist and regular Wilson collaborator Theo Travis performing for one night only (โno expense spent’ quips Wilson) on two songs from Grace For Drowning: No Part of Me and Remainder the Black Dog. His playing is as inventive as it was in the stunning solo set he did at the Prog the Forest festival last December. He also plays in Permanence, the final section of The Overview, one of those gorgeous, profoundly contemplative songs with which Wilson has often ended his albums โ Collapse the Light into Earth from Porcupine Treeโs In Absentia (2002) springs to mind. The latter song contemplates the aftermath of 9/11, while the former considers whether there may be green shoots of life on other planets or in other galaxies after mankind has destroyed the Earth; both are weighty subjects.
The jazz theme of the music continues into Adam Holzmanโs keyboard playing. He shows his full jazz pedigree tonight (he was Miles Davisโs Music Director in the mid-to late 1980s), with lovely Fender Rhodes chords, exhilarating Moog runs, as well as rich Mellotron harmonies for the prog purists. Nick Beggs plays upright jazz bass on a couple of songs, and Craig Blundellโs drumming is fiercely syncopated, with some jazzy cymbal work. He drives the band with intense snare beats, and the physicality is visceral. Itโs high but deserved praise to say that he has become to Wilsonโs solo band what drummer Gavin Harrison has become to Porcupine Tree. Both drummers are amazing.
The concert begins with a complete performance of the two-part new album, The Overview. Projected behind the band is Miles Skarinโs stunning new film, which explores and illuminates the themes of the album. Seeing it at the IMAX launch in London revealed its pristine quality, but with strong concert lights and dry ice in front of it, the animated film seems to take on an almost 3-D quality. Having a live band playing in front of it makes this a truly immersive experience, of which both Wilson and Skarin can be justly proud. The pristine visuals are matched by the clarity of the live sound, which is superb throughout the gig.
From the opening few bars, itโs clear that Wilson is in excellent voice; his falsetto on the words โI incline myself to spaceโ is as powerful as it has ever been live. Three hours later, in the encores, his voice is as strong as ever. Instrumentally, despite his protestations, he is a powerful player. Itโs great to see him showcasing his skills on the PRS guitars, which are beloved by his prog fans for their mellow and versatile tones. McStine matches his virtuosity, the two of them coming onto the apron of the stage to duet close to the audience.
Beggs is on stunning form too. The opening of Luminol from The Raven That Refused to Sing reminds us of the robust virtuosity and rhythmic precision of his playing. His sound is reminiscent of Chris Squire, the bedrock on which the sound of Yes was built for so many years. The song is an opportunity for Wilson and McStine to join Beggs in mellifluous three-part harmonies. It also showcases another jazzy element of tonightโs band: an extended improvisation at the end of the song. Beggs also shines in the driving instrumental Vermillioncore from the EP 4+1โ2 . But perhaps the biggest surprise is that he and drummer Blundell perform the only Porcupine Tree song of the evening, Dislocated Day (from the early space-rock LP The Sky Moves Sideways) in such a blisteringly funky version.
Earlier, space rock is represented in a very different way, with Wilson playing analogue synths, spreading himself from one bank of synths to another like Rick Wakeman without the cape. His wife Rotem joins him on an evocative spoken word description of the Earth viewed from space, tying in neatly with the view of Earth from space described in the Overview Effect, in which astronauts are emotionally and sometimes spiritually affected when viewing the Earth from space.
This is a resolutely proggy evening. Itโs fascinating to speculate what the abandoned tour for The Future Bites would have been like, with its much more electronic sound, but only one song has survived the Pandemic into this set list, King Ghost. Wilson graciously accepts that some members of the audience may be there with friends or family who are less prog-minded. His concession to them is to play the rocky ballad, What Life Brings (from The Harmony Codex), which he announces is only four minutes long.
But Prog Widows and others who like short songs shouldnโt be lulled into a false sense of security. Wilson announces at the end of the concert that there will be two encores, but one of them is fifteen minutes long. This is the prog epic Ancestral from Hand. Cannot. Erase. which is performed here in an uplifting version. On earlier tour dates, Wilson ended with an emotional song, Pariah from To the Bone. Tonight, he chooses an equally emotional song, the title track from The Raven, with Jess Cope’s powerful video behind him.
The audience pays rapt attention throughout the concert, aided by Wilsonโs insistence that phones shouldnโt be used for photos or videos, which is largely respected. So we live in the moment, revelling in the joy of musicians playing at the very pinnacle of their game. It’s a privilege to be here.
The standing ovation at the end of the gig.
This post was updated on Thursday 15 May 2025 to add Theo Travis’s name,ย and to credit Jess Cope for the video of TheRaven That Refused to Sing
This post was further updated on 13 September 2025 to confirm that Adam Holzman worked with Miles Davis in the mid-to late 1980s, not the 1990s as previously stated
Steven Wilsonโs latest album, The Overview, is inspired by the emotional and sometimes spiritual experience that astronauts have described when they look back at the Earth from space, known as โThe Overview Effectโ. This article reflects on Wilson’s space songs from his previous solo work. For an analysis of the space songs he wrote for his band Porcupine Tree, click here.
The cover of Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015)
Happy Returns (Hand. Cannot. Erase. 2015)
Hand. Cannot. Erase, Wilson’s fourth solo album, was released in 2015. The concept is based on the true story of the life of Joyce Carol Vincent and the grim circumstances of her death. Joyce was found in her London flat in January 2006. She had been dead for nearly three years. Her body was only discovered when bailiffs broke in to recover rent arrears.
As the protagonist for his album, Wilson created an isolated character, who is never named, loosely based on the story. For the Deluxe Edition of the album, he created a whole back story for his character. The book provides unique and realistic artefacts from the protagonist’s life, beautifully recreated, including a sketchbook, newspaper cuttings, a postcard, a birth certificate, a letter, a handwritten mixtape cover and her diary. The book also contains entries from her Blog. In her Blog, the protagonist mentions ‘the Visitors’ several times. It’s unclear whether they are real, or figments of her imagination. They may be aliens from outer space.
The words of the song, the penultimate track on the album, come from a letter the protagonist wrote to her brother, dated 22 December 2014, a physical copy of which can be found in the Deluxe Edition book, handwritten in blue ink on lined paper. In a blog dated the day before, she describes her relationship with him, โI barely know my brother. I know he has a wife and two children, but I have no idea if heโs happy or what is important to him.โ Poignantly, she refers to the annual Christmas card she has just received from him and the invitation to visit that she knows she wonโt take up, โfor some reason this time it made me cry.โ Perhaps this is because she now realises she will never see him again.
The end of the album is ambiguous. The letter and the song both end with the words, โIโm feeling kind of drowsy now/So Iโll finish this tomorrow.โ This could be a note of hope, a suggestion that her life will continue the next day. Her words, โI bet you thought that I was dead but Iโm still hereโ contrast with Joyce Carol Vincentโs tragic death. But on Twitter Wilson said, โJust like Joyce wrapping Christmas presents on the evening she died, things left unfinished.โ
So what happens next? In contrast with the words in the letter, in her final blog dated 28 February 2015 her last words are, โI told them Iโm ready, itโs time to leave now.โ Presumably, โtheyโ are the visitors, and she is leaving with them. The photos in the blog show strange lights in the sky, like those from an alien spacecraft. As Wilson said cryptically on Twitter, โYou can make up your own mind where the character goes.โ
Wilsonโs wordless vocalising at the start is haunting. Although the song is seen entirely from the protagonistโs point of view – it’s her letter – Wilson sings the words rather than using a female vocalist. The song begins with a simple, singer-songwriter feel which matches the thoughtful approach of the letter. Wilson sings like a contemporary folk singer, his voice close-miked and honest, with more wordless vocalising at the end of the vocal section, โdoo doo doo…โ The song becomes subtly epic, as instruments surround Wilsonโs voice, ending with a lovely but relatively subdued guitar solo from Guthrie Govan. The contrast between the relatively epic instrumentation and the raw solo voice continues the feeling of ambiguity; are we witnessing the tragic ending of a human story, or a new beginning? The song ends with an unfinished feel, like the letter itself.
โAscendant Here On…โ (Hand. Cannot. Erase. 2015)
On Twitter, Wilson said โAscendant Here On…โ is an almost anagram of Hand Cannot Erase.โ Heโs right โ there’s a missing letter โAโ but the rest of the letters are all used. Itโs strange to end the album with an instrumental, but as Wilson said, โIt’s a reprise of the theme from Happy Returns arranged for piano and the boy choristers.โ The title of this instrumental seems to refer to the protagonist ascending into another dimension, or it could be a metaphor for a new, happier state (death?) into which she is passing. Cleverly, Wilson doesn’t divide his listeners.
Those who like stories of aliens from space can follow that story, and those who prefer poetic metaphors will also be satisfied. Some may like to enjoy the ambiguity and hold both options in their mind at the same time.
The Cover of To the Bone (2017)
Nowhere Now (To the Bone, 2017)
The song’s title echoes the Porcupine Tree song Arriving Somewhere But Not Here (Deadwing, 2005).
We begin the song โsix feet undergroundโ; humankind has lost its way, so we might as well be dead and buried. On Earth (or under it) we are moving backwards at the speed of sound, wasting our lives, failing to learn. Love no longer has any meaning. This contrasts with the chorus in which the protagonist (a single individual rather than the collective โweโ of the verses) floats in space feeling a โrushโ of the love that no longer exists on Earth. Looking down at Planet Earth, it now appears โluminousโ, the same joyous adjective that is used to describe the moon in the song Permanating, which appears later on the album.
‘Here above the clouds, I am free of all the crowds And I float above the stars, and I feel the rush of love Looking down at Earth, it is luminous observed‘
Ken Grady of Upside Adelaide perceptively suggested to Wilson that there was a possible link between this song and David Bowieโs Space Oddity (1969), which Wilson played live as a tribute to Bowie, who died in January 2016. Wilson reacted initially with slight surprise to Gradyโs suggestion, but soon accepted that he was right, as both songs share โa sense of someone drifting high above the Earth, and seeing it as a beautiful thing far removed from all the politics and terrorism.โ
The video was filmed by Lasse Hoile at the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, a collection of over 60 radio telescopes in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Earlier in 2025, Wilson visited the site where the European Southern Observatory is building the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope).
The Cover of The Harmony Codex (2023)
The Harmony Codex (The Harmony Codex, 2023)
The album is based on Wilson’s short story, The Harmony Codex, which was published in his 2022 book Limited Edition of One. The story describes a visit made by Harmony (a 12-year-old girl) and her brother Jamie (16) to visit their father in the tower block where he works in Whitechapel, East London. They ascend the skyscraper to the 38th floor, but before they can meet their father thereโs an explosion. They try to escape the building and get trapped on an apparently endless staircase. At the end of the story, Jamie is in space, looking back down on the Earth towards London, but also across endless stars and galaxies.
On the album’s title track, Wilson takes Jamie’s thoughts, which are seen from a third-person point of view in the story, and puts them in the first person, spoken on the track by his wife, Rotem,
‘It seems Iโm miles above the surface of the Earth I can see across the whole of London and beyond Lights from a thousand cities… A trillion stars in a billion galaxies‘
The theme of the enormity of space is picked up again by Rotem’s spoken words at the beginning of the title track of The Overview, which describe the relative sizes of objects in space,
‘Size beyond one megametre Ten to the power of six Ganymede, Callisto Wolf 359…’
Them No. 1(Tape Experiments 1985/1986, 2010)
This begins with an electronic recreation of the sound of a helicopter or an alien spaceship (perhaps referred to by the word โThemโ in the title). With its eerie, slow synths, it could be the theme tune to a horror film. Itโs given a touch of the avant-garde with โrandom radio transmissions.โ
A lovely instrumental, featuring koto playing from Michiyo Yagi, who also plays on the title track of Insurgentes, and lively bass-playing from Tony Levin. The melody at about 1:00 is a pre-echo of the opening of the verse melody of Dignity on Porcupine Treeโs 2022 album Closure/Continuation. The guitar solos, probably played on a PRS (Paul Reed Smith) guitar, have a warm, honeyed sound.
Space Oddity(B side to Happiness III single, 2016)
Like most people of his generation (he was born in 1967), Wilson grew up listening to David Bowie. He first heard Bowie’s music in 1973, when he was given a copy of Bowie’s novelty single The Laughing Gnome. Bowie died on Sunday 10 January 2016, at the age of 69, just after the release of his final album Blackstar. Wilson and the rest of the world woke up the following morning to hear the sad news.
It felt very surreal to wake up this morning into a world that no longer has David Bowie in it. I canโt imagine there is any rock or pop musician on earth that hasnโt been influenced by Bowie, either directly or indirectly, and Iโm no exception.
Steven Wilson, 11th January 2016
Bowie wrote several songs on a space theme, including Life on Mars, Starman, Ashes to Ashes, Moonage Daydream and Hallo Spaceboy. As a tribute to Bowie, Steven Wilson performed Space Oddity at the Hammersmith Apollo on 27 January 2016. Wilson was joined on stage by Ninet Tayeb, who duetted with him on the vocals. It’s a simple, heartfelt version of one of the greatest space songs ever. The live recording was released as the B-side of the 7-inch single Happiness III on 14 October 2016.
How Big the Space (Single, 2018)
This song was released as a 12-inch single for Record Store Day on 21 April 2018. In 2017, Wilson told Anil Prasad of Innerviews.org it didnโt fit the To The Bone album because itโs a โ60s psychedelic-sounding song.โ The lyrics are by Andy Partridge of the English rock band XTC, who also wrote the words for the title track of To The Bone.
Partridge contributed lyrics to Objects Outlive Us on The Overview, which contrast the mundane nature of life here on Earth with what is happening in space, such as,
And there, in an ordinary street A car isn’t where it would normally be The driver in tears, ’bout his payment arrears Still, nobody hears whะตn a sun disappears In a galaxy afar
The lyrics of How Big the Space are a beautifully poetic description of the end of a relationship, superbly contrasting the mundane, โI think Iโll change the locks’, with the existential, using a cleverly-worked space metaphor,
How big the space inside an empty heart How brave the face when orbits pull apart How black the hole where universes fade How vast the bed where both of us once laid
NB not all songs mentioned are availabe on streaming services
Sources
Twitter (now X) Ken Grady, INTERVIEW: STEVEN WILSON, PROGRESSIVE ROCKโS BIGGEST STAR TALKS ABOUT TRUTH, TOURING AND โTO THE BONEโ (Upside Adelaide September 2018)โฏ Anil Prasad, Perceptions of Reality (Innerviews.org 2017)โฏ
For Part I of Steven Wilsonโs Space Songs: The Procupine Tree Years, click here
Lyrically I arrived at a point where I was no longer interested in writing about abstract concepts, like war, religion, space… etc. These are very personal and emotionally raw songs.
Steven Wilson, on Porcupine Tree’s Lightbulb Sun (2000)
Steven Wilson’s latest album, The Overview, is inspired by the emotional and sometimes spiritual experience that astronauts have described when they look back at the Earth from space, known as ‘The Overview Effect’. Wilson often used space as a theme, particularly in the early years of Porcupine Tree, when the band was essentially a solo project. But on later Porcupine Tree albums, from Lightbulb Sun (2000) onwards, Wilson’s lyrical preoccupations turned first towards the profoundly personal on that album, and then to his broader concerns about modern society on later albums from In Absentia (2002) to The Incident (2009). The band then went on hiatus for over ten years while Wilson launched his successful solo career. This article reflects on Porcupine Tree’s space songs, album by album, and track by track. For Part II: The solo years, click here.
The cover of On the Sunday of Life (1992)
Space Transmission (On the Sunday of Life, 1992)
This is not really a song, but more a message from outer space. It’s a genuinely creepy monologue, uttered by a creature thatโs been trapped on another planet, โfor many eonsโ by โYou know whoโ, in complete darkness since going blind or โsince the sun exploded fourteen centuries agoโ. It could have come from a Doctor Who episode โ itโs not difficult to imagine the songโs monster causing children to hide behind the sofa. We know nothing about โHe who keeps me hereโ, but he regards himself as a competitor to God, so is apparently a supreme being. The protagonist appears to be a creature with โscalesโ, whose threats of revenge upon returning to Earth are as dark as the black liquid that seeps uncontrollably from its mouth.
It Will Rain for a Million Years(On the Sunday of Life, 1992)
This track is mainly instrumental; the lyrics are spoken, rather than sung. The protagonist is leaving Earth, presumably because a war or natural disaster has left the planet in such a dystopian state that the rain will never stop. Heโs leaving in a spaceship, and in the opening lines, there are echoes of the David Bowie persona, Major Tom (from Space Oddity and others),
โI locked myself inside the capsule And watched the planet slowly turning blue.โ
Bowieโs song describes the lonely Major Tom as being in a โcapsuleโ, and the protagonists of both songs observe that planet Earth looks โblueโ. The two songs share a sense of melancholy due to the inability to return to Earth, though for different reasons. The protagonist in the Porcupine Tree song will visit โworlds of crystal beautyโ but will never find answers, suggesting that his quest is existential rather than simply an escape from a ruined planet,
‘I’ve seen the past, I’ve seen the future Beyond dimension and into empty space Finding questions, never answers Living time behind another face.’
The cover of The Sky Moves Sideways 1994
The Sky Moves Sideways Phase 1: II. I Find That Iโm Not There (The Sky Moves Sideways 1993)
This is the only section of the largely instrumental track The Sky Moves Sideways (from the 19994 album of the same name) that includes lyrics. It has a lovely, desolate feel, as the protagonist seems to disappear; first going off the map, before not being there at all. The lyrics blend the surreal and the poetic, suggesting space travel while evoking a journey to the inner consciousness. The vocals possess a contemplative introspection, enhanced by the use of echo, and a desperate, almost angry tone of despair.
‘We lost the skyline We stepped right off the map Drifted into blank space And let the clocks relapse.’
Moonloop (The Sky Moves Sideways 1993)
Wilson was inspired to record a song about the Moon when, in an Oxfam shop, he found a vinyl copy of the spoken word recording, Man On The Moon, narrated by Walter Cronkite, the American broadcaster who anchored CBS Evening News for nearly twenty years. This instrumental track was recorded in July 1995, 26 years after the Apollo 11 Moon landing. In July 1969, as the Moon landing took place, Pink Floyd were in a television studio, improvising another Moon-themed piece. Floyd guitarist, David Gilmour, wrote in The Guardian in July 2009,
โThey were broadcasting the Moon landing, and they thought that to provide a bit of a break, they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called โMoonheadโ โ itโs a nice, atmospheric, spacey, 12-bar bluesโ.
The sample near the end of Moonloop is a NASA recording of the Apollo 11 Astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, at Tranquility [sic] Base on the Moon, communicating by radio with Bruce McCandless, an astronaut at Mission Control in Houston. In a heavily edited recording, Neil Armstrong can be heard climbing down the Lunar Module ladder, describing the Moonโs surface as he sets foot on it. It was at this point that he made his most famous quote, which is not present in the sample, โThatโs one small step for man; one giant leap for mankindโ
The track begins with what could be the sound of an ocean on the Moon. Early astronomers thought the sea of tranquillity, or Mare Tranquillitatis, was actually a sea, though closer inspection revealed it to be a dry plain created by ancient volcanic eruptions. Wilsonโs distorted guitar provides space-rock stylings until around fifteen minutes in, when the song reaches a stasis point, and the above-quoted samples appear. The song has a trance-like, hypnotic feel, making it part of the space rock that began in the 1960s, with bands like Gong and Hawkwind, and resurfaced in the 1990s.
The cover of the Moonloop EP (1994)
Stars Die (Moonloop EP 1994)
The concept of stars dying suggests that, in the long term, everything dies; that humanity is fragile and ephemeral, and that the Earth itself will eventually perish,
โTree cracked And mountain cried Bridges broke And window sighed.โ
The sample at around 2:30 is of President Richard Nixon speaking from the White House Oval Office to the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin when they were on the Moon. In what he describes as โthe most historic telephone call ever madeโ, the President says the astronautsโ achievements have inspired mankind to โredouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to Earthโ. Perhaps the Moon mission brought hope. But the song itself doesnโt suggest peace and tranquillity will come to Earth. It ends with an image of humanity blasting off into space โ astronauts in โhypersleepโ, the deep coma-like sleep thatโs essential for long-distance space travel.
The cover of Stupid Dream (1999)
A Smart Kid (Stupid Dream, 1999)
A quietly melancholy song about the infinite loneliness suffered by the protagonist, the last remaining human being stranded on planet Earth after what seems to have been a five-year nuclear winter. After โa chemical harvest was sownโ, nuclear clouds obscure the sun. It appears there was a nuclear war, which the protagonist โmust have wonโ: making the song title profoundly ironic. He has won an empty victory.
The nuclear war theme is related to Radioactive Toy (from On the Sunday of Life), in which the โtoyโ grants โthe freedom to destroyโ. It would perhaps be foolish to describe Robert Oppenheimer โ credited as the โfather of the atomic bombโ โ as merely a โsmart kidโ like the songโs protagonist. The reality is much more subtle, but Oppenheimer later did express regret about the โsinโ that he and other physicists had committed: that once the knowledge that created the atomic bomb had been gained, it could never be lost again.
In A Smart Kid, the protagonist is waiting for an alien spaceship to arrive to rescue him from Earth. He will wait โuntil the sky is blueโ. The implication is that it will never be blue again.
‘A spaceship from another star They ask me where all the people are What can I tell them? I tell them I’m the only one There was a war but I must’ve won Please, take me with you.’
The Cover of Lightbulb Sun (2000)
Last Chance To Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled (Lightbulb Sun, 2000)
The first part of this song is called โWinding Shot (Summer 1981)โ, part of the more personal lyrical themes Wilson began writing songs about on Lightbulb Sun. It refers to the time when childhood turns into adolescence. In the summer of 1981, Wilson was thirteen and living in Hemel Hempstead, an English town about 24 miles northwest of London. Winding Shot is the name of a small cul-de-sac off Spring Lane in Hemel Hempstead. The nostalgia in the song is tinged with regret as summer comes to an end,
โSummer went away And we just werenโt the same.โ
This part of the song ends with his childhood friend kissing him on the lips, as they reach that strange limbo of adolescence, suspended between childhood and adulthood; โNot grown-ups but not kidsโ. A rhythmic acoustic riff drives a short bridge, leading to an instrumental passage from which the song title is derived.
The title could convey an environmental message, something thatโs become even more critical in the two decades since the song was written. But Wilson told Joakim Jahlmar of DPRP.net in March 2001 that, Last Chance To Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled is not about ecology. It takes its title from the edited transcript of a videotape dated 29 September 1996, from the leader of the Heavenโs Gate religious cult, who called himself Do (real name: Marshall Applewhite).
‘This planet is about to be recycled, refurbished, started over. That doesnโt mean itโs going to be destroyed; it doesnโt mean itโs the end of the world. And whether or not you believe that this civilization is going to be recycled or refurbished is up to you. Now, the purpose of this tape is to warn you that this is about to happen and that itโs going to happen very soon. At the End of the Age, the planet is wiped cleanโฆ refurbishedโฆ rejuvenated.‘
On 22 March 1997, Heavenโs Gate published a macabre press release,
โHEAVENโS GATE โAway Teamโ Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space
By the time you receive this, weโll be gone โ several dozen of us. We came from the Level Above Human in distant space, and we have now exited the bodies that we were wearing for our earthly task, to return to the world from whence we came โ task completed.‘
Applewhite told his followers that they could leave Earth on a spaceship that would accompany the comet Hale-Bopp, which was due to approach the planet in early 1997. Tragically, despite a claim on the Heavenโs Gate website that the group was strongly against suicide, 39 cult members (including Applewhite) were found dead in a San Diego house on 26 March 1997. The track ends with the song titleโs chilling words, spoken by Applewhite before he joined his followers in a mass suicide, achieved by consuming a mixture of apple sauce, vodka and barbiturates.
The cover of Closure/Continuation (2022)
Herd Culling (Closure/Continuation 2022)
This track opens with the visceral lines,
โSon, go fetch the rifle now, Thereโs something in the yard.’
These words throw us immediately into a compelling psychodrama. Wilson has the ability of a poet or scriptwriter to enter a story halfway through โ the narrative gradually unfolds as the song progresses, teasing the listener to extract the meaning of the song, wondering who the ‘strange gods’ are,
‘Did you fall to earth to cull a herd? Strange gods above the earth These are things you just won’t believe.
In the shackles of the night There are lights up in the sky…’
Wilson revealed the songโs meaning to Anil Prasad of Innerviews before he later retracted, saying he would prefer listeners to make up their own minds. Those who prefer not to have their views influenced by Wilsonโs thoughts should skip the next paragraph.
Wilson told Prasad that the story of Skinwalker Ranch, near Ballard, Utah, inspired the song. Several accounts suggest that the ranch has been plagued by paranormal activity and UFO sightings, and several books, films, and documentaries have been published about it. The song describes the familyโs attempts to defend themselves against aliens, โstrange gods above the earthโ who may have landed to โcull a herdโ of cattle on the ranch. He told Prasad: โI remain sceptical when it comes to the UFO stuff and government coverups. But I love the stories.โ His scepticism is echoed in the chorus of the song, which consists of the single word โliarโ, resentfully muttered at first, then viciously spat out as his venom increases.
Sources
Gilmour, D., My moon-landing jam session (The Guardian, 2 July 2009) Press release, HEAVENโS GATE โAway Teamโ Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space (22 March 1997) Applewhite, M., Last Chance to Evacuate Earth Before Itโs Recycled; Edited Transcript of Videotape (Heavenโs Gate website, 29 September 1996) Jahlmar, J., An Interview with Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree (DPRP.net, March 2001) Prasad, A., Porcupine Tree Collective Action (Innerviews, 2022)
For Steven Wilsonโs Space Songs Part II: The Soloย Years, click here
My own response to King Crimson is one of quiet terror
Robert Fripp (Die Zeit May 1995)
In 2019, I heard that King Crimson had released an album called THRAK in 1995. The title reminded me of another great progressive rock band, the mighty Thotch who recorded their classic song Land of the Crab in 1975.
But Seriously ยฉ Phil Collins, despite its opaque title and equally impenetrable cover art this is a great album.
In King Crimson…there was always a call for a sense of a threat of impending doom.
The music itself can also be opaque and impenetrable at times, partly because there are two bands playing at the same time. In different time signatures. The two bands are in fact a double trio:
But, as Tom Johnson wrote in 2015 it was difficult to sustain for a whole album
In theory, it sounds fascinating, and is a real challenge to the way rock music can be approached. In practice, however, the band, well, didnโt. The only real example of this approach to be found is VROOOM: Pan your speakers left or right and youโll hear two separate trios playing, you guessed it, slightly different versions of the same song. They merge back together as Coda: Marine 475 begins. As promising as the idea had been, it proved too much to accomplish an entire album that way at the time.
VROOM is the opening track. The first minute is King Crimson in a microcosm, a universe in a grain of sand. It begins with a lovely, nostalgic-sounding theme on Mellotron strings which soon drifts uneasily down in pitch before we are briefly thrown through countless galaxies in Space and the grinding industrial prog-funk-metal of the double trio kicks in.
VROOM segues into Coda Marine 475, which according to Robert Fripp takes its title and spoken words from the Marine 475 Syndicate at Lloyd’s Insurance. Musically, something very interesting is going on. This sounds like an example of an auditory illusion called the Shepard Tone, in which a tone seems continually to ascend or descend in pitch but in fact gets no higher or lower, trapped like a brown paper bag blown by the wind against a rusty gate. The music appears to be constantly descending here; the great Hans Zimmer used the same effect, only with an ascending tone, in his score for Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk.
YouTube: Vox: The sound illusion that makes Dunkirk so intense
Dinosaur begins with short Mellotron intro, sounding like a Mahler symphony beamed from a distant planet, then dystopian guitars crunch and grind; the same thing happens again after a lovely pastoral interlude at around 3.36. But there is humour in the lyrics, which seem to acknowledge that the once hip young band of the 1960’s have been left behind,
When I look back on the past
It's a wonder I'm not yet extinct...
I'm a dinosaur, somebody is digging my bones
(The term ‘dinosaur rock’ itself now seems to be largely extinct; a quick image search mostly reveals rocks shaped like dinosaurs…)
Walking on air is a lovely ballad, similar to Matte Kudasai from the 1981 Discipline. Even in the midst of all this Thrakking, King Crimson can surprise us with beauty.
But don’t get too comfortable. We go briefly spinning into the galaxies again before we land at B’boom. It’s a drum solo. For two drummers. What can I tell you? Well, since you asked, it does sound rather like The Flowers of Romance by Public Image.
Gentle reader, I recently re-discovered my hand-written notes about each track on the album. Under the heading ‘THRAK’ I wrote one word:
HELP!
A visceral reaction to a visceral song. It’s time to Unleash the Frogs (well, one frog and seven fridges). You may remember (you wonโt, but Iโm being polite) that I began my opening Blog in this series, How I learned to listen to King Crimson with a quote from an Amazon review of the album.
A huge compression of grinding guitar riffs and stupefying bass, only upstaged on occasion by drumming that reminds me of the time my pet frog was squashed by seven falling refrigerators.
Paul Ferguson, Amazon Review of Thrak by King Crimson, February 2003
Itโs a compelling image. And the song would make an excellent soundtrack to a dystopian movie, perhaps about a Plague of Frogs (or fridges?)
But now I need to explain how I came across the album THRAK. I admit I hadnโt heard of it until I emailed Bill Bruford about to ask him about auditory illusions in music โ particularly rhythmic illusions. He suggested, modestly, that I should listen to a track from this album called Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream as I might find it interesting. I did. Thereโs one extraordinary section where the two drummers play in completely different time signatures. Listening to the track on the train when I was on my way to meet Bill I happened to be facing backwards and I became disorientated. It felt as if I was moving backwards and forwards at the same time. I felt as if I were moving in two different, but related dimensions at the same time, like the passenger and the person on the platform in Einsteinโs thought experiment about the train being struck by bolts of lightning. This was a musical bolt of lightning, one of those rare moments when the musical landscape is briefly illuminated and its contours reveal themselves. The reason I felt so disorientated was that the two drummers, Bill himself and Pat Mastelotto were playing in two different time signatures at the same time.
Another moment of revelation came when I met Bill himself and he explained the key to King Crimsonโs music,
In King Crimson…there was always a call for a sense of a threat of impending doom.
Suddenly, I understood. (Italics added for emphasis and a little bit of pretension). As far as King Crimson were concerned I now had a key to enable me to unlock the doors of perception ยฉ A Huxley and Wm Blake. And no Mescaline or sitting naked in my front garden seeing visions of flights of angels had been necessary. Although that would have been nice.
So my journey through King Crimsonโs dystopian delights began.
This Blog was originally published five years ago in early 2020. I am publishing it again to mark the 30th anniversary of the release of Thrak on 3 April 1995
A double-header of new prog rock albums in a Sunday afternoon launch
Despite the London sunshine, rather than lazing on a Sunday afternoon, progressive rock fans packed themselves into the small but perfectly formed venue that is the Camden club. Long songs and high concepts were promised, and this gig didnโt disappoint. The event, organised by the tireless Chris Parkins of London Prog Gigs, saw the launch of two new albums. Hats Off Gentlemen Itโs Adequate were here to showcase their eighth studio album, The Uncertainty Principle. But before that, a relatively new band – albeit made up of veterans – Ghost of the Machine had travelled from Yorkshire to launch their second studio album, Empires Must Fall.
Charlie Bramald and Malcolm Galloway in the Q&A Session. Photo courtesy of Bรฉla Alabรกstrom
The afternoon began with a short Q&A session hosted by Charlie Bramald of Ghost of the Machine and Malcolm Galloway of Hats Off. An audience member asked if there would be any dancing. Galloway said that, as a former doctor, he would recommend physical exercise and invited the audience to โexpress themselves physically,โ before admitting that sounded wrong. He asked Bramald which came first in creating an album, โthe concept, the musicโฆ or the choreography.โ
As Genesis themselves admitted, prog rockers generally โcanโt danceโ โ presumably because of the complex time signatures (one of the most amusing sights I have seen at a prog rock gig was several seated gentlemen on the front row of a Steven Wilson concert, desperately trying to head bang in time to one of Wilsonโs more esoteric rhythms). Bramald, whose band have been compared to Genesis, admitted that the genesis (see what he did there?) of the songs was usually a keyboard part from Mark [Hagan]. Galloway said that he usually wrote in speech rhythms, and did an uncannily inaccurate [sic] demonstration of Beyoncรฉ singing a melismatic melody.
Bramald asked Galloway how the eighth Hats Off album differed from the previous seven. Galloway quipped that the main difference between the albums was the colour scheme of the booklet. But there was a serious point โ the album traces the development of quantum physics up to the 1950s, so a Cold War colour scheme was felt appropriate. Some of the highly imaginative images from the album were projected on a screen behind the band. However, before we became too impressed by the technology, the band’s bass player, Mark Gatland admitted he couldnโt hear his bass amp as it was hidden behind the screen.
Ghost of the Machine have only one fewer word in their name than Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate, although it could be argued they are syllabically challenged in comparison. They made up for their lack of syllables by having six band members on stage โ Bramald (vocals), Graham Garbett and Scott Owens (guitars), Mark Hagan (keyboards), Stuart McAuley (bass) and Andy Milner (drums). They decided to treat us to the entire album, Empires Must Fall, in the order it appears. This was their first London gig, and early on Bramald said it had been worth coming all the way from Yorkshire; the sold-out audience was very enthusiastic.
The new album is, naturally, a concept album. It continues the narrative from the first album, Scissorgames (2022). At the end of that album, the main character, Hope, who appears on the cover of both albums, freed herself from a tyrant but ended up in prison as a result. She becomes a superior being and creates an empire of light into which she draws those who are due to commit crimes in the future. As Bramald told Stephen Lambe of Prog magazine, the moral ambiguity of this is similar to that of the 2002 film Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise. She starts a revolution which leads to war, but the album ends on a more hopeful note of forgiveness.
Vocalist Charlie Bramald flanked by Scott Owens and Andy Milner on guitar, with Andy Milner on drums. Photo courtesy of Chris Parkins of London Prog Gigs
It’s tempting to play a game of spot the influence with a relatively new band. As mentioned earlier, Genesis is a possibility, as is Marillion. There were touches of Asia, and Yes, and Bramaldโs voice was sometimes reminiscent of Geddy Lee of Rush or Roger Hodgson of Supertramp. However, while acknowledging that these luminaries make excellent musical company, the band itself prefers not to be categorised. The only overt influence was when keyboard player Hagan gave a brief rendition of Tubeway Armyโs 1979 smash hit Are ‘Friends’ Electric, written by Gary Numan, his musical hero. However, there was a definite influence from Rick Wakeman’s 1974 classic, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, particularly in the opening song, Keepers of the Light. The instrumental section was lacking a glittering cape but was suitably proggy, before the band returned to one of its great strengths, strong melodies. Bramald, as in all the songs, was a compelling stage presence, acting out the lyrics while his voice soared above the band.
Days That Never Were began with gentle piano and synth, and a lovely bass riff that introduced a rocky number with a beautiful harmonic change. The song ended with a mighty drum flourish. Bramald explained that the next song, Panopticon, is the centre piece of the album. For those who donโt know (I admit that I didnโt), a panopticon is a circular prison designed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century, to allow all the prisoners to be seen at the same time. Itโs a perfect metaphor for isolation, as in the wall that surrounds the protagonist in Pink Floydโs 1979 album The Wall. As the lyrics of Panopticon state, we are โprisoners of our own designโ, who eventually break out from prison, just as Pink Floydโs character tears down the wall. The panopticon is also a metaphor for surveillance culture, a malevolent form of the benign accumulation of data that Peter Gabriel describes in his song Panopticom(note the change in the final letter) from his 2023 album i/o. But, as Days That Never Were states, โEmpires must fallโโฆ and, according to Bramald, we can help bring them down. Interestingly, Hats Off expressed a similar opinion in the song All Empires Fall from 2022โs The Confidence Trick. As Galloway writes,
Even the most evil dictator will, like everyone else, die. Every empire eventually crumbles. At the most basic level, the second law of thermodynamics suggests that any conquest is ultimately temporary. All empires fall.
The highlight of Ghost of the Machineโs set was the final song from their new album, the 14-minute epic After the War. The first section, ‘Runs Away’, began as a piano ballad, featuring gentle guitar and backing vocals from Graham Garbett. The song built up pleasingly to a metal guitar section, with a sense of inevitability and majesty. The next section, โBellsโ, featured a suitably bell-like piano part by Mark Hagan, frenetic percussion, and swirling guitars. Section three, ‘Sunrise and Sirens’ began with a flowing piano part and an almost funky guitar riff, expressing optimism around the lyric โthe war is overโ. In the next section, the instrumental โSorrow in the Silenceโ, Scott Owens played a spiky guitar solo, and Garbett joined him in a lovely duet. The final sections, โThe Sound of Homeโ and โWith Meโ were uplifting, including another fine solo from Garbett, whose playing had been superb throughout the set.
Malcolm Galloway of Hats Off self-deprecatingly offered to โkill the moodโ with โan hour of very educational stuff about quantum physics.โ As a former neuropathologist, the concepts behind the Hats Off albums often have a strong scientific basis. But as Galloway said in the Q&A session, the songs arenโt โjust dry physics.โ For each track, he adopts the perspective of a different character. A good example is the One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov), the first single from the new album, in which Galloway describes an agonising dilemma in an eloquent and moving vignette about โnot starting a nuclear war.โ Galloway and Gatland performed a blistering version; Gallowayโs agonised vocals bring out the song’s anguish and essential humanity in a stunning performance. The opening song, Certainty, the first track on the new album, began with a vocal duet, Galloway and Gatland singing in gentle unison. But as the song reached its climax, Gallowayโs voice exploded with emotion. The deep bond between these two gentlemen (they have known each other since school) was evident when they faced each other, and a warm smile passed between them.
Galloway reassured the audience that there would be โno shoutingโ on the third song in the set, the instrumental The Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This is difficult to play, but as Gatland quipped at the end, โsomeoneโs been putting the hours in.โ There was a spacey, psychedelic intro with sequenced keyboards, and virtuosic guitar-playing from Galloway โ those hours of practice paid off. Gatlandโs bass-playing was delightfully chunky, and at one point he played his bass around his knees like a prog rock Peter Hook. A genuinely inspiring performance. Gallowayโs voice was lower, richly warm in Copenhagen, another single from The Uncertainty Principle, bringing out the humanity and ambiguity of the much-disputed meeting between quantum physicist Niels Bohr and his former student Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941.
The deep humanity of Gallowayโs performance was evident in another new song, Between Two Worlds, which one suspects is more personal, given that he has suffered from complex medical conditions. To use an analogy from quantum mechanics, the song explores the dilemma in Schrรถdinger’s cat thought experiment, the uncertainty in waiting for test results which could be either positive or negative. Galloway performed a moving version on solo piano, with half-spoken contemplative vocals, drawing us into a strange world between two worlds.
From the personal, Galloway brought us back to the political in another new song, Think Tank. In a lengthy and fascinating introduction, Galloway explained that the song is inspired by a whistleblower from a US nuclear war think tank in the 1950s, which decided it was too complicated to have two different plans… so the best thing to do was to nuke both China and Russia. As Galloway dryly pointed out, โthe apocalypse leads to some administrative challengesโ, some of which were resolved by the five-digit nuclear code being incredibly hard to guess (00000 in case you were wondering). At least, as Galloway said, we were lucky that we werenโt in some hideous post-apocalyptic wasteland. โHow do you know?โ came the witty response from an audience member. Whatever the theoretical background of the song, Galloway and Gatlandโs performance was stunning. Gallowayโs guitar playing throughout the set was fluid, passionate, virtuosic and compassionate. Gatland was also playing at the top of his game. It was a privilege to witness the two of them together.
Kathryn Thomas, (Werner Heisenberg), Malcolm Galloway, and Mark Gatland. Photo courtesy of Chris Parkins
The set ended with an โencoreโ (due to time pressure, the band didnโt leave the stage and wait for adoring applause and shouts for more), the new album’s title track, The Uncertainty Principle. Kathryn Thomas joined them on flute. With a look of fierce concentration on her face, watching Galloway like a hawk, she matched his bluesy guitar solos, bringing a lovely jazz element in contrast to the distorted guitar. At the end of the song, Galloway bade the audience โgoodbyeโ.
But there was a surprise to come, an extra song, dedicated to Bรฉla [Alabรกstrom], who had come all the way from Brussels, Century Rain from 2020โs Nostalgia For Infinity. The song also came as a surprise to the laptop providing the backing tracks; it gave up and left the trio to perform โa cappellaโ as it were, with a very witty false ending in the style of King Crimson. The audience rose to its feet to give the band a well-deserved standing ovation.
Sources
Stephen Lambe Empire of Ghosts (Prog Magazine Issue 158, 07.03.25) Malcolm Galloway The Confidence Trick – Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate (hatsoffgentlemen.com)
