Beatrix Players recently reformed after a hiatus during which their lead singer and main songwriter Ms Amy Birks released two solo albums, In Our Souls (2022) and All That I Am and All That I Was (2020). The Players’ first album Magnified was released in 2017 and their second, Living & Alivewas released last year.
This was the Players’ penultimate gig before Birks takes some time out to have a baby – she said she was suffering from ‘baby brain’ and could feel her daughter kicking. She also said she was surprisingly nervous because she was performing on home territory – some of her songs were written only half a mile from the hall. She needn’t have worried; the packed hall received her with great warmth and enthusiasm, and she and the band performed superbly.
As they had done at their recent gig at Manchester’s Band on the Wall, the Players began by performing the whole of their new album live. With a very clear and well-balanced sound mix from local engineer Shaun Beetham, every detail from the intricate arrangements for seven-piece band could be heard and savoured. There was a lovely interplay between the two guitarists, Tom Manning and Oliver Day. John Hackett on flute added gorgeously mellifluous and florid touches. Matthew Lumb provided elegant and flowing piano parts. The rhythm section of Kyle Welch on bass and Andrew Booker on drums provided a satisfyingly robust bottom end, Welch’s melodic bass lines and Booker’s lithe and inventive drumming making the sound rockier and livelier than on the record. When the band took flight in their instrumental breaks, as on ‘This is Your Life’, which felt faster than on the album, they were a joy to hear.
Birks was a charismatic leader, her wonderfully expressive voice ranging from a warm, low mezzo to a high soprano, sometimes urgent in her delivery and at other times quietly intimate – often in the same song. She was a powerful stage presence, drawing the audience in as was clear from their enthusiastic response. She also maintained a good rapport with the audience. Rather than simply shouting, ‘Barlaston, how are you doing?’ or ‘It’s great to be here, Barlaston!’ she took the trouble to introduce the songs, providing detail and context that helped to bring them to life. So we learned that ‘Purgatory’ was inspired by a horrible example of parenting that she saw from a customer in Home Bargains (she was careful to clarify that it can’t have been Homebase as they don’t sell toothpaste.) And it came as a surprise to some that ‘Obey Me’ is a ‘cheeky’ song inspired by watching 50 Shades of Gray.
Drummer Andrew Booker sometimes carried off that difficult feat of singing backing vocals whilst playing drums (like Roger Taylor of Queen). Highlight from the first set included lovely harmony vocals from Booker and both guitarists on ‘A Beautiful Lie’, and the guitar work on ‘Overflow’ – evocative lap steel guitar and a mandolin solo from Day, Manning’s intense, almost Fripp-like electric guitar solo, and Welch’s walking bass line. Lumb contributed a haunting piano motif. Another highlight was ‘Free’, written by Birks and Manning when they were teenagers together at Staffordshire University, ‘a couple of years ago’ quipped Manning. It’s a more hopeful, uplifting song than many that Birks has written. Again the two guitarists shone – Day on slide guitar; rocky guitar and a bluesy solo from Manning. This all was topped off by flamboyant flute from Hackett.
The second set consisted of five songs from the first album, when the Players were a trio. Birks informed us that ‘Never Again’ was based on the vow she made never to go to another rave in London, and also played on her love of the Brontë sisters. ‘Rushlight’ featured a heart-stopping moment of contemplation when Booker joined Birks on vocals before the full onslaught of the ensemble, playing in a less classical style than on the original album. ‘Obey Me’ had a very catchy chorus, which perhaps spared the blushes of the audience members who now knew what the song was about. The set ended with ‘What do You Say’, an encore that wasn’t one as Birks said it was always going to be the last song. As a parting flourish she did however treat us to a little operatic vocalise. Had an encore been offered, the audience would no doubt have accepted it happily – it was a privilege to hear such a talented ensemble playing in such an intimate venue.
Birks announced at the end that she hoped the audience could get over ‘the crossing’ before it closed at 10.30, or was it 11.00 pm? (It was 11.00 pm).Locals nodded sagely, while those who had travelled from afar speculated wildly – was it something to do with the closure this weekend of parts of the M25? Was Birks referring to the nearby railway crossing, and if so, was a very long train blocking it all night? The hall cleared very quickly as the audience avoided the witching hour of 23.00. An amusing ending to an excellent evening.
Wilson’s most eclectic album to date is ‘cinema for the ears’
*****
Steven Wilson has often said he would like to write a film score. He even wrote a screenplay with the film maker Mike Bennion, and they tried for a while to get the film made. When it became clear this probably wouldn’t happen, Wilson turned the project into Deadwing, the eighth studio album he wrote for his band Porcupine Tree. In September 2020, Wilson announced that he had rewritten the script with Bennion, and released a short film as a teaser to promote the project which was now called And No Birds Sing. The project doesn’t appear to have got any further at the time of writing, but it appears that Wilson’s passion for movies remains undiminished.
Teaser for the And No Birds Sing film project
Wilson’s new album, The Harmony Codex his seventh solo studio album, follows the unexpected release of Closure/Continuation with Porcupine Tree last year, and his previous solo album The Future Bites in 2021. The new album is an eclectic soundtrack to Wilson’s rich imagination, and his love of cinema is shown by his ambition to create an album which he has described as ‘cinema for the ears.’
Wilson’s cinematic ambition manifests itself in various ways on the album. Like the European surrealist and art films that it he so admires, it has a loose structure, a series of sometime apparently unconnected scenes which are linked by a strong vision; the songwriter and musician as auteur. Like many films, the album is based on a short story, in this case The Harmony Codex written by Wilson and published in his 2022 book Limited Edition of One. Like many film makers, Wilson takes liberties with the story and doesn’t attempt to create a linear narrative that matches the events of his story, which does generally have a clear narrative and a sense of logic and realism even when it veers into science fiction and dream logic.
Within individual songs on the album, there is often a cinematic structure, as has often been the case in Wilson’s songwriting both as a solo artist and for Porcupine Tree. Wilson is perfectly capable of writing a rock or pop ballad with a conventional song structure, and even released a Christmas song in a conventional style, December Skies, much to the surprise of many (not least Wilson himself, who collaborated with an Artificially Intelligent lyricist to write the song). But many of his songs are much longer than the standard three to five minutes, have several different but connected sections and feel like short films or stories in themselves.
December Skies – music Steven Wilson, lyrics by ChatGPT
The other cinematic aspect of the album is the sound itself. Wilson has been working with surround sound, which was originally developed for the cinema, for many years. He began mixing Porcupine Tree albums and his own solo albums in 5.1 surround sound, receiving several Grammy Award nominations in the process. He has since remixed the work of several artists, including not only bands who share his prog credentials like King Crimson, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull and Yes but also Black Sabbath and Tears for Fears. He has more recently adopted another surround sound format originally developed for the cinema, Dolby Atmos which adds additional height speakers to create a fully immersive soundscape. Although multiple speakers are needed to recreate the full effect at home, the technology is now available in Dolby Atmos-enabled Soundbars for TV, and some streaming services allow Atmos mixes to be experienced on headphones. Wilson moved to London a few years ago and built a new home studio equipped with the latest Dolby Atmos technology. The first album he mixed in this studio was The Future Bites.
Steven Wilson’s home studio
Wilson launched the new album in a series of surround sound playbacks using spatial audio mixes in Dolby Atmos or using the L-Acoustics multiple loudspeaker system. As well as smaller listening rooms, Wilson used an actual cinema in central London and a medium-sized theatre in the EartH arts centre in Hackney, London, creating ‘cinema for the ears’ in a large, dark room. For many in the audience it was an unexpectedly profound experience, and Wilson has said he would like to recreate that experience in a live context with a band, in intimate venues with surround sound. He has said that he hopes that The Harmony Codex will become the demonstration recording to show how effective spatial audio can be for music, just as The Dark Side of the Moon was for stereo systems. But he didn’t write the album to be heard only in spatial audio – it was only in the mixing process that he considered the spatial aspects of the mix, and he was careful to ensure it worked well in stereo too. As Polly Glass said in her review in the November 2023 issue of Prog magazine, ‘we’ve listened to it at a spatial playback, through a basic Bluetooth speaker and headphones – it sounded great on all three.’
The short story provides a loose concept that influences some of the songs, but this isn’t a concept album in the way that some of Wilson’s previous solo albums are. For instance, Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015) has an immensely complex back story about the disappearance of a young woman, and the 2013 album The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories) is based on a collection of ghost stories.
The Harmony Codex 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 there’s an explosion. They try to escape the building via the staircase and the story passes from being a hyper-realistic description of their journey on the Tube and up in the lift, followed by a description of the moment of the explosion that reads like a film script, to a science fiction story in which Harmony and Jamie get trapped on an apparently endless staircase. The story ends ambiguously – it’s unclear whose point of view we are seeing the story from, and whether any of it has been real,
‘Did he have a dream about his sister, Harmony?Or is Harmony dreaming him now?’
Wilson grew up reading science fiction that is more about inner space, an examination of the human psyche rather than outer space, the shape of things to come. His story is inspired by a short story written by the American science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch called Descending, published in 1968 in the collection Fun With Your New Head. The story begins with a realistic description of the un-named protagonist entering a department store, using his credit card to buy things he can’t afford. He takes the escalator down from the top floor to leave the building and at this point the story morphs into a dystopian science fiction satire like an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. The protagonist becomes trapped on a never-ending series of descending escalators, which becomes a metaphor for the futility of life and pointless consumerism. There’s an interesting parallel with the video for Wilson’s song Personal Shopper, also a satire on consumerism, in which the protagonist is seen climbing an escalator in a shopping mall as Wilson himself descends an escalator on the other side.
The idea of an infinite staircase as a metaphor has fascinated Wilson for a long time. His second studio album for Porcupine Tree was titled Up the Downstair (1993) and it was originally going to include the single Voyage 34 (1992) which describes the 34th LSD trip of the protagonist, Brian. Spoken words on Voyage 34, sampled from an American documentary LP called LSD describe how Brian had pleasurable LSD trips until the 34th when he had a complete mental breakdown,
‘On Voyage 34 he finally met himself coming down an up-staircase and the effect was devastating.’
The staircase here is a literal description of what poor Brian experienced on his trip, but also becomes a metaphor for his complete existential confusion; his psyche is trapped in an infinite staircase, like the figures in the Dutch artist M. C. Escher’s print Ascending and Descending (1960). Wilson called the collection of unused tracks from Up the Downstair by another staircase-related name, Staircase Infinities (1994).
M. C. Escher’s print Ascending and Descending
In his short story, Wilson describes his protagonist trapped on an M. C. Escher staircase. On his new album, Wilson uses the staircase metaphor in a slightly different way, to describe the journey of life. This is another of Wilson’s recurring themes, dating back specifically to the Porcupine Tree song Arriving Somewhere But Not Here from Deadwing (2005). And the theme of pursuing a meaningful existence dates back even earlier to the albums Stupid Dream (1999) and Signify (1996).
The image of a staircase features in the album’s artwork, along with the skyscraper from the story. The German designer, illustrator, and photographer Hajo Müller has created a clever design to illustrate the infinite staircase, a bit like a 2-dimensional Rubik’s Cube, which is made up of ten bricks to represent the ten tracks of the album. A small version of the object features in the videos used to promote the album, and Wilson used a much larger version during his live show at EartH which concluded the surround sound playback of the new album.
Steven Wilson performing at EartH on 27 September 2023. Author’s photo.
The brief live show was the first time for decades that Wilson had come on stage without wearing a guitar around his neck, although he was joined by guitarist Niko Tsonev. Wilson has often played live keyboards both with Porcupine Tree and on his solo tours, but his main live instrument has always been guitar. His decision to play exclusively keyboards was influenced by the electronic nature of much of the new album. Wilson has always loved electronica and ambient music, and his side project Bass Communion uses those styles, but it was his purchase of various classic analogue synthesisers before he wrote his previous album that led him to change his writing style. Most of the songs on the new album were written on synths rather than on the more conventional guitar or piano.
The Harmony Codex does include guitar parts, but many of them are played by collaborators such as Niko Tsonev and David Kollar. In fact, the album is remarkable for the number of additional musicians, contrasting with the most recent Porcupine Tree album on which almost all the instruments were played by the three band members. But rather than going into the studio to record with his collaborators, as Wilson had done particularly on The Raven That Refused to Sing, the new albumwas recorded in a similar way to Wilson’s first solo albumInsurgentes, where in effect a bespoke band was formed for each individual track. The album was recorded during lockdown in Wilson’s home studio, so he could call upon a much wider range of collaborators than usual via file-sharing.
There are around twenty additional musicians on the record, including regular contributors such as Adam Holzman on keyboards, Ninet Tayeb on vocals, Craig Blundell on drums, Nick Beggs on bass and Theo Travis on woodwind. New faces include Nate Navarro and Guy Pratt (from Pink Floyd’s live band and Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets) on bass, Nate Wood and Sam Fogarino (Interpol) on drums, Ben Coleman (ex no-man) on violin and Wilson’s wife Rotem on spoken word inserts. One of the reasons the album sounds more eclectic than his previous solo albums, particularly The Future Bites on which Wilson played almost all the instruments himself, is the wide range of collaborators used.
1 Inclination
The opening trackwas written during the recording sessions for Wilson’s previous solo album The Future Bites. Wilson had originally intended to include the song on the bonus tracks for that album but decided it was too good. It opens with the sound of a trumpet, played by the Norwegian trumpeter and composer Nils Petter Molvær. An intriguing beginning to the record, it has some of the ornamental majesty of the first few bars of JS Bach’s famous organ piece Toccata and Fugue in D minor, drenched in echo as if being played in a large church like the Bach piece.
Bubbling synths lead to a heavily martial electronic rhythm track played by Pat Mastelotto of King Crimson, similar to the aggressive percussion pattern in Portishead’s Machine Gunfrom Third (2008). Ominous, rising keyboard washes are joined by feral, sampled breathing and a spidery trumpet solo that sounds more like a guitar. Shortly, the trumpet tone softens and sounds like Mark Isham who played trumpet and flugelhorn on albums by art rocker David Sylvian like Secrets of the Beehive (1987).
The track grinds to a halt at three minutes in and fades out with evocative soundscaping and it appears it has come to an end. Then, in a coup de théâtre that was particularly effective in the surround sound playback in the dark at EartH arts centre in London to launch the album, Wilson’s solo voice appears, sweet, almost tender but with an ominous undercurrent. He draws us in immediately, inviting us to, ‘Come see the fool.’ At first, it seems that the fool could be a figure who commands respect, a wise Fool like the court jester in Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear (1606); a Holy Fool with the gift of prophecy or deep religious insight; or the Tarot card that represents hope for the future. But in the next line it becomes clear that the fool is a swindler like the protagonist in Eminent Sleazefrom the previous album, ‘He’ll swindle you out of the game.’
The protagonist is extremely combative, like the main character in the Radiohead song You And Whose Army fromAmnesiac (2001); even the language is similar – compare ‘One at a time I will take you all on’ from Inclination with ‘Come on if you think/You can take us on’ from You And Whose Army. Wilson seems to be writing about a fictitious character, whereas Thom Yorke’s lyrics for the Radiohead song are much more political. In the June 2001 issue of Mojo, Yorke told Nick Kent the song was addressed to Tony Blair who was then Prime Minister.
The title of the track recalls the adage, ‘If you’ve got the time, I’ve got the inclination‘, which apparently refers to a joke in which the Leaning Tower of Pisa is addressing a clock in Westminster, London – possibly Big Ben, although the exact origin is obscure. In the context of the song, a jocular comment which possibly contains innuendo is turned into an aggressive threat.
2What Life Brings
This song is about the journey of life, and embracing whatever life throws at you. It’s unusually positive for Wilson, whose work often embraces the darker and more depressing side of life. It ends with the positive sentiment, ‘Love it all and hold it in your hands.’ There may be an autobiographical element to the song, in that his life journey has taken an unexpected – and happy – turn in recent years. In January 2017, in a rather poignant interview with Jarrett Bellini on YouTube, Wilson announced that, ‘I’ve sacrificed family for music.’ In September 2019 he got married, announcing on Instagram that it was the, ‘Happiest day of my life marrying the love of my life!’ He immediately gained a family, with two stepdaughters, and he seems to have embraced family life with all the enthusiasm he has always given to his musical projects.
Wilson in 2016 – ‘I’ve made a decision, I’m not going to have a family…’
The opening bars of the song, with languid drums and gently strummed acoustic guitars have a similarly dreamy, slightly melancholy feel to the opening of the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides (2000) written by the French band Air. On his website, Wilson described his song as ‘steeped in sun-dazed autumnal acoustics’, and this could also describe the Air soundtrack and the atmosphere of the film itself. In an interview with Jonathan Horsley of Decibelmagazine in May 2012, Wilson expressed his admiration for the film’s soundtrack.
The beautiful, delicate imagery of the ‘oscillating sunset’ fading in a previous autumn evokes the nostalgic feel of many of Wilson’s solo works. There’s another important image in the lyrics, which links to The Harmony Codex short story. The word ‘haze’ is used to describe the ‘haze of smoke and dust’ caused by the explosion in the story. The ‘dream fog’ of the song relates to the fog of smoke in the story. The protagonist of the song is lost in the fog, just as Harmony and her brother Jamie are in the story, and Harmony is addressed in the fourth song, Impossible Tightrope. The ‘black freighter’ in the next song Economies of Scale is also lost in fog. The ‘dream fog’ of What Life Brings also relates to the ‘lucid dream’ experienced by Jamie’s character in the short story, and the final image of Harmony and Jamie wondering if they are dreaming about each other in the story.
On his website, Wilson described the song as a ‘perfect entry point’ to the world of the album, but on Twitter he said that at first he was reluctant to put it on the record as it sounds like something he had written in the past on an acoustic guitar in the old-fashioned way, finding the right chords and then writing a melody to go with them. He had similar misgivings about 12 Things I Forgot on his previous album, as he felt it didn’t match the more electronic style of the other songs. But the truth is that both songs are simply too good to have been left off the records, as they demonstrate Wilson’s ability to write wistful, gorgeously melodic pop songs.
3Economies of Scale
Economies of Scale was the first track to be released as a single, in late August 2023, a month before the album’s release. Wilson introduced the track on Twitter, saying it was ‘an obvious choice to be the first taster for the album.’ That may be the case from a musical point of view, as the track is heavily electronic like much of the rest of the album, but lyrically the track is a challenge to listeners, beginning with the words ‘Black freighter regale’ which are rather obscure. The ‘black freighter’ appears to be a pirate ship, as referenced in the song Pirate Jenny from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, ‘a black freighter/ With a skull on its masthead.’ The song has been covered by, amongst others, Nina Simone, Lotta Lenya, Judy Collins, Marianne Faithfull and Marc Almond. The imagery fits with the nautical themes of many of the songs on the most recent Porcupine Tree album, Closure/Continuation.
Musically, the track continues the electronic style of Wilson’s previous solo album, The Future Bites. On Twitter, Wilson explained that the track began as a ‘weird modular synth loop’ provided by his regular keyboard player Adam Holzman. The loop can be heard at the start of the song, with added percussion which Wilson described as a ‘semi-electronic trap-beat.’ The arrangement of the song is very sparse, featuring Wilson on all instruments except Holzman’s loop. Wilson told Graham Fuller of the arts deskin December 2023 that he tried to add more instrumental parts too it, but each time he did so he felt he was making the song worse, ‘the less I added to it, the more emotional it felt.’ Wilson’s soulful vocals and rich backing vocals contrast with the skittering electronic backing track. There’s also a nod to the staircase concept, with a rising piano motif that suggests climbing stairs.
4 Impossible Tightrope
In his book Limited Edition of One, Wilson entitled chapter 21, ‘The Impossible Tightrope’ to describe trying to please both himself and his fans, concluding that he must satisfy his own musical integrity first and hope that his fans will follow him. Later in the book he uses the same metaphor to describe working with his other band members in Porcupine Tree, and his desire not to, ‘jump permanently back on the tightrope’ of having to keep everyone in the band happy while maintaining his own artistic vision.
This instrumental track is one of three on the album which are around ten minutes long, the others being the title track (also an instrumental, with some spoken word inserts) and Staircase (track ten). The ten tracks on the album are over an hour long in total. This contrasts with the previous album, The Future Bites, a tight electronic pop record only about 40 minutes long with only one ten- minute song, Personal Shopper. Wilson has said that each of his solo albums is a reaction to the previous ones, and this album to an extent marks a return to long-form progressive rock songs, although Wilson himself has always resisted the term as it doesn’t really reflect the breadth of his vision; instead it reflects the depth of his ambition in that he is always trying to progress.
On Twitter, Wilson described the track as a mix of ‘progressive rock, spiritual jazz and electronica.’ It opens with sweet, cinematic violins played by Ben Coleman, who was the third member of art-rock band no-man before the group became a duo consisting of Wilson and Tim Bowness, most recently releasing Love You to Bits in 2019. Fiercely syncopated drums are joined by a vigorous guitar and bass riff which crescendo into explosive guitar chords. The bass line, played by Wilson himself from around 2.00 is based a single repeated low C, creating a driving, pulsating energy rather than the virtuosic, melodic part that a player like Nick Beggs might have created. The track breaks down and the explosive guitar chords are recreated by a jazzy acoustic guitar, beautifully played and recorded. The jazzy theme is continued by Theo Travis’ virtuosic and frenetic saxophone stylings, recalling his work on Wilson’s second solo album Grace for Drowning (2011).
About half-way through the song, there’s an ambient section featuring Wilson’s solo falsetto voice manipulated via software to create a melody, rather than Wilson singing the melody himself. This a technique often used in urban music – a single sung or spoken note can be processed via Auto-Tune or similar software to create a range of pitches. In August 2023, Wilson told Stephen Humphries of Under the Radar that he was probably influenced by a much earlier song, Godley & Creme’s I Pity Inanimate Objects from their 1979 album Freeze Frame. Kevin Godley, ‘sang the whole lyric in a monotone… and then programmed the Eventide Harmonizer to pitch shift up or down.’
A full choir – presumably from a sample library as no credit is given to a real choir in the sleeve notes – joins, giving the track a cinematic feel. It reaches an instrumental climax with a repeat of the unison bass and guitar riff heard earlier, followed by a spacey section which is shortly graced by virtuosic, jazzy soloing by Adam Holzman on electric piano, and some whimsical almost scat singing reminiscent of Wilson’s performance on Harridan, the first track on Porcupine Tree’s Closure/Continuation. The song ends with an invigorating analogue synth solo, creating counterpoint against a running bass line, before it finally dissolves into a reprise of the opening string section. An intriguing end to an epic song that is cinematic in its musical sweep.
5 Rock Bottom
This song is a power ballad, written by Wilson’s regular vocal collaborator the Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb, who also sings backing vocals on the first two tracks on the album. Tayeb’s soulful, earthy mezzo-soprano voice has graced some of the most emotional songs on Wilson’s solo albums such as Routine from Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015) and Pariah from To The Bone(2017). Wilson told Mark Millar of the XS Noize Podcast, ‘there’s something magical about the way we work together.’ He said Tayeb had written the track as an indie guitar song, but that – in keeping with the cinematic theme of the album – he asked her permission to turn the song into something with, ‘a big John Barry [James] Bond theme type of sound.’
Despite the rich arrangement and soaring guitar solo from Niko Tsonev, the sentiment is very simple, similar to that of Pariah where the female voice tries to console the male voice. It’s Tayeb’s singing that gives the elemental lyrics their emotional depth and resonance. The addressee is urged to ‘break apart’, having reached rock bottom, and to embrace the hope of new life that will result.
6 Beautiful Scarecrow
Beautiful scarecrow is the second track on the album to feature a controlling, aggressive protagonist, the first being Inclination (track one). Here the protagonist is a charlatan, a fraudster or ‘racketeer.’ The title of the track is an oxymoron, or contradiction in terms – scarecrows are known for wearing tatty old clothes as they hang around in fields frightening birds. They are not known for their beauty.
Superficially, the protagonist may have a certain charm, but beneath the façade he is ‘deep in debt.’ It’s a strange image compared with the other more positive images of life’s journey elsewhere on the album. Perhaps there’s a warning here; this is how life could end up if you take the wrong path.
The song begins with an image of the protagonist pulling off the legs and wings of the person addressing him. The image of the human being as an insect may have been inspired by the character of Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, the 1915 novella by the Czech absurdist writer Franz Kafka. When he was a teenager, Wilson and his friend Malcolm Stocks used to go to London together to buy novels by the likes of Kafka and the German-Swiss writer Hermann Hesse. Another literary image that may be appropriate is the lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), expressing the power that the gods exert over helpless humans,
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.
Wherever the image originates, it suggests that the protagonist addressed in the song is in complete control, pulling the strings. At the end of the song, the protagonist and the person addressing him become one, ‘No longer slaves/We’re just the lonely souls that take their place.’ The subtle grace with which Wilson sings the vocals suggests a degree of empathy with the protagonist, whatever he has done.
The video for the song, directed by frequent Wilson collaborator Jess Cope of Owl House Studios in Harrogate takes the story in a different direction, indirectly inspired by the song. Co-directed by Venkatram Viswanathan, it’s a gothic horror story set in a post-pandemic world in which humanity is divided.
The track features the evocate sound of the duduk, a wind instrument which has a large double reed, originally from Armenia. The double reed is much larger than that of an oboe or bassoon, and the instrument itself looks like a recorder, with finger holes along one side but sealed at the bottom end. Here it is played by Theo Travis, a frequent collaborator with Wilson. The instrument can be heard clearly at around 2.00 minutes into the track.
7 The Harmony Codex
Thetitle track is one the most unusual tracks Wilson has recorded under his own name, as opposed to his ambient experiments under the name Bass Communion, or the material he collected for his compilation Unreleased Electronic Music (2004). To create a title track that is largely ambient, consisting of a long series of repeated, arpeggiated synth chords, is a brave move.
It would have been much easier to write a set of lyrics which are a summary of the short story Wilson wrote that provides the title for the track and build the music around that. Instead, with the confidence that comes from over 30 years of songwriting, Wilson decided to write a purely electronic track based on synth loops, reflecting his love for this style of music which he has largely ignored in his songwriting on his solo albums and for Porcupine Tree. He has often recounted the story of his mother getting Donna Summer’s album Love to Love You Baby (1975) for Christmas, and how he grew up loving the hypnotic disco sounds which she, Giorgio Moroder and producer Pete Bellotte created for the masterpiece that is the title track of that album. Wilson told FaceCulture in October 2023, ‘I love simplicity in music. I love atmosphere. I love texture in music.’
As befits the simplicity of the song, Wilson said on Twitter (X) that it was the ‘easiest and quickest to write’ as there is ‘very little to it.’ He kept adding to the song, but any extra layers detracted from the song that he had written in about 24 hours rather than the ‘months’ it often takes him to craft a song. On YouTube he showed how he built the foundations of the track with various vintage synths – an ARP 2600 to create bleeping noises and white noise, and arpeggiators on a Prophet-6 and a Moog, adjusting the filters on both keyboards in real time to vary the texture of the sound.
“Here is a quick demonstration on how I created the foundations of ‘The Harmony Codex’.”
The result is spellbinding. The words of the German poet Stefan George, ‘I feel air from another planet’ (quoted by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in his Second String Quartet) come to mind. During the surround sound playback at EartH arts centre in Hackney to launch the album, the trance-like nature of the track was deeply enhanced by the immersive sound; it truly felt as if the music was being beamed from a distant planet or from a dying star, creating a feeling of deep nostalgia for lost worlds but also a profound sense of joy.
The track does however give a tantalising glimpse of the Harmony Codex short story. Wilson chooses the most ambiguous part of the story, the final few paragraphs on the last page (p. 359 in the hardback edition). He takes the thoughts of Harmony’s brother Jamie, seen from a third person point of view in the story, and puts them instead into the first person, spoken on the track by his wife Rotem. He places the protagonist in the song ‘miles above the Earth’, gazing out not just over London where the story is set, but beyond to see the lights from ‘a thousand cities’, the ships and seas beyond them, and ‘a trillion stars in a billion galaxies.’ The crucial word comes at the very beginning of the passage, ‘It seems.’ It’s unclear whether this is reality or imagined, and even whether Jamie or Harmony is dreaming the other person. The short story makes the ambiguity even more profound, ending with the words, ‘It was how all their games ended’, casting doubt on the whole story; has it all just been a game?
8 Time is Running Out
This is another song about the journey through life, probably the most autobiographical song on the album. In Chapter 24 of his book (entitled ‘60’), Wilson, then in his mid-fifties, describes the decade between 50 and 60 as only ’16 per cent’ of his time on Earth, showing how time seems to speed up as you get older. He also addresses the irony that just when you have worked out what to do with your life, you realise ‘time is running out.’
Verse one compares the short existence of the human soul to ‘a cigarette on a summer night’, that burns out all too quickly. The image of the burning cigarette recalls Macbeth’s famous speech from Shakespeare’s 1606 play of the same name, beginning with the words, ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow’,
Out, out, brief candle! /Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, /That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, /And then is heard no more.
The second verse addresses the protagonist as a ‘startled deer in the headlights’, imagery which is reminiscent of a much earlier Porcupine Tree song about life’s journey, Arriving Somewhere But Not Here from Deadwing (2005), ‘Never stop the car on the drive in the dark.’ The chorus of the earlier song expresses the same sentiment as verse two of Time is Running Out,
‘All my designs simplified/ And all of my plans compromised/ All of my dreams sacrificed.’
It’s remarkable that Wilson, writing only in his mid-to late-thirties, was able to express the sentiments of the song he wrote 20 years later.
The existential crisis suffered by the protagonist is illustrated by the panic attack he suffers ‘mid-way through the flight.’ The lyrics recall the Radiohead song Burn the Witch from their 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool, ‘This is a low-flying panic attack.’ Another song on the same album, Glass Eyes, finds the protagonist getting off a train in a panic, finding it, ‘a frightening place’, with the cold glass eyes of the other passengers whose faces are ‘concrete grey.’
There’s a nostalgic element in verse three, Wilson name-checking the works of various bands and artist from the late 1970s when he was in his early teens. The Future Now is a 1978 album by the singer, musician and songwriter Peter Hammill, also a member of prog-rock band Van der Graaf Generator. In his book, Wilson describes the ‘twisted and nihilistic’ prog of Hammill and his band as being one of his ‘absolute favourites.’ The ‘Poison Girls’ were an English punk band formed in 1976, and their first album Hex was released in 1979. The Kick Inside was Kate Bush’s first album, from 1978. Wilson has often spoken of his admiration for her work. Finally, ‘a war of worlds’ refers to Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds (1978) based on H.G. Wells’ novel of the same name published in 1898. Wilson discussed the album with Tim Bowness in their podcast The Album Years. Wilson described it as ‘an absolute masterpiece.’
9 Actual Brutal Facts
Unusually, this track features Wilson speaking rhythmically – not quite rapping – rather than singing. He told Stephen Humphries of Under the Radar that he was strongly influenced by Jack Dangers of the electronic group Meat Beat Manifesto, who did programming on this and other tracks, to write a track ‘in a hip-hop rhythm or at least trip hop.’ The vocals recall the quietly ominous rapping on Risingson from Mezzanine by Massive Attack (1998) provided by 3D (Robert Del Naja) and Daddy G (Grantley Evan Marshall).
Wilson created a similar sound by pitching his vocal down a few semitones; some listeners didn’t initially recognise his voice. There is a precedent for the use of spoken word/rapping in Wilson’s work – the title track of Deadwing(2005) includes a rhythmically vigorous contribution from Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth. And on tracks like King Ghostfrom The Future Bites Wilson heavily manipulated his voice to make it go much lower (and higher!) showing a new confidence in his vocal delivery that began with that album, partly due to the encouragement of his co-Producer David Kosten. The new confidence Wilson has in his voice is reflected in the supreme rhythmic precision with which he delivers the lyrics.
The protagonist of the song is the third of the despicable characters addressed on the album (the other two appear on Inclination and Beautiful Scarecrow; or perhaps it is the same character?). The opening line, ‘condescending will as condescending does’ is a clever reversal of the old expression, ‘handsome is as handsome does’, meaning that true beauty is revealed by a person’s deeds rather than physical beauty. There is also another reference to life’s journey and the significance that living a valid existence can bring (one of the themes of the Porcupine Tree album Signify from 1996). In this case, the protagonist’s past weighs heavily on him, ‘You drag the passing years behind you on a ball and chain.’
Beatriz G Aranda of the Spanish newspaper El País suggested to Wilson that the chorus lyrics, ‘when you turn the shit to gold it’s not appreciated’ could be autobiographical. Wilson modestly replied, ‘I don’t consider myself that good at making gold!’ He also said, however, that if he had been born ten years earlier, he would probably have found it easier to achieve recognition. But a more likely protagonist is the ‘gold man’ described in Harridan on the last Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation, like the mythical King Midas whose every touch turned objects into gold – at first seen as a blessing when he touched roses but then as a curse when food and even his daughter turned to gold.
10 Staircase
The final track on the album adopts the central staircase image, representing life’s journey. Wilson told Stephen Humphries that the staircase in this song represents the pressures of ‘growing older in this modern world; such as providing for your family, getting on the property ladder’, dealing with stress, anxiety, illness, your children’s health, and social pressures. In July 2022, over a year before the album’s release, speaking to Jonathan Cornell of Immersive Audio Album, Wilson said Staircase was a ‘pretty generic title’ and he was thinking of changing it, but he obviously decided not to, perhaps as the characters from the short story, Harmony and Jamie, became less important to the album than the staircase metaphor itself.
Wilson told Mark Millar of The XS Noize Podcast that the track was the last one to be written, and that he had agonised over writing it because he knew it was going to be the closing track, ‘I wanted it to feel like the final scene in a movie… the climax to this movie.’ Wilson has solved this problem, both by making the final track one of the strongest on the album, and by creating a track which has a complex structure like a short film over nearly ten minutes.
To add to the complexity of the track, there are two drummers playing at once. Wilson chose Craig Blundell who joined him on the To The Bone tour and plays on most of the current album. Blundell also played with other members of Wilson’s touring band – Nick Beggs and Adam Holzman – on the excellent jazz-inflected Trifecta. The other drummer is Sam Fogarino from the American rock bank Interpol. Wilson told Millar that Blundell played a very busy, technical part whereas Fogarino played in a more direct indie style. The result, which Wilson said took him weeks of trying different things to get right, is amusingly described by Wilson as a, ‘kind of composite Frankenstein drum pad.’
The track begins with a sparkling synth loop written on a Moog arpeggiator, in what sounds like a complex polyrhythm but is in fact in standard 4/4 – Wilson shares a love of rhythmic complexity with Gavin Harrison, Porcupine Tree’s drummer. The deep voice at around 0.45 is Wilson’s own, tuned down using vocal processing of the kind used extensively on the previous album. The bubbling bass line that arrives at around 1.15 could also have come from that album. The track springs gloriously to life at around 1.40, after some joyfully sarcastic backing vocals on the words ‘congratulate yourself’ which amplify the central theme of the first section of the track, the pointless accumulation of wealth.
The guitar solo, beautifully played by Niko Tsonev on a Fender Strat with some lovely David Gilmour string bends, breaks all the usual structural rules by appearing at just over two minutes into a nine and a half minute track. A breakdown section at around 3.00 leads to the chorus which begins with a reference that will delight Porcupine Tree fans, ‘a train set’. The song Trains from the 2002 album In Absentia is a fan favourite, with over 32m plays on Spotify at the time of writing. And Wilson got a train set for his birthday in 2019, as he excitedly announced on Instagram – nearly 50 years since his parents bought him his first one! Whether he ever got a ‘daguerreotype’ (a type of photograph popular in Victorian times) for his birthday is unknown. Like many of the words in the chorus, it appears to be there for its rhythmic punch rather than a deeper meaning.
The muscular bass solo by Nick Beggs on Chapman stick at around 5.00 is a highlight of the track, and indeed the album as a whole. The track drops away again at around 5.40; most artists would have ended it there, but Wilson instead plays some lovely contemplative piano chords that take us to the sound world of Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015). Adam Holzman provides an evocative Moog solo that recalls the work of Swiss keyboard player Patrick Moraz, who played for Yes and the Moody Blues and worked closely with Robert Moog in the 1970s. As the track ends the Moog solo continues and we are transported again to the distant view of the Earth that we visited during the title track, via Rotem Wilson’s spoken words. A transcendent ending to a superb track.
CONCLUSION
It seems strange to classify The Harmony Codex as a lockdown album, compared for instance with the album Under a Spell by Porcupine Tree’s Richard Barbieri, which Barbieri described as a ‘weird, self-contained dream-state album’ reacting to ‘all this strangeness going on outside’ during the pandemic. In some ways, although it was written and recorded before lockdown, Wilson’s previous album The Future Bites has more of a lockdown feel to it. That album somehow reflected the intense inwardness of being trapped at home, with its concentration on electronics and heavily processed vocals and percussion. The postponement of the album’s release and cancellation of the accompanying tour because of the pandemic, with all the promotional interviews done on Zoom rather than in person, also strengthened the sense of it being a lockdown album.
Ironically, Wilson used the extra time he had at home during the pandemic to collaborate much more with other musicians, whereas the previous album had comparatively few collaborators – although it’s worth mentioning Sir Elton John’s spoken word contribution on Personal Shopper from that album. While writing The Harmony Codex, Wilson took the time to revisit his complete creative landscape, adding the richness of his solo albums before The Future Bites to the spiky electronics of that album.
The result is an album that is more eclectic than any of his previous work, more ambitious in scope, a cinematic treat for the ears and food for the soul. As Wilson approaches middle age (he was 56 last November) he uses his vast experience as a musician, songwriter and producer to create new worlds with each project. After over 30 years in the music industry, many artists (and their fans) would be very happy to repeat the same musical formula they perfected early in their career. It’s to Wilson’s immense credit that he continues to progress, sometimes deliberately alienating some of his fans, but constantly surprising and delighting those who are prepared to stay with him.
Sources
Kent, N. HAPPY NOW? Songs are coming easily, confidence has returned. After the paranoia and angst, Radiohead talk to Nick Kent about Amnesiac, love of music and a way out of the woods (Mojo, June 2001)
Horsley, J. INTERVIEW: Storm Corrosion’s Steven Wilson (Decibel, 21/05/20120
Fuller, G. the arts desk Q&A: Steven Wilson on Porcupine Tree, ‘The Harmony Codex’ and electro-dominance (the arts desk 12/12/23)
Humphries, S. Steven Wilson on “The Harmony Codex” (Part 1) The Staircase Infinities of Modern Life (Under the Radar 29/08/2023)
Millar, M. Steven Wilson: Unlocking The Harmony Codex (The XS Noize Podcast 14/09/2023)
FaceCulture Steven Wilson interview – ‘The Harmony Codex’, creating his own universe, ambiguity +more! (YouTube 02/10/2023)
Aranda, B.G.Steven Wilson, the wizard of progressive rock: ‘125,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. It’s absurd’ (El País 16/10/2023)
Cornell, J. Q&A WITH STEVEN WILSON: MUSICIAN, PRODUCER & GRAMMY AWARD-WINNING IMMERSIVE MIX ENGINEER (Immersive Audio Album 10/07/22)
On Track … Steven Wilson which includes a more detailed version of the above review and an in-depth analysis of Wilson’s other six studio albums will be published in Spring 2024
If Steven Wilson had written a song called December Skies in the early years of his band Porcupine Tree it would have been a dreamy, spacey extended jam with poetic, earnestly abstract lyrics. For later Porcupine Tree it would have been an angst-ridden, prog-metal song, probably featuring lyrics about disaffected teenagers or a serial killer. In the early years of his solo career it might have been a deeply-felt, intensely introverted indie song with slightly abstruse lyrics. In the middle of his solo career, it could have been a ghost story with existential tendencies. Most recently, it could have been a ten-minute prog epic with elements of spiritual jazz and electronica, beautifully mixed in immersive surround sound with a stunning video directed by Miles Skarin. All of them would have been profound.
So it came as a surprise to many, not least to Wilson himself, that he has written a bona fide Christmas Song… Just to be clear, this is the same songwriter who used to introduce his song Routine when he played it live as his attempt to write the most depressing song ever written (it’s also one of his best songs). Wilson, when challenged recently by a friend to write a festive ditty, decided to call upon the services of ChatGPT to write the lyrics for him. To be fair, his instructions to the chatbot included the Wilsonesque sentiments, ‘Don’t mention Christmas’, (bah humbug!) and ‘make it feel cold and lonely.’
Wilson’s artificially intelligent lyricist has done a reasonable job; the words are good enough to have graced many a past Christmas number one, but it feels there is a slight emptiness at their heart, perhaps because it’s difficult to ignore the fact that they are the product of artificial intelligence. But, as he does with all his projects, Wilson has applied great musical intelligence, artistry and the highest possible production skills, even when he is working very quickly, and perhaps slightly tongue in cheek as he may be here. The song has all the requisite elements of a traditional Christmas hit – a slightly melancholy verse with some juicy minor chords; acoustic guitars and a heavily echoed vocals (as at the start of Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas), the sound of sleigh bells; an uplifting chorus; some Christmas carol-like tunes (in this case the sound of a harmonium and bells playing passages that could have come from Carol of the Bells, the early 20th century Christmas carol); orchestral strings and rich backing vocals; the obligatory key change at the end. Add to that some gorgeous slide guitar work from Randy McStine, who joined Wilson on the two recent Porcupine Tree tours, and the song is actually very good. It’s the kind of song that could have been a Christmas number one, in the traditional style of Cliff Richard’s two solo Christmas chart toppers, or David Essex’s number two hit A Winter’s Tale – which like Steven Wilson’s is beautifully crafted, rather melancholy song, and also doesn’t specifically mention Christmas.
Wilson has said ‘”I didn’t think I had it in me.” To be honest, neither did we, but Merry Christmas, Steven!
The video for December Skies was generated using a purpose built AI system created by Miles Skarin
No chatbots were harmed (or used!) in the writing of this blog
You wait 12 years for a Train… then two come at once
For 12 years between their gig at the Royal Albert Hall in London in October 2010 and their next London gig at Wembley Arena in November 2022 it appeared that Porcupine Tree would never play live again. Following their 2022 tour in support of their new album Closure/Continuation, the band announced a festival tour in the summer of 2023, and Thursday night’s gig, part of Manchester’s Sounds of the City series at Castlefield Bowl, was the only UK date on that tour.
The gig began with some parish notices from lead singer and songwriter Steven Wilson. He expressed mild disappointment at the weather – the combination of outdoors, Manchester and the music of Porcupine Tree would surely have led to rain rather than the glorious sunshine that graced the allegedly ‘rainy’ City. Only the sight of a Joy Division tee-shirt in the audience restored some sense of normality.
On a more serious note, Wilson announced that sadly the band’s touring bass player Nate Navarro wouldn’t be able to appear due to a ‘serious family emergency’ which had forced him to return home. Wilson apologised, saying Navarro’s parts would be played on tape, and introduced the ‘invisible bass player.’ The crowd duly clapped the invisible man.
The other technical issue was that the sound of Gavin Harrison’s drums, at least from the verdant slope at the back of the Bowl, was quite boomy at first, threatening to dominate the rest of the band. This could be attributed to the acoustics of an outdoor bowl. It was certainly no reflection on Harrison’s playing, which was reliably excellent throughout. Fortunately, the problem was fixed only a few songs in to the two hour set.
Much of the set was the same as the Wembley Arena gig, although the shortened time available in Manchester meant that some tracks from the new album were dropped. A welcome new addition was Mellotron Scratch from the 2005 album Deadwing which was recently re-released in a Deluxe Edition which Wilson, with typically wry humour, said came as an ‘overpriced package.’ The rhythmic fervour at the start of the track was almost danceable, then a dreamlike mellotron choir joined with gorgeous backing vocals, leading to a funky verse section. An atmospheric glockenspiel led to heavy metal riffs which would have pleased the many audience members sporting heavy metal tee-shirts – more than Wilson himself said he had expected to see.
Heavy metal fans would also have been pleased by another highlight, the epic longform song Anesthetize from 2007’s classic album Fear of a Blank Planet. Wilson teased the audience by saying that there is an album of that name, just by way of a public service announcement and that didn’t necessarily mean the band was going to play any of it; but he soon obliged by launching into the song. Some fans mouthed the words in awestruck reverence. Others pointed towards the stage with heavy metal gestures. Tour guitarist Randy McStine matched the virtuosity of Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson who played a solo on the original album track, but in his own unique style. Wilson provided funky electric piano at one point, and keyboard player Richard Barbieri brought piercing guitar-like sounds and warm synth washes. Perched magisterially above the band on his drum throne, Harrison’s brought loose-limbed but disciplined dexterity to his huge kit. Another highlight from the same album was Sleep Together, in which Wilson played a syncopated keyboard solo. The crowd continued to clap along to the main beat, and weren’t put off by the syncopation. Only a prog/metal crowd can do this (probably).
But Wilson also demonstrated a different side, more contemplative, a 21st century folk troubadour in versions of the songs which were sometimes gentler than the album versions, such as the opening section of Chimera’s Wreck and the final section of Harridan, both from the new album. He joked, ‘Thank you, Glastonbury!’ after the latter and later invited the crowd to join him in a Glastonbury-style sing a long in an old song – The Sound of Muzak – written by a ‘visionary’ (one Steven Wilson) The audience cheerfully obliged, joining him in the chorus that, ironically, bemoans the commodification and devaluing of music.
Image from visitmanchester.com
The previous concert in London had ended with fan favourite Trains, which at the time of writing has had very nearly 30 million plays on Spotify. Appropriately, a train track runs high along one side of Castlefield Bowl. ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if a train would come now’, opined Wilson. When one failed to appear the crowd managed to conjure one up by helpfully shouting, ‘Train, train, train’. When the ’60-ton angel’ of the song appeared there was a huge cheer, which must have puzzled the passengers. A magical end to an excellent evening.
Swedish prog metal band celebrate three decades of music with audience choices
A work colleague was bemused when I told her I was going to London on Friday to see a prog metal band, ‘didn’t you do that last week?’ she said. I explained that I had been to see Porcupine Tree, who are prog rock rather than prog metal. But both bands transcend their genre labels, as demonstrated in this concert by opener Ghost of Perdition which begins with death metal vocals and guitars but soon embraces pastoral folk. Both bands also feature leaders who are endlessly restless, refusing to repeat themselves. As Opeth’s leader Mikael Åkerfeldt said during the gig, he could easily have rewritten the band’s classic album Blackwater Park (2001) for every subsequent album, just as Steven Wilson could have carried on writing new versions of Porcupine Tree’s classic Fear of a Blank Planet (2007). But both men have refused to compromise, sometimes alienating fans but also gaining new ones by constantly changing. The two men have also been close friends since Wilson worked on Blackwater Park and more recently their Storm Corrosion album (2012).
Åkerfeldt did please fans however by allowing them to choose the setlist by picking one song from each of the band’s 13 studio albums to celebrate Opeth’s 30th anniversary. This led to the slightly strange choice of Black Rose Immortal from the 1996 album Morningrise. Åkerfeldt admitted that his aim was to write a song for the first album which was over twenty minutes long. It wasn’t ready in time so he put it on the second album. He conceded that he built the track by stitching together short sections. The resulting song is episodic almost to the point of being disjointed, but the band made a good effort at playing it live for the first time.
Elsewhere, long-form structures worked much better, as on The Moor (from 1999’s Still Life) with its dreamy opening followed by driving metal riffs, and closing number Deliverance (from the 2002 album of the same name) with its mesmerising syncopated final section. And throughout the concert Åkerfeldt’s endlessly inventive songwriting was illustrated by songs that – remarkably – he began writing at the age of 19, obtaining the band’s first record deal by sending a cassette to a record company with 15 seconds of rehearsal footage on it. His amazing ear for unusual chord progressions and rich harmonies was evident throughout, particularly in the beautiful harmony vocals for Eternal Rains will Come (from Pale Communion 2014).
Åkerfeldt has worked very hard to get Opeth to its current level of success, and he is obviously enjoying it; his onstage persona was relaxed, taking time to tune his guitar and chat amiably to the audience between songs. His singing voice was equally relaxed, his death metal growls rich and evocative and his clean vocals searing and potent, often within the same song. The audience were in good voice too, joyfully singing along when Åkerfeldt played a short excerpt from a song by another great singer – George Michael’s Faith. New drummer Waltteri Väyrynen (Paradise Lost, Bodom After Midnight and Bloodbath) was equally relaxed, and seems to have fitted into his new band really well already, happily embracing Opeth’s prog metal, blues, jazz and folk with equal aplomb.
The video screens were vertically split into three, meaning that from the balcony seats it looked at times as if Väyrynen and keyboard player Joakim Svalberg were swimming in a sea of fire or water. The images occasionally felt slightly generic but there was a stunning video for The Devil’s Orchard (from Heritage 2011) with a terrifying opening image of a woman falling from a high building into the abyss, matching the existential despair of the Nietzschean cry, ‘God is Dead.’
Like so many gigs, this one was delayed due to Covid, so the band are now in their 32nd year. Let’s hope that Åkerfeldt and friends continue to record and perform great music for many years to come.
Radiohead members bring new band The Smile to Manchester
*****
Last time Radiohead played in Manchester was five years ago, when the Manchester Bombing forced the Arena to close and the gig was moved to Old Trafford Cricket Ground. It was an emotional evening, with the crowd singing Karma Police, ‘For a minute there I lost myself’, which became even more poignant in that context. Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood returned with their new band The Smile, and again there was a change of venue, from The Albert Hall to The Academy, but this time for a more benign reason, described as ‘production issues’.
This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Radiohead’s seminal album OK Computer, and many bands would have marked it with a world tour, promising to ‘play the whole classic album in full.’ It would be hard to criticise them if they had decided to do so, and many fans would certainly have appreciated it. Instead, Yorke and Greenwood decided to do something radically different, to form a new band with drummer Tom Skinner from the jazz group Sons of Kemet. Thom Yorke’s distinctive falsetto vocals and Jonny Greenwood’s intense guitar playing provide a strong link to Radiohead, but The Smile are far from being a slimmed-down version of the famous band. The most obvious musical link appears in the song You Will Never Work in Television Again which looks back to the post-punk of the early Radiohead era of The Bends.
But both men have moved on; it seems unlikely that they will ever write a song like Creep again. Thom Yorke has released some excellent solo albums, in particular Anima from 2019, and Jonny Greenwood has written Oscar-nominated film scores Phantom Thread and The Power of the Dog. So it’s no surprise that The Smile’s new album A Light for Attracting Attention has moved on from Radiohead in style. And to stress that they aren’t Radiohead, the new band didn’t play any songs from the band’s rich back catalogue, restricting themselves to playing only one song not written by The Smile, a compelling version of Thom Yorke’s solo single Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses in the encore.
The role that Tom Skinner plays in the band shouldn’t be underestimated. He brought a more loose-limbed, jazz style to many of the songs, and the rhythmic complexity and precision of the intertwining instrumental and vocal lines was a highlight of the evening, starting with the pulsating synths of The Same which opened the gig. Thom Yorke’s voice was a strong and emotive as it has ever been; sometimes it felt as he if was an ascetic solo troubadour in troubled times. Elsewhere he was nearly drowned out in a maelstrom of psychedelic sound that was reminiscent of early Pink Floyd instrumentals. Jonny Greenwood brought a funky swagger to some of his basslines, as well as his more familiar introspective guitar-playing. Sequenced synth lines wrapped around the band, weaving in and out like vines around a tree. The band have created their own style, making them hard to categorise, a mesmerizing mix of post-rock, math rock, contemplative balladry, and the complex time signatures of prog rock. The audience listened intensely, with some members gently swaying to the hypnotic beats. 30 years since Radiohead released Creep as their first single, members of the band continue to innovate, and to bring their audience with them as their musical journey continues.
Classic Pink Floyd songs brought to life with an Australian twist
****
The last time Pink Floyd played an indoor concert venue in Manchester was nearly 50 years ago at the Palace Theatre on 10 December 1974. It seems unlikely that the three surviving members will ever play live together again, although Nick Mason has already played the Apollo with his band Saucerful of Secrets and is returning next year to play more of the band’s early material. In the meantime, fans of the band can enjoy the Australian Pink Floyd Show, a chance to hear live versions of songs that are too good never to be heard live again.
The potential problem with a tribute band is that they can earnestly replicate the exact notes that the original band played without really capturing the spirit of that band. This can sometimes happen with the Australian Pink Floyd Show, but at their best they take flight and their passion and energy lift the songs so they become less of a high quality reproduction of an Old Master and more like the original, with all the depth of the brushstrokes and the subtlety of the colour intact. Guitarist David Domminney Fowler in particular is able to lift a song, both with his soulful vocals and the fluid grace of his soloing. And the vocals throughout were excellent – lead vocalist Chris Barnes (a Salford University graduate) was always passionate and polished, and Ricky Howard brought the rougher edge of Dave Gilmour’s vocals to life. And a special mention for Lorelei McBroom, Emily Lynn and Lara Smiles who provided warm and energetic backing vocals throughout and all shone in their solos in The Great Gig in the Sky.
The other dilemma faced by a tribute band is whether they should faithfully play every note of the original songs from the albums, or whether they should allow themselves to improvise when playing the songs live. Pink Floyd themselves, particularly in later years, added extended guitar solos and Money had a breakdown jam section that was absent from the Australian Floyd’s version and would perhaps have lifted it. So it was great to hear Another Brick in the Wall Part II in a longer version, with added guitar parts at the end, while the grotesque inflatable teacher nodded along menacingly. Another highlight was a modified version of One of These Days, which made great use of the guitars appearing at either side of the stereo picture. It also featured an inflatable, a pink kangaroo with a disturbingly rat like smile. There were several other witty references to the band’s Australian origin, including the famous image from Wish You Were Here of the man on fire shaking now shaking hands with a kangaroo, and the radio station browsing at the start of that song being replaced by TV channel-hopping shows including Neighbours. But there was more poignant imagery on the circular screen behind the band too, early pictures of the original band with the haunted face of Syd Barrett providing a moving backdrop to an excellent rendition of Shine on You Crazy Diamond.
Amongst all the ‘hits’, it was good to hear some slightly lesser-known songs. The second half opened with a superb version of Astronomy Domine which featured on ‘Ummagumma’in a live version recorded over 50 years ago in 1969. And there was a blistering version of Sheep from the 1977 album ‘Animals’, featuring the bizarre mangling of spoken words from Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, He converteth me to lamb cutlets.’
The show ended with two encores, a powerful version of Run Like Hell and a rousing Comfortably Numb for which the audience was on its feet, a thrilling ending to a very good evening.
Drummer Craig Blundell, keyboard player Adam Holzman and bass player Nick Beggs began playing together on Steven Wilson’s Hand. Cannot. Erase tour in 2015. They also joined Steven on his To the Bone tour in 2018 and 2019. When Steven went off for a cup of tea after a brief soundcheck, the three others would remain on stage to jam together, creating what they described as a ‘jazz club’. They recorded each other on their phones as they played, and decided to use these recordings as the basis of some of the songs for the new Trifecta project. The result is a version of jazz rock fusion, almost entirely instrumental, in a style described by Nick Beggs as ‘Fission! It’s like Fusion but less efficient and more dangerous … with fall out.’ The outcome is an explosion of joyful, melodic virtuosity.
Beggs and Holzman were due to tour with Steven Wilson again but tours due in 2020 and again in 2021 were cancelled due to Covid-19. Like many artists, the three members of Trifecta collaborated remotely during lockdown – Beggs and Blundell in England and Holzman in New York. But whereas the work of another Steven Wilson alumnus Richard BarbieriUnder a Spell described darkly trouble dreams in lockdown, Trifecta cast a genial spell on tracks that they each completed at home before Holzman mixed the heady brew in his home studio. Further magic was sprinkled by expert mastering engineer Andy VanDette (who also worked on some of the Porcupine Tree albums). The light-hearted nature of the collaboration is shown by some of the tiles of the 15 ‘fragments’ that make up the album, such as ‘Clean Up On Aisle Five’ and ‘Nightmare In Shining Armour’. But don’t let that distract you from the serious levels of musicianship on display here.
Nick Beggs’ dry humour is evident on the only track that features vocals, the gently enticing Pavlov’s Dog Killed Schrodinger’s Cat, the lyrics of which he describes as ‘written from the perspective of a layman trying to understand quantum mechanics … and failing’. They include such memorable lines as ‘Wrestled to the ground by your quantum theory/ I’ve listened to your talk until my eyes grew weary’.
Despite the consistently high level of inventiveness and virtuosity shown by all three players, planting them firmly in prog rock territory, none of the songs are prog epics in terms of length; all of the 15 tracks are beautifully-crafted miniatures of around 3 minutes. The whole album is only 45 minutes long. Steven Wilson has recently called for a return to the shorter-form album, and his latest release The Future Bites lasts 42 minutes.
Opening track Clean Up On Aisle Five with its swirling keyboards, strong melody and powerful drumming is reminiscent of another prog rock supergroup, U.K. (John Wetton, Bill Bruford, Eddie Jobson and Alan Holdsworth) on their track ‘In the Dead of Night’, although without the impassioned vocals.
Other highlights include Proto Molecule with its amazingly funky bassline – worthy of Jaco Pastorius – evocative keyboard lines, syncopated jazz-funk riffing, and a delightful interplay between both instruments. There is more Jaco-style bass at the start of Nightmare in Shining Armor.
The Enigma of Mr Fripp cheerfully acknowledges its debt to Robert Fripp of King Crimson. It encapsulates all that is great about that band in less than three minutes. Nick Beggs plays Chapman Stick with Fripp-like intensity, the lines spiralling around each other. There are dystopian drums, sudden key changes, warm mellotron washes and rhythmic illusions. A complete King Crimson album in miniature. The track suddenly stops, delightfully segueing into the ultra-cool jazz keyboards of the next track Sally Doo-Dally.
Have You Seen What the Neighbours are Doing refers to the house next to Adam Holzman’s in the North Bronx, left empty when the man living there disappeared. It could easily have come from the soundtrack to a 1970s movie like Shaft. It begins with a disturbing film-noir scenario, with a looping funky bassline and luminous synths. There’s dirty distortion on the Fender Rhodes-like solo, adding to the sleaze. Holzman uses a similar sound on his recent live album The Last Gig.
The whole album is an unexpected lockdown delight that reveals its deep treasures with repeated listening. Two important questions remain. Are Trifecta working on new material, and will they ever tour? Hopefully the answer to both questions is yes!
The 2007 classic album finally appears on streaming services
*****
Lasse Hoile’s striking cover image for Fear of a Blank Planet
Within Porcupine Tree’s canon of ten studio albums, their 2007 album Fear of a Blank Planet has a similar status to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon within the Pink Floyd catalogue, a cohesive and deeply-satisfying concept album about alienation in modern life. So it has been a source of surprise and frustration to fans of Porcupine Tree that arguably their best album has been unavailable to stream, despite the fact that most of their albums have been on Spotify and other services for some time. Hopefully its availability will bring new listeners to a record which was Classic Rock Magazine’s Album of the Year in 2007.
Fear of a Blank Planet is now on Spotify and other streaming services
The album takes its title from Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, a hip-hop album greatly admired by Steven Wilson, Porcupine Tree’s band leader and principal song-writer until the band ceased to exist following their final album The Incident in 2009.
The fear of a ‘blank planet’ expressed in the album’s title reflects Steven Wilson’s deep concern about the effect that technology was having, particularity on teenagers who he felt were failing to connect with the real world as a result of their obsession with their computers, their iPods, mobile phones and gaming platforms. Writing the lyrics for the album in 2006, Steven may have been unaware that smartphones and social media were about to become ubiquitous. His fears seem prescient, bearing in mind for instance the recent Netflix docudrama The Social Dilemma in which former employees of major tech companies make serious allegations about the monetization of social networks, and the dopamine hits that engaging with them can apparently bring.
Steven Wilson said that the album’s theme of alienated teenagers was strongly influenced by the novel Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho. The novel features a character called Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, and is a strange but weirdly compelling amalgam of partial autobiography, satire, fantasy, horror and satire. Steven was intrigued by the central character’s son Robby, who spends his time in his room playing games and watching TV, or hanging out at the shopping mall with his equally vacuous friends. According to Steven Wilson’s website,
The lyrics deal with two typical neurobehavioural developmental disorders affecting teenagers in the 21st century: bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder, and also with other common behaviour tendencies of youth like escapism through prescription drugs, social alienation caused by technology, and a feeling of vacuity—a product of information overload by the mass media.
In Lunar Park, the over-reliance of parents on prescription drugs to control their children (and themselves) is satirised mercilessly in a scene in which a birthday party features six-year-olds who are so over-medicated that they move lethargically and speak monotonously, chewing their fingernails until they bleed. A paediatrician stands by in case further medical intervention is needed.
Steven’s lyrics for the album are largely quite earnest rather than satirical, although the odd turn of phrase expressing teenage angst can be witty:
Your mouth should be boarded up
Talking all day
With nothing to sayFear of a Blank Planet
And…
I'm trying to forget you
And I know that I will
In a thousand years, or maybe a week
Way Out of Here
In interviews around the time of the album’s release, Steven Wilson expressed deep disquiet about the effect of teenagers’ access not just to drugs but to guns, which he related to the massacres at Columbine and Virginia. He also referred to the links between violence and obsession with fame fostered by reality TV, and the shootings at the Westroads Mall in Omaha where the protagonist apparently left a suicide note to say this would make him famous.
All this makes the album seem very serious and heavy, and in some ways it is. But as with many great rock albums the lyrics serve the music, which is a perfect example of Porcupine Tree’s mature style. Steven Wilson has said that at that time he was strongly influenced by the Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah, who inspired him to write heavy riffs. But in an interview with Dutch Prog Rock headed Fear of a Dull Band there is an amusing discussion involving all four band members trying to decide exactly how heavy they had become. Steven decides that even he isn’t sure,
I think Fear Of A Blank Planet gives the impression that it is heavy because it starts with a long heavy song, and then there is Anesthetize which has this long heavy section. But I don’t know, you’d have to analyse it. ‘My Ashes’ [track two] is pretty mellow as is the last section of ‘Anesthetize‘ [track three]…
You can sense the frustration he feels in his music being categorised, something he has always resisted as his musical taste and influences have always been very wide. The fact that the whole album consists of only six songs, made into one continuous suite of around 50 minutes sounds suspiciously like Prog rock, a label which Steven has often resisted with some degree of irritation both for his work with Porcupine Tree and his later work as a solo artist.
Perhaps the best way to describe the music is a unique combination of heavy rock, melodic pop and art rock and metal with classical strings and gorgeous vocal harmonies. Progressive rock doesn’t really do it justice, except to the extent that it gives some idea of the scope of ambition…and the length of some of the songs.
The first track Fear Of A Blank Planet immediately establishes the album’s theme, beginning with the sound of keys on a vintage computer keyboard. The opening riff, on acoustic guitar, begins with a repeating octave interspersed with a tritone – an interval known as the ‘devil in music’ often used in heavy metal as in the song Black Sabbath.
Gavin Harrison, one of the finest rock drummers in the world (now with King Crimson and the Pineapple Thief) enters with a syncopated rhythm which sets up the dystopian mood of the song.
But this being a Porcupine Tree song, the heavy suddenly morphs into a beautiful moment of introspection, an instrumental at around four minutes in, still using the opening guitar riff but with atmospheric synth playing from Richard Barbieri and languid drumming from Gavin Harrison.
The driving urgency of much the song is paradoxically at odds with the lyrics that often express the torpor of the teenage boy’s life
I'm stoned in the mall again
Terminally bored
Shuffling round the stores...
The sense of boredom is felt so keenly felt that it bursts out into the burning rage that perfectly captures the hormonal maelstrom of a teenage boy. This is combined with a sense of cynical detachment and the sedative effect that prescription drugs have on him ‘my face is mogadon…I’m tuning out desires’. The effect is heightened by the heavy compression applied to Steven’s vocals in the verse, creating a sense of detachment.
Most of the music for My Ashes was written by the band’s keyboard player, Richard Barbieri, who was previously a member of Japan and its spin-off project Rain Tree Crow.
In keeping with the theme of the album, the song is shot through with melancholy resignation but also with a degree of bitterness; the central character is presumably the teenage boy who is the protagonist in the opening track, based on the character in Lunar Park. In the novel, the relationship between the narrator (who happens to be called Brett Easton Ellis) and his son Bobby is very strained, and in the song the boy blames his problems on his parents
When a mother and father Gave me their problems I accepted them all
Anesthetize
After the simplicity of the previous song, this track is of epic proportions and length. Various YouTubers, who have usually not heard of Porcupine Tree, can be seen reacting with genuine surprise and delight when hearing the song for the first time, and for those who are new to the band it could be a good place to start. To fans of the band it has become a classic.
The first section of the song features a guitar solo from Alex Lifeson of Rush (around four minutes in). Steven Wilson told Prog Archives that that he read a magazine article that mentioned that Lifeson was a fan of Porcupine Tree, causing him almost to fall off his chair as he had grown up listening to Rush. Steven got in touch with him via the journalist who had written the article and asked him to contribute the solo to the album.
The second section features astounding drumming from Gavin Harrison, which is isolated in the video below.
Gavin Harrison plays the drum parts on the second section of Anesthetize, The Pills I’m Taking
Most bands would have ended the song at this point, perhaps with a metallic flourish or a faded final chorus repeating itself as it disappears into the ether, but Steven Wilson takes us in to a completely different world in the final section, with lovely vocal harmonies and a gorgeous melancholic feel.
Sentimental
On 4 June 2007, NPR (National Public Radio) in America picked this track as their Song of the Day, which means that it was picked up by over 1000 public radio stations in the US. Cecile Clouthier reviewed the song under the heading Progressive Rock Gets Mordantly Witty and her description is not only pleasingly witty but very accurate.
The wit arises mainly from tension between the charmingly calm atmosphere of the chorus, particularly the third time with smooth backing vocals from John Wesley, and the words which describe the ‘sullen and bored’ kids who are ‘stoned in the mall’ again, returning to the theme of teenage alienation.
Way Out Of Here
This song perfectly demonstrates two of Steven Wilson’s favourite and most successful vocal techniques. It begins with one of his most beautiful vocal lines, intimate, delicately poised between speech and melody, creating a great sense of empathy with the subject of the song, dreaming of escape. The chorus then changes focus completely with a full-voiced, almost epic delivery, to express the main character’s desperate need for escape, to find a way out of here’.
Sleep Together
The final song on the album remains one of Steven Wilson’s favourites, as shown by the fact that he played it on his huge tour to support the release of his 2017 solo album To the Bone. It appears on the Home Invasion: In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall live DVD released in 2018 (track 17).
Generally, Steven Wilson unconsciously absorbs his musical influences but as he told Roy Povarchik of Alternative Zine ‘there is one exception, which is that I wanted the track Sleep Together to sound like Nine Inch Nails, with John Bonham [of Led Zeppelin] on drums, and produced by Massive Attack!’
So ends a classic album, with six very strong but very different tracks; you are in for a treat if you haven’t heard it before. And if you want more of the same, also try Nil Recurring, the companion EP of material recorded during the Fear of a Blank Planet Sessions.
See you next time.
Personnel
Steven Wilson: vocals, guitars, piano, keyboards
Richard Barbieri: keyboards and synthesizers
Colin Edwin: bass guitars
Gavin Harrison: drums
Alex Lifeson (Rush): guitar solo on ‘Anesthetize’
Robert Fripp (King Crimson): soundscapes on ‘Way Out of Here’
In those distant days before the world was gripped by the hands of a virus that forced us all into lockdown, I was on my way back home on a train from London. I was doing some research on my laptop into the Prog Rock band Porcupine Tree (as you do). The woman sitting next to me asked me if I liked that genre of music. Guilty as charged. She introduced herself as Ms Amy Birks (Winner of “Best Female Vocalist” in the 2018 PROG Magazine poll). She told me that she was about to release her debut solo album, having split with her former band Beatrix Players. I promised to review the album when it was released. So, dear reader, here is my review.
The first thing that strikes you is Amy’s voice, which is honey-rich, sometimes heavy with emotional vibrato, urgently rhythmic in its phrasing and in its need to communicate these quietly vital songs.
Ms Birks has been compared to Kate Bush, and it’s a valid comparison, but the singer that came to mind in terms of emotional truth is a very different performer, Peter Hammill. Listen to his 1977 album Over, written at the end of long relationship. Some of the songs on All That I Am & All That I Was are about a painful divorce, and are as intensely raw and personal as those on the earlier album. And the comparison continues with the close-micing of the vocals on each album; the singer is in the room with you. Compare these lines from Peter Hammill
For pain and love go hand in hand...
And hand in hand go you and my friend
from Time Heals
With these from Amy Birks
Tell me who is, who is she
You owe me that at least
from WithAll that I am
Other, slow, reflective, tracks on the new album such as Unlike The Heart, More and Not Every Night also deal with Amy’s painful past relationships.
But the most powerful song on the album Say Something describes her time as a teenage model and an older man who took advantage of her. Accompanied by gentle, delicate falling mournful harmonies she describes her regret that she didn’t say anything at the time about behaviour that was just as wrong then as it is now
And it was okay was it
For me to take off my clothes
So much beauty
And only seventeen years old
She now says “It’s not just about my experience, but also other people’s. These songs help to take me through very difficult parts of my life. I’ve realised I’m much stronger than I thought I was, now I’ve had time to explore those feelings.
What’s very effective is that this very autobiographical song segues into another song in the same key, and also in the unusual rhythm (for a pop song) of 3/4 or waltz time. The track is about another woman who is hated and mistreated by a man, Catherine of Aragon
He woke up today
With a hate for Catherine
Like several of the other songs, Catherine displays a lovely use of instrumental harmonies juxtaposed with the vocal line. Here, the melody seems to be in a major key at one point where the harmony is in the minor. It feels like a false relation, appropriately enough a musical technique that was popular during the reign of Henry VIII.
Amy’s evident love for history continues with another song with a Baroque dance feel to it, All the Fault of Lady Anne, and about another of Henry’s wives Anne Boleyn. Gentler than its predecessor, the song still reminds us of her fate when she was sent to the Tower.
Amy Birks’ love of history extends to historic literature. The track I Wish features Steve Hackett on acoustic guitar and lyrics based on the words of Christina Rossetti in her poem I wish I were a little bird – poet, activist and the subject of some of the most famous paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
Portrait of Christina Rossetti by her brother Dante Gabriel
As Amy says, The Rossetti poem works perfectly as this is a dark lyric about the fragility of the mind and how the past can so very easily come back to tease and torment.
I wish I were a little bird
That out of sight doth soar,
I wish I were a song once heard
But often pondered o'er,
Or shadow of a lily stirred
By wind upon the floor,
Or echo of a loving word
Worth all that went before,
Or memory of a hope deferred
That springs again no more.
I wish I were a little bird, by Christina Rossetti
The guitar and percussion add a lively flamenco feel to the track, and a subtle highlight of the album is the quote from Rossetti which includes a gorgeous chord change around 2 minutes 15 seconds into the song (under the words hope deferred) which melts in the mind.
The literary theme is also found in Jamaica Inn which refers to the book by Daphne du Maurier. Although it was published in the 1930s it was set in 200 years ago in Cornwall, which allows Amy to have fun on Cornish beaches and in a horde-driven carriage in the video:
The song, which opens the album, begins with a gentle, confessional melody, leading to an ear-worm of a chorus which haunts the mind for days.
The album is largely self-produced, no doubt drawing on skills Amy acquired from her degree in Music Technology at Staffordshire University. The production is beautifully simple, the song writing and arrangements accomplished and mature.
It’s always a good sign when an album leaves you wanting more, as this one did when it finished. It was also a consoling, richly-felt companion on a solitary coronavirus walk through a nearby sunlit industrial estate.
Nick Holmes Music 