Tag: Adam Holzman

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Steven Wilson – Impossible Tightrope – Live in Madrid – Album Review

★★★★★

Wilson launches his Headphone Dust online store with a stunning live recording made one The Overview Tour in Madrid

The cover of Impossible Tightrope. Image © Hajo Müller. Design by Carl Glover, Aleph Studio

Impossible Tightrope: Live in Madrid is Steven Wilson’s fourth solo live album, following Catalogue / Preserve / Amass (2012), Get All You Deserve (2012), and Home Invasion: In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall (2018). It was recorded on 13 June 2025, at La Riviera Madrid, at the final concert of the European leg of The Overview tour.

Headphone Dust Logo and Mission Statement © 2026 Headphone Dust

According to Discogs.com, Wilson launched his Headphone Dust store 25 years ago as a platform for online and mail-order sales of his solo work in his own name and other projects, such as Bass Communion. On 6 February 2026, Wilson relaunched the platform as a digital-only store, as ‘a passion project to bring immersive audio to fans worldwide.’ The first release was Impossible Tightrope: Live in Madrid. According to the website, ‘there are no plans for a physical release of this recording; it is exclusive to Headphone Dust.’ Since then, there have been several releases, including more of Wilson’s solo albums, and albums by Gentle Giant, Hawkwind, Theo Travis and Richard Barbieri.

The Overview

The Overview

The concert begins with a complete performance of The Overview, starting with Objects Outlive Us, Wilson’s strong falsetto, and the rich soundscaping that introduces the alien on the moor. The opening piano theme for ‘The Buddha of the Modern Age’, with rich backing vocals joining Wilson’s impassioned vocals, builds to an impressive climax. The ‘Objects Meanwhile’ section, with lyrics by Andy Partridge of XTC, contrasts humdrum daily lives with cosmic phenomena and has a lovely flow, aided by Nick Beggs’ melodically inventive bass lines. A thunderous bass solo from Beggs leads to superbly syncopated drums from Craig Blundell and Iron Maiden-like twin guitars from Wilson and Randy McStine. This feels like a mature, practised performance from a band at the top of their game.

There’s a gorgeous moment with lovely, contemplative guitar arpeggios and a gentle solo. The main 19-note piano theme returns, and the track gradually builds to a vocal climax as we leave the Earth, provoking a huge cheer from the audience. The proggy instrumental section is superb, with fiercely virtuosic drumming from Blundell and a stunning guitar solo which duets with the bass. The music falls away as we return to the ghost on the moor, and Randy McStine’s distinctive guitar solo is enhanced by Blundell’s spacey drumming. Wilson’s piece recorded largely solo in the studio has become a stunning work for live rock band.

The second part of the new album is the title track, The Overview. It begins with swirling electronics and spoken word inserts from Wilson’s wife, Rotem. The electronics drop, and Adam Holzman’s robust piano chords take over before more electronics appear, this time heavily treated with changing filters. A contemplative section shows the protagonist floating in space, with a slightly gritty tone to Wilson’s voice that stresses the tragedy of his loving wife’s death years before. McStine’s guitar threatens to break up in his next solo, before becoming more bluesy. The rich backing vocals, reminiscent of Wilson’s work with Porcupine Tree, create gorgeous harmonies. Rotem returns, and we are now deep in space.

A fiercely funky section, with hand claps, leads to a deliciously flowing solo from Holzman. The song ends with a replacement for Theo Travis’ sax solo that appears on the album; he also played it live in London in return for Wilson lending him an original Mellotron for use on Soft Machine’s latest album Thirteen. It’s replaced here by mellow synth and guitar, with a touch of early Pink Floyd psychedelia. We have been on a fascinating journey to the other side of the universe

The Harmony Codex
Hand. Cannot. Erase.
Insurgentes

After the interval, the album features tracks from Wilson’s solo albums and a couple of deep cuts from his work with Porcupine Tree. These are grouped together by album below (the order in which they were played can be found at the end of this post).

Insurgentes

Harmony Korine begins with bright, shimmering guitars and Beggs’ robust bass. The epic chorus is haunting, enhanced by Blundell’s heavily syncopated drums. This track is the closest to the original version, except for Blundell’s delightfully unexpected drum roll at about three minutes in.

Holzman covered Abandoner in an instrumental version on his live album The Last Gig. Wilson’s live version begins with soft-grained vocals, spacey drums, and Holzman’s delicate electric piano. McStine provides an anguished guitar solo and eerie backing vocals. A brief, contemplative instrumental passage leads into a section of vigorous noise rock featuring energetic drumming by Blundell. The song returns to the thoughtful instrumental mode. As Wilson says at the end, ‘Lovely stuff!’

The Harmony Codex

The title track of Wilson’s seventh solo album, The Harmony Codex (reviewed in detail here), begins with an explosion and audience cheers. I first heard the mesmerising repeated synth patterns at the album launch at EartH in London, and I wrote at the time,

‘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 deep sense of joy.’

The sounds of the hammered dulcimer and electric piano are added in this live version, making the sparkling sequences sound even more ethereal and otherworldly. The track’s heavily electronic feel evokes the same emotional response as the electronic opening of The Overview’s title track.

What Life Brings is a gentle ballad that shows Wilson at his melodic best. Holzman provides a new piano intro and jazzy piano parts, while Blundell brings robust drums, as he does on the original. The Floydian guitar solo leads to a subtly epic climax, ‘Love it all and hold it in your hands.’

The live album’s title track, Impossible Tightrope, is also the name of a chapter in Wilson’s book, Limited Edition of One, in which he explains why he doesn’t want to spend all his time trying to please a particular audience, or working with a band,

I don’t want to jump permanently back on that tightrope of trying to keep everyone happy while not compromising my own ‘vision’ the whole time. It does take a toll.

The live version is more robust than the original, with fiercer drums and guitar, while keeping the syncopated one-note bass line. Wilson’s falsetto vocals are more prominent than on the original track, which are more ethereal and heavily manipulated. Holzman ends the song with a fruity-toned, jazzy synth solo.

Hand. Cannot. Erase.

Above the applause, the mysterious high synths of Home Invasion (the title of Wilson’s previous live album) float in. There’s a phenomenally proggy, syncopated opening, with dirty-sounding, funky synths from Holzman and drum flourishes from Blundell. Later, Holzman plays a juicy synth solo with plenty of virtuosic runs and pitch bends. There’s a superb instrumental section, with funky lines, then a gorgeous, spacey sound on the words ‘Another day on Earth.’ The band is incredibly tight here. The guitar solo, played by Randy ‘The Mink’ McStine on Regret #9, is a little less flashy than Guthrie Govan’s stunning version on the original album, but it’s still excellent.

The first encore, Ancestral, begins with distinctive percussion from the original version and a new, thoughtful piano part. Beggs adds a gently funky bass line, which gives the track a quiet momentum at the start. Wilson’s subtly nostalgic vocals here are superb. Instrumentally, the track is very strong too, with a stunning guitar solo and proggy, syncopated sections that snake back on themselves; the audience enjoys clapping along in time. The breakdown section with Holzman’s eerie keyboards is spine-chilling. The full-on metal guitar riffs are invigorating.

Porcupine Tree – Voyage 34 and The Sky Moves Sideways

In December 2020, during the global pandemic, Wilson released a YouTube version of Porcupine Tree’s Voyage 34 as part of The Future Bites Sessions, recorded in lockdown at his home studio. At the time he wrote, ‘Look out for a more extended updating of Brian’s 34th LSD trip on my tour next year.’

Sadly, the 2021 tour was cancelled due to the pandemic, but the material will be toured later this year by former Porcupine Tree bass player Colin Edwin and the band’s touring guitarist, John Wesley, under the name Voyage 35.

The Floydian riffs at the start of Wilson’s live version draw cheers and clapping, and psychedelic keyboards are soon added. The track becomes a version for the complete band, with a quicksilver guitar solo and a new, virtuosic bass line from Beggs. It’s only a pity that this version isn’t longer – the original single was around 30 minutes – but the constraints of a concert setlist understandably cut it short. But it’s great to hear the spoken-word opening: ‘This remarkable, sometimes incoherent manuscript…’

In contrast, the other Porcupine track, Dislocated Day, is longer than the original. It comes from The Sky Moves Sideways, released 30 years ago. It’s one of the highlights of the live album. Blundell’s drumming is superb, Beggs’ bass is again incredibly funky, and there are warm, mellotron-like synth washes, Iron Maiden-style twin guitars, and a frenzied guitar solo. Perhaps best of all, there’s a lovely breakdown section, in which the excitable crowd decide to cheer rhythmically along; Wilson cheerfully points out, ‘We’re supposed to be coming down here, guys… Do it quietly!’ The crowd duly obeys; a huge cheer at the end suggests the audience doesn’t feel too chastened.

4½
The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories)

4½

The instrumental track, Vermillioncore, one of the album’s highlights, is a thrilling exercise in the power of musical repetition. It features spacey, psychedelic keyboards and a stunning ostinato bass line. The guitar solo is fractured and angular, and the synth lines have a warm Moog-like tone. Beggs’ tone in his bass solo is reminiscent of the great Chris Squire. The performance has a thrillingly visceral drive. It ends with long applause and a chorus of ‘¡Olé!, ¡Olé!, ¡Olé!’ From the Spanish crowd, as they call for an encore (the first one is Ancestral – see above).

The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories)

The second encore is the title track of The Raven That Refused to Sing. I admit that this will always have a special place in my heart, as it was the first of his tracks I discovered about ten years ago. It’s become a bit of a favourite of Wilson’s as an encore, and it’s easy to see why; its melancholy majesty is enthralling and deeply moving, and Wilson’s plaintive cries of the single word ‘Please’ pierce the soul. A fitting ending to a riveting live album.

Tracklist

  1. Objects Outlive Us (23.29) from The Overview
  2. The Overview (18.51) from The Overview
  3. The Harmony Codex (10.18) from The Harmony Codex
  4. Home Invasion / Regret # 9 (10.54) from Hand. Cannot. Erase.
  5. What Life Brings (3.51) from The Harmony Codex
  6. Voyage 34 (5.51) from Voyage 34 (Porcupine Tree)
  7. Dislocated Day (8.54) from The Sky Moves Sideways (Porcupine Tree)
  8. Abandoner (5.06) from Insurgentes
  9. Impossible Tightrope (10.53) from The Harmony Codex
  10. Harmony Korine (5.12) from Insurgentes
  11. Vermillioncore (6.24) from 4½
  12. Ancestral (13.48) from Hand. Cannot. Erase.
  13. The Raven That Refused to Sing (8.33) from The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories)

Now Read on…

Steven Wilson – The Overview Tour – Live Review
Steven Wilson – The Overview – Album Review
Interview – Miles Skarin: Creating ‘The Overview’ film with Steven Wilson (revised post)
The Harmony Codex by Steven Wilson – Album Review
Steven Wilson – Album Launch and First Impressions of his Ninth Studio Album
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Steven Wilson – The Overview – Album Review Part Three: ‘The Overview’ 

This is an analysis of the second half, and title track, of Steven Wilson’s eighth solo album, The Overview. For an introduction to the album, click here. For an analysis of the first half of the album, ‘Objects Outlive Us’, click here.

The Earth Seen from Apollo 17. Source: Wikimedia Commons

THE OVERVIEW

Perspective  

Perspective begins with radio transmissions from deep space. They sound like the radio transmissions at the opening of another space rock song, ‘Astronomy Domine’ from Pink Floyd’s 1967 album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In March 2024, Wilson said in a YouTube interview with Rick Beato that one of his favourite albums, by Pink Floyd – ‘still my favourite band’ – is Ummagumma (1969), which includes a live version of the song (although without the spoken words). When The Piper was released, Pink Floyd were managed by Andrew King and Peter Jenner. The latter read out the names of planets, stars and galaxies through a megaphone.

‘Perspective’ includes spoken word commentary from Wilson’s wife Rotem, just like the two previous albums, The Harmony Codex and The Future Bites. She names various cosmic phenomena, and their distances from Earth. Wilson used a website called scaleofuniverse.com to provide scientific facts. The distances involved are hard to comprehend – see below:

A megametre = 10^6 = ten to the power of six = ten with six zeroes = 1,000,000 m = a million m

A gigametre = 10^9 = ten to the power of nine = 10 with nine zeroes = 1,000,000,000 m = a billion m 

Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System and Callisto is Jupiter’s second largest moon:

Size beyond one megametre 
Ten to the power of six 
Ganymede, Callisto

A still from The Overview Film by Miles Skarin

Rotem’s voice is tuned down in pitch. Wilson told The Rockonteurs podcast that he wanted her voice to sound dispassionate, and ‘emotionally flat… to recite these scientific facts.’ He had in mind HAL, the talking computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the spacecraft Discovery One, who memorably says, ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.’

The red camera eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Source; Wikimedia Commons

What intrigues Wilson is not just the scientific facts about the space phenomena that Rotem describes, but also the effect such facts have on human consciousness. In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, he said that the sense of perspective shows who and what we are in relation to the vastness of the universe. He referred to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series and the Total Perspective Vortex. This machine allows the user to take in the whole universe, by extrapolating ‘the whole of creation… from one small piece of fairy cake.’ Built to annoy his wife, when the inventor turned the machine on, she saw ‘in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it… to [the inventor’s horror] the shock completely annihilated her brain.’ Despite this, the inventor had proved to his satisfaction that ‘the one thing [we] cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.’ The machine was later used as a punishment; the first person to survive it was the Betelgeusian, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who promptly ate the fairy cake.

A Still from The Overview Film by Miles Skarin

The opening music is the most electronic on the album, following on from the more electronic sound of parts of The Future Bites and The Harmony Codex. Wilson told John Earls of NME that it’s something that the English electronic duo Autechre might have produced. Wilson isn’t the first musician to use electronic music on a prog rock album. Pink Floyd opened The Dark Side of the Moon with ‘On the Run’, which used the VCS3 analogue synthesiser to create the electronic sequence. Roger Waters can be seen manipulating the synth sounds, cigarette in hand, on Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii (1972; re-released in 2025 as Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII with new mixes by Wilson).

EMS Putney VCS 3 Synthesiser, of the Type Used by Pink Floyd on The Dark Side of the Moon. Source: Wikimedia Commons

 

The fiercely rhythmic, jerky synth tracks and electronic drums – all played and programmed by Wilson – contrast with Rotem’s deadpan delivery of scientific facts. At the same time, they create a futuristic soundscape that suggests that science is more dominant on the second side of the album. Wilson told Dave Everley of Prog that Objects Outlive Us is more of a ‘human’ story, whereas in Everley’s phrase, the title track ‘evokes the sparseness and coldness of space.’ At around 2:00, slower, more human-sounding chords begin to take over. We hear Wilson’s voice at around 2:30, albeit partly stripped of its humanity in a wordless vocalise, transposed up an octave, so that it sounds more like a synthesiser than a human voice.

A Beautiful Infinity I/ Borrowed Atoms/A Beautiful Infinity II  

The protagonist is now on the other side of the universe, reflecting on his life back on Earth. He considers the time it takes light to travel long distances across space to reach the Earth; we see stars as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. There’s a strong parallel with Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. The line ‘Each moment for me is a lifetime for you’ could apply to the film’s plot. It stars Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a widowed former NASA test pilot who leaves a devastated Earth on a mission to find other habitable planets, leaving his young daughter Murph behind. Cooper and his crew travel remarkably close to a black hole called Gargantua. The scientific adviser to the film, Kip Thorne, wrote in his 2014 book The Science of Interstellar that time reaches a complete halt at the surface of a black hole.


A Still from The Overview Film by Miles Skarin

When Cooper travels near Gargantua, he ages only a few hours while Murph, on Earth, ages eight decades. There’s a profoundly moving moment when he receives a transmission from his daughter, and he realises that he has missed 23 years of his daughter’s life. They are now the same age. When he left Earth, she was a child. Wilson encapsulates the emotion of this moment in the simple but deeply poetic line, ‘Back on Earth, my loving wife’s been dead for years.’ Although the title track concentrates on science, there is room for humanity, too. The protagonist’s distance from Earth puts everything in perspective: ‘what seemed important [is] now like dust inside the squall.’ There’s perhaps an echo of the dust storms in Interstellar, which make Earth uninhabitable.

‘A Beautiful Infinity I’ is the first time we hear Craig Blundell on drums. He plays in a more robust, rockier style than Russell Holzman on Objects Outlive Us; both drummers are superb. Wilson’s vocals are treated with a delay effect; the final part of each phrase is repeated, ‘from here… from here… from here.’ Pink Floyd used this effect on ‘Us and Them’ from The Dark Side of the Moon to add emotional depth. Wilson used the same effect on ‘Arriving Somewhere But Not Here’ on Deadwing (2005).   

The slide guitar adds to the Floydian feeling of the track, but the guitar solo isn’t Gilmour-esque. Wilson asked Niko Tsonev to play the solo – his only solo on the album – in a style that combined the classic with the contemporary.’ The acoustic guitar, played by Wilson, is an Ovation in Nashville tuning. He used the same guitar and tuning on ‘Chimera’s Wreck’ from the 2022 Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation. He told Amit Sharma of Total Guitar that he used his Ovation guitar in Nashville tuning – the lowest four strings are tuned up an octave, creating ‘a very crystalline, musical box kind of tone.’

‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’

The ‘Borrowed Atoms’ section begins at around 2:40 with a piano break. The delicate musical backdrop of piano and synthesiser accompanies one of the most poetic moments on the album, with the words ‘The clouds have no history’, and ends ten lines later with the words ‘Is this a dream?’ Wilson’s lyrics express profound complexity in simple language. He reverses the ‘pathetic fallacy’, a poetic device where human emotions or characteristics are attributed to nature. (A good example is I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, which describes the daffodils as human dancers, ‘tossing their heads in sprightly dance.’) Wilson does the opposite, stressing that nature has no human emotion: ‘The clouds have no history/And the sea feels no sorrow.’ This is another aspect of the album’s perspective theme. Nature ignores us, so we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. Wilson says our atoms are just ‘borrowed’; when we die, they return to the universe. This is ambiguous – if our atoms are only ‘borrowed’, we are insignificant, but we should also take good care of our atoms, as we only have temporary stewardship. Wilson’s meditation on the nature of selfhood ends with a moving expression of existential angst, warmly sung, ‘Is this a dream?’

 ‘A Beautiful Infinity II’ begins at around 4:00 with the words ‘There’s no reason for any of this.’ Wilson’s personal view – with which some would disagree – is that the universe was created out of chaos, not by design or by a supreme being,  

‘There’s no reason for any of this 
Just a beautiful infinity 
No design and no one at the wheel 
Just an existential mystery.’ 

The idea of no one being at the wheel is reminiscent of ‘The Creator has a Master Tape’ from the Porcupine Tree album In Absentia (2002). We discover that ‘the creator had a master tape’, which suggests design, only to find that – ironically – ‘he left it in a cab.’ 

After the massed backing vocals of Wilson and Randy McStine, there are some whimsical, almost scatting vocals from Wilson at around 4:05, in the same style as on ‘Harridan’, the opening track of Closure/Continuation. At around 5:00, McStine closes the track with a richly analogue Moog solo.

Infinity Measured In Moments  

This section is the climax of side two. Rotem Wilson returns, reciting another list of space statistics to create a further sense of awe about the vastness of the universe. Blundell’s drumming here is impressive. He adds subtle shifts to the rhythmic patterns here, building the epic feel of the track and bringing a human feel to the electronic parts. The track is built around arpeggiating analogue synth patterns, just as Wilson built up the title track on The Harmony Codex. Wilson’s vocals are warm and rich, multitracked in unison rather than complex harmonies, as often in his Porcupine Tree songs. McStine provides backing vocals and a guitar solo at 2:15, which combines an angular, modern feel with the classic uplifting rock solo.

The Inner Sleeve of In Absentia by Lasse Hoile

It’s followed by handclaps (Wilson) and ukulele (McStine). Porcupine Tree fans may recall a similar effect on ‘Trains’ (In Absentia, 2002), a fan favourite with over 38 million plays on Spotify at the time of writing. There is some very Peter Hook-style bass in this section. Wilson is a massive fan of Hook’s former band Joy Division, listing the band’s debut single Transmission (1979), in his book Limited Edition of One as one of his top 100 tracks. At around 3:20, the track reaches a climax with Adam Holzman’s Moog solo, the first real opportunity Holzman has on the album to show the warmth and virtuosity of his jazz-tinged playing, which was a real highlight of The Overview Tour that came to London in May 2025.

Permanence  

The final section of the album is a contemplative instrumental, beautiful, ambient and ethereal. We are now floating in space, billions of light-years away from Earth. The encounter with the alien on the moor at the beginning of the album now seems an infinite time ago.     

Theo Travis. Photo by Mariia Korneeva

Theo Travis plays the soprano sax solo. Travis worked on some of Wilson’s solo albums, and the two worked together on Travis’ 2024 solo album Aeolus. That album is a one-hour Theo Travis piece for duduk; the instrument Travis played on ‘Beautiful Scarecrow’ on The Harmony Codex. Wilson produced the recordings and created soundscapes from Travis’s alto flute playing. That album is gentle, meditative, introspective and quietly mesmerising. Travis’s playing has the same effect on ‘Permanence.’  

The section begins with the evocative sound of the electric piano, processed through a reverse echo. Two new instruments are added. The first is the celeste or celesta, a keyboard instrument that looks like a small upright piano. Like a piano, a hammer is operated by pressing a key, but instead of striking strings, the hammer hits a metal plate like that of a glockenspiel. Appropriately, in the context of this track, the name means ‘celestial’ or ‘heavenly.’ The second instrument is the Moog synthesiser on which Wilson created a sound like the theremin.

In the film by Miles Skarin, we move gradually closer to a green shoot of life. An out-of-focus creature gradually comes into focus. Our old friend, the alien from Objects Outlive Us, intently investigates the green shoot. We hadn’t forgotten that the alien exists. There is hope after all.  

This post was updated at 18.02 on 29 December 2025 to correct the explanation of the terms megametre and gigametre, which had incorrectly referred to kilometres (km) rather than metres (m)

Links

Steven Wilson – The Overview – Album Review Part Two: ‘Objects Outlive us’
Steven Wilson – The Overview – Album Review – Part One – Introduction

Sources

Beato, Rick, Steven Wilson Discusses His Favorite [Sic] Albums (Rick Beato 2, YouTube 24/03/34) 
Kemp, Gary and Pratt, Guy, Gary Kemp album special with Steven Wilson (The Rockonteurs, YouTube 26/01/25) 
Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Omnibus Edition, Boekerij 2018)
Earls, John, Steven Wilson: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo”  (NME 18/02/25) 
Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025)
Images from The Overview film by Miles Skarin of Crystal Spotlight
Beato, Rick, Steven Wilson Discusses His Favorite [Sic] Albums (Rick Beato 2, YouTube 24/03/34) 
Kemp, Gary and Pratt, Guy, Gary Kemp album special with Steven Wilson (The Rockonteurs, YouTube 26/01/25) 
Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Omnibus Edition, Boekerij 2018)
Earls, John, Steven Wilson: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo”  (NME 18/02/25) 
Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) 
Sharma, Amit, Steven Wilson on Porcupine Tree’s triumphant return and his love of “guitar players that can play one note and break your heart” (Total Guitar, August 2022)
Wilson, Steven, Limited Edition of One (Constable, April 2022)

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Steven Wilson – The Overview Tour – Live Review

Monday 12 May 2025

The London Palladium 

*****
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 – 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 that’s true, that’s only because he’s surrounded by a group of phenomenal musicians), he acts as lead vocalist, and sometimes guitar and keyboard player. At other times, he’s 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 Blundell’s drumming.

And the jazz analogy doesn’t end there. We are lucky enough to see the jazz saxophonist, flautist and regular Wilson collaborator Theo Travis performing for one night only (‘no 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 – Collapse the Light into Earth from Porcupine Tree’s 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 Holzman’s keyboard playing. He shows his full jazz pedigree tonight (he was Miles Davis’s 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 Blundell’s drumming is fiercely syncopated, with some jazzy cymbal work. He drives the band with intense snare beats, and the physicality is visceral. It’s high but deserved praise to say that he has become to Wilson’s 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 Skarin’s 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, it’s clear that Wilson is in excellent voice; his falsetto on the words ‘I incline myself to space’ 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. It’s 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 tonight’s band: an extended improvisation at the end of the song. Beggs also shines in the driving instrumental Vermillioncore from the EP 4+1⁄2 . 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. It’s 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 shouldn’t 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 Wilson’s insistence that phones shouldn’t 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,  and to credit Jess Cope for the video of The Raven 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

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Harmonic Divergence by Steven Wilson – Album Review

The cover of Harmonic Divergence by Steven Wilson

Record Store Day exclusive remix album completes the Harmony Codex trilogy

****

The cover of Harmonic Divergence by Steven Wilson

Steven Wilson’s Harmony Codex trilogy is complete. The original album was released in September 2023. The Deluxe Edition of The Harmony Codex included a remix album, Harmonic Distortion. The new remix album, Harmonic Divergence was released on 20 April 2024 as a limited-edition Record Store Day exclusive on vinyl only. According to the Discogs website, only 2200 copies were released, and purchasers in England had to queue up on an unseasonably cold Saturday morning to buy it from their local record store, or hope that it would be available to buy online a few days later. As Wilson said on his website,

One of the most fun and rewarding aspects of The Harmony Codex has been the opportunity to have the music remixed by so many other artists and musicians I admire. The material seemed to lend itself so well to reinterpretation. 

Wilson adds a small amount of his own material, in the form of the short Codex Themes #10, #4 and #13, just as he does on the previous remix album.

Time Is Running Out Remix – Ewan Pearson Remix (9:20) 

Ewan Pearson is an English producer, mixer and remixer. His remix of ‘Inclination’, another track from the original album, was released as a single on 19 January 2024. In January 2024, Alexis Petridis wrote in The Guardian that Pearson’s joyful remix ‘sprinkles sunlit Balearic euphoria’ on the original.

Wilson describes Pearson’s remix of ‘Time Is Running Out’ as a, ‘euphoric and propulsive reworking.’ It begins with bells, like the opening of ‘High Hopes’ from Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell (1994). The bells in both songs are metaphors for the passing of time, and the ephemeral nature of human life. The Pink Floyd song describes nostalgia for childhood, a common theme in Wilson’s work, a time when ‘the grass was greener’ before, ‘ a life consumed by slow decay.’ On his Harmonic Distortion remix, Mikael Åkerfeldt, lead singer of Opeth, replaces Wilson’s vocals with his own yearning, nostalgic vocals, but Pearson’s remix retains the original vocals.

An electronic voice at the start and the end of the track gives a time and date; the date appears to be 4/29/92, or April 29th 1992. It’s easy to fall down an internet rabbit hole trying to find out the significance of the date, but it was the day when the Los Angeles riots began following the acquittal of four LAPD officers who were charged with using excessive force in the arrest of Rodney King. The American rock band Sublime wrote a song about the riots called ‘April 29, 1992 (Miami)’ from their album Sublime (1996). The lyrics refer to 26th of April but apparently when the band realised their mistake, they decided to keep the take as it was so good. In April 1992, Pearson was 20 years old (he was born on 1 April 1972), and Wilson released the first ‘official’ Porcupine Tree album, On the Sunday of Life around that time (12 May 1992), but although these were important times in both men’s lives the dates don’t seem precise enough.

Pearson develops the clattering rhythm track of the original song and turns it into a joyous dance song. He completely abandons the piano introduction and adds rich synths, followed by a hefty kick drum and a pulsating single-note bass line. An ethereal synth melody floats above, giving the track a hopeful feel as additional percussion is added. A delicious percussion breakdown features Wilson’s voice tuned down to create a human beatbox, which appears a couple of times on the original track. Pearson makes the beatbox theme much more of a feature, tuning it up and down and massively extending it. It’s unclear whether there are any decipherable words here, but the heavily processed voice is still strangely moving. Pearson’s remix is almost twice as long as Wilson’s original, giving it a 12- inch single extended remix feel; it’s not until five minutes in that the first verse arrives, accompanied by metallic keyboards rather than the original piano. Pearson sensibly retains the complete guitar solo by Niko Tsonev, a highlight of the original track.

The Harmony Codex Remix – David Kollar & Arve Henriksen Remix (5:10) 

This is the first of two remixes of the title track, by Norwegian jazz trumpeter Arve Henriksen and the Slovakian guitarist David Kollar, who provides guitar solos on ‘Inclination’, and ‘Actual Brutal Facts’ on the main album. It’s not so much a remix as a complete rewriting or radical re-imagining; all that remains of the original track is the voice over by Wilson’s wife Rotem. It becomes a contemplative duet between trumpet and acoustic guitar, with what sounds like Kollar on bowed mandolin about half way through. Henriksen’s trumpet is soft-grained, similar in style to the playing of Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær on the opening track of the main album, ‘Inclination.’ As Nate Chinen said in an article in The New York Times on 18 June 2009, the two trumpeters, ‘share a fondness for fragile lyricism and rippling atmosphere, building on a 40-year tradition that began with the Miles Davis album In a Silent Way [1969]’, although he goes on to say that their live performances are very different. The remix provides a very different perspective on Rotem’s spoken words. Whereas on the original track it appears that the music is beamed from a distant galaxy, here we sit much closer, and the words feel much more intimate as if we are sitting with the protagonist rather than hearing her from afar.

Actual Brutal Facts Remix – Craig Blundell Remix (5:09) 

Craig Blundell plays drums on most of tracks on the original album. He was also Wilson’s drummer on the To the Bone tour in 2018 and 2019. This was Wilson’s most recent solo tour as the tour to support the 2020 album The Future Bites was cancelled due to Covid. Blundell is also a member of Trifecta, which was formed with two other Steven Wilson band members, Nick Beggs and Adam Holzman (who has remixed ‘What Life Brings’ – see below) were sound checking during the tour. They have released two albums to date – Fragments in 2021 and The New Normal earlier this year.

Blundell’s remix is fairly subtle, more of a reworking than a complete re-imagining like some of the other tracks on the two remix albums. It retains the structure of the original song, although the introduction is slightly longer.

The track begins with the original guitar introduction, but the surrounding instruments are distorted and manipulated to create a sense of dread. There’s a disturbing added bass drum, like an irregular heartbeat, and creepy whispering voices as if from a nightmare or a horror film. A slightly eerie synth or mellotron sound hovers above, like something from the soundtrack of a 1950s sci-fi movie. When Wilson’s voice enters, Blundell adds very heavy compression, a vocal effect Wilson often uses on earlier Porcupine Tree tracks.

At one minute in, the track suddenly opens out and Wilson’s vocals return to normal. The original bass line is replaced by a heavy dubstep bass throughout the rest of the song. The use of dubstep in a prog rock song is reminiscent of ‘Unsustainable’ by Muse from their 2012 album The Second Law, which combines elements of classical music, dubstep and prog rock. The overall effect is to increase the already aggressive feel of the track, and Blundell sensibly retains the brutal guitar solo from David Kollar to enhance this feel.

Economies Of Scale – Manic Street Preachers Remix (4:03) 

The Manic Street Preachers’ remix of ‘Economies of Scale’ was released as a single on 24 November 2023. It also appears on the first remix album, Harmonic Distortion, released as part of the Deluxe Edition of The Harmony Codex. It’s the only track from Harmonic Divergence which is currently available to stream.

The Manics’ lead singer/guitarist, James Dean Bradfield, quoted by Jerry Ewing of Prog, said the original track reminded him of The Police in the early 80s – the ‘bareness of the vocals, the steely percussion and slight detachment’ of tracks like ‘Walking in Your Footsteps’ and ‘Murder by Numbers’ from Synchronicity (1983), and Police drummer Stewart Copeland’s soundtrack to Rumble Fish (1983) released in the same year. He said that the Manics’ bass player, Nicky Wire, ‘immediately sought to push the second half of the track in more of a Holy Bible [the Manics’ 1994 album] direction.’ 

Wilson told Graham Fuller of the arts desk in December 2023 the original song is an ‘electronic soul ballad’, whereas the Manics’ version is a ‘rock guitar anthem.’ It’s fascinating to compare the two versions, particularly as they both use the same vocal melody and the complete set of lyrics (unlike some of the other tracks on this album) showing what a huge difference the chords and instruments used beneath a melody can make. The Manics’ version adds a lovely extra set of guitar chords at 1.50 and a driving earworm of a riff in the chorus, effectively creating a new track which stands up very well on its own. 

Rock Bottom – Adam Holzman Remix (5:01) 

Adam Holzman has been Steven Wilson’s regular keyboard player since he joined the Grace for Drowning tour in late 2011 in support of Wilson’s second solo album. He has his own band, Brave New World who released a live album The Last Gig (2021). Holzman played with Miles Davis’ band from 1985 to 1989, eventually becoming Davis’ musical director. He can be heard on Davis’ Tutu (1986) and Live Around the World (1996), and the live DVD That’s What Happened: Live in Germany 1987 (2009).

Miles Davis died in 1991 when Wilson was in his mid-twenties and just finding his musical feet with Porcupine Tree, so the prospect of the two artists working together was always extremely remote. But Holzman convincingly channels the keyboard sounds of Davis’ backing band, from the late 1960s onwards when he moved from an acoustic band to an electric band, beginning with A Silent Way in 1969.

The track begins with a jazzy hi-hat rhythm, spacey electric piano and syncopated bass. Holzman retains the original vocals sung by Ninet Tayeb which still soar above, but the track has much more laid-back feel than the cinematic epic on the main album. The demo version that Tayeb first sent to Wilson was much more downbeat, so this version gives us some sense of what a low-key version of the song might have sounded like.

The original track develops into an epic power ballad, and Holzman’s remix also has a sense of movement towards a climax. A pulsating bass line is added, with full drums, and towards the end of the track fiercely rhythmic, driving synths add to the momentum. Appropriately, the guitar solo by Niko Tsonev is replaced with a sparkling synth solo.

The Harmony Codex – Mogwai Remix (9.51) 

On his website, Wilson described this remix by Stuart Braithwaite, guitarist of Scottish post-rock band Mogwai, as a ‘claustrophobic treatment of the title track.’ The remix retains most of the original elements, but it has a very different feel. As Wilson says the mix, ‘adds layers of sheet noise to the original.’ The pristine clarity of the original synth chords is gradually buried beneath a sea of noise and feedback, plunging us into a dark and disconcerting world of storms at sea rather distant stars. The track begins with a juddering sound which continues as the original track fades in. A guitar wails nervously in the background. Mournful, ponderous drums are added. The only respite comes at the end with a gentle piano theme. The overall effect is as if Mogwai have taken one their atmospheric pieces written for a film score such as ‘Ghost Nets’ from the soundtrack for Before the Flood (2016) and overlaid it on top of Wilson’s song. Wilson himself has previously flooded his crystalline sound worlds with noise, particularly on his first solo album Insurgentes (2008) on tracks such as ‘Salvaging.’

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Fragments by Trifecta – Album Review

*****

New Prog supergroup bring joy in fragmented times

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 Barbieri Under 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!

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The Last Gig by Adam Holzman and Brave New World – Album Review

Impeccable live jazz-rock from former Miles Davis music director and Steven Wilson’s keyboard player

*****

On 12 March 2020, keyboard player Adam Holzman and his band Brave New World drove to the Nublu club to soundcheck for a gig that night. The global pandemic was about to close New York City. Broadway had just shut down, but as Adam said later, ‘we decided to play anyway. Something big was coming, and who knew when we’d be able to perform again?… Only about 18 hardcore fans showed up.’

Adam Holzman has been Steven Wilson’s regular keyboard player since he joined the Grace for Drowning tour in late 2011 in support of Steven’s second solo album.

But Adam’s musical pedigree goes back much further than that; most notably he was with Miles Davis’ band for nearly five years, eventually becoming Miles’ musical director. And going back further still, Adam’s father is Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records (who signed The Doors) and Nonesuch Records (who began by specialising in European Early Music, but also commissioned the pioneering electronic album Silver Apples of the Moon, by the American composer Morton Subotnick in 1967). Adam tells stories of when he was a boy and Jim Morrison came to the house, and Adam showed Jim his toy keyboard and tape recorder; quiet moments when Jim was far from his rebellious and controversial public persona. Young Adam was also hugely influenced by The Doors’ keyboard player Ray Manzarek.

The album opens with Intro – The Age of Fear with dystopian synth noises, and ominous voices intoning, ‘The age of fear; the creative spirit must fight to stay alive’, words that take on a poignant significance in this context. But since the 1980s, Adam has made music under the title ‘Optimistic music in the time of fear’, so perhaps there is hope, and the vigorous drum solo from Gene Lake, with bubbling analogue synth sounds suggest that there is still life in music.

On the tour to support Steven Wilson’s third solo album, The Raven That Refused to Sing,  Adam began to do piano improvisations each night at the start of Deform to Form a Star, a song from Steven’s second solo album Grace for Drowning. He collected them together on The Deform Variations in 2015. The second track Pianodemic is another in that tradition, a moment of optimism despite the reference to the Pandemic in the title.

The next three tracks are taken from Adam’s 2018 album Truth Decay. As is often the case with jazz, the live versions have more power and energy than the studio versions, good though they are. The first of these, Ectoplasm, bursts into life with fierce drumming and cool Fender Rhodes keyboards. On the NewEars Prog Show podcast Adam described the Fender as ‘the electric guitar of jazz’, and it plays an important role on this album (although the instrument Adam plays is a Korg SV1 Stage Vintage piano). Throughout the album, Adam gives space to the other players in the band rather than just showing off his keyboard skills, virtuosic as they are, so the album feels like a true band album.

The next track, Phobia has a lovely, spacey, open feel with an atmospheric main theme with evocative harmonies. It gives all the band their chance to shine above the backbeat – first Adam with some distorted Fender Rhodes sounds, then Ofer Assaf, with evocative saxophone, then Jane Getter on heavily echoed guitar. An excellent track.

Growing up as the son of a record company executive, Adam could easily have had a very cynical view of the music industry, the kind of view expressed by a relative who might have said, Good Luck with your Music, in the way that we might say, ‘good luck with that.’ But Adam’s father has been supportive of his son, and it seems that Adam has retained his joy in music making. This is a seriously funky track with an earworm for a chorus, featuring excellent rumbling bass playing from Freddy Cash jr.

Adam originally recorded Maze, a Miles Davis song in 1985, live in the studio just before the sessions for Miles’ 1986 album Tutu. The track finally appeared on the Rubberband album released in 2019. Adam described the track as having, ‘a killer groove…with a flat-out burning solo.’

The final song, Abandoner is a cover of a track from Steven Wilson’s first solo album Insurgentes. The original track begins with a lovely, introspective quality, and Steven’s plaintive vocals are replaced here with soulful saxophone playing from Ofer Assaf. As the title suggests, the song is about loss and abandonment, and Adam’s version perfectly captures this. Steven’s song descends into terrifying noise, perhaps reflecting bitterness and anger at being abandoned. Adam’s version takes a slightly quieter, but equally effective approach.

This is a stunning live album, although it often sounds like a studio album both because of the quality of the playing and the recording, and the fact that the audience is small due to the Pandemic. Holzman says, ‘As of now, it’s still the last gig’. Let’s hope it’s not too long before he is able to tour again.