80. Steven Wilson
Troxy
17 March 2015
Look, I have already gushed about The Raven That Refused to Sing like it’s some lost scripture, so let’s skip the foreplay. That tour was a revelation. One of those gigs that rearranges the furniture of your musical soul. But this, this, was something else. Hand.Cannot.Erase, the album he was now touring, took everything Wilson had done before, threw it in a blender with some Portishead, a dash of Kate Bush, some Depeche Mode and a splash Sigur Rós had left lying around, and pressed “melancholy purée.” Gone were the Edgar Allen Poe ghosts and King Crimson prog affectations. This was Wilson 2.0: sleeker, sadder, and unnervingly catchy.
The album’s inspiration was the tragic real-life story of Joyce Vincent, a woman who died alone in her flat in London and wasn’t discovered for over three years. The telly still playing. Power bills quietly forgiven. No one noticed. It’s the kind of horror story you expect from a dystopian novel, not a broadsheet obituary. And Wilson, that maestro of sonic melancholia, took it and turned it into one of the most haunting concept albums of the decade.
The start of this tour was a warmup gig at the Troxy, a first outing to play the record live with the inimitable Nick Beggs on bass, he of Kajagoogoo fame and now probably the most in-demand bass man out there, and the over-caffeinated, octopus-like Marcus Minneman taking stick duties.
Launching straight into the album, with a full run through from start to finish, this was a progressive rock show for the ages, the sort of gig they just don’t do any more, the sort of gig that Gabriel wished the technology existed for when he was prancing about in lumpy suits for The Lamb. Artistic visuals, courtesy of Laisse Holle, weave between the musical narrative beating out a story of lost youth, and a life being lived in the shadow of loss, grief and violence, to its transcendent, mystical and enigmatic ending.
We were dumped out of the record with an encore from Porcupine Tree days and Raven as the finale. Utterly mesmerised.
If this was the warm-up gig, I can only assume the Royal Albert Hall shows will require emergency defibrillators and an on-site counsellor. Because this wasn’t just a concert. It was a reckoning, wrapped in ambience, soaked in loss, and delivered with laser-precise melancholy by a man who makes sadness sound like a aesthetic.
Steven Wilson is still the only person who can turn emotional desolation into a standing ovation.