106. Steven Wilson
Royal Albert Hall
28 and 29 September 2015
Steven Wilson’s Hand.Cannot.Erase warm-up back in March had already left me questioning the point of every other live act on the circuit. Now the “proper” shows were upon us: two consecutive nights at the Royal Albert Hall, each promised as a different set with “special guests”. Tickets for both nights? Obviously. Mortgage the cat if you must.
A decade later these gigs still shares the summit of my personal Everest of concerts, events against which everything else is measured, usually found wanting.
Night One – The Cinematic Gut-Punch
Line-up tweaks first: Guthrie Govan was off touring The Aristocrats, so in strutted Dave Kilminster, fresh from recreating Gilmourisms on Roger Waters’ The Wall tour, to man the fretboard.
The houselights dim and there’s Carrie Grr (the actress from the album visuals) seated under a desk lamp, motionless as a waxwork. She rises, shrugs on a coat, exits and the band ghost onto the stage. From that moment on the Albert Hall becomes an IMAX for the ears.
Wilson and company play Hand.Cannot.Erase. front-to-back, every note accompanied by Lasse Hoile’s towering visuals: lonely tower blocks, flickering CCTV, dreamscapes in digital decay. “First Regret” unfurls like an overture; “Three Years Older” and the title track batter the Hall’s Victorian masonry with 21st-century melancholy. “Perfect Life” shimmers so hard it brings actual tears.
Then the roof lifts clean off. Israeli powerhouse Ninet Tayeb arrives for “Routine”, Jess Cope’s heartbreaking stop-motion rolling on the screen while Tayeb hits those final screams like they’re soul-extraction tools. By the instrumental end of “Ancestral” we’re wrung out, hollow, grateful. Interval gin never tasted so medicinal.
Set two is a prog pick’n’mix: deep cuts from Insurgentes and Grace for Drowning, a jagged “Index”, and, because Wilson can, on strolls Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt to debut the funereal waltz “Drag Ropes”. We finish with the thunder of “The Raven That Refused to Sing”. No one leaves the Hall; we just float out on contact high.
Night Two – Same Hall, Parallel Universe
I turn up indecently early and am rewarded with Ninet sound-checking “Routine” to an auditorium holding exactly one awestruck nerd (me). Bliss.
Tonight begins sideways: the static thrum of Bass Communion’s “Cenotaph” while the band members wander on one by one, layering texture until “Introspectre” erupts like a prog hurricane. Then, a curveball is thrown, with a porcelain-delicate “Shesmovedon” before we jump back into Hand.Cannot.Erase. rearranged like cinematic outtakes. Tayeb’s repeat performance of “Routine” earns a standing ovation so raucous Wilson mutters, “Well, the only way to follow that is with some dumb heavy metal,” and detonates into the doom-riff of “Open Car.”
Guest parade: Guthrie Govan rematerialises for a pair of fret-murdering instrumentals; Theo Travis wafts on with flute and soprano sax; Kilminster returns; then with a prog royalty gasp from the assembled audience, Porcupine Tree/King Crimson time-lord Gavin Harrison appears, turning a Porcupine Tree mini-set into a polyrhythmic street fight.
Across two nights these musicians delivered four plus hours of labyrinthine material, rehearsed, staged and synched to precision visuals, without a seam showing. It was proof that high concept can still punch you in the viscera.
I walked out each night, ears ringing, certain I’d just witnessed a benchmark by which future gigs would be judged. Ten years on, the list of shows that come close I can count on a single hand.