119. Steven Wilson
Hammersmith Apollo
27 January 2016
Some gigs are just gigs. Others are… moments, fully formed, crystalline experiences that burn themselves into your cortex forever and say “I was there”. Steven Wilson’s Hand.Cannot.Erase at the Royal Albert Hall was precisely one of those, or rather, two of those, since I’d been greedy and gone twice. And now I was back again, like a prog-glutton, this time dragging along a different friend, presumably agreed to, just to shut me up.
Same band. Different venue. Same devastating, multimedia art-rock spiral of grief and modern alienation. Wilson doesn’t so much perform his Hand.Cannot.Erase album as unfurl it, like some tragic tapestry woven from minor keys, ghostly harmonies and projected visual montages by Lasse Hoile that haunt your eyeballs.
Just like the last time, out walks Ninet Tayeb, part banshee, part angel, part demolition crew, to deliver “Routine” with the sort of raw, lacerating grief that could hollow out the soul of even the most cynical misanthrope.
The second half shifts gear into a Porcupine Tree retrospective and Ninet returns once more for “Don’t Hate Me”, a track from Stupid Dream that is anything but. It’s a slow-burn masterclass in melancholy and tension, delivered with restraint and precision.
However, it’s the encore that tipped it all into the realm of something truly special. Wilson and Ninet return to a silent stage and break into “Space Oddity”, a cover so delicate, so reverent, lighting a candle for Bowie’s passing. It was goosebumps, spine chills, lump-in-the-throat stuff.
As the final note hung in the air, the audience rose in unison, not with whoops or whistles but with a quiet, standing ovation charged with something far rarer in a venue of that size, awe.
This was a masterclass in atmosphere and storytelling and a reminder that prog, in the right hands, can still reach in and twist something raw and human out of the crowd. Wilson, ever the reluctant messiah of modern prog, didn’t just show us how it’s done. He showed us how it could feel. Again.