The last time Steven Wilson’s famously unfettered feet trod the Royal Albert Hall stage he was fronting Porcupine Tree on their last date before an extended hiatus and stepping out alone on a solo career. Acknowledging this, Wilson enters strumming the familiar chords to the final encore from that night in 2010, Trains. It’s a seamless transition but one which simultaneously highlights the distance he has travelled in that time, with two critically acclaimed albums and one bona fide masterpiece.
His lone figure mirrors the character we have been viewing for the previous twenty minutes on the projector screen - the scruffy busker from the current opus’s lead-off track, all ‘Oxfam panache, laces undone’. Wilson’s new compadres take their places and Luminol erupts from the rhythm section of Nick Beggs and Chad Wackerman, who has replaced Marco Minnemann on the drum stool. Beggs’ phenomenally funky bass break is greeted with cheers. There is a palpable excitement in the air tonight, not just for our host and for the music to come but for the individual performances of some of the most talented virtuoso musicians in (let’s call it) rock music today.
Some of those performances elicit spontaneous applause just as they would in a jazz setting, which is fitting given the pedigree on show. At the rear of the stage Wackerman, Adam Holzman (keyboards) and Theo Travis (sax, flute, clarinet, keys) demonstrate their decades of fusion chops honed on stage with such giants as Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, Gong and Allan Holdsworth. On the frontline we have Team Prog: Wilson flanked by Beggs and Guthrie Govan whose solo during Drive Home is greeted rapturously, and deservedly so.
A new piece, tentatively titled Wreckage, is shown off as a work-in-progress. At a quarter-of-an-hour in duration, it’s clear that its composer is not coming to the end of his purple patch any time soon.
During the interval a gauze curtain is raised, forming a literal fourth wall between audience and performers. Serving as another surface for the visuals to be projected upon, it bears witness to The Watchmaker’s tale of murder and betrayal, from acoustic intro to its brutal (narratively and musically) finale. The gauze is a device that was introduced on the Grace For Drowning tour and, despite its familiarity to returning fans, that moment during the instrumental Sectarian is still a simple but magical piece of theatre.
An abridged version of Raider II, with ten minutes edited out, loses none of its disturbing power and the beautiful, if melancholic, The Raven That Refused To Sing comes as some relief. Returning to Porcupine Tree for an encore, Wilson explains that Radioactive Toy is essentially a solo track from the days when he was labelled a space rock artist. With that clumsy pigeon-holing in mind he urges his band to stretch out which they do with aplomb but it is ultimately an anticlimactic ending to what was otherwise a superb evening of some of the best progressive music around.
