A brilliant evening with Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree
Steven Wilson, guitarist, singer and composer for the progressive rock band
Quelle: pa/PIC ONE/Peter Engelke/peng images
Barefoot, with a parted hairdo, Steven Wilson is standing in one of the largest concrete halls in Berlin. For the 11,000 fans, his solo work probably merges into the music of his band Porcupine Tree – the Phil Collins effect. The high entrance fee is worth the drummer alone.
FLet’s start at the beginning: Sometime around the turn of the millennium, this weird guy, Steven Wilson from Hemel Hempstead, had the idea to form the greatest progressive rock band of all time. So he came up with lyrics, music that initially sounded a little like Pink Floyd, and recorded it on cassette tapes. Because he was so young, he didn’t really trust himself and invented – for the newspapers – the history and legend of the long-forgotten band “Porcupine Tree”, which in the end was just himself.
A good three decades later, Steven Wilson, still barefoot but with a more fashionable parted hairstyle, is standing in one of the largest concrete halls in Berlin. A good 11,000 spectators are there, few of whom may know how it all began; most are probably mixing Wilson’s mega-successful solo albums with the band’s work, sort of a Phil Collins effect.
However, he does not make it easy for these people. In addition to the new, hard and bulky album “Closer/Continuation”, the program mainly includes songs from the easily overlooked “In Absentia” and “Fear of a blank Planet” – this causes a heaviness that is not necessarily style-defining for the band , which on the first full-lengths, as one would say today, was known for a melancholic and epic style. At least by friends of the Neo-Prog, which was celebrated as a niche at the time, which, with Marillion at the spearhead and bands like IQ, Twelfth Night or Pallas, was a counterpoint to the Roland MX1 hairspray variant of a social revolution.
And that wasn’t prog rock, and certainly not Porcupine Tree. The weakest passages were also Wilson’s interim announcements, in which he cheaply blasphemed about “the USA”, later about “the music industry”, which he obviously strictly rejects and at the same time embraces. No musician created more expensive box sets than Wilson? In those parts, he was – as he had been for many, many years – too much Roger Waters, Pink Floyd’s nemesis. Did I mention that the Porcupine Tree origins are there, in that post-Medoodle phase where Water’s ego completely drifted off.
The drummer is worth the entrance fee in itself
The basic trio, reinforced to five for the stage, plays through the set with great precision and discipline. Marco Minnemann, who played in Wilson’s solo band, can’t keep up with King Crimson third drummer Gavin Harrison. The drummer is in a class of his own, worth the (high) entrance fee just to see him. In the “Eye in the Sky” logo shirt, a nice homage to the eighties, Richard Barbieri stands at the keyboards and weaves the dense carpets, well illuminated by spotlights. That’s, if it weren’t so hard, very Floyd.
Then there are the moments when the band’s music grabs you in a harsh way, physically abducts you, inflicts stomach pounding and leaves your jaws dropping. In the best moments, Porcupine Tree are a really, really great band, the collective that Wilson didn’t dare to found at first. Then the multiple usable, always slightly nauseous vocals of the front man add up to something bigger.
Unlike the solo work, which can be assigned almost 1:1 to the genre models (especially King Crimson), the band Porcupine Tree has a class of its own. It’s a pity that the archeology of the catalog only touched on the early days with “Lightbulb Sun”. “The Sky moves sideways” would have been a great addition. And the single hit, the absence of which Wilson lamented for a long time and much too lazily, wasn’t the well-pleasing “Trains”, but would have been “Radioactive Toy”. This evening and in general.
But let’s leave that aside: A great, wonderful concert in which the screen projections (a bit too one-dimensional) never overlaid what was happening on stage. You have to get it right first. Big respect.