It has been a few years since I saw Steven Wilson live. My first experience was seeing his band Porcupine Tree when a friend got us tickets. Although that was his project he broke up the band and started putting out music under his own name. I would say that it has elements of Pink Floyd, but often gets pretty heavy.
His latest album is The Overview that just has two long tracks on a space theme. He kicked off with those in his show at the London Palladium. The last time i was there was to see Lulu.
We were there in plenty of time, so went to the noodle bar next door. In there i practically bumped into Adam Holzman who plays keyboard with the band. I think he was with sax player Theo Travis who made a guest appearance in the show.
We also had time to take a look at the new IKEA store on Oxford Street.
For this run of shows he seems to be having comedians as support acts. We had terrible phsychic Clinton Baptiste, who was a character in the Peter Kay series Phoenix Nights. He was amusing, if a bit random.
My better half has been to previous Steven Wilson shows even though she does not listen to the albums. She found this review that mentioned a previous show was nearly 3 hours. When she checked what trains we could get it showed that one was replaced by a bus, so we had the dilemma of whether to leave early to get home at a reasonable time.
After playing the new album and a short interval we were treated to a selection of tracks from his career. The musicianship is outstanding as these are not ready tubes to play. A lot of them had video projections, but otherwise the stage was quite plain.
We were watching the clock, but the final songs came up earlier than expected. Of course there was an encore and we stayed for part of that. He did say that one of the extra songs would be 15 minutes and that would not allow us much time to spare. It was a shame to miss that, but we still had over 2 hours of music.
I enjoyed the show despite these issues. He is a great performer who ought to be better known.
