Steven Wilson Brings “The Overview” to Australia This Summer

Acclaimed musical innovator and six-time Grammy nominee, Steven Wilson, will bring his highly anticipated The Overview Tour to Australia this November. His arrival in Australia will follow a massive run of UK, European and American dates and celebrates the release of his eighth solo album, The Overview, out now via Fiction Records.

Australian fans can expect a captivating live experience from one of contemporary music’s most boundary pushing, genre bending artists. Accompanied by accomplished and seasoned veterans including Nick Beggs on bass (Mute Gods, Steve Hackett), legendary jazz keyboardist, Adam Holzman (Miles Davis, Ray Manzarek,), Craig Blundell on drums (Steve Hackett, Frost) and Randy McStine on guitars (Marco Minnemann, The Fringe) this world class line up will bring the expansive, progressive soundscapes to life in a way that can only be experienced in a live setting.

The Overview is a forty two minute conceptual journey inspired by the “overview effect” of astronauts viewing Earth from space and marks a return to the long form progressive style Steven Wilson redefined with the iconic Porcupine Tree and his earlier solo work. Featuring two ambitious tracks and immersive spatial audio production, The Overview blends progressive sprawl with cinematic electronics and lush, immersive vibes all wrapped in spatial audio wizardry.

It’s a bold addition to his repertoire which also includes six Grammy nominations, three consecutive UK Top 5 albums and a string of iconic remixes for artists including, Pink Floyd, The Who, King Crimson and Tears For Fears. The Australian tour promises to be a thrilling and dynamic experience. Expect a set packed with The Overview’s mind bending sprawl alongside cuts from his acclaimed and peerless career. Steve talks to Hi Fi Way ahead of his Australian tour.

Seven years is a long time, but you must be really looking forward to returning to Australia this November?
Very much so, yeah. I mean, I love Australia, it’s always exhausting being in Australia because of all the flying and the jet lag and everything, but it’s the shows and the experience definitely make it worthwhile, yeah.

I know this show, from what I’ve been reading, is described as an experience like no other. Without giving too much away, how would you describe it?
Well, I think it’s very rare these days that you get a chance to come along to a show where the spectacle, the visual side, the audio side, and I’m talking about having surround sound at my shows, the musicianship and the kind of conceptual flow of the show are all given equal priority. I have an incredible band, the best musicians that you can possibly imagine. I have incredible visuals at the show. I have surround sound. I have a three-hour repertoire, a three-hour journey that I take the concert attendee on. When you come to my show, you’re entering my world, my environment. I think the kind of reaction that the audience have had to the show in Europe, and now we’re in America now, bears that out. I think people are genuinely stunned that they’ve never seen anything quite like it, certainly not at this level. I mean, if you go to a big, massive stadium show, of course you’ll see something spectacular, but to be able to come to something a little bit more intimate. With fifteen hundred to two thousand other people, and experience something so spectacular in a relatively intimate theatre environment. I’ve never seen anything like it myself.

With so many moving parts, does that create another layer of stress for you, or is everything pretty much down pat now?
Well, stress, yes and no. I’ve been very fortunate of being able to employ not only the best musicians that are available, but also the best crew. I have people that are in control of the visuals and in control of the audio that are all committed just as much to me as the show, and I think it’s the sort of project that people love to be involved in because it’s not just a regular rock show. There’s something that people, and let’s not forget that people get involved in the music industry, the projection industry and the sound engineering industry, because they have a passion for those things, and they want to do something special. They want to create something magical for the people coming to the show. I think that’s something that’s been attractive to people, so I’ve been able to attract the very best people that I can afford to employ essentially. So it’s almost like everyone, all the twenty, twenty-five people I have involved in the show are all committed to making this the most amazing experience. In that sense, a lot of the stress has been taken off my shoulders, and I can just concentrate on being the front man and the master of ceremonies.

How did the concept for this show come about?
I had a bunch of meetings with people. After my last album came out, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I’m the kind of person that doesn’t like to repeat myself, so I’m always looking for something new, and I love to have a concept, or a project subject matter that I can hang a whole album cycle off, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. One of the people I met was a very good friend of mine who actually created and founded an organisation called Space Rocks, which is an organisation that is dedicated to bringing together the worlds of astronomy, science, music and art, which sound like, in some ways, you’d think those two things wouldn’t go together, but actually they do go together very well. I think a lot of musicians are fascinated with the idea of space, and a lot of people that are interested in astronomy are also big fans of music. There’s something that I think we have in common which is this idea of looking beyond the norms, looking for something more magical in the experience of existence, the experience of life, the experience of looking up into the stars. And of course, in a way, metaphorically, that’s what artists are doing. We’re kind of gazing up into the stars, you know, and imagining things, imagining magical things.

I had a good chat with this guy, Alex, and one of the meetings we had, he started to tell me about the overview effect. I became fascinated with it, and straight away, almost this light bulb went off over my head. It’s like, oh my god. This is something which speaks so much to the human experience in the age of social media. This idea of looking back at Earth from space and understanding in a way, just how insignificant the human species really is, in a good way, kind of reminding ourselves in a good way just how insignificant we are, how beautiful our planet is, how remarkable the gift of life is, but how random it is in a way, too and how massive the universe is. I mean, the numbers are, as I’m sure you know, the numbers are mind-boggling. I mean, trillions and trillions of stars, trillions of galaxies, of which ours is a very small one, relatively speaking. When you start going into the numbers, it is… I think the word for me was… perspective, having more of a perspective on life, the gift of life and all these sort of things that are going on in the world right now. The absurd stuff that’s going on, the prejudice, the wars, all this stuff going on and how human beings, in a way, have a knack of believing ourselves to be much more important than we really are. The universe doesn’t care about us. The universe barely even notices us. We’re in one little corner of the universe, barely recognised. I think that’s an important thing to remind people of in a way. I wanted to frame it in a positive way. I wanted to say to people, you know what, maybe just spend a few minutes every day not looking down into your phone but actually looking up. Acknowledging the stars, acknowledging space, acknowledging the universe, and that can only be a good thing. I mean, God, I wish some of these politicians would have more of a perspective. Do you know what I mean?

Does this take even a greater meaning when it’s played live?
I think so, I mean, the idea of having a kind of communal experience with two thousand other people, or however many people are in the room at the time, it is such audio-visual experience. The visuals, the music, the playing, the atmosphere, I think it’s quite powerful. It’s difficult for me to have an objective view on it because I’m up on stage right in the middle of it, but I can feel how profound, in a way, the experience is for a lot of people. I hear what people say about the show afterwards and isn’t that what art is supposed to be in a way? Art is supposed to be like holding up a mirror to people and saying, this is my experience, this is my view of the world, or this is another perspective on life, on human existence, on the way we connect with each other, on social media, on the way we receive news and all this information overload that we have now via social media.

I think it’s an important role for art to play, and sometimes I worry that art doesn’t rise to that challenge as much as it perhaps should. So much pop music, for example, is so banal, lyrically so banal. Everything from metal to hip-hop to pop, lyrically, it’s just banal. It doesn’t say anything about the world we live in. I think that’s a shame, because if you go back to the golden years of pop and rock music, going back to the Beatles and the 70s, politically aware music, going forward to the 80s and thinking of things like Live Aid and how music, politics, geopolitics and the world… everything was combined together, and it felt like there was a power that musicians had to influence things for the better. I think I miss that. I miss that in pop music and rock music. There’s not enough of that for me now.

You described the concept and the idea, but how do you take that and put this into music? It just seems like such an ambitious undertaking.
Well, I like a challenge. It’s a hard question to answer, because it’s basically the same question that I think a lot of people that make things get asked. How do you create something? And you don’t really know. How is it that you pluck something from the air that wasn’t there before? I’ve been doing it a long time now and I’ve made lots of records over the years, and I’ve listened to lots of records, and I love lots of music, and I’ve seen lots of movies, and I’ve read lots of books, and I’ve seen lots of news bulletins, and I’ve spent a lot of time reading, learning, acquiring knowledge about the world. I’m raising two stepdaughters, so I’m seeing the world also through their eyes. I think all of these things, in a way, come to bear all of this kind of input comes to bear on your output. I don’t try and analyse it too much. Having been doing it now for more than thirty years, I don’t analyse that process too much.

I guess I had an idea. I thought about the idea, the more it started to kind of coalesce in my brain. We’re going to start on Earth. We’re going to start on Earth with meeting an alien, and the alien is going to say to us, did you forget? Did you forget about us? Did you forget about space? Did you forget about the universe? You’ve been so busy looking down into your digital devices and being obsessed with yourself, the reflection of yourself, you forgot about us, about this universe. So I knew I wanted to start from that point of view, and from there on, it was really just taking a journey further and further and further away from the Earth. I knew by the end of the piece, I literally wanted to be floating, well, not literally, obviously, you know what I mean. I wanted to be floating on the other side of the universe, having literally travelled through galaxies and galaxies. That was really my starting point. From that point on, it was really just about connecting the dots, musically and lyrically.

Was it the sort of thing that just gained its own momentum once you started?
I think so, I was fine with writing, particularly writing the kind of music I make, which a lot of people call progressive rock, I call it conceptual rock. It’s something that I always feel is kind of analogous with writing a novel, or creating a movie script. It’s not creating ten standalone pop songs, three or four minute rock or pop songs. You’re going to create a continuous piece of music. Of course, that might break down into separate pieces, but ultimately, every piece of music you want to logically lead into the next piece of music. Which is, if you think about it, is a very literary way of making music. That’s what a novelist would do. Okay, we start with defining the characters. Now, what’s going to happen to the characters? What dramatic devices are we going to have happen to these characters that will take them through all these different kind of emotional states. Happiness, then something tragic happens, then you have anger, regret, nostalgia, and then coming out the other end, joy, or resignation, or whatever it is. That kind of character arc that you would have in a novel or in cinema. I’ve always liked the idea that music can also encapsulate that same kind of experience. Records going back to Sgt. Peppers and Dark Side of the Moon is a proven thing that pop music and rock music can also take the listener on a journey across a forty, forty-five -minute album. I think that I kind of grew up with that kind of idea, because my dad used to listen to records like that when I was a kid. It was in my DNA in a way to always look at the idea of making music in the same way that a filmmaker or a writer would think about what they were creating.

How significant for you was Andy Partridge’s contribution?
I think Andy is so good at capturing small-town England, small-town Britain, or small-town life, and one thing you asked me earlier about how I decided how the piece would unfold. One of the things I knew that I wanted early on in the record was to contrast everyday life. So, these little soap operas going on Earth. The things that are going on all the time, you know, a husband cheating on his wife, a kid starting his first job, a nurse working in a care home, whatever it is, a woman dreaming about her murdering her husband, all of these things, these little soap operas going on in small towns, small villages, all over the world, all the time. And how that kind of little minutiae, minutiae of life you can compare and contrast that with these massive cosmic phenomena, black holes imploding, universes coming into being, stars dying. Again, to create that idea of perspective, the great and the small. I thought, who’s better than anyone else at writing about small-town England? Actually, there are two people that would originally actually spring to mind. Ray Davis of the Kinks and Andy from XTC. I don’t have the number of Ray Davis, but I do know Andy very well. I think Andy’s even a little bit better… for me, he’s even a little bit better than Ray Davis. So he seemed like a very logical choice for me to try and capture that small town atmosphere that I wanted. He took on the job and did an amazing piece of work.

Were you surprised, even after The Harmony Codex, that you would follow up with another significant album like this so quickly?
Yeah, I was, I’m going through the same thing right now. I’m actually halfway through writing a new record, and I don’t know where they keep coming from, because every time I finish a record, I feel exhausted. I’m like, oh my god, okay, maybe that’s the last thing I’m ever gonna do. I’ve always, touch wood, I’ve always, so far been able to surprise myself. The last couple of records, The Overview and this new one I’m working on, they’ve come relatively quick off the back of the previous records. I don’t take that for granted, because I don’t know, this goes back to your earlier question about where does the inspiration come from? I don’t really know, except I suppose the answer to the question might be, the world is pretty fascinating right now, for all the wrong reasons. It’s an endless source of grim fascination and it’s very hard not to become engaged, enraged, grimly fascinated by what’s going on in the world. So I suppose in that sense, and again, this comes back to what I was saying earlier, I’m surprised when there aren’t more musicians and artists taking on this what’s going on in the world right now. Most pop music I seem to hear still seems to be about boy meets girl, girl breaks boy’s heart, very banal and I think for fuck’s sake, haven’t we had enough of those songs? But that seems to still be ninety nine point nine percent of everything. Or if it’s a heavy metal group, it’s just the heavy, it’s just the usual sub-Black Sabbath clichés, death, graves and cemeteries, and for fuck’s sake can we not try and be a little bit more engaged with the world we live in? It’s all going horribly wrong. I’m not suggesting I’m the only person doing it. I know there are other people doing it, but I think the point I’m making is that, for me, it’s one of the great things about rock and pop music for me, was that it was able to reflect the times we live in, and I see precious little of that right now. I feel sometimes a bit lonely when I’m taking inspiration for these things, and putting them it into musical form.

Do you think people are just too scared to have an opinion?
I think that’s partly it, but I also think that people are also scared that the audience these days just don’t engage with music, and they’d be right. They’d be right, unfortunately. There was a time, 60s, 70s, 80s, I would say even into the early twenty first century, when people still engaged with albums, they still listened to music for more than a few seconds at a time and they don’t anymore. I mean, I’m generalising here. Of course, there are still people that do that, and a lot of those people I’m very lucky to count amongst my audience. But I think, generally speaking, for the pop audience, for the rock audience, they are now thinking in terms of what can get the attention of their fans in the space of fifteen seconds. The average length of a TikTok video, which is very sad. Very sad, because I think music is a much more magical, special thing, and so that it’s become so reductive to the point that now musicians are thinking about, got to get the audience hooked within the first fifteen seconds of the song, because people won’t listen beyond the first fifteen seconds anyway. That, to me, is one of the great tragedies of where music is. Now we have the whole artificial intelligence dilemma as well to deal with.

Is that frustrating for you as well with the whole AI influence on music especially on Spotify with all these non-original bands that are popping up.
I don’t wish to overstate this and it sounds like hyperbole, but it is an existential crisis. It’s not just music, of course, it’s applying to everything from filmmakers, to photographers, to writers. Everyone is going to be affected by artificial intelligence. It’s a great existential crisis, and that’s not overstating it. We are quite literally rendering ourselves obsolete. But at the same time when I hear AI-generated music, I think it’s shit. It says nothing. It doesn’t have any emotional heart. It doesn’t communicate to me any real depth. Any real insight into the human condition? Because how could it? How could it? So, I think the sad thing is that people are accepting it as a substitute for the real thing, when it really isn’t and that’s down to the fact that I think people’s quality control, their level of what they will accept, has become so low now. So low, because I think we’re all distracted ninety nine point nine percent of the time with bullshit. It’s very sad. AI is here to stay. I’m not suggesting AI itself is evil, I think it has some incredible applications, but I’m very committed to the idea of continuing to make music without any interference with AI at all.

AI doesn’t have the magic of the live experience and that can’t be beaten?
Absolutely, and all the stuff that goes along with a live experience, the mistakes, the frailties, the capacity for human error, and that interaction you have with an audience, that vulnerability you have. I think that’s what people really should be taking from art, isn’t it? Reflecting things that are very unique to human beings. Feelings like nostalgia, feelings like regret, feelings like joy, happiness, depression, anger, these are things that only human beings… well, obviously there are some animals that experience that. There are certain things that are very unique to human beings. Nostalgia, for example, is a very human feeling. As far as we know, animals don’t feel nostalgia. They don’t feel a yearning for their past, or for their childhood. That’s a very, very, very particular feeling and emotion that human beings have, and I think nostalgia is a big part, for example, of what I do. Nostalgia for childhood. Nostalgia for the past. It’s all around us all the time, this idea of nostalgia, particularly in this day and age. I think a lot of people are nostalgic for other times.

What is next for yourself? Is there maybe even a Porcupine Tree album in there at some point?
I’d like to think so. I like to go forward, not backwards, so I’m already into my next solo record, which again, is very, very different to the Overview. I think that will be next. Possibly after that, maybe a new Porcupine Tree album, if we can find something new that we want to say, within the context of the band. I would love to… I always love working with those guys. I’m talking to various people about all sorts of projects. I’ve started my own radio show now on SiriusXM, which is fun, so I have a radio show. I do the remix work, classic album remix, I’m talking to various people about film projects, theatre projects. It’s almost like… life’s not long enough for me to squeeze everything I’d like to do, which is a wonderful position to be in.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Steven Wilson on the following dates, tickets from Teamwrk Touring…