Steven Wilson
GUITAR-BASED MUSIC CONSIGNED TO MUSEUM STATUS, ALBUMS NOTHING MORE THAN ARTISTCURATED PLAYLISTS, AND SOCIAL MEDIA ALTERING THE COURSE OF EVOLUTION… WHAT THE FRIGGIN’ PROG IS GOING ON, MR WILSON?
“It’s obviously been extremely hard to release and promote an album essentially into a vacuum,” Steven Wilson says at the start of our Zoom interview. “There’s no touring. There’s no record store appearances. There’s no TV I can do. I can’t travel to Europe and do the press and TV I would normally have done. So I basically sat at home talking to people on Zoom like I am now, which is pretty much all I can do…”
The irony is that Steven’s latest album, The Future Bites, paints the picture of a society dominated and shaped by its online activity. This is a future that can’t be too far off as more and more we live, shop, listen to music and generally amuse ourselves through the weird wide web, seeking ‘little bubbles of happiness’ often manifested in online shopping sprees – something addressed in Steven’s track Personal Shopper, which also features a cameo appearance by none other than Elton John.
Whereas previously Steven’s albums have been guitar dominated – something you can trace back to his Porcupine Tree days – The Future Bites focuses more on keyboard-generated electronica for its principal instrumental thrust. The guitar is still there, but this time around it’s in a supporting role. We were curious as to why, naturally, but first of all there is the question of releasing the album while live music is still a wasteland and any promotion is similarly stymied.
It must have been disappointing to wait a year to release an album, hoping things would be returning to normal by now, only to find that very little had in fact changed.
“It’s very disappointing because I grew up with the romance of releasing albums – the build-up and the momentum and the day of release was a big thing. But that’s not really the world we live in any more. An album these days is really nothing more than an artist-curated playlist. You know, ‘Here’s nine songs and here’s the order I think you should listen to them.’ So that sense of the album as an event I think is largely eroded anyway. It’s an album about living in dystopian times, but I didn’t realise I would be releasing it into such a climate as the one we’re going through now. And I guess it’s hard to get people to engage with an album about dystopia when they’re living in one.”
When did the theme begin to come together during the writing process?
“I don’t think it was a conscious decision. Like a lot of people I find myself reflecting what I see in the world. I began to write it late 2017, early 2018. So right in the middle of the Trump administration, which is something that basically made me question everything. I mean, it made you even question the very nature of reality and truth. And then, at the same time, the whole Brexit thing was going on, which is very depressing to me. And unfortunately,
everything that I feared would come to pass has come to pass.
“So I was writing about what I saw as the increasing dominance of social media in everyone’s lives, about how that was affecting, as I saw it, the evolution of the human species. I mean, it sounds like a very dramatic thing to say, but I don’t think it is understating it to say that the internet and specifically social media has, without doubt in my mind, altered the trajectory of human evolution in an incredibly short period of time. The song Self, which opens the record, is about that idea of how identity has changed and been altered by the mirror of social media. We all see ourselves reflected back in that mirror. Now we all understand what it is like to have our opinions read, reflected on and responded to by people that we don’t know.”
Where songwriting is concerned, what’s your process? Lyrics first, then melody, for instance?
“Well, the ‘lyrics then melody’ process is not really the way I’ve ever worked. My demos are quite elaborate from the very start. And I think part of the reason for that is because I’ve always tended to hear the whole thing in my head almost from the beginning. I’m not the kind of person who can go into a hotel room with an acoustic guitar and come out with an album written. I need to be surrounded by my gadgets: I need to be able to reach over and program a drum rhythm; I need to be able to pick up the bass or programme a sequencer pattern or place a bunch of backing vocals onto the melody. I can’t just put that bare-bones demo down and feel like I’ve written something.
“For the second album in a row I worked with a co-producer. So I would be taking in my demo songs – which would have all the parts, orchestrations, drums and all that stuff – and we’d often deconstruct the songs and start to build them up from scratch again. Not always. Some of them stayed close to my original demos, but there was definitely an element of deconstructing and reconstructing.”
“I’m not the kind of person who can go into a hotel room with an acoustic guitar and come out with an album written”
The Future Bites places keyboards centre stage rather than guitar. At what point did you make that decision?
“I think that was pretty early on. There was a number of factors. The first one is I don’t think guitars really reflect the world that we live in any more. I know that’s quite a depressing thing to say. Obviously the guitar is still very important to me. I grew up with them. And, you know, I come from the tradition of rock music where the guitar is fundamental. But I think it’s also fair to say that the sound of guitars very much belongs to the second half of the 20th century in the same way that jazz and big band music was the dominant popular music form during the first half.
“Rock music has gradually been doing a disappearing act through most of the 21st century and I think it’s going the same way that big band music and jazz music went. It never disappeared and never will disappear, but it has become a niche and almost like a cult form of music in its own right. Guitars don’t really exist within mainstream pop culture any more. If they do, they’ll be heavily processed almost to the point where they become part of the texture of the electronic backing track.”
On the track Eminent Sleaze there’s a guitar solo that recalls Robert Fripp’s solo on King Crimson’s Sailor’s Tale. Was that in your mind at the time?
“Robert is definitely part of my musical DNA. I’m sure it was somewhere in my subconscious. It’s a very fragmented, angular, almost anti-guitar solo, isn’t it? I mean, what is a classic rock guitar solo? I’ve had a lot of those on my recent records. I had some real superstar guitar players in my band playing traditional, classic rock guitar solos. And I got a bit bored with that. It’s a familiar sort of trope, certainly in progressive rock music.
“I like the idea of approaching the solos on this album in a different way. Part of the reason I did them myself is because I’m not really a guitar player. I’m a songwriter-producer who’s ended up playing a number of instruments in order to create what I hear in my head. So guitar is part of my tool kit, being the songwriter and almost approaching the guitar solo like, ‘Okay, what’s this song about? What are the lyrics about?’ On Eminent Sleaze this character is an embodiment of political sleaze and insidious persuasions. So what kind of guitar solo would that character play?
“I’m a songwriter-producer who’s ended up playing a number of instruments in order to create what I hear in my head”
You’ve toured with some virtuoso players in the past, Guthrie Govan and Alex Hutchings being two of them.What was it like to hear their interpretation of your music?
“It was amazing for a while. One of the problems I have with having superstar musicians play my music is the need they sometimes have to show what they can do all the time! Every few days, I would say, ‘Look, can you play slower? Can you play with more feel and more consideration and perhaps less of the pyrotechnics?’ Because sometimes that’s their default setting. And that’s not me. I never enjoyed that side.
“My favourite guitar players were always people like Peter Green, David Gilmour and Robert Fripp because they didn’t play fast for the sake of it. So that whole shredder mentality, which I think a lot of guitar players seem to grow up with, I can’t stand. It’s like music is an Olympic sport and it goes without saying that music is not a sport. But you can go on YouTube and you can find clips of eight-year-old kids that can play John McLaughlin out of the park. But they’ve got absolutely zero to say musically. It’s not music, it’s become a sport. And unfortunately I find that a lot of that mentality has seeped into a lot of contemporary musicianship and a lot of contemporary guitar players.”
How did you manage to get Elton John on the track Personal Shopper?
“The facetiously simple answer is I asked him. The slightly more convoluted answer is I had this song in demo form and I was looking for somebody to narrate the shopping list in the middle. I went to see the Rocket Man movie and at the end of the movie there’s a ‘where are they now?’ sequence and they go through the main characters and it says something like, ‘Meanwhile, Elton has kicked all of his addictions except for one…’ And there’s a picture of him with all the shopping. Everyone knows Elton John loves to shop. So it was like a light bulb moment for me. And I thought, ‘This has to work. I cannot allow this to fail. This is too perfect.’
“Cutting a long story short I managed to get the track to him and I got a message one day to say, ‘Elton John’s going to ring you in 10 minutes.’ And sure enough, 10 minutes later I got a phone call and I picked up the phone and this very familiar voice said, ‘Hello Steven, this is Elton John. I fucking love your track. Let’s do it!’ Which I have to say is probably one of the most surreal and extraordinary moments in my career and one that I will never forget.”
“I don’t think guitars really reflect the world that we live in any more… The sound of guitars very much belongs to the second half of the 20th century”