When Steven Wilson insisted his 2017 album To The Bone was more pop than prog, it bought to the fore a struggle with definitions and intentions that had surrounded his entire career. That year he discussed his place in the modern music scene with Prog.
Steven Wilson wants you to know that his new album, To The Bone, is a pop album.
Even to someone unschooled in prog, it doesn’t sound much like a pop record. Instead it sounds like an artful modern rock work with some pop touches. It’s proggy a lot of the time, to be honest – but those who fly the prog banner need to be warned.
“I know ‘pop’ is a very pejorative term,” Wilson says, sitting in the conservatory of his Hertfordshire home. “Particularly when you’re talking with the prog audience. ‘Pop’ is the sort of word they run screaming from. But I think of pop in the sense that Kate Bush is pop. Or The Beatles are pop. Or ABBA are pop. I’m not talking about the modern, very conservative pop scene – I’m talking about pop in the broad sense.”
If you know anything about Wilson you’ll know he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as prog. It’s not that he dislikes it or is ashamed of prog – you don’t set about remixing the King Crimson catalogue, or make the music he does, if you feel that way. It’s more that he recognises a grim reality: prog brings with it a set of associations in the wider public mind. Prog is male; it’s po-faced; it values technical excellence above melody; it’s self-indulgent; it’s best left undisturbed in its bedsit.
That’s all rubbish, Wilson accepts, and it masks the fact that a lot of music which few would consider prog is actually perfectly prog; but because it doesn’t get lumbered with the label, it can reach a wider audience.
He explains: “If you listen to a band like Joy Division, for example, Closer is closer to progressive rock than punk. The weighty lyrical subject matter about the human condition; the use of Mellotrons; the portentous, conceptual side of it; even the Peter Saville artwork – very pretentious, very humourless. It’s closer to In The Court Of The Crimson King than it is to The Damned.
“In the UK, things are put on one side of the hip divide or the other. My music does sound a bit more old-fashioned than Radiohead or Sigur Rós. I do wear my love of people like Jeff Lynne and Yes a little bit more on my sleeve than those guys do. But at the same time, I do hear those things in the music of Radiohead and Sigur Rós and Muse. It’s frustrating to me that they’re overlooked in their music but not in my music.”
As soon as people suggested Radiohead were prog, they took care to say they hated prog. “Yeah, and I’ve always thought that was incredibly disingenuous of them. But, actually, I have to acknowledge that perhaps it was very wise.”
My dad built me a little four-track recorder and a sequencer. Except he wasn’t a musician, so he’d always get something a little bit wrong
It’s not that Wilson doesn’t love or value prog fans. He’s very grateful for everything you’ve done for him. He just wishes some other people liked his music too. “Most people who would consider themselves to be music lovers have had the opportunity to decide whether they like Coldplay or not, and whether they like Radiohead or not. The frustration is that they haven’t had the chance to decide whether or not they like my music.” And that’s because once you get called prog, you’re never going to get on the radio, into most of the music magazines, or into the newspapers.
One reason people don’t call Radiohead and Muse and Sigur Rós prog is that they always took care to look like indie bands. “You think it’s as simple as that?” Not entirely. But partly. “I look like a nerd, which probably doesn’t help. If I’d been wiser, I probably could have gone about cultivating my image in a different way.”
Wilson was probably always destined to be a nerd. “My dad was an electronic engineer and he used to build me things,” he says. “He would have to invent them, because in the 80s you couldn’t just download a circuit diagram. So he’d figure out how to build me things. He built me a little four-track recorder, so at 12, 13 years old I was experimenting with multitracking; and he built me a sequencer.
“Except my dad wasn’t a musician, so he would always get something a little bit wrong. The sequencer was a nine-step sequencer. A musician would have known that most music is in four, so he’d have built a four-step or eight-step sequencer. He built me a nine-step sequencer because that was the number of relays he could afford.
“If I try to intellectualise that, maybe that’s why I became so interested in strange time signatures – everything I wrote with the sequencer had to be in three or nine, which are not common time signatures. It made me think about music in different ways, because I had to work around things.
I was a pretentious, pompous teenager, reading Franz Kafka and listening to Throbbing Gristle
“With the multitrack machine he couldn’t figure out how to get the erase head to work, so everything I did had to be a first take. Maybe that’s why I became interested in the idea of lo-fi and the role of chance in music.”
Rather than doing what most kids do – picking up an instrument, finding some mates who’ve got instruments, bashing out cover versions in someone’s bedroom until before playing in a local youth club – Wilson was learning to be a producer. And that’s what he intended to be. “I wanted to hold a record in my hand and say, ‘This is something I made.’ My first ambitions were to be in the studio all the time, and my dad – amazingly – facilitated that from an early age.”
Alongside that was a voracious interest in music – not just the prog giants, but the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, Neil Young, Elton John, ABBA, Can, Tangerine Dream, ELO, Tubular Bells, The Dark Side Of The Moon.
“But at the same time – and I’ve always struggled to explain this – I was fascinated by dark music. I was a very pretentious, pompous teenager, readings things like Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony and listening to Throbbing Gristle’s The Second Annual Report. Maybe it’s because I came from this very happy, loving family that I was fascinated by these things, which were alien to me. I guess that’s part of the magic of pop music – presenting a world you’d never want to be a part of.”
What he grew up with – and this feeds back to why he doesn’t want to be “Mr Prog” – was a sense that music was a journey rather than a destination. It could be everything, and should never just be one thing. He mourns the loss of a concept of ‘pop’ that incorporates everything, rather than something that’s narrowly defined by the fashions of radio playlists.
We spend a moment discussing the wonder of BBC4’s repeats of Top Of The Pops, which – by simply reflecting what happened to be in the charts at any given time, rather than ‘curating’ a view of what music should be – offer a fairly dizzying idea of 80s pop. You might get a terrible novelty record, some absurdly ambitious piece of new pop, a heavy metal epic and a disco hit all thrown through the screen, one after the other, not differentiated.
Truth has become a flexible notion. I’s filtered through your race, your religion, your politics
“The 80s get a bad rep,” Wilson says, “but it’s wonderfully mad when you see The Smiths alongside The Tweets on the same episode of Top Of The Pops, or Status Quo next to Echo And The Bunnymen. It’s all become so homogenised.”
So when he says To The Bone is a pop record, he doesn’t mean he’s trying to compete with Ed Sheeran; he means he’s trying to make a record that captures the spirit of adventure he remembers from some of the big acts of his teens. Not a lowest common denominator, but a higher plane, of pop.
“I was completely besotted by artists like Kate Bush, Tears For Fears, Talk Talk, Prince, Depeche Mode, and what Peter Gabriel was doing in the 80s. What I loved about those records was that they were very accessible – you could enjoy them for the melodies – but at the same time, if you chose to engage with them at a deeper level, there were great lyrics about quite deep subject matter, and very ambitious, cinematic production, with great musicianship. And they were outside genre classification.
“So this is the first time I’ve really focused on my pop sensibility, stripping away some of the most conceptual elements and some of the more technical muso aspects, and just concentrating on the art of writing big, epic, ambitious pop music.”
You might be preparing yourself for Wilson’s fifth solo album to be a bundle of entirely unrelated, utterly flippant three-minute songs. That’s not what To The Bone is. While it might not be as obsessed with the darkness as its predecessor, Hand.Cannot.Erase., or as unconcerned with commercial possibility as previous iterations of Wilson’s career – Bass Communion, Blackfield, Continuum, Incredible Expanding Mindfuck, No-Man, Porcupine Tree, Storm Corrosion – it’s a weighty album, dealing with what has become the weightiest theme of all in the contemporary world.
It’s the Tarantino thing: ‘I don’t care if John Travolta’s out of fashion – I’m going to bring him back’
“It starts with this black American schoolteacher who’s a very good friend of mine, Jasmine, talking about the nature of truth and how truth has become a flexible notion,” he says. “Truth is something that’s filtered through everyone’s agenda, whether it’s your race, your religion, your politics. All the songs on the record are about truth and about the way people have different truths, whether it’s the religious fundamentalist or the terrorist or the politician.
“In the simplest sense, there are songs about how two people in a relationship can have a completely different truth about that relationship; a different perspective. What we call ‘truth’ is nothing of the sort a lot of the time. We have a perspective, and that becomes our truth. Truth, in the true sense of the word, is an absolute singular reality. But it seems to me you can never get to that singular absolute reality.”
His fascination with truth is a result of what has happened since Wilson wrote Hand.Cannot.Erase.. He had thought that record offered a bleak enough view of the world, “but since then we’ve had Brexit, we’ve had Donald Trump, we’ve had the terrorists come right to our very doorstep, we’ve had Bataclan, we’ve had Manchester. I wouldn’t say it would have been irresponsible not to write about those things, but it would have been strange if I hadn’t touched upon them.”
He thinks pop’s escapist artists must have been challenged by what has happened in the world – when 22 people are murdered at the end of a pop concert, how can it not be? “This world has now come to them, and it’s affecting their young fans. Can they continue to completely pretend it’s not happening? It seems to me that we’ve forgotten that a lot of pop music came out of anger – and you could argue that was when it was at its best.”
But there’s sentiment there, too. Wilson often invited his heroes to recreate their roles for him – like getting Alan Parsons to serve as engineer on The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories) – and while he would doubtless argue it’s about getting the best person for the job, it’s hard not to see it as wish fulfilment too.
There’s another returning hero this time. “Do you know those old Talk Talk and The The records from the 80s? Remember the harmonica? I tracked down the guy who was on all those records, Mark Feltham. It’s one of the first sounds you hear on the record. It’s such an amazing sound. No one had looked at him for 20 years. It’s the Tarantino thing: ‘I don’t care if John Travolta’s out of fashion – I remember he was great, and I’m going to bring him back and make him hip again.’”
Maybe it’s self-validation. … I’m not saying I feel like a failure
He considers that for a moment. “I don’t know if I’m making these people hip again. Probably not. But as soon as he started playing in the studio, people around were almost crying. It’s such an amazing sound.”
The sensible money would be against To The Bone being the album that makes Wilson into a mainstream star. But his exclusion from that environment baffles him. At one point we have a 10-minute discussion on why I never commissioned an interview with him when I was music editor of The Guardian, despite the paper’s writers giving him good reviews. (Short answer: ‘bloke who’s made good records makes another good record’ isn’t much of a story for people who’ve never heard of him.)
But what I don’t understand is why it bothers him. He lives in a beautiful house. He sells out big theatres. His audience loves him. He gets to make the music he wants, without interference. In the end, he accepts, it boils down to something simple. “I have a big ego, as most people that stand up in front of an audience on a stage do. You have to have a big ego. I would like my music to have some place in history. I would like it to have some immortality. And the more significant it is to the more people, the happier I’ll be.
“Maybe it’s self-validation. People look at me and say, ‘He’s made music. He’s not compromised. He’s got a good fanbase and he sells lots of records.’ I’m not saying I feel like a failure – but I still don’t feel self-validation to the extent I’d like to. And yes, I look at people like Thom Yorke and I think: ‘You fucker!’”
Wilson isn’t bitter. He’s just devoted so much of his life to thinking about music, and the music industry, that he can’t quite see the wood for the trees. It’s easy for an outsider to point to the 629 albums recorded under 327 identities, to the concept albums and experiments, to the privacy he protects, and say: ‘Dude! You want to be a household name, and get in all the music mags? Just make one album every two years and tell people how unhappy you were making it, and how drunk you got every night to cope.’
But if he did that, he wouldn’t be Steven Wilson. And what would be the point of that?
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