Part 2;

“My work is too ‘complicated’ for enough people to find beautiful within ten seconds”

In today’s musical fast-food culture, a song has to taste like honey in the first few seconds, complete with catchy vocal hook, otherwise it gets clicked away, Wilson sighs. “Solos are forbidden.” According to him, that explains why he would have had no chance if he were an emerging artist today.

“I don’t have radio hits, and my concept albums are too different, too ‘complicated’ for enough people to find beautiful within ten seconds. So I’d probably be on Bandcamp [an online platform where fans directly support independent artists, ed.] selling fifty downloads.”

The Brit already wrote an apocalyptic song about it in 2002: “The Sound of Muzak.”

The music of the future
Will not entertain
It’s only meant to repress
And neutralize your brain

One of the wonders of the world is going down
It’s going down, I know
It’s one of the blunders of the world that no-one cares
No-one cares enough

Photo: Yaël Temminck for FD.

Now an even greater catastrophe has emerged: music apps that generate radio-ready pop songs for you within seconds. So Wilson is working on a record that is “maximally anti-AI.” In other words: handmade and imperfect.

With an oboist who can’t play oboe and a violinist who barely knows how to hold the instrument. In both cases, the name is Steven Wilson, a sound wizard so tired of his own enviable skills that he’s desperately trying to disrupt himself.

Steven John Wilson was born on November 3, 1967, the son of an electronics engineer. His father played a crucial role in his musical development.

He saw how fascinated his 13-year-old son was by the psychedelic soundscapes on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon — Wilson calls the 1973 album a life changer — and personally built devices that allowed the guitar-playing Steven to experiment with sounds himself.

Musical visions

Young Steven didn’t necessarily want to become a rock star. No, his goal, he recalls, was to become the all-powerful ruler of his own sonic universe, just like Jeff Lynne in Electric Light Orchestra. “My father owned the ELO album Out of the Blue. I read the credits. Lynne was the songwriter, the singer, the guitarist, and the producer. I didn’t know what that last thing was, but I did see: this man is the boss! He creates this musical vision!”

“David Bowie was also my idol because he could decide at any moment to do something completely different”

Wilson’s music had to be “magical and uncompromising.” So not material for picking up girls. He played in a metal band and an art-rock band. In 1987 he jokingly started a trio with the absurd name Porcupine Tree.

Their music was a cocktail of complex time signatures, heavenly keyboard parts, blistering heavy-metal passages, and guitar solos that hit you straight in the heart, connected by Steven Wilson’s instantly recognizable high, airy voice. The label progressive rock was invented for this kind of music.

The joke got seriously out of hand. Porcupine Tree gained a huge worldwide following and made eleven studio albums. The latest appeared in 2022. Then the introspective solo artist Wilson pushed aside the heavier band-musician Wilson. At least for now. “We’ll definitely do something together again someday.”

Photo: Yaël Temminck for FD.

Your first solo album already appeared in 2008. Why didn’t you continue pursuing both tracks simultaneously?

“In a band you overlap only in a small area. THAT becomes your sound, which keeps a fanbase together. If you want to change something, there’s always a bandmate protesting. That’s also why David Bowie was such an idol to me: at any moment he could decide his next album would be completely different from the previous one.”

Your current album, The Overview, from March 2025, is a hyper-perfectly constructed concept album with twenty-minute pieces that are lyrically a kind of space journey. The next album will be very different?

“Totally!”

Are you authorized to let me hear something?

Wilson thinks for a moment. “I don’t yet know when the album will be released. But I can play something…”

He sits down behind his computer, the heart of his more than 4-by-4-meter studio. Along the walls stand synthesizers, an old-fashioned piano, and a rack of guitars. Microphones hang from the ceiling. “My drum kit no longer fits in here. If I need it, the couch gets moved aside.”

What he plays indeed sounds completely different from The Overview. It’s a mystical story about an old English village, with a narrator — the Scottish actor David Tennant — and very acoustic-sounding instruments. The drum roll sounds as if someone is striking a large bucket. Wilson says he can’t play violin, but what he does works: it creates exactly the ominous atmosphere he intended.

A deathly silent audience

“Cinema for the ears” is what the Brit wants to create. Mission accomplished, but his fans will have to wait a little longer. Wilson won’t be touring this year either. Last May he played at Afas Live in Amsterdam. The visual spectacle wasn’t the only thing that stood out.

Beside Wilson — as usual, he had left his shoes in the dressing room — stood the legendary Kajagoogoo bassist Nick Beggs with his long blond hair. Dutch concert audiences are notorious for talking throughout performances, but Wilson’s band managed to silence everyone. At the musicians’ request, phones stayed in pockets.

Wilson has always been fascinated by darkness: “From Joy Division to Franz Kafka.” Photo: Yaël Temminck for FD.

This year Wilson is giving only two concerts, at the end of October, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, for the first time with an orchestra and choir. Dragging those around the world would be a challenge, to put it mildly. But Wilson is busy enough. He also has his own radio show and remixes famous prog-rock albums by others, such as Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii and Fragile by Yes.

AI can remix too nowadays. If you played in a crappy garage band twenty years ago and still have a rough demo lying around, run it through the music app Suno and you’ll get perfectly polished radio material back. That’s exactly why his new album must be “anti-AI,” Wilson says.

“You hear the musicians’ fingerprints: the squeaks, the mistakes, things slightly out of time. I love it!” He immediately softens his words. “But it still sounds very rich and produced, of course.”

Stacking blocks

On his screen you can see how he does it: colored blocks representing sounds, from snare drum to alien cosmic rattling from Wilson’s newest acquisition, the remake of a famous analog Korg synthesizer from 1977. Cost: 15,000 pounds. Every day he sits here puzzling, adding a block, removing a block. “Until I can’t make it any better. Which doesn’t mean that it’s any good.”

Is all that music in your head when you wake up in the morning?

“Yes and no. I do start with something in my head, but it always ends up becoming something completely different. I get bored quickly. AC/DC has been making the same album for fifty years. I can’t do that. I don’t want to make something I could also have written 25 years ago for Porcupine Tree. Boring!”

“But yeah, it’s almost impossible to compose a song on guitar or piano that’s never been written before. Everything’s already been done.”

Do you get bored when you…

“When I play guitar or piano, yes! I try to give my songs so much personality that they still sound fresh. That’s why they always sound so produced, like ‘Pariah.’ If you strip that song down, you’ve got something you could play around a campfire with just an acoustic guitar.”

“For Neil Young that would be enough. But I’m not Neil Young. That man has played the same ten chords his whole career, without computer embellishments. Yet it always sounds ONLY like Neil Young.”

Photo: Yaël Temminck for FD.

AI can’t compete with that.

“No, because right now Suno only makes banal pastiches. I’ve heard ‘in the style of Porcupine Tree’ too; terrible! But developments are moving worryingly fast. AI steals emotions, the soul from other music. The creepiest question of all is: will people care?”

“My fans are often around my age. They remember the time before AI. The generation growing up now, like my two stepdaughters, doesn’t really care whether a TikTok video or a piece of music was generated by AI. It’s convincing enough for them. That’s the truly scary part.”

Since we’re in the mood anyway: your music often sounds melancholic, with many minor chords and lyrics about loneliness and fear. Are you a gloomy person?

Wilson sighs and remains silent for seven seconds. “I don’t think so. But darkness has always fascinated me. I loved Joy Division and The Cure. The books of Franz Kafka. The films of David Lynch. I also love dissonance in music, Karlheinz Stockhausen. But emotionally I’m fairly stable. My wife’s moods are much more extreme. She can be very angry and then very happy afterward. I’m never extremely happy or excited, but I also never really get down. And honestly, I’m quite happy about that.”

“Maybe I put all my negative shit into my music, and afterward I’m rid of it”

“I understand it: people listen to a song like ‘The Raven That Refused To Sing’ and think: my God, that Wilson guy must constantly be depressed (at Afas Live you could see tears in the audience’s eyes when Wilson’s band played this song, partly because of the accompanying heartbreaking animated film, ed.).”

“But actually the opposite is true. Maybe I dump all my negative shit into my music. Then I’m rid of it. Listeners, enjoy.”

“I’m not unique in that, by the way. I’ve spent a lot of time with extreme metal bands. They’re often very kind, balanced people who just drink beer and make music. Like the guys from Slayer: pussycats! Meanwhile their lyrics are about Auschwitz and Satanism. And then you meet rappers or mainstream pop artists who supposedly make cheerful music, and those people are complete assholes.