Nearly a month ago J and I went to see Steven Wilson play at the Royal Albert Hall. As this was shortly after we’d got home from Turin we didn’t spend the day in London beforehand, just headed in in time for the concert. After meeting up with Paul and Ady we had dinner at Wagamamas and headed off to find our seats. Paul had bought the tickets some time before* and we’d all forgotten what we’d done about seats – just remembered we’d gone for fairly cheap tickets so assumed we were up in the nosebleed seats somewhere. But it turned out we’d got seats on the main floor seating area, only about 20 or 30 rows back from the front, which was pretty awesome.
I find talking about solo gigs for Steven Wilson a bit difficult – I don’t often (if at all) listen to the albums at home. So I don’t know the music particularly well, and often can’t name the tracks even when I do know them. There’s something about the atmosphere of him & his band live, in combination with the visuals, that makes the music work for me in a way it doesn’t really do on record. And I do like the videos that go with the songs. The concert even opened with a short video set to music about a busker who no-one notices (which is also the subject of one of Wilson’s songs – “Luminol”), which segued seamlessly into the start of the concert proper. I can’t remember the setlist now (and as I said at the beginning of this paragraph I likely couldn’t’ve told you it immediately after the gig either) – I do remember we got Postcard (which I like quite a lot, but J’s not that fond of), and Watchmaker, and The Raven that Refused to Sing, because I remember all the visuals for those ones 🙂 And they finished up with Radioactive Toy as the encore, just like in March 🙂
They were fairly strict about no photography during the show, so I don’t have any photos (and the one I tried to take on my phone to show where we were in the venue didn’t come out at all). I’ll finish up the post with a video from youtube instead, of Postcard as played in Mexico City last year: