The New Cue #322 September 29: Steven Wilson, Mutual Benefit, Simon Williams, The Murder Capital, Really Good Time, VLURE, Wilco, Underworld

"The only agenda I had was to have no agenda"

Good morning,

Sheesharama, have we got a bumper Recommender for you! Here’s a quick list of contents and then we’ll crack on:

-       an interview with prog overlord Steven Wilson, who wolfed down his lunch before his TNC interview because he knows the perils of speaking to Niall on an empty stomach. Wow!

-       A Guest Recommender from Fierce Panda founder Simon Williams. Pow!

-       An Album To Blow Your Mind pick from Mutual Benefit. Yow!

-       And all the other good shit you’ve come to expect from your favourite music newsletter.

Let’s get to it. Press Subscribe Now if you’re not a paying Subscriber and this intro has done what all the other intros failed to do and convinced you to pay £5 a month and make all of this nonsense worthwhile. WOOF!

Here’s a playlist, it’s going to win a Brit:

Enjoy the edition,

Ted (still absent but sends his regards), Niall and Chris

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End The Week With… Steven Wilson

Oooh End The Week With, we haven’t done that before and we might never do it again but it’s our newsletter, as long as it’s in line with Substack’s Content Guidelines we can do it what we want. They actually email us every week from the US telling us what to put in our Recommenders. Niall doesn’t even like Radiohead but some guy called Robert who lives in Palo Alto and works in Substack HR is a big fan and makes Niall put everything Radiohead members do into his Recommender entries. He also made Niall listen to the new album by experimental rock renaissance man Steven Wilson but luckily Niall really liked it: it’s called The Harmony Codex and it’s out today, a mind-bending prog epic that sometimes sounds like soundtrack-mode Trent Reznor making a Massive Attack record and at other times resembles These New Puritans binning off all the eerie introspection and going full Pink Floyd. Last week, Robert from Substack told Niall to interview Steven Wilson all about the new album and because Niall doesn’t want to upset the Substack overlords he agreed.

Hello Steven, how are you?
I’m alright. I’m sorry I’m a little bit late, I was quickly wolfing down some lunch between interviews.

Sorry for making you wolf down your lunch. When you’re doing interviews about new records, do you find your thinking about the records changing or is it already set in stone before you start talking about it?
Well, the former really. I think the thing is that when you make music, you’re not having to articulate what you’re doing in words. Why would you, you’re just kind of following a very intuitive process of being creative and then when somebody says to you, ‘Well, why did you do that and why did you write that and what does that line mean?’, you almost have to delve into yourself and come out with reasons for yourself as well as for the person that’s asked the question. I do find the process of being interviewed about records really fascinating because I discover things about the record that I didn’t acknowledge to myself, and sometimes I probably make shit up just to make it interesting as well, if I’m being totally honest.

That’s fair enough. I love the record, even though it’s over an hour long, a few times I’ve accidentally listened to it twice over where it’s been on a loop.
Oh wow, well that’s a great sign. I always worry about the length of an album when it’s 65 minutes, whether it’s going to wear the listener out, but apparently not in your case. That’s great.

It feels like a lot of different sonic fragments and I have no idea where an album like this would begin. How did it start?
That’s an interesting question because this album is probably the only one I’ve ever made without me having any kind of agenda to begin with. I like to do different things with every record, but I’ve always got some vague idea in the back of my mind. So, for example, on The Future Bites, I knew from the beginning, ‘this is going to be my electronic pop record’. Then going back to The Raven That Refused To Sing, I knew ‘this is going to be my old-fashioned, old school prog rock record’, so I always had this idea in the back of my mind going into a new project, what kind of record I was going to make.

This time, I had no idea and I had no agenda. The only agenda I had was to have no agenda. I think one of the big reasons for that is that it did begin during a period of enforced isolation of lockdown. I was unable to interact with other musicians, I was very much cut off and I was really just creating music almost to fill the time that I suddenly found that I unexpectedly had, because I had a big tour cancelled. I was filling the time just making music and being creative and not trying to make any particular kind of music. And I think that’s one of the reasons why the album just keeps surprising you and going off in all these kind of crazy different directions is because there wasn’t really any master plan to it.

At what point did all those pieces start to form to make a cohesive record?
I started the first songs probably in the first week of lockdown and it would probably have been around about six or seven months before I realised, ‘maybe I have a record here’. It was a period of not putting any pressure on myself. In fact, I was off doing other things. At the same time I was working on a book, I started a podcast, so the record was really just something happening in this very organic uncontrived way.

You’ve got those one-liners for each of your other records, what are you going to say for this one?
The way I describe this one is ‘a piece of cinema for the ears’. I also like to think the album exists outside of any notion of genre. The ultimate conclusion you come away from listening to it with is it’s recognisably a Steven Wilson record but beyond that, it’s very hard to say what genre it belongs to. I love that because I’ve always striven to create my own musical world and most of the artists that I grew up admiring the most and still admire the most - Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, Neil Young, Nick Cave - these kinds of artists are very hard to pigeonhole. I’m not comparing myself to these musical geniuses, but I like to think in my own little way, I’ve achieved something similar with the way I’ve gone about consistently confronting the expectations of my listeners and continuing to change and also disappoint some of those people when I don’t go in the direction they would like me to or I don’t make the generic music they would like me to.

Porcupine Tree reformed since you started work on this record, did that have an effect on anything?
No, it’s been a process that’s began before, carried on throughout and ended after. The Porcupine Tree record is an odd one, because that was almost all written back in 2012 or 2013 so there wasn’t a lot of writing to do for that project, there was arrangement and there was recording and mixing and the release and the promotion, but in terms of the actual creative side of writing, most of that was already done years ago. So really all of my creative juices as it were going into this new record. Literally, I’d be mixing a Porcupine Tree track, send it off to the other two guys and then five minutes later, I’ve loaded up a track from the Harmony Codex and I’m working on that again. I’ve always liked multi-tasking.

Recently, every big reissue that comes out seems to feature a Dolby Atmos remix by you. Do you sleep?
In my defence, I’ve worked on a lot of projects over the last three or four years, all of which seem to be coming out now. It’s just one of those things that during Covid, I did a lot of remixing of classic albums and archive work. I worked on The Who project, I worked on Suede, I worked on Tears For Fears, the Chic catalogue, Richard Wright’s album, ABC, these are probably some of the ones you’re referring to. They were done over a very long period of time, but it’s just the way the industry works that sometimes things don’t come out for a few years and it’s sod’s law that they all seem to be coming out in exactly the same window of time that my new album is coming out.

Which of those remix projects has been the most personally enjoyable for you?
Well, in terms of pure legendary status, being asked to do Who’s Next. I mean, that’s canon, one of the greatest if not the greatest rock album ever made. That was a real honour. In terms of actual sound and sonics, I really enjoyed doing the ABC record because Trevor Horn was one of my big influences growing up. When I was growing up, I fell in love with the idea of being a producer, more than I fell in love with the idea of being a rock star or a musician. I never really had a great interest in those things. But I did love this idea of the auteur, the producer, the captain of the ship, and Trevor’s productions at that time when I was really getting into buying records, in ‘82, ‘83, the ZTT staff, the Yes album, the ABC record, the Seal records, these were on another level in terms of the sonic excellent.

Which track off your new album have you listened to the most?
I’m really proud of the title track. I felt like it was quite a brave thing to do, to put this 10-minute long track in the middle of the record where very little happens. It’s very ambient, it’s very textural, there’s no drums, there’s no guitar, there’s no vocal. I’m not sure if I would have been brave enough to have put that on any record previous to this one, so I’m really proud of it.

ND

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