Porcupine Tree Hypnotize Padua (2009)

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Venue: Teatro Tenda / Padua / Italy
Concert date: November 7, 2009
Attendance: 3000
Ticket price: €34.50

Here we go again. A new Porcupine Tree tour, a new album, “The Incident” (RockLine review HERE). Four days after Porcupine Tree played Slovenia, at Kino Šiška in Ljubljana to be precise (RockLine report HERE), curiosity pulled us to the next closest stop on their current tour: Padua, Italy.

Porcupine Tree, who are joined on this tour by promising French progressive rockers Demians, rolled into Padua from Bologna, where they had played the night before. It was the last date on the old continent. After that, Porcupine Tree retreat for quite a while to the bosom of their home island, Great Britain, until they return at the end of November for the German leg of the tour. Teatro Tenda (theater tent), also known as Gran Teatro, raised no small number of questions for the two unsuspecting travelers heading to the gig. You simply can’t find its exact address online. All it said was Corso Australia. That’s one of the “inner” ring roads around Padua. After the logical loss of orientation and landing somewhere in the southern part of town, we got incredibly lucky with the first victim we asked for the right coordinates: the friendly waitress at a gas station snack bar sent us toward the Foro Boario area. You get pretty confused, if not downright surprised, when you realize you had actually already driven right past the theater. On the dual carriageway, no less, except the theater was on the opposite side from where you were coming (from Padova west toward Padova south). So all we had to do was turn back the other way. The theater really is on Corso Australia. Ever heard of buildings along a ring road having a house number? And the theater “under the tent” doesn’t have one either. All I’m trying to say is that it’s damn easy to find, but just as easy to miss. And since it goes up and comes down depending on the concert schedule, it doesn’t even need a permanent house number.

The organizers only put this theater up on the day of the show, frame and tent canvas roof included. This routine caused some confusion for the Porcupine Tree crew too, who arrived to find they had no idea where the hall entrance was or where the stage was, because neither of them, hall included, was anywhere to be seen (yet). Heaven knows why, but Italians have their own philosophy when it comes to concert spectacles, and it’s good to be ready for it. Porcupine Tree only started their soundcheck at 7:00 PM, probably thinking the promoter was lazy. Far from it. That’s just the Italian style. The show was announced for 9:30 PM. In Ljubljana everything kicked off at exactly 8:00 PM. But that’s how it goes. Italians are used to coming to hang out and have a good time, to share a pint or two, eat well, chat, while the concert itself is an extra treat at the end, like a cherry on top of a fruit bowl.

At 6:00 PM a big crowd was pushing against the steel doors, which were still carefully bolted shut. After about half an hour the people’s prayers were answered, and they immediately stormed the fast-food stand and started “stuffing” themselves en masse. Only at 7:00 PM, as mentioned, could you hear the first sounds of Porcupine Tree’s soundcheck, and people finally started entering the hall at 8:30 PM!

The French band, who never dreamed in their wildest dreams that their music would appeal to Porcupine Tree’s own boss Steven Wilson, who invited them on tour, have a debut album, “Building An Empire” (2008), in their pocket (RockLine review HERE) and finished recording a new album a few days before leaving for this tour. It’s expected out in April 2010!

The band is led by musical wizard and “one-of-a-kind” Nicholas Chapel, who, in how he absorbs and delivers musical information, works on basically the same principle as Steven Wilson. Let’s leave the sonic nitpicking and everything else aside for a moment. What the two share is that they both let themselves be guided freely in combining perfect melodies with a highly vibrant atmosphere, and neither looks for direction in music other people have already made. Chapel, who has two other members helping him on stage, has to play with Demians without a keyboardist, so the keyboards are prerecorded. Simply put, he didn’t manage to find a suitable keyboardist before the tour to fill the gap. He throws a rich, riff-driven smear of sound into the room that stays organic while also creating a punchy, rocking touch, and with Chapel’s manly, mid-pitched singing (you’d never guess in a million years the guy is French, that’s how un-French Demians sound), it grabs you pretty quickly. The vocals are more than satisfactorily “English,” and the way Chapel takes the verses and stretches the words along the melody proves he has an excellent ear and a sensitivity for music running in his blood.

Demians are a much easier bite than Porcupine Tree. I hate making comparisons, but Demians also manage to create moments of high atmosphere that can pull you deep in and won’t let you out of the ride. But Demians are considerably simpler. They don’t create such a rich dialogue between keyboards and guitar, nor between those two building blocks and the rhythm section. The keyboards in particular serve only to create a sonic curtain, though they often turn to retro sounds from the turn of the sixties into the seventies for that. Although the arrangements can be stretched out, they’re simplified above all by the many guitar patterns and the emphasized noisiness of the rock moment.

Demians gave it their all. As far as sound goes, conditions were more than optimal for a support act, which is very important in Demians’ situation, when the band is still lesser known in plenty of places. The Italian crowd felt it firsthand: Demians won them over and they saw the band off the stage with loud ovations. Chapel is definitely a genius of sorts. Demians are hard to compare to anyone, they have a special, recognizable style. They build on rich sonic curtains while keeping the melody. All of which is interesting for Porcupine Tree fans too. In Perfect Simmetry, Chapel also used some delay effects, “memorizing” a motif, pushing it into the background of the soundscape and playing a melody over it. So Demians are a band that could prosper richly in the future and manage to grow into wider recognition on the world map. Fingers crossed.

Our friends, with whom we’d spent two unforgettable hours of concert phantasmagoria of sonic and performance perfection just four days earlier in Ljubljana, treated themselves this time to a thorough cleaning of the stage floor before deciding to step onto it. For a good five minutes after everything was technically ready for the show, we got to enjoy the sight of the stage manager vigorously vacuuming the floor. It set off quite a few salvos of laughter in the crowd, many people reached for pocket cameras and mobile phones to immortalize the moment, and the rather grotesque view of the stage helped us kill the tough minutes of counting down to showtime.

The audience in Padua soon got the answer to why Porcupine Tree need a vacuum cleaner on tour. Darkness swallowed the theater. The crowd comes alive. The men are on stage. A soft violet-blue beam of light lights up only Steven Wilson for a few moments as he stands motionless, waiting for the prerecorded intro of Occam’s Razor to play out. Right after that the band bursts into the heavy riff of The Blind House, a wash of green, red and white light fills the stage, and Wilson immediately signals right from the start that he confidently commands much bigger stages than the one at Kino Šiška. Between riffs he nearly performed a proper shaman’s opening dance and showed his bare feet for the first time, which gave the vacuum cleaner its meaning.

To give you a better picture, I’ll quickly sketch the conditions Porcupine Tree played under in Padua. The theater “under the tent” is not much smaller than the small hall of Hala Tivoli, and the stands are only behind the floor, about 80 m from the stage. The canvas is pulled over a steel tent structure that rises about a good 20 m high. Conditions like that let the band make the most of the stage lighting setup. That allowed an important factor to work in creating the hypnotic atmosphere Porcupine Tree concerts are famous for.

The sound was once again pristine. Of course, you couldn’t stand too far from the stage, because the sound faded with distance. So the opposite effect from Ljubljana, where some people who attended the concert reportedly had “aching” ears, because Porcupine Tree were supposedly “too loud” right at the very back (by the entrance/exit of the Kino Šiška hall). During the concert I moved from the right, then back to 30 m from the stage, and somehow squeezed my way through the middle of the floor to just under 10 m from the band. Everywhere you could hear everything on stage clearly. That was especially important for the layered sonic collages built by Wilson, Barbieri and Wesley. Usually the latter two, in a way where you sometimes can barely tell which sound belongs to which of them. The effects Wilson and Wesley play through bend the sound so much that sometimes you get the feeling there are three keyboardists on stage. Add to that Wilson’s occasional mellotron “soundscapes” (Circle of Manias) played through the guitar, which we no longer even need to mention which guitar guru they’re inherited from, or the doubling of lines between Barbieri and Wesley (I Drive The Hearse).

The band confirmed their excellent tightness and top form once again. The first part was entirely marked by the album “The Incident”, peaking with Time Flies. The excellent new product definitely deserves to be played in full by the band. Wilson, who hadn’t yet managed to shave in the four days since Porcupine Tree’s visit to Ljubljana and shamelessly showed off a lightly stubbled face in Padua, kept an eye like a true leader on what his bandmates were doing on stage the whole time. Often, when Barbieri or Wesley takes the lead in laying out a motif, Wilson, just before that handover, walks all the way over to them, or to Harrison and Edwin, to check whether his colleagues are on the “right wavelength” in bringing the material to life on stage.

Wilson is all hair, deliberately tousled across his eyes and his whole face. Often you can’t even see his face while he sings. From time to time the bundle of hair falling over his face and mouth briefly fans out as the guy exhales while singing, or he blows it aside to clear a view whenever he needs one. These are small things, but they’re interesting because they belong only to the behavior and stage image of the unique figure that is Steven Wilson. Wilson sang excellently again, articulating his voice skillfully, and he was especially thrilling when he was strapped into an acoustic guitar, sitting on a bar stool, in other words in moments of greater sophistication.

After a 10-minute break the band starts the second part, devoted to playing older classics. This part was naturally more intense, since the audience knows them far better than the new album, which is still just sinking into their ears. So we could sail boundlessly with the band through the triplet they opened with The Start of Something Beautiful (“Deadwing”, 2005). In the second part especially, the band’s power and ability to build a solid atmosphere came to the surface in all its expressive intensity, an atmosphere that can lure you into a state of “rapture,” not to say “hypnosis.” With the excellent stage lighting effects, this feeling only deepened and intensified. The enthusiastic crowd added a lot to it too, quickly catching the right frequency with the band and freely surrendering to the unrestrained drift of Porcupine Tree’s unique sound and musical world. Magic, in a word!

One of the gloomier moments of the evening, Russia On Ice (“Lightbulb Sun”, 2000), flowed seamlessly into a moment of heavier rocking out, the second part of Anesthetize (“Fear of a Blank Planet”, 2007), which thoroughly fired up the packed floor. After that Wilson, who was a lot less talkative this time than at the Ljubljana show, did take a few moments to speak to the crowd. He announced the next number as the moment of the Padua concert that nobody on the current tour had witnessed yet. He described the song as something written many, many years ago, back when Porcupine Tree had no chance of playing in Italy. The song Stars Die, which came out as an EP even before the album “The Sky Moves Sideways” (1995), kind of replaced Lazarus (“Deadwing”, 2005), which the band played at the Ljubljana concert four days earlier, while keeping its function of easing the highly charged atmosphere and creating a transition into a completely new ambient experience! The dreamy song was an excellent and unique enrichment of the repertoire. The band then poured oil on the fire again with the sharp but dark, accelerated and wicked “In Absentia” (2002) classic Strip The Soul, and masterfully “calmed” it down with the song “.3”

Another short break follows, and Wilson appears on stage with a little glass of wine. In his address he toasts the crowd and draws attention to himself, above all with the line: “This is my first glass of “vino” on this tour!” Of course the audience caught the Englishman’s cynicism, which drew fresh salvos of laughter and ovations. Given what a nitpicking hair-splitter Wilson is, being the musical perfectionist he really is, you’d almost believe him that he’d only been drinking water on tour so far. After a short plug for the EP “Nil Recurring” (2008), the band launches into Normal, then surprises with a completely unexpected move. For the closing number of the regular set they pick a song from the bonus CD of the new album “The Incident”, namely Bonnie The Cat. The move is especially surprising because most people expected an older song to finish, in the style of Blackest Eyes, Even Less, Open Car, The Hatesong, and so on…

But it’s clear why the band loves this song so much. Despite the intensely dark mood the band conjures on stage once again, what pleases and amazes in this song above all is the sight of drummer Gavin Harrison’s unique work. It’s marked by completely unpredictable progressive breaking up of the exploring lines. Not a single drum line repeats, not a single transition is the same. The dictation of the basic snare rhythm in this song can’t be predicted, and at the same time Gavin “sprinkles” a few explosive, precisely measured “rolls” through the song, which create superb dynamics and underline the rich three-dimensional reach of the song’s soundscape. Brilliant and in the style of the greatest masters! Hats off! And all of a sudden the regular part of the concert was over! No wonder Robert Fripp himself picked Harrison for the King Crimson lineup.

The crowd just wouldn’t stop with the ovations. “Porkupin 3!” was this time the “Italianized” version of the name of their favorite band. People are in ecstasy. The heroes come back and fire off the expected The Sound Of Muzak (“In Absentia”, 2002), which lulls the crowd into a new dream and feels triumphant in its melodically seductive chorus, which you can’t imagine without Wilson’s vocals. When Wilson picks up the acoustic guitar again, it becomes almost completely clear that Trains (“In Absentia”, 2002) is next. During the performance Wilson once again moves right up to Wesley and then to the master Richard Barbieri (ex-Japan) and gives them instructions. Clearly both caught the right signals. Just before the song’s closing exit, Porcupine Tree stop. What followed was a playful introduction of the band members, starting with Gavin Harrison and his towel trick, while a prerecorded part of Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” crept into the background. Next up was the introduction, in Wilson’s words, of the Italian Richard Barbieri, who launched into a short, humorous salsa motif. The humoresque doesn’t end there, and people have an especially good time when Wilson announces the American John Wesley and Barbieri “slips in” the lead motif of Springsteen’s “Born In The Usa”. That leaves Colin Edwin. An Australian? That’s right. And what did the mischievous sound pranksters pick for the background of his introduction? Men At Work’s “Down Under”, of course!

But the jokes soon ran out as the band takes us through the closing two repetitions of Trains, through the verse “Always the summers, are slipping away”… Then Wilson shouts: “Grazie!” The end. A full two hours and ten minutes (not counting the break) of sonic and musical perfection from Porcupine Tree, a band in exceptional form, flew by again in the blink of an eye. Not a moment of emptiness. After the Ljubljana show, where, compared to the Padua experience, the band put the emphasis on greater intimacy and more rocking out, Porcupine Tree strung together another unforgettable musical moment in the completely different ambience of Teatro Tenda, unrepeatable, one of a kind and magnificent. This time we got to enjoy and feel the triumphant creation of a rich atmosphere even more intensely, the unique world of the Porcupine Tree essence.

photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Setlist

DEMIANS: 1. Sapphire 2. Naive 3. Feel Alive 4. Earth 5. The Perfect Symmetry PORCUPINE TREE: 1. Occam’s Razor 2. The Blind House 3. Great Expectations 4. Kneel and Disconnect 5. Drawing the Line 6. The Incident 7. Your Unpleasant Family 8.The Yellow Windows of the Evening Train 9. Time Flies 10. Degree Zero of Liberty 11. Octane Twisted 12. The Séance 13. Circle of Manias 14. I Drive the Hearse — second set (after a 10-minute break) — 15. The Start of Something Beautiful 16. Russia on Ice 17. Anesthetize Part 2: “The Pills I’m Taking” 18. Stars Die 19. Strip The Soul 20. .3 21. Normal 22. Bonnie the Cat — encore — 23. The Sound of Muzak 24. Trains

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