‘I like upsetting people’: Steven Wilson interviewed

Steven Wilson is going about becoming a pop musician entirely the wrong way. For one thing, he’s into his fifties, not typically the point in life at which budding chart-botherers launch their assault on hearts and minds. For another, in an age in which pop stardom and identity politics have become entwined — in cultural discourse, at least, even if not necessarily in your teenager’s listening habits — he has everything going against him. ‘I come from a very well-adjusted family. I’m heterosexual. I’m white.’

Of course, Wilson doesn’t really expect to be competing against Stormzy and Dua Lipa and Cardi B. His new album, The Future Bites, is a markedly grown-up record, concerned with how algorithms are controlling the world, nodding to his own age (‘Now I just sit in the corner complaining/ Making out things were best in the 80s,’ he sings on the gorgeous ‘12 Things I Forgot’, a lambent, swelling song not a million miles from Pink Floyd at their most concise), and varying in style from the pulsing electronica of ‘Personal Shopper’ to the jagged funk of ‘Eminent Sleaze’.