'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’. It’s terrific, from front to back.

Nor would he be able to compete with those artists. As he notes, the streaming services that have supplanted radio as the main disseminator of new music don’t have a lot of time for people like him. ‘Spotify has a kind of unwritten bias towards urban music and electronic music, which is fine. But it makes someone like myself, who is perceived to come from the tradition of rock music, persona non grata essentially. Part of the issue for me has always been that people don’t listen. They’ve already made up their mind.’