Live Review - Porcupine Tree, Manchester Academy 1
My third gig in nine days at the half-finished building site of a venue known as Manchester Academy 1. This time I noticed the lack of a cloakroom all the more because it had been tipping down with rain all day, so I had to spend the gig clutching a wet coat. Oh well.
Support was an great 45 minute set from Liverpudlian rockers Anathema. They hit the stage so soon after the doors opened that I missed the very start of their set; they were in full flow with ‘Fragile Dreams’ by the time I’d got into the venue. A lot better than they were the last time they supported PT in 2005. The quite atmospheric new material from the forthcoming album “Angels Walk Amongst Us” sounded interesting, and the older material rocked hard.
On paper, Porcupine Tree don’t seem to have the ingredients for a great live band. They don’t interact with the audience much, Steve Wilson is hardly the worlds greatest frontman, and their songs don’t turn into singalongs. But if they weren’t any good I would not have been seeing them for the fifth time in three years. PT gigs are all about the music rather than the band; they’re all great musicians. Steve Wilson has claimed in interviews he’s not a virtuoso guitarist, but with the fluid solos he reels off, who does he think he’s kidding? Colin Edwin and Gavin Harrison have to be one of the tightest rhythm sections I’ve heard this year; in the best tradition of prog-rock a lot of their music is in complex time signatures, which they play flawlessly. Richard Barbieri on keys and John Wesley on second guitar and backing vocals might not take much of the limelight, but they make a big contribution to the rich multi-layered sound.
The sound mix was an order of magnitude better than it had been for Within Temptation nine days before; it was very loud, possibly one of my loudest gigs of the year, but this time there was no muddy bottom end; we had good separation with every instrument heard clearly, especially the drums. The set still drew heavily from this year’s superb “Fear of a Blank Planet”, with much of the rest from “Deadwing” and “In Absentia”. But they also found space for a couple of real oldies, “Dark Matter” and “The Sky Moves Sideways”, and some material from their new EP, “Nil Recurring”. Highlights were many; the epic “Anaethetise”, a brutally heavy version of “Sleep Together”, the Zeppelinesque riffing of “Blackest Eyes”, and a great version of “Trains”.
They promised to be back next year with more brand new material. I’ll be there!
