This somewhat unexpected musical pairing brought Porcupine Tree and Magma to Manchester’s Castlefield Bowl on a blindingly bright Thursday evening for what appears to be each band’s sole UK gig of the summer, despite having both played on bills previously in Switzerland. It was part of Manchester’s ‘Sounds of the City’ season, an increasingly popular summer diversion in a number of UK cities, and here located in an area steeped in history. The temporary stage is literally placed above the end of a terminal canal lock and looked down upon by the old Roman fort which was excavated in the late Eighties, ironically around the time that Porcupine Tree were emerging at the forefront of that era’s new wave of psychedelia. Much has happened since to their sound, their style and their audience since then, before arriving at today’s semi-stadial extravaganza, but more of that later…
For me at least, this was very much an equal double header, with an opportunity to see an astonishingly vibrant Magma band a year or so on from an intimate Band on the Wall gig in the same city which I’d rate somewhere towards the top of my gigging experiences of the last 40 years. This unique French ensemble were often compared and contrasted to Gong in the early Seventies, both in terms of musician origin, their peddling of an often unfathomable mythology, and a rich juxtaposition of musical styles, but Magma’s was always a more self-consciously serious approach than Gong, and Britain saw little of them between the mid Seventies and relatively recently.
Magma
The current line-up is an extraordinary 11-strong posse, with the emphasis very much on a communal vocal element (8 of the band sing, 6 exclusively so), and their very carefully manicured arrangements of classics from the Magma canon is quite something to behold. The band had an hour to perform, and that of course, that meant just 3 tracks – the last starting almost 40 minutes out. It’s something of a statement of intent when your opener is the gorgeous ‘Hhai!’, a vehicle for drummer and band leader Christian Vander’s impassioned vocal lines, with drumsticks temporarily set aside, delivered in pure Kobaian, Vander’s patent language which he uses to embellish and propel the music.
Christian Vander
Second up was ‘KA1’ from the Köhntarkösz Anteria album, ideally suited for this line-up, an upbeat and mesmeric invocation with wafer thin guitar themes accentuating the mass vocal lines. And then onto ‘Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh’, the band’s trademark 1973 composition. Connoisseurs of the band’s original studio piece, or Seventies’ Youtube performances will identify with this track as a heavy, hypnotic, imploring groove – in the hands of its mass choral airing here it takes on a different lifeform.
Jimmy Top/Stella Vander
Simon Goubert, who I spoke to in research for the Hugh Hopper biography in his role as Soft Bounds’ drummer, is one of two keyboard players for the band and provides the iconic backdrop throughout; Jimmy Top, son of Magma stalwart Jannik, the rumbling bass; and Vander himself the tight, expressive drumming, but centrepiece is that all-consuming choir. This is mesmeric, trance-like music – one might focus on lead singer Hervé Aknin’s deep-voiced gesturing, or Vander himself once again taking vocal centrestage with minimal backdrop, but a special word for Lora Yma Perso, the diminutive singer who stands somewhere stage right in amongst the ensemble. Magma run a notoriously tight ship, with apparently nothing left unscored, but as the atmosphere builds later on in the piece, live performances of MDK have seen her given increasing licence to release the tension with an extraordinary passage of diva-ish exclamations, none more so than tonight – this is goosebump material for sure.
Lora Yma Perso/Caroline Indjein/Simon Goubert
Given the estimated capacity of this outdoor arena is 8000, and a 6:30pm start meaning that gig-goers continued to filter in until around 8pm, Magma certainly didn’t get the best of the crowd, nor perhaps the sound (there are so many individual components to throw into the sound mix, which echoed sometimes hollowly around the amphitheater), but the atmosphere in front of stage was clearly electric – Simon Goubert later described it as ‘intense’.
And so back to Porcupine Tree. My own relationship with the band’s music has been somewhat inconsistent. Facelift was lucky enough to receive mailouts from the much-missed Delerium label in the early 90s, when the band sat somewhat incongruously alongside the likes of Kava Kava, Dead Flowers and Nukli. I say incongruously because whilst Delerium pushed hard the sounds of the psychedelic underground, Porcupine Tree always seemed to be destined for higher things. For all later accusations of them producing almost psychedelia by numbers (witness the epic ‘Voyage 34’, sampling Pink Floyd guitar riffs and Van der Graaf flute loops), blessed with Steven Wilson’s clear knowledge of what had gone before, and a certain amount of production polish, it was nonetheless high class music, and even delvings into ‘Dark Side’ type proggy fluff circa ‘The Sky Moves Sideways’ was often saved by the inclusion of at least one classy guitar ballad (such as ‘Stars Die’), per album… Facelift reviewed a number of further albums, which were often saved by those ballads as well as some memorably spiky riffs such as on ‘Signify’, but then as the magazine folded, so did my exposure to their music.
It took ‘In Absentia’, a near faultless album based lyrically on a questionable obsession with serial murder as well as a revitalisation of Wilson’s guitar approach underpinned by some gloriously chugging riffs to spark my interest again, as the band upgraded various venue sizes to leave them well beyond the tiny lecture theatre I saw them with in Salford University in the very early days, or even Megadog co-billings later that in the Nineties, as the band positioned themselves as advanced progressive musicians railing in a seemingly post-adolescent manner against the system. A few more albums, then a hiatus whilst Wilson pursued solo projects and an increasingly lucrative position as the go-to remasterer of classic prog albums, including ‘In The Land Of Grey and Pink’ before this slightly surprising re-emergence with a new album ‘Closure/Continuation’ last year.
Porcupine Tree
So, how would Porcupine Tree re-emerge? Firstly, the unfortunate withdrawal of bass player Nate Navarro meant that existing bass lines were piped through the mix, leaving the overall sound lacking a little clarity, and, presumably a physical void on stage as Gavin Harrison set up with a preposterously large kit stage right. Richard Barbieri was seated back left, providing largely textured keyboards, leaving the main visual and musical impact both to Wilson and fellow guitarist John Wesley who takes backing vocals as well as often impressively taking Wilson’s studio lines, be they solo or rhythmic . The band command the space well and as the natural light faded, the startling dystopian images of the film show behind them were brought more sharply into focus. Wilson admitted that this two hour set would be something of a more mellow diversion than normal, and that was reflected in several new numbers I didn’t recognise, as well as elements of ones I did such as ‘Mellotron Scratch’ and ‘I Drive the Hearse’.
What I can tell you is that new track ‘Culling the Herd’, with its grinding guitar riff against the visual backdrop of rabid wolves, was right up to standard, and that the band worked through a number of staples including a rousing opener of ‘Blackest Eyes’, an upbeat ‘Sound of Muzak’ or dipping into slightly unexpected territory such as the otherworldly metronomic strumming of ‘Last Chance To Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled’.
Steven Wilson
But, soporific as the summer evening might have been, there was always a sense of waiting for the performance to explode with some stellar classics and that finally arrived with two tracks – firstly ‘Anaesthesize’, the hymn-like opus from ‘Fear of a Blank Planet’ which flits in and out of all-out sonic assault; and ‘Sleep Together’ from the same album, a track I neither particularly rated or remembered beyond its slightly turgid album outing, tonight unexpectedly transformed into the disturbing, menacing highpoint of their performance – a deserving set ender. Which only left what turned out to be 3 encores: a mellow one (‘Collapse the Light Into Earth’), a rocky crowdpleaser (‘Halo’) and perhaps, inevitably, the band’s calling card ‘Trains’. The Castlefield Basin is uniquely placed with a railway viaduct towering over stage left and, whether by design or otherwise this brief rendition of the track coincided with the loudest cheers of the night as a series of trains passed in either direction as band and audience turned their heads to acclaim them – a moment of joyful synchronicity to end the night…
The Canterbury scene(zine) continued.... 