{"id":491,"date":"2026-08-18T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/18\/that-was-incredibly-disingenuous-of-radiohead-but-i-have-to-acknowledge-that-perhaps-it-was-very-wise-steven-wilson-and-the-war-between-prog-and-pop\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T16:00:00","slug":"that-was-incredibly-disingenuous-of-radiohead-but-i-have-to-acknowledge-that-perhaps-it-was-very-wise-steven-wilson-and-the-war-between-prog-and-pop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/18\/that-was-incredibly-disingenuous-of-radiohead-but-i-have-to-acknowledge-that-perhaps-it-was-very-wise-steven-wilson-and-the-war-between-prog-and-pop\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThat was incredibly disingenuous of Radiohead. But I have to acknowledge that perhaps it was very wise\u201d: Steven Wilson and the war between prog and pop"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In 2017, some <\/em>Steven Wilson<\/em><\/a> fans could have been forgiven if they misunderstood his statement that his album <\/em>To The Bone<\/a> was a pop record rather than a prog one. But if they gave him a chance to explain \u2013 as he did to <\/em>Prog \u2013 his argument made more sense than it might have seemed.<\/em><\/p>\n

Steven Wilson wants you to know that his new album, To The Bone<\/em>, is a pop album. Even to someone unschooled in prog, it doesn\u2019t sound much like a pop record. Instead it sounds like an artful modern rock work with some pop touches. It\u2019s proggy a lot of the time \u2013 but those who fly the prog banner need to be warned.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know \u2018pop\u2019 is a very pejorative term,\u201d he says, sitting in the conservatory of his Hertfordshire home. \u201cParticularly when you\u2019re talking with the prog audience. \u2018Pop\u2019 is the sort of word they run screaming from. But I think of pop in the sense that Kate Bush<\/a> is pop. Or The Beatles<\/a> are pop. Or ABBA are pop. I\u2019m not talking about the modern, very conservative pop scene \u2013 I\u2019m talking about pop in the broad sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you know anything about Wilson you\u2019ll know he doesn\u2019t want to be pigeonholed as prog. It\u2019s not that he\u2019s ashamed of the genre \u2013 you don\u2019t set about remixing the King Crimson<\/a> catalogue, or make the music he does, if you feel that way. It\u2019s more that he recognises a grim reality: prog brings with it a set of associations in the wider public mind. Prog is male; it\u2019s po-faced; it values technical excellence above melody; it\u2019s self-indulgent; it\u2019s best left undisturbed in its bedsit.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s all rubbish, Wilson accepts, and it masks the fact that a lot of music which few would consider prog is actually perfectly<\/em> prog; but because it doesn\u2019t get lumbered with the label, it can reach a wider audience.<\/p>\n

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He explains: \u201cIf you listen to a band like Joy Division<\/a>, for example, Closer<\/em> is closer to progressive rock than punk. The weighty lyrical subject matter about the human condition; the use of Mellotrons; the portentous, conceptual side of it; even the Peter Saville artwork \u2013 very pretentious, very humourless. It\u2019s closer to In The Court Of The Crimson King<\/em><\/a> than it is to The Damned<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the UK, things are put on one side of the hip divide or the other. My music does sound a bit more old-fashioned than Radiohead <\/a>or Sigur R\u00f3s<\/a>. I do wear my love of people like Jeff Lynne<\/a> and Yes<\/a> a little bit more on my sleeve than those guys do. But at the same time, I do hear those things in the music of Radiohead and Sigur R\u00f3s and Muse<\/a>. It\u2019s frustrating to me that it\u2019s overlooked in their music but not in my music.\u201d<\/p>\n

As soon as people suggested Radiohead were prog, they took care to say they hated the genre. \u201cYeah, and I\u2019ve always thought that was incredibly disingenuous of them. But, actually, I have to acknowledge that perhaps it was very wise.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that Wilson doesn\u2019t love or value prog fans. He\u2019s very grateful for everything you\u2019ve done for him. He just wishes others liked his music too. \u201cMost people who consider themselves music lovers have had the opportunity to decide whether they like Coldplay<\/a> or not, and whether they like Radiohead or not. The frustration is that they haven\u2019t had the chance to decide whether or not they like my<\/em> music.\u201d And that\u2019s because once you get called prog, you\u2019re never going to get on the radio, into most of the music magazines, or into the newspapers.<\/p>\n

One reason people don\u2019t call Radiohead, Muse and Sigur R\u00f3s prog is that they always took care to look like indie bands. Wilson: \u201cI look like a nerd, which probably doesn\u2019t help. If I\u2019d been wiser, I probably could have gone about cultivating my image in a different way.\u201d<\/p>\n

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He was probably always destined to be a nerd. \u201cMy dad was an electronic engineer and he used to build me things. He would have to invent them, because in the 80s you couldn\u2019t just download a circuit diagram. He built me a little four-track recorder, so at 12, 13 years old I was experimenting with multitracking; and he built me a sequencer. <\/p>\n

\u201cExcept my dad wasn\u2019t a musician, so he would always get something a little bit wrong. The sequencer was a nine-step sequencer. A musician would have known that most music is in four, so he\u2019d have built a four-step or eight-step sequencer. He built me a nine-step sequencer because that was the number of relays he could afford.<\/p>\n

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I was a pretentious, pompous teenager, reading Franz Kafka and listening to Throbbing Gristle<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cMaybe that\u2019s why I became so interested in strange time signatures \u2013 everything I wrote with the sequencer had<\/em> to be in three or nine, which are not common time signatures. With the multitrack machine he couldn\u2019t figure out how to get the erase head to work, so everything I did had to be a first take. Maybe that\u2019s why I became interested in the idea of lo-fi and the role of chance in music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than doing what most kids do \u2013 picking up an instrument, finding some mates who\u2019ve got instruments, bashing out cover versions in someone\u2019s bedroom until before playing in a local youth club \u2013 Wilson was learning to be a producer. \u201cI wanted to hold a record in my hand and say, \u2018This is something I made.\u2019 My first ambitions were to be in the studio all the time, and my dad \u2013 amazingly \u2013 facilitated that from an early age.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alongside that was a voracious interest in music \u2013 not just the prog giants, but the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal<\/a>, Neil Young<\/a>, Elton John<\/a>, ABBA, Can, Tangerine Dream<\/a>, ELO<\/a>, Tubular Bells<\/em><\/a>, The Dark Side Of The Moon<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u201cBut at the same time \u2013 and I\u2019ve always struggled to explain this \u2013 I was fascinated by dark music. I was a very pretentious, pompous teenager, readings things like Franz Kafka\u2019s In the Penal Colony<\/em> and listening to Throbbing Gristle<\/a>\u2019s The Second Annual Report<\/em>. Maybe it\u2019s because I came from this very happy, loving family that I was fascinated by these things, which were alien to me. I guess that\u2019s part of the magic of pop music \u2013 presenting a world you\u2019d never want to be a part of.\u201d<\/p>\n

He grew up with a sense that music was a journey rather than a destination, and mourns the loss of a concept of \u2018pop\u2019 that incorporates everything, rather than something that\u2019s narrowly defined by the fashions of radio playlists. We discuss the wonder of BBC4\u2019s repeats of Top Of The Pops<\/em>,<\/a> which \u2013 by simply reflecting what happened to be in the charts at any given time, rather than \u2018curating\u2019 a view of what music should be \u2013 offer a fairly dizzying idea of 80s pop. You might get a terrible novelty record, some absurdly ambitious piece of new pop, a heavy metal epic and a disco hit all thrown through the screen, one after the other, not differentiated.<\/p>\n

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Truth has become a flexible notion. It\u2019s filtered through your race, your religion, your politics<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cThe 80s get a bad rep,\u201d Wilson says, \u201cbut it\u2019s wonderfully mad when you see The Smiths<\/a> alongside The Tweets on the same episode of Top Of The Pops<\/em>, or Status Quo<\/a> next to Echo And The Bunnymen<\/a>. It\u2019s all become so homogenised.\u201d<\/p>\n

So when he says To The Bone<\/em> is a pop record, he doesn\u2019t mean he\u2019s trying to compete with Ed Sheeran; he means he\u2019s trying to make a record that captures the spirit of adventure he remembers from some of the big acts of his teens. Not a lowest common denominator, but a higher plane, of pop.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was completely besotted by artists like Kate Bush, Tears For Fears<\/a>, Talk Talk<\/a>, Prince<\/a>, Depeche Mode<\/a>, and what Peter Gabriel<\/a> was doing in the 80s. What I loved about those records was that they were very accessible \u2013 you could enjoy them for the melodies \u2013 but at the same time, if you chose to engage with them at a deeper level, there were great lyrics about quite deep subject matter, and very ambitious, cinematic production, with great musicianship. And they were outside genre classification.<\/p>\n

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\"Steven<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>

(Image credit: Scarlett Page)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cSo this is the first time I\u2019ve really focused on my pop sensibility, stripping away some of the most conceptual elements and some of the more technical muso aspects, and just concentrating on the art of writing big, epic, ambitious pop music.\u201d<\/p>\n

You might be preparing yourself for Wilson\u2019s fifth solo album to be a bundle of entirely unrelated, utterly flippant three-minute songs. That\u2019s not what To The Bone<\/em> is. While it might not be as obsessed with the darkness as its predecessor, Hand.Cannot.Erase.<\/em><\/a>, or as unconcerned with commercial possibility as previous iterations of Wilson\u2019s career \u2013 Bass Communion<\/a>, Blackfield<\/a>, Continuum, Incredible Expanding Mindfuck, No-Man<\/a>, Porcupine Tree<\/a>, Storm Corrosion<\/a> \u2013 it\u2019s a weighty album, dealing with what has become the weightiest theme of all in the contemporary world.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s the Tarantino thing: \u2018I don\u2019t care if John Travolta\u2019s out of fashion \u2013 I\u2019m going to bring him back\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cIt starts with this black American schoolteacher who\u2019s a very good friend of mine, Jasmine, talking about the nature of truth and how truth has become a flexible notion,\u201d he says. \u201cTruth is something that\u2019s filtered through everyone\u2019s agenda, whether it\u2019s your race, your religion, your politics. All the songs on the record are about truth and about the way people have different truths, whether it\u2019s the religious fundamentalist or the terrorist or the politician.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the simplest sense, there are songs about how two people in a relationship can have a completely different truth about that relationship; a different perspective. What we call \u2018truth\u2019 is nothing of the sort a lot of the time. We have a perspective, and that becomes our truth. Truth, in the true sense of the word, is an absolute singular reality. But it seems to me you can never get to that singular absolute reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

His fascination with truth is a result of what has happened since Wilson wrote Hand.Cannot.Erase.<\/em>. He had thought that record offered a bleak enough view of the world, \u201cbut since then we\u2019ve had Brexit, we\u2019ve had Donald Trump, we\u2019ve had the terrorists come right to our very doorstep, we\u2019ve had Bataclan, we\u2019ve had Manchester. I wouldn\u2019t say it would have been irresponsible not to write about those things, but it would have been strange if I hadn\u2019t touched upon them.\u201d<\/p>\n

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He thinks pop\u2019s escapist artists must have been challenged by what has happened in the world \u2013 when 22 people are murdered at the end of a pop concert, how can it not be? \u201cThis world has now come to them, and it\u2019s affecting their young fans. Can they continue to completely pretend it\u2019s not happening? It seems to me that we\u2019ve forgotten that a lot of pop music came out of anger \u2013 and you could argue that was when it was at its best.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s sentiment there, too. Wilson often invited his heroes to recreate their roles for him \u2013 like getting Alan Parsons<\/a> to serve as engineer on The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories)<\/em><\/a> \u2013 and while he would doubtless argue it\u2019s about getting the best person for the job, it\u2019s hard not to see it as wish fulfilment too. <\/p>\n

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Maybe it\u2019s self-validation. \u2026 I\u2019m not saying I feel like a failure<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

There\u2019s another returning hero this time. \u201cDo you know those old Talk Talk and The The records from the 80s? Remember the harmonica? I tracked down the guy who was on all those records, Mark Feltham. It\u2019s one of the first sounds you hear on the record. It\u2019s such an amazing sound. No one had looked at him for 20 years. It\u2019s the Tarantino thing: \u2018I don\u2019t care if John Travolta\u2019s out of fashion \u2013 I remember he was great, and I\u2019m going to bring him back and make him hip again.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He considers that for a moment. \u201cI don\u2019t know if I\u2019m making these people hip again. Probably not. But as soon as he started playing in the studio, people around were almost crying. It\u2019s such an amazing sound.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sensible money would be against To The Bone<\/em> being the album that makes Wilson into a mainstream star. But his exclusion from that environment baffles him. At one point we have a 10-minute discussion on why I never commissioned an interview with him when I was music editor of The Guardian<\/em>, despite the paper\u2019s writers giving him good reviews. (Short answer: \u2018bloke who\u2019s made good records makes another good record\u2019 isn\u2019t much of a story for people who\u2019ve never heard of him.)<\/p>\n

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But what I don\u2019t understand is why it bothers him. He lives in a beautiful house. He sells out big theatres. His audience loves him. He gets to make the music he wants, without interference. In the end, he accepts, it boils down to something simple. \u201cI have a big ego, as most people that stand up in front of an audience on a stage do. You have<\/em> to have a big ego. I would like my music to have some place in history. I would like it to have some immortality. And the more significant it is to the more people, the happier I\u2019ll be.<\/p>\n

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\"Prog<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>

This article first appeared in Prog 79 <\/span>(Image credit: Future)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cMaybe it\u2019s self-validation. People look at me and say, \u2018He\u2019s made music. He\u2019s not compromised. He\u2019s got a good fanbase and he sells lots of records.\u2019 I\u2019m not saying I feel like a failure \u2013 but I still don\u2019t feel self-validation to the extent I\u2019d like to. And yes, I look at people like Thom Yorke and I think: \u2018You fucker!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilson isn\u2019t bitter. He\u2019s just devoted so much of his life to thinking about music, and the music industry, that he can\u2019t quite see the wood for the trees. It\u2019s easy for an outsider to point to the 629 albums recorded under 327 identities, to the concept albums and experiments, to the privacy he protects, and say: \u2018Dude! You want to be a household name, and get in all the music mags? Just make one album every two years and tell people how unhappy you were making it, and how drunk you got every night to cope.\u2019<\/p>\n

But if he did that, he wouldn\u2019t be Steven Wilson. And what would be the point of that?<\/p>\n<\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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