Photo: Kylie Keene

Hotly anticipated among the local music community, tonight’s event draws a positively eclectic crowd inside The Tivoli’s iconic walls as the metalheads in black T-shirts, curious indie kids and middle-aged couples converge in order to experience something that no DVD is able to replicate: an impossibly powerful live combination of sound and vision. To paraphrase the relevant song lyrics, we’re here to witness the start of something beautiful – or more accurately, the sonic gurus collapsing the light into Earth.

The warm-up honours for the occasion again fall on Melbournians Sleep Parade’s collective shoulders and the “sleepyheads” comfortably deliver. With a new guitarist and bass player in tow, the four-piece assemble a healthy gathering with their panoramic, distinctly Australian alt-prog. Frontman Leigh Davies changes guitars for practically every song, among which the sinister Oxygen, the Karnivool-like Every Day, Seconds Away and a lengthy new number are particularly impressive.

With everyone’s progressive rock bug now well and truly ticked, a colossal cheer meets the ever-bespectacled Steven Wilson and the rest of Porcupine Tree as the cult UK collective walk onstage. Occam’s Razor’s huge opening chords silence the house, the barefoot leader announcing his band will perform the entire first disc of last year’s sprawling masterpiece The Incident during act one and subsequently ripping into a furious Blind House.

From that moment on, we’re taken away by the veterans’ skills and impassioned delivery. The cast-iron rhythm section of the Melbourne-born bass wizard Colin Edwin and skins supremo Gavin Harrison is perhaps matchless in modern rock music, while Richard Barbieri remains one of the finest keyboard players since … well, his Japan days and touring guitarist John Wesley is a perfect vocal foil for Wilson – none more so than on the aching-then-bludgeoning Octane Twisted/The Séance/Circle Of Manias sequence. The punchy Drawing The Line is a cluster of electricity, the menacing title track thunders with its drop-tuned riff and an incredible 12-minute centrepiece Time Flies makes this writer forget to collect his jaw from the floor. “Pink Floyd … who?” I dare whisper for the first time. Marilyn Manson, you were right for a change: this IS the new shit – and as a side note, what excellent visuals and deep lyrics…

A 10-minute break follows after the lullaby-like I Drive The Hearse, the exultant crowd voicing the last seconds of the on-screen countdown before Wilson and co return and commence act two with Deadwing’s sublime Start Of Something Beautiful. From 2000’s Lightbulb Sun, the ominous Russia On Ice far outstrips the recorded version for heaviness while a visceral, apocalyptic imagery-accompanied Anaesthetize and a hugely emotive Way Out Of Here (both from 2007’s big-seller Fear Of A Blank Planet) further annihilate everyone’s senses. Fan favourite Lazarus and the Nil Recurring EP highlight Normal are moments of acoustic guitar-led beauty, however Wilson finds time to indulge in some prime “alien screaming” on Bonnie The Cat, snapping a string in the process.

Alas, all (extremely) good must end, and the extraordinary gentlemen encore with the audience-chanted In Absentia double of The Sound Of Muzak (“… one of the wonders of the world is going down … and no one cares”) and Trains, concluding the show that will be long talked about among Brisbane’s music fans on an elated note. Simply phenomenal; thank you and please come back soon, Mr Wilson.

DENIS SEMCHENKO

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