In A New York Minute - the Eagles live at Madison Square Garden

© Simon Poulter 2013

We've all done it. We've all wondered what it must be like to have lived in a different era. For me, it's a very specific time and a very specific location: the canyons that stream north into the Hollywood Hills from Sunset Boulevard, around 1970.

For there, amid a haze of strangely sweet-smelling smoke and all manner of bed-hopping, was a music scene that mainly wore denim and hung out in shacks, huts and ramshackle houses in Laurel Canyon and on various semi-rural stretches of Mulholland Drive.

At the time, Los Angeles was taking on both New York (then the traditional HQ of America's music industry) and London for the title of Music Capital of the World. As the West Coast has always done, it had drawn musical gold diggers to its sunshine and casual vibe, generating a post-Beach Boys LA cocktail of rock, folk and country, and bands like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and their offspring Crosby, Stills & Nash (and Young), The Flying Burrito Brothers and Poco.

Night after night, the legendary Troubador club on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood would host various combinations of these bands and their associates, like Linda Ronstadt and Joni Mitchell. 

It was beautiful and it was groovy, and just a short, battered Porsche drive down the twisting, turning, thrill-seek that is Laurel Canyon Boulevard, before heading back to whichever bed was in use that night.

In the middle of all this, a confident young man from Detroit, Michigan - Glenn Frey - was sleeping on the floor of a room rented by a young songwriter by the name of Jackson Browne. Frey would later be introduced - by Ronstadt - to a wry Texan called Don Henley. Together, these two aspirational  immigrants to the Golden State would form, in 1971, one of the bands that would define West Coast FM radio-friendly soft rock for the exact duration of the 1970s before imploding acrimoniously in 1980, with Henley avowing to reform "when Hell froze over". I am, of course, talking about the Eagles.

Speed forward 14 years and the Devil himself had clearly begun ice skating to the office. For in 1994, at the tail-end of the MTV Unplugged era, Henley and Frey, together with Joe Walsh, Timothy B. Schmidt and Don Felder got together to do a live show, Hell Freezes Over. Sense of humour clearly reconstructed. But this being the Eagles meant that it wouldn't be long before more strife, with the gifted guitarist Felder (it is he and Walsh who perform the legendary guitar duet on Hotel California) being fired in 2001 and then it all turning sour with lawsuits over royalties.

Fast forward again to 2013 and the Eagles are keen to tell their story. Their DVD/Blu-ray Disc documentary History Of The Eagles is doing boffo business, being a warts'n'all (albeit carefully so) account of their 42-year story. Which has brought them out on the road to tell their story, including three nights at New York's Madison Square Garden, the ludicrously enormous host of boxing fights, ice hockey and basketball games, where in front of my seat in the first row of my tier, there are TV monitors. Presumably for the myopic who can't quite see what's happening on the floor below. Or, for those easily bored and need something else to watch. Occasionally it hosts rock concerts, though just how Ed Sheehan managed to sell it out a few nights earlier baffles me now.

However, for almost the next three hours, however, it would be hard to be bored. Logging in at 27 songs, this show by the Eagles is a deliberately exhaustive greatest hits trail. Last summer, as I was driving from Chicago to LA on Route 66, I was listening to a box set of the six albums the band made between 1972 and 1979. Six albums. Seven years.

© Simon Poulter 2013

And its that canon that they run through tonight. Kicking off with a folksy set of early songs like Saturday Night, Train Leaves Here This Morning and Peaceful Easy Feeling, Frey, Henley, Schmidt and Walsh are perched on top of amps and flight cases, slightly contrivedly recreating how they used to jam and write in the early days. Delightfully, they are joined by Bernie Leadon, the former Flying Burrito Brother who was their lead guitarist (and banjo player long before hipsters made it fashionable....) until leaving in 1975 as a result of musical disillusionment.

Gradually, the set cranks up, Witchy Woman from their debut album and Doolin-Dalton from the Western-themed Desperado album that followed it, running through the sanguine Tequila Sunrise, and the evening's first singalongs, The Best of My Love and Lyin' Eyes. There's no escaping the fact that, at this point in the Eagles' career, they had quickly established themselves as the sound of LA that suited LA at the time.

Other bands, like Led Zeppelin, for example, may have turned LA into their playground, but the Eagles - along with Steely Dan and, perhaps the post-blues Fleetwood Mac - came to exemplify a form of music that wasn't quite rock, wasn't quite country, wasn't quite blues and wasn't quite soul.

© Simon Poulter 2013

But did sound good while driving up Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu on a sultry evening. One of These Nights is the song that captures that mood perfectly, and here at the MSG (which obviously shares its acronym with a key ingredient of Chinese food) it swings with a laid-back vigour, Henley demonstrating the remarkable and unique art of singing and drumming (an exclusive club populated by the likes of Micky Dolenz, Dave Clark, Karen Carpenter, The Bangles' Debbi Peterson, Meg White and Phil Collins).

Indeed throughout the show Henley demonstrates his musical virtuosity, switching between lead vocals, drums, guitar and backing percussion, dressed in a voluminous check shirt that gives him the air of a hardware store owner. His vocals are spot on, that slightly higher register of his defying the gruff, deep and dry Texan accent of his spoken voice. Indeed vocal duties are shared out equally - Frey, who always looks to be in the deepest pain when he sings, scrunching his entire face up, passing the vocal baton to the ever-so delicate-looking Schmidt, who provides an even higher register. Along with CS&N, the Eagles always were one of the great close-harmony vocal bands, something Frey explains later comes from their love of The Beach Boys.

Even 42 years after they formed, the Eagles still sound exactly as they did when you first heard them on the radio. But that doesn't mean that their performance is bland. Far from it. But after a 20-minute interval ("some members of the band need to use the bathroom," Frey quips at the end of Take It To The Limit), they return with an additional vigour. Joe Walsh, to be exact.

© Simon Poulter 2013

Walsh was already regarded as one of the best session guitarists in the business when he joined the Eagles in 1976 after Leadon had left. And his arrival marked a harder, bluesier edge to the band, with him making his recorded debut on the Hotel California album.

The second half of the Eagles set, however, starts off with a Walsh song from that album that had neither much to do with his guitar prowess or the band's country-rock back story: Pretty Maids All in a Row.

With its piano and synth backing, it was a new sound entirely for the Eagles, adding, in Walsh's own words, "a melancholy reflection on my life so far...and a valid statement for people from our generation."

Any band is a collection of personalities. And the Eagles are no exception. Frey is sharp-witted but contains a mid-western steel; Henley, ascerbic, Texan, and you just never know whether or not he's pissed off about something); Schmidt is the more accessible member, who replaced the ailing Randy Meisner and considers himself the "newcomer"; Walsh, however, is the rock star. He gets to be the class clown, the unpredictable whack-job who adds the sort of craziness to a relatively dry band  in the way Ilie Năstase used to make tennis matches more entertaining. Only not as annoying, thankfully.

On his own composition In the City he demonstrates some of the best bottleneck slide guitar you'll ever here, while on the ironic Life's Been Good, he larks around with all the seriousness expected of a song that
self-deprecatingly took a shot at the rock star lifestle. The James Gang's Funk #49, provides Walsh and the entire band with another solid workout, leading up to Life In the Fast Lane, another Walsh contribution to the rockier Hotel California album.

The first encore begins with the distinctive, jangling 12-string arpeggio, played tonight by long-serving support guitarist Steuert Smith. "On a long desert highway," blasts Henley as he pounds the equally familiar reggae-ish rhythm on his tom-toms, and the crowd, perhaps for the first time tonight, goes proper wild. The trouble with Hotel California - the song - is that it has become over-familiar. Almost four decades of constant play on myriad genres of radio stations have almost turned it into rock's equivalent of Monty Python's Dead Parrot Sketch, you know the jokes before they've come out.

© Simon Poulter 2013

Thus, Hotel California is performed with supreme precision, but with something lacking. Perhaps the band know it's their contractual obligation to play it.

The famed guitar duet - here played by Walsh and Smith - is performed with unwavering accuracy, it's complex interplay and 'human overdubbing' showing little variation from the studio original - but oddly, for the signature song of a band which represents pristine FM rock - it's the first time tonight that the Eagles have sounded so clinical.

Perhaps relieved to have gotten that song out of the way, and after another quick shimmy offstage, the Eagles return with the number which launched their career: Taking It Easy. I have a particular affinity with this song. 23 years ago I was working in an office of creative people, and to make the day more creative, we managed to acquire an office stereo. Unfortunately, we had a limited choice of music to listen to, largely the result of a boss who insisted on playing The Best of Eagles daily. Which meant the twanging, countrified guitar into - 'dang-dang-der-danga-danga-dang' is etched in my brain, along with that opening line "Well, I'm running down the road tryin' to loosen my load, I've got seven women on my mind".

© Simon Poulter 2013

It is, however, the second verse that would, like a terrorist sleeper cell, animate itself much later on in life: "Well, I'm a standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and such a fine sight to see. It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford slowin' down to take a look at me," is so specific a destination that, while driving Route 66 I couldn't help but visiting Winslow, Arizona where, at the corner of 2nd Street and Kingsley Avenue - there is a park dedicated to just this song.

Together with a gift shop pumping out Eagles songs (see From Holbrook, AZ to Lake Havasu City, AZ - Takin' It Easy). Obviously. 2,256 miles away, the song has taken on a rousing singalong value, turning MSG into a 20,000-seat country bar on a Saturday night, minus the cowboy boots, stetsons and fist fights.

With the crowd now having a good time, Walsh returns to the spotlight for Rocky Mountain Way, that blues-rock avalanche featuring the blond guitarist managing to play two Les Pauls at once, while singing - or playing? I never know which - into that plastic tube doobry that he, Pete Frampton and Floyd's David Gilmour managed to use to create a weir mash-up between voice and electric guitar.

And with that, there is just one more shuffle offstage before the Eagles - the harmonious, wise-cracking, self-depreciating, happy to trawl back through their history, 2013 edition - return to the stage and the piano introduction of Desperado, the sweeping, soft-rock anthem that was the title of what was meant to be a concept album about cowboys. Them 1970s, eh?

This has, however, been an exhaustive journey back through the Eagles' history. A 27-song set is an impressive achievement by any band, even more impressive for a band that has only released seven studio albums. There are acts with a considerably longer back catalogue who wouldn't invest in anywhere near as much stage time.

Like so many bands of the West Coast, soft-rock era, there is always room for people to sneer about the Eagles, that it was unadventurous music made for unadventurous music fans. But this show tonight has, if partly due to the grandiose scale of the venue, successfully amplified a band who were always about the songwriting. Walsh maybe their token showoff - and always entertaining he is too - but the Eagles were never about rock pyrotechnics and Lurex-clad mayhem. They were always about the LA lifestyle, the laid-back coastal vibe, the sun-dappled living of the Hollywood hills. And they managed to bring a taste of that to the chilly streets of Manhattan on a cold November night...and still render this fan dreaming of life in the not-so fast lane, 43 years ago.

© Simon Poulter 2013

Time to bar the beard

What Would David Bowie Do? has arrived in New York City, which remains – as David Lettermen nightly attests – The Greatest City In The World™.

There is so much to like about New York. And there is much more to it than the borough of Manhattan, that Ritz Cracker of an island with thousands of cocktail sticks poking upwards from its cramped grid of streets. But for the most part, and despite the allure of quaint Staten Island or Brooklyn’s light and shade, the old school seaside charm of Brighton Beach and Coney Island, Manhattan IS New York.

As soon as you arrive via bridge or tunnel you sense its energy. You can smell it, too (to which I oft refer to the late, great Bill Hicks: “‘Bill, you should give up smoking! Give up smoking and you’ll regain your sense of smell!’ ‘Why do I need that? I live in New York!’”).

You immediately get a sense of the enormity of a city accommodating eight million people – a million and a half of those alone in the 23 square miles that constitute Manhattan. Proximity brings its pressures, but there really is nothing more amusing than watching New Yorkers fight over who bagged a taxi first at rush hour on a Friday night. People have fought hard to come to New York, and once there, they’re not going to give up that easily.

So the two-word "M and P" cliché goes, New York is the exemplification of the United States and that ‘land of opportunity’ stuff.  Out there in the middle of its harbour sits the Statue of Liberty, her flaming torch welcoming those seeking freedom and a chance to make it. No wonder almost 40% of New York’s residents can claim to have been born somewhere else. And it is that mad, insane cocktail of just about every nationality known to mankind: Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Fijian, Australian, Lebanese, Syrian, Jews from all over Eastern Europe, Iraqi, Iranian, Irish, Italian, German, Polish, Romanian, Russian, British, Greek, Ukrainian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, Ecuadorian, Colombian, Salvadoran - clearly not the exhaustive list, but you get the point.

Then throw into the mix the numerous industries of New York – from the mad men (and manettes) of Madison Avenue’s advertising agencies, to the universally popular financial community, the fashion business, publishing, media, tourism and the world’s greatest collection of restaurants, bars and pubs.

I could go on, but I won’t, because there are more pressing matters at hand. Specifically, one particular group of New Yorkers who, by now, might even qualify for ethnic status of their own: hipsters. 

For those not in the know, the hipster is that breed of urban, middle-class (and, it would appear, mainly WASP) twentysomething or thirtysomething who has adopted the 21st century’s equivalent of late 1960s hippyism, by growing beards, eating organically and buying organically, owning a ukulele, and managing to shun consumerism while ensuring they’re wearing the coolest brand of skinny jeans and myriad other trends du jour.

Last August, Caitlin Moran - without doubt the finest newspaper columnist working in the ink industry today - wrote a piece for The Times defending the hipster from the rampant hatred that had been springing up against them.

"I would like to speak out on behalf of one of the most reviled sub-species in the world," she wrote, prompted by the bizarre news that animal sanctuaries in America’s hipster hubs (New York, Los Angeles, Miami, etc) were being “overrun” – and that was the word - by formerly pet chickens that their city dwelling urban cool owners were unable to cope with any more. Yes, chickens.

Friends’ Joey and Chandler may have started this by adopting a duck and a chick as their housepets, but the modern trend has, evidently, not been fueled by aviatic companionship as the intention to set up a rather limited free range egg production line.

Frankly, however, such a painful and agonizingly stupid attempt to appropriate coolness by owning a chicken is nothing compared to the hipster accessory I despise the most: the beard.

For transparency and balance, I should point out that this does, of course, apply to only, and this is a rough estimate, half of the hipster population. But that’s bad enough.

Near the end of WWDBD?’s "epic" drive across America on Route 66 this summer, it entered Los Angeles the Silver Lake neighbourhood. For the brief duration that 66 runs along the Silver Lake end of Sunset Boulevard, there were streams of preposterously-bearded young men heading for organic restaurants.

The irony hit me quite soon: here were hordes of men, in their beards and lumberjack shirts, looking like the very gold miners who turned California into a state of flailing pick axes in the mid-19th century. But instead of searching for nuggets of Earth’s most coveted commodity, they were out in force looking for an exotically-sourced cup of coffee, or a table at that restaurant specializing in ethnic Cambodian fare (which might probably include a French baguette, a legacy of French colonial rule).

I say that the beardos of Silver Lake was an ironic sight, but hipsterism is, I’m told, all about irony. Hipster ownership of bone-shaking, testicle-shrinking Penny Farthing-style bicycles is an ironic statement, and not some comment on affluent middle-class urbanites buying the most expensive road bikes they can find; the wearing of T-shirts bearing the logos of toothpaste brands from the 1960s, once-reviled rock bands from the 1970s, and TV series from the 1980s is purely about irony, making a statement that says: “Yes, I may look a twat in my oversized white-frame WayFarers, and my beard is now so long I actually use it as a doormat, but look at me wearing a Styxx 1975 tour T-shirt – I’m so organically, ethically-contentedly wacky!”.

The reason the United States hasn’t tipped into the sea due to all that hipster beard growth in Los Angeles is that the weight is more than balanced, it would appear, by the hipster population of New York. Since arriving last night I have been traumatized by the length, breadth and all-round volume of the hipster pelt on display on the city’s streets. And that was just in one cab ride from the airport.

Ground Zero for New York’s hipster explosion is the district of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, a mass of coffee shops, farmer’s markets, second-hand and 'non-brand' clothing shops, and lots and lots and lots of people cycling around (no hipster owns a car) dressed in a mixture of vintage attire and H&M, Urban Outfitters and American Apparel. Oh, and even more ironic T-shirts.

I was recently watching an episode of the excellent Blue Bloods, in which Tom Selleck and his entire family are the New York City Police Department, and they were confronted with a terrorist attack on New York in which the bad guys were about to release a weaponised mutation of influenza. Kindergarten teachers will know how virulent this can be. So Tom brought in his flu-as-terrorist-weapon expert who did that thing TV and movie disaster stories do, where they calculate how soon it will be before everyone is affected. The expectation, he said, was that within 72 hours millions would be sick. Without a cure. That, my friends, is how fast hipsterism spun out of control out of Brooklyn.

But beware, oh luxuriously bearded ones. For America does not share your over-zealous trend-setting: according to a report in the Washington Times earlier this year, many Americans don’t like hipsters. A Public Policy Polling survey found that only 16 percent of Americans regarded hipsters favourably, while 42 percent were decidedly unfavorable, although clearly a third of Americans couldn’t be arsed to have an opinion at all.

“We asked voters whether they thought hipsters made a positive cultural contribution to society or whether they just ‘soullessly appropriate cultural tropes from the past for their own ironic amusement,’” the poll’s analysis read, somewhat weightily, adding that “Twenty-three percent of voters said they made positive cultural contributions, while nearly half — 46 percent — went with soulless cultural appropriation.” Of some note, Republicans expressed the strongest opinions of all.

I have no strong opinion in any direction as to whether hipsters add anything to society. The only truck I carry is for that stupid, stupid beard. Extending the chin out like an airliner’s escape slide is not only ridiculous to look at, but impractical. As someone who regularly sports some degree of facial hirsuteness (currently limited to a barber-standard No.4 length, I’ll have you know), I know that any excessive length of hair on the mug will be prone to acting as an unplanned repository for toast crumbs, Cheetos, hummus, toothpaste and mouthwash on a regular basis. Trendier distances of beard must raise high the risk of small woodland animals setting up shop.

It must stop.

Oh Mother, it's happening again...

Along with obesity, flat bed trucks and Krispy Kreme doughnuts, another unwelcome American import to Britain is the Halloween celebration.

In America it is virtually a national holiday, a strangely pagan celebration in such an occasionally puritanical country. By August, its supermarkets are bulging with trick-or-treat paraphernalia, and by September its children are already running around in anticipation of the chocolate-fuelled frenzy they'll be whipped into come October's end.

So why any country would wish to import this commercial juggernaut is beyond me. Which is why, at risk of crossing a line of political correctness, I was somewhat impressed by the investment in Halloween made by the woman in Orpington, a leafy suburb of London, who, when visited by trick-or-treating children, opened the front door dressed in a blood-stained apron wielding a large knife in one hand and a bag containing a lamb's heart. Needless to say, the children and their parents are a tad upset. The woman in question has branded the stunt as a "bit of fun". The Daily Mail is, as I write, still unknotting its underwear over the prank. 

While not wishing to condone the emotional disturbance of children, I am quite glad to live in a country (France) that very sensibly eschews the American-style Halloween circus in favour of taking All Saints Day, the day after Halloween, off as a Catholic holiday.

Anyway, for one group of Londoners - let's just call them the players and managerial staff of Chelsea Football Club - Halloween has a habit of marking the start of a particularly unpleasant, particularly traumatic and particularly debilitating tradition known as November.

Because no matter who is in charge, whichever miscreant has been handed the poisoned chalice of being named 'head coach' at Chelsea, the weeks after Halloween have, over the last several seasons, been one long, night sweat-inducing pavor nocturnus. 

Last season it happened like clockwork: on October 31, the Blues finished 5-4 victors after a legendary League Cup tie against Manchester United. By November 3 they were drawing 1-1 in a dismal encounter away to Swansea. And then it pretty much collapsed until December: 1-1 against Liverpool on November 11, a 2-1 defeat to West Bromwich Albion on the 17th, a 3-0 defeat to Juventus in the Champions League on November 20, 0-0 against Manchester City at Stamford Bridge on the 25th, 0-0 again against Fulham at the Bridge three days later, and a 3-1 defeat to West Ham on December 1.

Thankfully, December brought a 6 - 1 win over FC Nordsjælland in the Champions League, 3-1 win over Sunderland in the league, 5-1 win over Leeds in the League Cup, and 8-0 over Aston Villa in the league, with wins following away to Norwich and Everton over the Christmas program.

In previous seasons the November to Christmas period - and beyond - has been a source of nothing but frustration followed by recovery at the tail end of winter (accompanied by the inevitable change of manager).

© BBC

So you could easily forgive José Mourinho for being "angry" following yesterday's 2-0 defeat to Newcastle at St. James' Park. "I'm angry because I don't understand [why we lost]," said The (Un)Happy One. "I was expecting to lose my next game when the opponent was fantastic or when we were very unlucky - a match where we fought to our limits and couldn't get the result."

Now I know what you're thinking: one defeat does not a lengthy disaster make. But Chelsea have form here. And with a challenging fixture list between now and Christmas, and indeed over Christmas, Mourinho needs to get to grips with any Groundhog Day-style repetition.

Only Tuesday night sports journalists were wondering whether the Portuguese may have found his formula - including getting better performances out of Fernando Torres and finally realising that Juan Mata is a player of rare creative gift. Four days later and the Chelsea coach is nursing what could be politely called a bloody nose delivered by a Newcastle United who took their chances well.

Mourinho is aware that Chelsea's away form this season has not been good. More importantly, he's also aware of where they are in the calendar: "Of course I am worried, and I read in previous years it happened the same," he told the BBC, noting that successful cup progress has regularly not been matched by league proficiency. "Last year, in December, they were not in the race for the title because they were already 20 points behind. This season, we have played five matches away in the Premier League - I know at difficult places to play difficult matches - but we have one victory and we have two defeats."

Refreshingly, Mourinho admitted that he may not have the right attitude amongst his players, suggesting that they were too "comfortable" at Stamford Bridge. Moreover, he admitted that he may have, simply, put the wrong team out. "I made 11 mistakes. I should have picked another 11 and not this one. It's the feeling I have. When my team plays so badly, it's the feeling I have."

The worry, from this end of the season ticket, is that Chelsea's next matches might offer more opportunities for banana skins: home next Wednesday to Schalke in the Champions League, home next Saturday to West Brom, managed by Mourinho's former No.2 at Chelsea, Steve Clarke, and then away matches to the uncompromising West Ham and then another European trip to Basel.

An Advent Day encounter with Southampton at Stamford Bridge seems a long way away for Chelsea fans, especially as the team embarks upon on the rickety-rackety rope bridge that is, traditionally, November.

This just in: common sense breaks out in airline industry

You could say Alec Baldwin took one for the rest of us when he was forcibly removed from an American Airlines flight at Los Angeles International Airport in December 2011. Baldwin - or TV's Jack Donaghy to all right-thinking people - was kicked off the plane for, apparently, continuing to play Words With Friends on his phone long after passengers had been told to switch off their electronic devices for takeoff.

Of course, Baldwin’s act of defiance had nothing to do with highlighting the absurdity of the aviation industry’s restriction on gadget use, even if a publicist for the actor maintained at the time that "He loves WWF so much that he was willing to leave a plane for it”.

No one, I can think of, loves their smartphone, tablet, laptop or the movie or on-deadline work project so much they’re willing to leave a plane. For the most part, people want to just get on with the whole ordeal and arrive at the other end.

But the American Airlines cabin crew member who allegedly had to ask Baldwin five times to switch off his phone will be taking at least a semi-breath of relief following this week’s announcement by the US Federal Aviation Administration that it was changing its policy on the use of electronic gadgets during takeoff and landing.

The policy - adopted around the world by other aviation regulators - is an arcane piece of safety control dating back before airliners started being kitted out with in-flight WiFi and satellite TV feeds, when mass mobile phone ownership was still relatively new, and there were concerns that even the lasers contained in portable CD players (there’s one for the teenagers!) could interfere with critical flight systems like navigation in the air and on the ground.

Picture: Air France

The FAA's announcement on Thursday was that, subject to further technical validation by airlines, passengers would be able to use their personal electronic devices to listen to music, watch movies, read and play Words With Friends "in all phases of flight”, as long as these devices remain in ‘flight mode’ without the ability to receive or make calls or send data wirelessly. In other words, the ban on mobile phones being used to speak to people on flights remains in place, which is something we should all embrace.

Planes, unlike other modes of public transport, remain the last sanctuary from listening to other people talking at excessive volume about their medical woes, their Aunt Fanny’s dodgy knee, whether the person at the other end of the line can remember to buy extra milk for the weekend, and all the other irritating bits of personal information people feel the need to impart loudly while in the company of strangers.

Thankfully, putting in-flight mobile phone reception on planes is still some way away, even though it has been touted for a while as an imminent possibility, although the proliferation of in-flight WiFi will no doubt lead to the annoyance of loud conversations via VoIP.

All that aside, however, the most important part of all this is that soon, the majority of passengers who simply want to get on board, strap in and start watching a film or films, or spend the time confined within the big silver bird productively, will be able to just that from wheels-up to wheels-down. Quite rightly, the FAA’s change of policy has been welcomed universally.

Flight attendants, in particular have given their approval, although Veda Shook, president of America's Association of Flight Attendants told Business Week that it shouldn't result in a safety compromise. "We’re not going to run away from technology," she said, "but we’re not going to run away from safety, either”, pointing out that having more gadgets out during the most safety-critical periods of a flight - take-off and landing - could also represent a safety risk.

Clearly, no-one wants a 2Kg laptop flying at them during a bumpy landing, which means, according to the appropriately-named Shook, there may be new regulations needed to ensure every airline was consistent on what needs to be stored under a seat or in an overhead bin, and what could be held or put in a seat back pocket.

Inconsistency across airlines is still one of the frequent flyers’ biggest bugbears. Today, some airlines allow mobile phones to be switched on when a plane is taxiing after landing (and hats off, British Airways, for relaxing on this one), while others don’t, causing frosty moments between passengers and cabin crews. On the other hand, phones - quite rightly - should not be on during take off, although there is always one passenger who thinks he - and, yes, it usually is - is above everyone else by continuing that "essential" phone conversation while the plane is running on the ground.

The rule change on laptops, tablets and MP3 players, however, is at least a step in the direction of common sense. “It’s great when you have kids, because you can get them settled in and settled down, and it makes a huge difference in the quality of the flight,” Atlanta-based PR executive Jodi Fleisig told Business Week.

“They can play games on their iPads, or they can read or watch a movie.” Though a sign of the times that a child might even have an iPad, getting children settled on a flight - and keeping them that way - is a major challenge for parents…and their fellow passengers alike.

Once the technological validation of the relaxation of gadgets has been carried out by US airlines, most are expected to adopt the new guidelines by the end of the year.

Already, Delta Airlines says it is ready to allow devices being used ‘gate to gate’ immediately, while JetBlue - an airline that has pioneered many in-flight conveniences - is champing at the bit to be the first US airline to lift the device restrictions.

Other parts of the world are not so clear, though the European Aviation Safety Agency said that it would analyze the FAA’s decision before making its own position known.

For now, the FAA can give themselves a pat on the back for removing one of the most outdated examples of in-flight nannying there is. "We believe today's decision honours both our commitment to safety and consumer's increasing desire to use their electronic devices during all phases of their flights,” said the US Transportation Secretary, Anthony Foxx.

Some restrictions, though, will remain: "Passengers must take a break from their devices, their reading material, their music, whatever they are doing, and listen to the safety briefing before each flight,” says FAA Administrator Michael Huerta. “It is information that can save your life.” And pilots can very easily impose an immediate ban on devices being used during airport approaches in bad weather and poor visibility, where planes use radio signals to land.

As a fairly frequent flyer, and someone who cannot enjoy the luxury of sleeping on planes, the airline cabin is an opportunity to buy back some time, to mainline a box set on my iPad or get on with work without being interrupted by ringing phones and a noisy office.

But, perhaps, the biggest beneficiary of the FAA's lifting of the restrictions on electronic devices are the flight attendants who have to constantly deal with belligerent passengers.

As Laura Glading, head of the trade union representing 16,000 American Airlines flight attendants - including, presumably, Alec Baldwin’s nemesis - told the New York Times, her colleagues were “frankly tired of feeling like hall monitors when it comes to this issue”.

Picture: Air France

iGoogle iGone

So welcome to the first day of the rest of your life. November 1, 2013. The first day of the rest of your life without iGoogle.

It's been there every morning when I wake up since 2005, there when I go to sleep, and there throughout my day. Anytime I wanted to check one of a number of preferred news sources for the world headlines, football news, what's happening in the business world, weather, the time in different cities - it's been there. Refreshing itself, always new.

It was a true "dashboard". Yes, I know that's one of those semi-analogous phrases the technology industry loves to make something slightly sexier than it actually is, but with iGoogle, a most apt description for how I, as a self-confessed news junkie, kept abreast of the world throughout the day via computer, smartphone or tablet.

So it is with the heaviest of hearts that I’m coming to terms with the forced closure by Google of arguably its best – and simplest product. The reason, Google says, is that "the need for something like iGoogle has eroded over time", claiming that access to information via their own apps like Chrome and Android make it redundant. "We originally launched iGoogle in 2005 before anyone could fully imagine the ways that today's web and mobile apps would put personalized, real-time information at your fingertips," Google says.

Ironically, the architect of iGoogle was Marissa Mayer, now CEO of Yahoo!. "I look at personalised search and I think it is one of the biggest advance we have had in the last couple of years," she said at the first major refresh of iGoogle in 2007, when Google's Vice President of User Experience.

Mayer and Yahoo! could, if they get their act together, retrieve iGoogle's millions of abandoned users by restoring the My Yahoo! service to the status of pre-eminent news dashboard it held before its upstart rival from Silicon Valley's Mountain View came along.

To all intents and purposes, iGoogle was more or less what My Yahoo! had started out as. Google, however, made the concept easier to personalise, and far richer in the choice of sources and widgets available. In short, it became indispensable.

Today, as Google shutters iGoogle, and 15 million users go off to make do with comparable services like Netvibes, iGhome and Symbaloo, they are curiously closing off a service which needed little further improvement and certainly, from this end of the fibre, no reason to be killed.

Even now, Google's claim that iGoogle has been superseded by the plethora of information aggregation apps and sites is thin. If you want to take the 'dashboard' description literally, imagine a car where you effectively had to install different apps just to see how fast you were driving, what the fuel situation was, and what radio station you were tuned into.

Joni Mitchell made a very good point when she opined “that you don't know what you've got till it's gone”, but I can promise her that long before iGoogle disappears from our computer screens today, 15 million of us knew exactly what we are losing.

My iGoogle, Friday, November 1, 2013. Adieu.

Every dome should have one: Peter Gabriel - Live at the O2

© Simon Poulter 2013

For a self-confessed dilettante such as Peter Gabriel, who releases new studio albums with as much regularity as ice ages, I'm a tad overwhelmed by the relative bounty of seeing him live for the second time in three years.

Apart from anything else, how has he found the time to go out on the road again? It wasn't that long ago that Gabriel was touring his New Blood show of orchestral renderings of his greatest hits.

Then, 48 years after leaving Charterhouse to form Genesis, Gabriel finally took his gap year, travelling the world with second wife Meabh and their two young sons in what he called "The Year of Interesting Things".

But even rock star sabbaticals must be paid for, so last year Gabriel celebrated (belatedly) the 25th anniversary of his hit-stuffed So album with a US tour of the record in its entirety. And now, after a further break, presumably to do more interesting things, Gabriel has returned to the day job with a much anticipated European tour that this week brought him to London's Thames-side tent, the O2 Arena.

If anything at all can claim a long history in London's 'new' East End, Gabriel and the Greenwich venue go back to the end of the last century when it was merely the Millennium Dome. Then, Gabriel co-directed the Cirque du Soleil-like Millennium Dome Show, supplying the 'soundtrack' featuring contributions from the late Richie Havens, Neneh Cherry, Alison Goldfrapp and The Blue Nile's Paul Buchanan.

So, three years after bringing the guitar and drums-free New Blood tour to the O2, Gabriel's return - for Back To Front 2013 - is a more conventional affair, calling up his most trusted lieutenants, the flush-bonced Tony Levin (a Gabriel stalwart since 1976) and English guitarist David Rhodes, along with keyboard player David Sancious and electrifying Parisian, Manu Katché, on drums, all of whom were part of the original So tour 26 years ago. The line-up is augmented by Swedish singer-cellist Linnea Olsson and her compatriot Jennie Abrahamson on backing vocals.

'Conventional' formation notwithstanding, Gabriel has never been one for conventional anything. In his Genesis days he famously donned masks, headgear and costumes that invariably impeded his ability to get songwords out.

It was a theatricality few of his peers possessed 40 years ago, Bowie being the obvious exception. But in 2012, and at the age of 63, Gabriel is still charging about the stage, acting out songs, awkwardly dad-dancing and occasionally missing his cues. He's always done it and the audience of Gabriel-faithful accept he always will. What also hasn't changed is his remarkable voice - which, for a rock artist into his seventh decade is in truly fine fettle - or his love of doing things just that little bit differently.

 © Simon Poulter 2013

Which is why the show begins with the O2 house lights fully up as Armenian duduk player Lévon Minassian takes to the stage on his own and unannounced to play the hauntingly beautiful The Feeling Begins, the opening track of Passion, Gabriel's stunning soundtrack to The Last Temptation Of Christ.

Minassian is no support act and his performance is just a prologue to the first of three sections of an evening built with typically artistic contrivance.

The first taste of the main event comes with Gabriel himself springing on stage, dressed in what looks like a dark black Mod's fishtail parka. In tow is Levin who provides gentle bass accompaniment to his Gabriel's piano on a work-in-progress, OBUT, a Randy Newman-like song being effectively demoed on the tour.

I could end the review right there: because, in just two songs, Gabriel has demonstrated himself at his most Gabrielesque - a lone performance from a Middle Eastern musician followed by a song that hasn't even been finished.

But that's the sort of idiosyncracy that keeps Gabriel going long after many of his peers - including the band that launched him - have stopped. Even for a trawl through the hits such as this show is, it is never going to be a straightforward rock concert ending with the obligatory fankuverymuchgoodnight.

It continues with the third song of the night, as Rhodes appears with an acoustic guitar and Sancious wearing an accordion. Any fears Gabriel might coming over all Mumford are soon allayed as a) no one else joins with a banjo and b) the band kick into a semi-unplugged version of Come Talk To Me, the honest-as-the-day-is-long confessional set during the singer's failing first marriage.

Gabriel is famous for his elaborate layering on record, but the stripped back approach, even in a venue as vast as the O2, works brilliantly. So goes the same with Shock The Monkey, a song even less likely to succeed semi-acoustically, but with this configuration, does so perfectly

The sparsity, with the house lights still up, continues with Family Snapshot, an old favourite from the third solo album, and concerning a lonely child's fixation with the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Always a powerful number, it marks the show's transition from semi-acoustic to the main course of full-on rock performance, as its mournful, piano-led introduction gives way to a power-chorded break that brings the house lights down and turns the stage lighting up to 11.

 © Simon Poulter 2013

It is during Family Snapshot that the amazing vocal talents of a tuneless, ability-free fucker in Seat 551, who insists on singing along profoundly off-key and at full pelt, prove unsustainable. A stern word soon takes care of his ruination of an otherwise early highlight in the show, much to the relief of everyone else in Block 404.

Vocal travesties amongst the puntership notwithstanding, Gabriel and his ensemble have hit their stride. Digging In The Dirt and Secret World, a brace from the 'divorce' album Us, rip the O2 apart, the former's restrained funk and repressed anger demonstrating Gabriel's kinship to that other member of rock's awkward squad David Byrne. Secret World's arcing theatre provides Rhodes with a platform to demonstrate how one man, in possession of a lump of wood, some strings and a plectrum can fill a 20,000-seat dome.

Having just reflected on his own marriage, Gabriel unearths The Family and the Fishing Net, a somewhat complex - and lengthy - track off his fourth solo album which, via some obscure lyrics, compares the act of getting hitched to the rituals of voodoo. Prescient in its original form, its inclusion in the set now might appear cute, but it provides a pounding springboard for another reach back into the past, No Self Control, Gabriel's hats off to greed which was even released as a single in 1980, perhaps to cash in on Kate Bush's atypically ethereal backing vocals.

The pre-So heads in the audience are, of course, besides themselves with this trawl through the distant past, and their glee is only amplified by the swirling acclamation of freedom, Solsbury Hill. Written mainly to express liberation from the restricted structure of rock star life, it fills the O2 with fresh vigour, 36 years after it was first committed to tape.

Gabriel's second act closes with another risky divert to something untried and new, as he debuts another box-fresh song, Why Don't You Show Yourself, written for the new Guillermo Arriaga film project, Words With Gods, and a tender love song that takes some of its musical cues from the orchestral work of the Scratch My Back album.

With that, and without any pause, Gabriel begins Act III - So. It has become somewhat fashionable for artists to tour complete classic albums. From Meatloaf to Kraftwerk, and Public Enemy to The Who, the heritage trail has provided a lucrative, if occasionally, uninspiring opportunity to recreate 45 minutes of vinyl for live audiences.

But as Gabriel explains, the restrictions of vinyl - and, in particular, the physical groove space occupied by bass notes - meant that many albums were something of a compromise when they were first released.

And so, the...er... So section of the Back To Front show is performed in the intended original sequence of the 1987 album which, after almost 20 years in the business, took Gabriel into the relatively uncharted territory (for him) of pop stardom.

There had been the odd Genesis single, like 1973's I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) to bother the charts, and the likes of Solsbury Hill and Shock The Monkey had been radio hits in their day. So was a different deal altogether, where Sledgehammer's mock Stax sound and the simply joyous In Your Eyes turning Gabriel into an MTV frequent flyer. Five of its songs even found their way into episodes of Miami Vice. 

Critics have since accused it of being a "desperate bid" for commercial success, but given that So finally enabled Gabriel to realise his teenage dream of being Otis Redding, the switch of gears from his fourth album's darkness to So's radio friendliness shouldn't be held against him. And, really, the shift was not that dramatic.

© Simon Poulter 2013

Katché's frantic hi-hat teasing heralds So's thunderous opening Red Rain, with the entire auditorium bathed in a biblical red light. If anything, songs like this on So brought to the Gabriel canon a completely new energy that continued with his subsequent releases.

Who knew, when Sledgehammer came out, that an old Carthusian from Surrey could play the soul star? 26 years ago it became Gabriel's biggest hit to date, boosted by its video featuring Nick Park's pre-Wallace & Gromit animations, and by the fact it got away with cheeky references to shagging (unlike Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax not so long before). It was also an infectious party hit, and still is, providing the largely greying, balding O2 audience with an opportunity to test their arthritis medication.

And who knew that someone from the depths of the progressive rock movement could write a song as tender as Don't Give Up? Even more disturbing is that this somnolent Depression-era romance was originally written as a duet with Dolly Parton in mind. Kate Bush, of course, made it to the eventual album and single release, but for this live tour, Abrahamson does the co-lead, and does so with an uncannily Dolly Parton-like vocal treatment.

That Voice Again was never one of So's strongest tracks, but it's something of a contractual obligation when doing the album in its entirety, soon making way for a spine-tingling rendition of Mercy Street. Clearly still a devotee of junior school 'music and movement' classes, Gabriel performs the song about tragic poet Anne Rice lying flat on his back. It is, we assume, intentional, and not the result of a trapped nerve. As he sings, stagehands push WALL-E-like lighting pods into place over him. It's all very theatrical. And, if I may, I'll use that word again - Gabrielesque.

© Simon Poulter 2013

Back on his feet, and the entire band get to test their funk chops again with Big Time, the wry swipe at fame which was recently covered by the equally wry Randy Newman on I'll Scratch Yours, the reciprocation of Gabriel's Scratch My Back covers project.

Seen, at the time, as being a little too much of a clone of Sledgehammer it bumps and grinds away pleasantly on this tour, raising the collective heart rate before the dystopian We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37) recounts the electric shock experiments of Stanley Milgram on obliging human lab rats in an attempt to understand obedience.

The idea that Gabriel sold out when he made So is, however, nonsense. True, it was a lot more accessible than its direct predecessor Peter Gabriel 4, but it still contained the layered complexity that is Gabriel's hallmark, and his occasional forays into the avant garde, such as his duet with Laurie Anderson, This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds). It was an obscurity on the album, even left off the vinyl release due to space constraints, but nevertheless part of the original album tour. Resurrected, 26 years on, it's still rather hard to nail down, but Rhodes adds a Nile Rodgers touch to it (ironic, seeing as Rodgers played on So), giving it an unexpected groove.

So's exposure to a wider audience was aided, in some small measure, by the American airplay of In Your Eyes as well as it's appearance in John Cusack's rom-com Say Anything. When Gabriel played the So show last year at the Hollywood Bowl, Cusack appeared at the side of the stage, a boombox held aloft as it was in the film's pivotal scene. Alas, no such showbusiness here, but there is little need for any peripheral adornment.

In Your Eyes is an uplifting, warmly infectious festival of a song and even after all these years of hearing it done live, and being a repeat fixture on Gabriel's live albums, it never fails to raise a grin, and certainly doesn't on this particular evening. As the intended conclusion of So it closes the third act, the band quickly reassembling for the evening's epilogue.

© Simon Poulter 2013

The Tower That Ate People, part of the Millennium Dome Show, brings the event to a spectacular finale, with Gabriel literally disappearing into a corkscrew tower that springs up out of a lighting ring.

Gabriel's tour for the Up album featured all sorts of elaborate staging like this, and until this point the Back To Front show has been somewhat devoid of such amusements.

That's not a complaint, however. After the bicycles, revolving stages and Zorb balls of Gabriel's tour to promote Up, his last full album of original material 11 years ago, the relative conventionality of this show is quite refreshing.

There is, though, one Gabriel convention still to uphold: Biko. Written about the 1977 death in police custody of South African civil rights campaigner Steve Biko, it has, since the 1980 tour, been an expected, no - demanded fixture of the live show.

Promoting the South African cause might seem dated now, 23 years after Nelson Mandela's long walk to freedom, but Biko remains one of the most powerful, neck hair-rising anthems about humanity ever-written. Live, it still chills, driven by its thumping dum-dum-DUM, dum-dum-DUM rhythm and industrial-buzz bass notes, and the massed clench fist-salute of solidarity that accompanies the chorus.

Biko may have been written out of hippy idealism by one of rock's finest idealists, but it closes a show as memorable as any I've seen over the last 26 years since I saw Gabriel in concert for the first time, when So was 'just' his fifth solo album.

Hopefully there will be another next year and, who knows? Perhaps a return to the big tent parked on a bend in the Thames at Greenwich?

Victorian values: Steven Wilson - live at the Royal Albert Hall

© Simon Poulter 2003

The Royal Albert Hall holds a special place in the heart of What Would David Bowie Do? For it is within this giant Victorian wedding cake that yours truly began his "career" at the cutting edge of rock writing.

February 19th, 1985, to be precise, in the company of Phil Collins and his 'Hot Tub Club' and on behalf of that august organ of record, the New Musical Express. Yes, I know: enough to have Nick Kent, Tony Parsons, Julie Burchill and the other angry young scribes of punk fold up their tents.

28 years on, it is with a tremendous sense of occasion that WWDBD? finds itself trotting up the steps to Kensington's most famous tribute to Prince Albert (the royal consort, not the - ahem - 'lifestyle accessory') to see a musician with whom it goes back even further - 43 years to be precise: Steven Wilson.

I'll spare you the why and how this vast expanse of time, save to say that here, I am filled with a profound pride at seeing someone I once shared a sandpit treading the boards of one of the most iconic concert venues in the world.

Wilson is, perhaps, the most successful British recording artist you've never heard of. Despite critical acclaim and Grammy nominations, production and remixing work for the likes of King Crimson and Jethro Tull, worldwide success with the band he formed while at school, Porcupine Tree, and work across several side projects and guest appearances, Wilson remains somewhat off radar to mainstream audiences, particularly in the UK.

And, yet, to see crowds of fans thronging outside the stage doors or the Albert Hall and other venues across Europe, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Surrey-born, Hertfordshire-raised musical polymath reassuringly demonstrates that Wilson is far from obscurity. Running into the likes of Steve Hackett (Genesis guitarist during their "classic" period), revered bassist Tony Levin (King Crimson, Peter Gabriel and many, many more), and Robert Fripp in the queue to pick up guest list tickets demonstrates the company Wilson keeps. And deservedly so.

His last album, The Raven That Refused To Sing has done splendid business around the world, winning rave reviews and making it onto the UK album Top 30, the Billboard Hot 100, debuting at No.3 in Germany and being awarded Album Of The Year at the 2013 Progressive Music Awards. No wonder, then that Albert Hall show has been so enthusiastically subscribed to.

Wilson is a busy character: somehow, since The Raven was released in March he has managed to tour the UK and Europe twice, play throughout North and South America, plus Australia earlier this month, record another album with Blackfield, his collaboration with Israeli megastar Aviv Geffen, and start work on new material for a fourth solo album to be released in the summer of 2014.

But for now, there's the small matter of the "home fixture". As soon as the house lights lower, Wilson is out to confound his audience, a 'mood' film backed by ambient drone music, appears to be of CCTV footage of a Home Counties street corner, interspersed with the sort of government information films we British children were forced to watch in the hope we won't kick footballs into overhead powerlines, or mess about on building sites (remember, kids, building sites BITE!). The central figure of the film is a busker, who appears halfway through, and may or not be Wilson, who procrastinates over getting his guitar out. When he starts strumming on screen, Wilson himself walks onto the stage - barefoot as usual, strumming the same guitar as his alter-ego - to perform solo Trains, a song from Porcupine Tree's In Absentia album.

For an artist so enthusiastically embraced by the prog rock movement, Wilson's solo work has veered more towards the sort of jazz fusion that Frank Zappa, Jean-Luc Ponty and Weather Report were doing in their prime, and the choice of musicians he has worked with on these solo albums and tours bears evidence of this. Adam Holzman, son of legendary Elektra Records founder Jac, has contributed his distinctly jazzy keyboard chops to Wilson's most recent solo tours, applying classic Mellotron, Wurtlitzer and piano sounds, while next to him stands in-demand jazz session flautist and brass player Theo Travis. Lead guitar is provided by one of the most sought-after performers today, Guthrie Govan, while the prolific Nick Beggs drives the bottom line with his expressive work on bass and Chapman Stick (a sort of bass guitar that isn't). Completing the line-up is prodigious Californian drummer Chad Wackerman, who was playing drums for Zappa as a teenager.

As the full band launch into Luminol, the expanse of their collective capabilities is brought into sharp focus, shifting from Beggs' thunderous foundation to more sensitive moments of close vocal harmony. Postcard changes the mood, demonstrating Wilson's proficiency in gentler fare, before returning to the infectious Holy Drinker.

© Simon Poulter 2003

Wilson is not, by his own admission, a singles artist. This is not, he says, out of some snobbish aversion to commerciality, it's just that he does not do, in his own words, "short". Even an abridged version of Grace For Drowning's epic Raider II runs to a mere 15 minutes. Drive Home is, however, being released this week as a single, but in typical Wilson style, part of a DVD or Blu-ray Disc audio-video package. Cute marketing, one might say, but he has a tremendous love of the visual arts and film making, which has resulted in commissions for independent film makers to create small films for both Drive Home and the title track of The Raven, an album inspired by the sort of spooky short stories written by Edgar Allen Poe.

Drive Home is a beautiful song and a touching love story inspired by artist Hajo Mueller, and one that I really can't understand why it hasn't been picked up by mainstream radio. It also has a solo from Govan that should be considered right up there with David Gilmour's on Comfortably Numb.

Wilson's prolific output is not, surprisingly, the result of being a restless soul - he's one of the most laid-back people you could ever wish to meet - but more the result of a restless creative seam. Even when not touring or recording and producing with others, new material appears effortlessly, such as the "work in progress" Wreckage, which receives a live debut at the RAH. "Still missing a few things," says Wilson, in incomplete form it takes a minimalist direction, Portishead-style trip-hop beats and a filtered vocal suggesting an interesting new direction for the next release.

© Simon Poulter 2003

Back to The Raven, and The Watchmaker closes the show's first half (with no support band, Wilson must observe some arcane Albert Hall regulation for holding an interval). It's a frenetic song, and another slice of macabre from Wilson's love of ghost stories, in which the eponymous horologist decides to off his wife of 50 years and bury her under the floorboards. Not the most joyous of pretexts, but it's a powerhouse of a number played live, and perhaps understandably leads to a well-earned 20-minute breather.

Back on stage, and Index - a story about a seriously disturbed collector of all manner of flotsam and taken from the Grace For Drowning demonstrates a band indulging in trading off each other with complex rhythms and even bolder time signatures. Sectarian from the same album, follows, and brings to the show an expanse that film buffs might be tempted to mix metaphors for, and describe as "cinematic".

The late-model Porcupine Tree stormer Harmony Korine blasts away, a few metalheads in the audience appropriating Devil's horns gestures, while another swathe of seated rockers nod their heads frantically, resembling - from my eyrie at least - a row of Beavis and Butthead fans headbanging away.

© Simon Poulter 2003

Like Drive Home, The Raven That Refused to Sing is another beautiful ballad, and one which really underlines the quality of Wilson's songwriting. With a genuinely moving accompanying film, animated in the style of East European cartoons from the 1970s, it is, according to Wilson himself, a very simple song, about loss, perhaps inspired by the loss of his own father a couple of years ago.

Telling the story of an old man "who is waiting to die",  he discovers a singing raven in his garden that he believes is the manifestation of his dead sister. Again, not a jaunty tale, but it's lyrical and melodic simplicity conspire to provide a compelling structure to what actually becomes an uplifting end to the show.

© Simon Poulter 2003

Not being a hits factory, Wilson doesn't exactly go in for concert singalongs. But for his encore he unearths a very old song indeed: Radioactive Toy. One of the first songs he wrote under the guise of Porcupine Tree, and before it evolved from bedroom project to fully-blown band featuring Japan's Richard Barbieri, it provides a lighthearted finale to the show, replete with audience participation on the chorus or "what I call a 'chorus'", as Wilson self-depreciatingly deadpans. It has been a PT live favourite for many years, a popularity reflected by the gusto with which the stalls join in.

This tour will roll on until the end of November, setting forth tomorrow night in Europe again, but the gig at a venue as prestigious as the Albert Hall provides an odd form of ending. It's the home show, attended by family and close friends, but in Wilson's own words, it's almost the start of something new. Beyond the tour there will be work to commence on his fourth solo album and, no doubt, plenty of appointments with the assorted alumni of classic rock who are queuing up to make use of his talents.

There is something of the Victorian work ethic about Steven Wilson. Which makes the setting of Queen Victoria's tribute to her late husband all the more appropriate.