Steven Wilson – Gig Review Photo Gallery 15th November @ The Forum, Melbourne VIC

Steven Wilson
The Forum, Melbourne (Naarm), VIC
November 15^th, 2025

What a night. A beautiful spring evening in Melbourne. My favourite venue in this fabulous, live music-adoring city of ours. Huge crowd. And well over two hours with the legend known as Steven Wilson, and his sublime band. 

What could be better?

Two of the absolute behemoths of heavy rock n roll have brought their enormous corporate rock shows through Melbourne in the last little while, but tonight is where it’s at. Steven Wilson is a true visionary, who creates epic art without boundaries, without ego, without compromise and without a need to conform to trends or formulas. He pulls in a tiny fraction of the numbers that Metallica and AC/DC draw, but who cares? Popularity rarely equals superior quality. The 1500-2000 people who rock up tonight are true, hardcore fans who are here purely for the music and the performance.

Personally, I’d rather watch Steven Wilson busk on a street corner than sit through five minutes of a soulless mega-concert.

But anyway, enough of that. What a performance Steven, his band and his crew give us this night. It’s an ‘evening-with’ format, two sets with a (very well deserved) ten-to-fifteen-minute break in between. The first set is a live rendering of his latest album, The Overview. The album itself is quite superb, and it grows another five legs in a live setting. The sound is pristine. The lighting is dazzling. The rear-screen projection segments are cosmological and kaleidoscopic. And, most importantly and tellingly, Steven and his band, made up of illustrious professionals, are absolutely dead on the money (not only do they nail the difficult instrumental parts with absolute aplomb, they reproduce Steven’s exquisite vocal arrangements [which I think he’s underrated for] beautifully), weaving the intricate composition with both passion and precision. 

In his own words, the piece, and the playing of it live, is ‘intense’.

I have to admit, I’m a bigger fan of Porcupine Tree (whom I consider among my all-time favourite bands) than of Steven’s solo career, and we only get two older, more (relatively) obscure PT tracks in the second set (‘Voyage 34 (Phase One)’ and ‘Dislocated Day’ – both from the 90s). No ‘Trains’ (although people certainly cry out for it), no ‘Open Car’, no ‘Blackest Eyes’, and certainly no sign of my all-time favourite PT track, ‘Glass Arm Shattering’. But again, it doesn’t matter, since what we get is of such sublime quality. The second set proper runs to well over an hour, and features such superb Wilson staples as ‘Harmony Korine’, ‘Pariah’ and ‘Vermillioncore’. Plus we get two encores (‘Ancestral’ and the compellingly melancholy ‘The Raven That Refused to Sing’, replete with its haunting animated film clip playing on the screen), which themselves stretch out to more than thirty minutes combined. 

Stunning bang for the punters’ buck.

Alongside Devin Townsend, Steven Wilson is the great progressive music innovator of our time. He may not sell out massive concrete stadiums, but he creates art of unparalleled quality and integrity, and then presents it in a live setting in truly compelling fashion. If you’re still to see this show, in Australia or anywhere else across the globe, you are in for an absolute treat. 

Review by Rod Whitfield

Set 1

Objects Outlive Us
The Overview

Set 2

Voyage 34 (Phase I)
Home Invasion
Regret #9
What Life Brings
Staircase
Dislocated Day
Pariah
Luminol
Harmony Korine
Vermillioncore

Encore

Ancestral
The Raven That Refused to Sing

Photo Gallery by Clinton Hatfield. Insta: @ampd.agency. Please credit Wall of Sound and Clinton Hatfield if you repost.