Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space

Buckle up and prepare to be taken on the ride of a lifetime. Steven Wilson is back with The Overview, an album that even he admits is prog. Comprising two tracks, the conceptual suite includes lyrics from XTC's Andy Partridge and visuals that are out of this world. Prog visits the musician at home to get the lowdown.

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There's a phenomenon that affects astronauts when they travel into space and look back at the Earth. It's called The Overview Effect.

"It's reportedly a cognitive shift that occurs that's to do with perspective and how they feel about their lives," says Steven Wilson, a man who hasn't been into space yet but has thought about The Overview Effect a lot over the last couple of years. "A mental perspective quite literally having an overview of where we fit in time and space, or some inkling of it, and understanding in a split second of just how insignificant we are." The Overview Effect affects different people in different ways. When actor William Shatner travelled into space onboard Amazon boss Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin shuttle in 2021 at the age of 90, the former Captain Kirk had an overwhelmingly negative reaction.

"He said he'd expect to feel this sense of euphoria, but all he felt when he looked back at the Earth was a sense of death and nothingness," says Wilson, as we sit at right angles on a pair of sofas in the open-plan kitchen of his north London home.

"Isn't that funny? Of all the people." Others have found beauty or even comfort in something that only emphasises our ultimately insignificant place in an unmeasurable, potentially infinite universe. Steven Wilson can understand this.

"Your life is futile, it's meaningless, and isn't that a wonderful thing?" he says with more relish than it probably warrants. "And I do mean that. We spend so much of our time anxious, stressed, worried about things that sometimes we just need an injection of perspective." The idea informs Wilson's new solo album, tellingly titled The Overview.