“TO BE A POP STAR YOU HAVE TO BE A NARCISSIST. I’M NOT REALLY”
In a large, sun-dappled living room in a leafy outpost of North-West London, Steven Wilson expounds the decade over peppermint tea and muffins. The latter were made by his Israeli wife Rotem, who he married four weeks previously. Two weeks before that they moved here. The decor is minimal and stylish and looks out on to a spacious back garden where they had their wedding reception.
Rock’s dark, jazzy enigma; 21st-century prog god; master of melancholia; pop star inspired by the likes of Peter Gabriel, Prince, Kate Bush… Wilson has been all these things over the past 10 years. Now there’s another side to him; pairs of children’s shoes sit by the door, belonging to his two stepdaughters.
“I think I have this reputation of being this incredibly melancholic person,” Wilson says. “I understand that part of that is my own doing because of the music, but I’ve always been happy. And I think now I’m not only happy, I’m content. It’s another thing, to be content with your life and no longer striving all the time to be somewhere different.”
After years of keeping your personal life under wraps, how did it feel
