2009 intro
Being true to yourself is not easy in the music business. Most of the reality TV stars, singer-songwriters and half-baked indie bands that clog up the charts have to toe a company line, look cool at all costs, rip off that sound everyone’s buying into, smile for the camera, supply that next hit single… It’s always been like that – but there have always been outsiders, mavericks, who refuse to operate that way.
Steven Wilson has remained fiercely independent throughout his career, right up to Porcupine Tree’s highly conceptual 10th album, The Incident. Like his other bands such as No-Man, and his recent solo album Insurgentes, his work is progressive in the best sense of the word. It’s creative, diverse, forward-thinking music that doesn’t care whatsoever about hit singles, chart placings or gold discs – despite the fact that his band has been a slowburning success for the best part of two decades.
The key word for Wilson is “album,” and he’s optimistic about the format’s future. “That the download culture is becoming more dominant doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” he argues. “We had, for example, Mike Skinner with The Streets. A Grand Don’t Come For Free was a concept album by a British hip-hop artist. It helped change the idea that music is a three-minute pop song. If radio and MTV have no influence anymore, the idea of the single becomes less relevant; people start thinking about albums again, so you have bands like Radiohead, Tool, The Mars Volta and Mastodon more recently, even Coldplay… big bands are thinking about the album as a statement.”
Wilson was a prodigious talent from an early age, working in his bedroom, teaching himself guitar and keyboards, making tape after tape of sounds, riffs and songs. Ironically, Porcupine Tree began as a joke – an imaginary 70s prog outfit with a full discography and band biogs. But then he began releasing largely ambient and psychedelic music under the name; and when he began to attract interest from the music industry, he needed a band to tour with.
Enter some real-life musicians! Keyboardist Richard Barbieri had been in early 80s art-rock band Japan. He and bassist Colin Edwin joined at the same time in 1993, then Gavin Harrison replaced original drummer Chris Maitland in 2002. “The solo album is me, with no consideration for collaborators at all,” says Wilson. “That’s the kind of music that left to my own devices I make for myself, and it’s a bit more eclectic. But Porcupine Tree has a sound that comes from the four musicians – so although people may see the credits and think, ‘Steven Wilson writes everything and the musicians are just doing what he’s written,’ that’s not the case. I’d never ask them to play something I didn’t think they’d enjoy. I know that the sound has to be something we all agree on. Imagine a Venn diagram: the area where those four personalities cross is the sound of Porcupine Tree, so I write in that area.”
That doesn’t mean it’s easy. “If you’ve written a song, it’s your baby and you’re precious about it. Sometimes they suggest changes that aren’t what I had in mind; but I do want to know what they think. Gavin comes up with very different drum parts than I would ever have thought of. Richard is all about sound design, and a lot of the time what you’re listening to is the detail, the subtlety he’s put in there. The sound design aspect, for me, makes the records, and that’s all him. It’s very much a band, which is sometimes a frustration – that’s why I do solo projects as well. But that’s good. The compromise gives you that sound.”
Porcupine Tree have always been experimental, developing, progressing and becoming heavier over time. A sea change occurred when Wilson produced Swedish prog-metallers Opeth, after the bands toured together. But he’s quick to dispel the myth that Pocupine Tree’s 2003 album In Absentia was influenced by his connection to Opeth’s Blackwater Park. “It was the opposite,” he says.
“The reason I worked with Opeth is that I was becoming more interested in heavy music again, not the other way round. In Absentia was written before I worked with Opeth so I’d already moved towards that. The first music I ever really liked as a kid was the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. It was the first music that was really mine, in my time – bands like Diamond Head and Saxon – so it was in my DNA. Like a lot of people as they get older, I moved away from metal. I had this thing in the back of my mind that metal was something I’d grown out of, in a patronising kind of way.”
There’s a very good reason for that. “Most of the metal I was hearing was nu-metal. But then I got turned on to bands like Sugar and Opeth and I was blown away, because I suddenly realised where to find all the incredible creativity that had been missing from mainstream metal, and even progressive music. It was sophisticated, album-based music. That revitalised my interest. With In Absentia and producing Opeth, it all came together at the same time.”
Porcupine Tree’s new album, The Incident, harks back to an earlier age of prog, featuring a series of songs sequenced in Roman numerals which flow seamlessly from one to the next. It transcends any genre and its influences are wide-ranging and far-reaching – including another Wilson in the form of Beach Boys genius Brian.
“What I love about Smile is that you have a series of songs that have reccurring themes, melodies and chord sequences,” says the younger musician. “The Beach Boys were a huge influence on my vocals. I finally discovered a way that I could feel confident about being a singer. I’d never thought of myself as a singer or had the confidence to push myself forward – but listening to Brian Wilson’s great works led me to start using harmony vocals in a rock context. It was around the time of In Absentia, when we started to reach a bigger audience – there was something fresh about the fusion of harmony vocals with heavy riffs.”
I loved anything that had an ambition to elevate the album above just 10 songs strung together. You see that influence in all of our work
He continues: “My father was into stuff like Dark Side Of The Moon and my mother was listening to Donna Summer, John Coltrane and Marvin Gaye records, which were also conceptual in the way they were structured. They became the two sides to my musical personality – and the thing they had in common was the idea of the album as a musical continuum, a journey. And then I discovered other things like Marillion and Jethro Tull. I loved anything that had an ambition to elevate the album above just 10 songs strung together. You see that influence in all of our work; but The Incident takes it to the next level: not just as an album that’s sequenced well, but as an album that’s a complete listening experience.”
From early ambient works such as Voyage 34 – a 30-minute single that combined guitars with the technological influence of similarly independent pioneers such as Future Sound Of London and The Orb – Porcupine Tree moved in a more song-oriented direction from 1999’s Stupid Dream, grew heavier, and have landed at The Incident, featuring 70-plus minutes of vignettes that can be taken individually but which also form a cohesive whole.
Sound, ambition, feel: those are the things that you sense drive Wilson, no matter what he’s writing, producing or mixing. Porcupine Tree have built up a huge following across the world, won awards, been up for a Grammy… but none of that, you sense, really matters to him. His band have helped revived interest in progressive music, and that maybe matters to him more.
