Porcupine Tree started in 1987 as nothing more than a distraction for Steven Wilson, who at the time was more focused on No-Man. But the surprise success of debut album On The Sunday Of Life… demanded a change of attitude. The band continued to confound expectations until, in 2005, they were poised to release eighth LP Deadwing, which truly put them on the map. In 2016 Prog republished an interview with Wilson and keyboardist Richard Barbieri, in which they looked back on their story so far.
Steven Wilson cloaked himself in subterfuge from day one of Porcupine Tree. At the band’s birth in 1987 the vocalist, guitarist, keyboard player and guiding light – concocted a fictional biography of his so-called “70s group,” complete with a lengthy “discography.” Along with friend Malcolm Stocks, Wilson recorded hours of music; but in reality Porcupine Tree were intended as a joke – little more than a diversion from Wilson’s main focus, art rockers No-Man. But the its growth was so sudden that Floyd freak Wilson hastily switched lanes.
“Like most people who are serious about music, I put together Porcupine Tree to entertain myself,” he explains. “There wasn’t enough irony in the joke for some people, who advertised for these ridiculous ‘albums’ of ours in their wants lists. It was a bit like XTC, who had the [fictional neo-psychedelic combo] Dukes Of Stratosphere. But in pursuing my own fake band, I stumbled upon something that had real potential.”
Debut album On The Sunday Of Life… was put together from material originally available on two limited edition cassettes – Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm and The Nostalgia Factory. A hypnotic, perversely commercial concoction blended from spacey synthesisers, Wilson’s anaemic vocals, Steve Hillage-style glissando guitar, trippy lyrics and whispered monologues, it was released in early 1992 via Delerium Records, a fledgling label run by the owners of UK underground magazine Freakbeat.
And nobody was more surprised than Wilson when the record’s 1,000-copy, vinyl-only run was snapped up, prompting an instant reprint. Since then the album has sold in the region of 30,000 – but its diversity and relative success created an instant headache. “Stylistically it was all over the place,” Wilson says. “The track Radioactive Toy was the one that got picked up on, but the album could have spawned nine or 10 bands in as many different styles.”
He has since confirmed that another of the album’s standout songs, Linton Samuel Dawson, was about LSD; although the lyrics were written by early collaborator Alan Duffy, who was “very immersed in acid culture and psychedelia – it was a Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds-type thing. A lot of what we were doing were shameless pastiches.”
Druga have never been an important activity for Wilson himself: “The subject does fascinate me,” he admits, “but as an outsider. People say a lot of great artists made their best work by using them. I don’t believe that. Drugs allowed them to tap into the power of dreams, but I can do that without chemicals to facilitate the process.”
No-Man had signed a record deal just before Sunday Of Life’s release, which had enabled Wilson to give up his job in the computer industry. But it was the second Porcupine Tree album, Up The Downstair, that really showed the way forward in 1993. Not dissimilar to the work of ambient house music pioneers The Orb, it thrust the group into the independent Top 20 chart for the first time. The record also had contributions from former Japan keyboard player Richard Barbieri, with whom Wilson had been working in No-Man; and Colin Edwin, who’d become their long-term bassist.
“Richard and I both had this wide-ranging love of classic rock from the 1970s,” Wilson says. “He loved Bowie and Roxy Music, whereas I came from the progressive end; but we also crossed over in a big way. I’d grown up living around the corner from Colin, who was a big fan of bands like Gong.”
“My job isn’t to do what most typical keyboard players in rock bands do, though of course that’s part of it,” Barbieri says. “I’m more into abstract sounds and electronics. At the time, Porcupine Tree were playing trance-orientated stuff, almost in a contemporary club style. That fascinated me.” He had no qualms about getting involved in something that was dominated by one individual: “Some people can deal with it, some can’t. It’s never been a dictatorship. David Sylvian was a similar character to Steven, and Japan didn’t feel any less my band.”
In late 1993, after bringing in drummer Chris Maitland, Porcupine Tree made their live debut. Barbieri describes the earliest gigs as “grim;” but during their first show at The Nag’s Head in High Wycombe, Wilson began to fully appreciated the group’s potential. “It was sold out, and to a lot more people than I was used to with No-Man,” he recalls. “Everybody knew the songs, and the reaction was rapturous. I started to think this could be a great band, maybe even with longevity.”
But things thudded back down to earth a few nights later when they played The Borderline in London. Once again the band played better than anybody hoped, but just 30 fans turned up at the 275-capacity venue. “So many people claim to have been at that gig,” Wilson laughs. “It’s like all those who say they saw the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club – there was no possible room for them all. Of course we were disappointed that night – but almost 10 years to the day afterwards we were headlining and selling out The Astoria, which holds 2,000, so it worked out okay.”
The next album, 1995’s The Sky Moves Sideways, wasn’t recorded by the Tree as a whole band. The record polarised the opinions of artists and fans; Wilson has since dismissed it as “too derivative.” He explains: “Despite pressure from the record company, it made me understand that I didn’t want to take the easy option and cater for that market. I liked The Sky Moves Sideways at the time, but straight away I knew what we did next had to be more edgy and contemporary.”
Porcupine Tree have done so many things wrong in our career but still persevered to carve out our own niche
Steven Wilson
Each of the band’s first three albums was dedicated to a deceased hero of Wilson’s: fellow musicians Miles Davis and Nick Drake weren’t entirely unexpected choices, although film director Orson Welles was perhaps more surprising. “They were all uncompromising individuals whose inner strength made things harder for themselves,” Wilson says. “Orson took on his whole industry because he couldn’t get his Citizen Kane shown as widely as he wanted. I’ve always admired that spirit. Porcupine Tree have done so many things wrong in our career but still persevered to carve out our own niche.”
In 1996, the band presented their most song-oriented album to date, Signify. More forwardly focused, its incisive blend of psychedelia, heavy rock and melancholy pop was further sharpened by Wilson’s imaginative production. As the record picked up their first mainstream reviews, Porcupine Tree struck while the iron was hot by recording a live album, Coma Divine, in Rome the following year. It included several songs from Signify but concentrating on older, more elaborate pieces like The Sky Moves Sideways, Moonloop and a 13-minute Radioactive Toy.
“I call those our R&D years – they were all about research and development,” Wilson says. “Until Coma Divine our studio albums were all over the place. By then we were able to make the songs sound like they were all by the same band. But I’m not really in the habit of listening to anything of ours that’s more than two or three years old.”
Summing up the pair’s state of mind, Barbieri says: “They were best performances of that early material. Coma was probably a great live album, but it’s not a chunk of our time that I’d necessarily enjoy hearing again now.”
Sea change was on the horizon, and a number of larger record companies were now eyeing the band with interest. Suspicious of the labels’ motives, the band signed instead with leading independent Snapper, who gave them their own imprint, Kscope. Sales continued to rise; but as Wilson points out, the band still hit brick walls, especially in getting their music on radio.
To the ears of most critics and fans, 1999’s Stupid Dream album initiated the process of simplifying their sound. Wilson, however, disagrees. “I take your point, and some of the album’s more horizontal song structures were a lot more digestible,” he concedes, “but the more vertical ones became more complex. The vocal harmonies made the arrangements a lot more complicated; they were just placed into a shorter, more direct format.
“We were accused of selling out – it wasn’t the first time – but all I was doing was responding to my own listening diet. I’d become obsessed with Brian Wilson and The Byrds. For two years my goal was to perfect the ultimate two-and-a-half-minute pop symphony.”
True enough, the band definitely sounded more like The Verve or Radiohead than the one that had made The Sky Moves Sideways, and were unrepentant about it. But then came a new problem: the press were starting to sniff around. From the start, Wilson hadn’t bothered to dilute his sometimes outspoken opinions (he once called The Who’s Tommy “a very poor record”), but suddenly people were listening.
In 1999 he’d described Yes as “absolute fucking excrement,” a comment he justifies by by recallling their descent from classic works like The Yes Album and Close To The Edge to 1996’s semi-live album Keys To Ascension (“dire”). The comments weren’t mentioned by anyone from Yes when Porcupine Tree opened for them in the US in late 2002; but Wilson and Barbieri both got the distinct impression that the headliners knew what had been said about them.
“We weren’t treated very well by Yes at all,” Barbieri recalls. “They didn’t seem particularly happy either; everyone had separate dressing rooms. Their shows were great though.”
The saddest thing of all was losing Chris Maitland just as the band was on the verge of some kind of breakthrough
Steven Wilson
By Wilson’s own admission, Porcupine Tree went too far on their next album. 2000’s Lightbulb Sun included string arrangements from his hero Dave Gregory of XTC, but the record was previewed by Four Chords That Made A Million – a single that took them dangerously close to pop territory. “That was a terrible track,” Wilson sighs. “It was one of the few times we did something for the wrong reasons. The record company felt it would be a hit. It really didn’t belong on the album.”
Realising that a proportion of their audience was still playing catch-up, the next album, 2001’s Recordings, was an out-takes-and-extras collection good enough to stand in its own right. “We had such a wealth of quality material that didn’t always make the records,” Wilson says. “Which makes it doubly annoying when something like Four Chords That Made A Million gets released.”
Perhaps the signing of a new deal with the Atlantic Records offshoot Lava in mid-2001 caused that slightly sour taste to fade. Several months later the eight-year stay of Chris Maitland ended in uncharacteristically ugly circumstances. There were even rumours of physical violence – hard to believe, given Wilson’s wiry frame. More intriguingly, Maitland later re-emerged as a member of the guitarist’s highly regarded side-project Blackfield.
“I’ll sidestep the subject of what happened with Chris,” Wilson states, ”except to say that nowadays we’re great friends again, and what seemed important then doesn’t seem so vital now. Due to the Atlantic deal there was a lot of pressure on us at the time. We really had to stand up and be counted in terms of professionalism and commitment. The saddest thing of all was losing Chris just as the band was on the verge of some kind of breakthrough.”
Lava gave the new-look band (completed by new drummer Gavin Harrison) their biggest recording budget so far and despatched them to New York to work with Rush/Ozzy Osbourne engineer Paul Northfield. The result was In Absentia, a broad-based album that displayed all the band’s usual lightness of touch, but also benefited from a tougher approach inspired by Wilson’s production of Opeth. “I definitely brought back some of what I learned from those guys,” he confirms. “We also toured with Opeth, and there was a great deal of cross-fertilisation between both bands.”
As pretentious as it might sound – this music is becoming more and more needed as an alternative to what’s out there
Steven Wilson
Although their Atlantic deal was a worldwide one, Porcupine Tree were signed to the label’s New York office – the kind of arrangement that has undermined the commitment of labels towards British acts in the past. But Wilson is quick to downplay the potential dangers of his band entering the corporate boardroom. “The downside of the arrangement was that in the UK we had a lower profile than on Snapper,” he acknowledges. “The Warner UK office didn’t give a shit about us – they just put the record into the stores. But in so many other territories, including America and Germany, our sales went through the roof.
“Of course, it was claimed that we’d sold out, which made us smile wryly because we knew the reality,” he adds. “Andy Karp, who signed us, was a fan of ours for years and had wanted us since Lightbulb Sun. One of the first things we told the label was, ‘You’re not even gonna have a say in what we do.’ And they agreed.”
Sales of 120,000 for In Absentia show that the wisdom of the arrangement has paid off. “Each stage we reach is more unexpected than the last, but it keeps on rolling,” Wilson smiles. “That said, we’re not ashamed that there were strong commercial possibilities for our last few records. And as the years go by we’re starting to realise that – as pretentious as it might sound – this music is becoming more and more needed as an alternative to what’s out there.”
Long after the Yes “incident,” a more media-savvy Wilson answers carefully when asked his opinion of Dream Theater, one of the few genuinely popular bands perceived to be driving progressive music onwards, and with any degree of integrity. “Um… as people we like them a lot,” he offers eventually, before passing the question across to Barbieri, who responds more decisively: “I don’t like their music at all. It doesn’t do anything for me, unfortunately.”
Another thing that annoys Porcupine Tree is an audience’s judging of a song by duration alone: “It’s absurd,” Wilson says. “I recognise that long tracks can be a sign of ambition beyond the norm – or used to be so. Nowadays labels specialise in bands that record long tracks. It’s no longer a novelty, more a sign of creative bankruptcy. Stringing lots of long sections that don’t belong together isn’t being weighty, it’s being bereft of proper ideas.”
Deadwing might infiltrate the mainstream, but such things really have nothing to do with the music, so we fully expect it to fail
Steven Wilson
Deadwing doesn’t lack epic material, like Arriving Somewhere But Not Here and the sprawling title cut, but the album is balanced by shorter tracks like the hauntingly spiritual Lazarus and several potential hits, with first single Shallow a prime example. It also includes guest appearances from King Crimson’s Adrian Belew and Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth.
“It’s all about luck, and if that comes you’ve gotta be ready,” Barbieri says. “Perversely, radio play is also crucial. But we’ve now played in America and got a decent following, and Atlantic have the machinery. Something might happen.”
“This record is very ambitious – it might fluke and go through the roof,” Wilson adds. “It’s extremely demanding, but it exists for the fans and ourselves. Twenty-five per cent of me believes that Deadwing might infiltrate the mainstream, but such things really have nothing to do with the music, so we fully expect it to fail. We’re such miserable fuckers.”
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