Porcupine Tree - The Porcupine's new day

It's a curious story, that of Porcupine Tree, who in the space of just a few years went from an obscure (and mysterious) cult band to a legend of British neo-prog. Curious right from the way their creator and undisputed leader Steven Wilson forged his creature. The project, in fact, came about almost by chance, in 1987, as the result of a jokey collaboration between the English multi-instrumentalist and Malcolm Stocks, who decided to invent a fake legendary rock band inspired by the sounds of the Seventies, by Pink Floyd in particular. So the two dreamed up countless details, such as the band members, their album titles, and a fake history that included things like Seventies festival gatherings and plenty of trips in and out of state prisons. Meanwhile Wilson managed to put aside a bit of money to buy recording gear and created several hours of music to prove his band's real existence, while also working on his other project, No-Man, together with singer-songwriter Tim Bowness.

Under the Porcupine Tree name, Wilson released a cassette titled Tarquin's Seaweed Farm, to which he added a booklet with information about the band's imaginary members, such as Sir Tarquin Underspoon and Timothy Tadpole-Jones. He then appeared on a few psychedelic music compilations and released the EP “The Love, Death & Mussolini” in a run of just ten copies, followed by the album “The Nostalgia Factory”. All of this work caught the attention of fans and industry insiders alike, building a small cult following around this mysterious band, which, little known in Britain, found — much like early Genesis — a true “second home” in Italy, and especially in Rome, where, helped along by promotion from Radio Rock, it managed to build a sizeable colony of fans around itself.

The Porcupine Tree, born out of the early demos released on Yellow Hedgerow Dreamscape, bore its first official fruit in 1992 with On The Sunday Of Life, a double album steeped in avant-garde psychedelic music that established them among the foremost disciples of Pink Floyd.

It ranges from nursery-rhyme whimsy in the style of Syd Barrett (“Jupiter Island”) to ballads in the vein of “Dark Side Of The Moon” such as “Radioactive Toy”, which would remain one of their most beloved songs. There's also room for more complex instrumental pieces, like “Third Eye Surfer”, with echoes of free jazz in the manner of Soft Machine, and “Nostalgia Factory”, woven from organ progressions and guitars reminiscent of Yes.

But behind Porcupine Tree there was no real band. The record, in fact, was played entirely by multi-instrumentalist Steven Wilson, a guitarist of great invention and a skilled sound manipulator too. “I overdubbed all the instruments myself in my studio and wasn't too bothered whether people thought I was a band or a solo project, so I decided to go for something mysterious, saying these were tracks produced and performed by Porcupine Tree,” he recalls.

The feat was repeated in 1993 with Up The Downstair, driven by the tight pulse and enveloping atmospheres of the formidable “Synesthesia”, a kind of electro-prog suite that shows off the full extent of Wilson's visionary talent. But the album also shines thanks to the otherworldly caresses of the ballad “Always Never”, built entirely on whispers and distant cosmic echoes right up to its rock-fuelled explosion, as well as the ten minutes of the other evocative suite that gives the record its title: a successful alchemy of space-rock and psychedelia, with an alienating coda.

The surrounding tracks win you over too, from a vibrant “Not Beautiful Anymore”, propelled by a cavernous bass line, to the delicate, dreamlike textures of “Small Fish”. Rock takes centre stage again across the eleven minutes of “Burning Sky”, while “Fadeaway” closes the record with once more cosmic, intangible settings.

The record finally broadened the band's following, and won over critics too. Melody Maker described it as “a psychedelic masterpiece and one of the albums of the year”. It is indeed one of their very best works, showing a further evolution of their fusion of electronic music and rock, with shades ranging from prog to psychedelia. And on these tracks, two future band members make their first appearance: Richard Barbieri, former keyboardist of Japan, and Australian bassist Colin Edwin.

A year later, the band recorded The Sky Moves Sideways, with Barbieri now a permanent member, pushing further into the “ambient” side of their music. The result is suites stretched out to the point of trance, though never through studio trickery or sampling, but through instruments played live. Just listen to “Moonloop” to believe it, where achingly sweet sounds of guitars, organs and percussion alternate in slow motion, before the whole thing takes off into a blazing blues-rock jam, or the hushed lullaby of “The Moon Touches Your Shoulder”, built on ethereal melodies left to float in the air, surrounded by intangible chords. Wilson conjures up the beautiful nocturnal image of a moon brushing against a shoulder and bringing back a new day: ⊡Q1⊡. The Sky Moves Sideways is a record that enchants, with its blend of Floydian guitars, icy keyboards launching into endless glides, and rhythmic textures ranging from acoustic percussion to alternative-dance beats. The effect is hypnotic, almost transcendent, and it's no coincidence that during their outdoor concerts audiences took to lying down on the ground and gazing up at the sky, scanning the stars.

Starting with the EP Waiting, Porcupine Tree strengthened their ensemble, now a quartet of guitar, keyboards, bass and drums. The result was a shift towards increasingly fairy-tale-like, dreamlike atmospheres. Examples of this new direction are the two long ballads and centrepiece tracks of the new album Signify (1996): “Dark Matter” and “I Regarded The Cosmos”, which echo the melodies of “Moonchild” by King Crimson and the melodrama of early Genesis. But the band also winks at pop with the single “Waiting”. By this point, Porcupine Tree were firmly structured as a band, with Steven Wilson on vocals, guitar, programming and tapes; Richard Barbieri on keyboards and programming; Colin Edwin on bass; and Chris Maitland on drums, percussion and backing vocals.

Sealing the band's by-now well-honed formula comes their first live album, Coma Divine, a recording of some memorable Rome shows.

1999 brought Stupid Dream. The Porcupine's “stupid dream” is to breathe eternal life into Sixties progressive rock. But while early on the band's model was Pink Floyd, their music has since shifted toward “space progressive laced with a hint of psychedelia”, as Wilson himself puts it. “I've always loved the sound of music without boundaries, able to embrace everything from jazz to classical, punk, blues – a fusion of sounds and styles”, he explains. In short, Wilson is starting to find the “progressive” label too confining. “I think Porcupine Tree have other leanings too, including jazz, hip-hop and techno, even if on the surface we seem far removed from them. Sixties and Seventies prog-rock came out of a cross-contamination of different styles. You had Pink Floyd starting from blues, Emerson Lake & Palmer borrowing from classical music, Jethro Tull drawing on jazz and folk. Today the real progressive bands are people like Portishead and Radiohead: they, like very few others, know how to blend different attitudes into something new”.

Stupid Dream, on which Wilson for the first time draws on the band's input at the songwriting stage too, places greater emphasis on the classic rock song, upping the amount of singing and making the tracks more accessible.

With Dave Gregory of Xtc brought on board, the following Lightbulb Sun marks another step forward for the band. It retains their taste for complex, refined arrangements, but also shows a newfound directness, with more straightforward songs, lyrically too. “All this is a result of how we worked – Wilson explains –. For us, making a record is a bit like putting together a mosaic, and this time it came together faster. It's also the album with the least cryptic lyrics. In the past I tried to build them around abstract imagery, which made them harder to grasp. This time they're very direct, hard and raw”.

A track like “Four Chords That Made A Million”, for instance, is Porcupine Tree's clear statement on the music business and their wish to shake off the cult-band label. “The song refers to one band in particular, easy enough to identify – says Wilson –. There are bands that lift their entire sound wholesale from other Sixties acts and become international hits. And that's rather frustrating for a band like Porcupine Tree, who make music that isn't especially difficult, but is original and potentially 'mainstream'. Yet it's music that the mass media work against, having decided that we're not 'fashionable' but 'cult'. What happened in Italy shows that when people actually hear us, they like us”.

The album is built on strong contrasts in sound, between hard-edged guitars and more relaxed ones. Gregory's orchestral arrangements can be heard on tracks like “The Rest Will Flow” and leave their mark across the whole record, which continues the band's exploration of more refined pop territory. “Xtc have always been one of my favourite bands, and I think the credit for their sophisticated yet direct sound goes to their arrangements”. But Wilson the human volcano doesn't stop there. Among his upcoming projects is the already-finished third album by his side project, No-Man, recorded with Robert Fripp. “Working with people of the calibre of Fripp, Gregory or Barbieri is easy. I'm not interested in technical musicians, only creative ones”.

But ask Wilson which musicians have influenced him most and the answers can be surprising. “I love vocal harmonies, from the Beach Boys to Neil Young, from Nick Drake to Todd Rundgren. And, in a way, I'm also inspired by American bands like Soundgarden, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins. But I also love lesser-known bands like Mercury Rev: I think their 'Deserter's Songs' is about the most creative and contemporary thing I've listened to recently”. And Pink Floyd? “What I love most about them is their ability to be 'multimedia', using art not just as music but as a form of expression that took in film, literature and stage design. But I think today Porcupine Tree are a long way from being a simple copy of old Pink Floyd”.

For a period, Porcupine Tree sold around 30 per cent of their records in Rome, driven by radio airplay and word of mouth among fans. Something similar happened in the early Seventies with bands like Genesis and Gentle Giant, each of which now has its own substantial place in rock history. They then became a touchstone for international devotees of the Kscope scene and of new prog as a whole.

In 2001 Wilson's band released two albums, Metanoia (recorded during the Signify sessions) and Recordings (a limited-edition anthology containing some singles from the preceding period).

In Absentia (2002) is another milestone in their journey, built more on sonic textures and atmospheres than on songs as such. With new drummer Gavin Harrison on board, Porcupine Tree range from more straightforward tracks, such as “Blackest Eyes”, “Prodigal” and “Strip The Soul”, to forays into more tortuous progressive territory (“The Sound Of Muzak”, “Collapse The Light Into Earth”, “Wedding Nails”), never losing sight of an inspiration that now seems to have returned to their very best form.

The neo-prog-rock dreamed up by Wilson and co. takes on Beatles-esque hues, chases the carefree Beach Boys airs, the soft vocal style of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, yet never loses its own identity. “I think 'In Absentia' sounds like our most seventies record – explains Richard Barbieri – and that pleases us, because our aim has always been to build organic albums, guided by a central theme”.

Deadwing is the 2005 release. The title track, which opens the album, leads straight into what many consider the natural follow-up to 2002's In Absentia. In a continuity that, on closer inspection, is more formal than genuinely substantive, “Deadwing” (almost ten minutes long) dawdles for barely a few seconds before revealing its true nature: a progressive rock stripped of excessive technical flourishes, guitars with a robust sound that take a moment to soften, a middle section inevitably tinged with Pink Floyd-ish echoes (in the vocals more than anything), and an ending that edges toward the techno-ambient territory of “Voyage 34”. The stop-and-go guitar imprint opens and drives the second track, “Shallow”, which alternates moments of genuine rock with pleasant pop melodies (in the chorus). In places, Wilson even seems to be aping Maynard James Keenan of Tool.

“Lazarus”, an overly classicist slow easy listening number, is a track that winks at old-school chart-pop tradition. Luckily, in its closing moments the unsettled texture heralds “Halo”, with its solid, cyclical, distinctly British-sounding bass and an almost immediate vocal breadth. After an opening influenced by the second phase of King Crimson (Adrian Belew turns up, fittingly, on the title track), the song gradually morphs into a hymn to Motorpsycho.

With “Arriving Somewhere, But Not Here” (12 minutes), the band crafts one of its most ambitious and successful tracks. The psychedelic genetic makeup accrued over almost fifteen years of sonic brooding gives the piece real power, helped along by sudden tempo changes, atmospheres that stretch out and then contract, jolts of pseudo-hardcore, a sturdy central section and a logical, soaring finale. On the following “Mellotron Scratch”, Wilson once again sets aside metal-ish bombast in favour of introspection and sensory meditation, in a pop-tinged back-and-forth. “Open Car”, sung once more in Tool-mode, reworks and transfigures some native elements of the heavy universe: a lavish but never gratuitous use of guitars, a rhythm section that's powerful for long stretches and sudden brakes softened by light acoustic touches. Edwin's bass holds sway skilfully on “The Start of Something Beautiful”, a track that wins back fans from the so-called early days, who'd felt let down by the band's changes. The sturdy bridge of memory finally stretches as far back as the ethereal old “Fadeway”, just as the notes of “Glass Arm Shattering”, gorgeous and enveloping, begin to take shape. The fast/slow dichotomy running through the album finds a happy resolution precisely in its closing stretch, with “Glass Arm Shattering” and the ghost track, with its b-side aftertaste, “She's Moved One”. In the former, Porcupine Tree hold up a mirror in a choral, crepuscular track of rare intensity; the ghost track, fairly pointless and largely forgettable, is another pseudo-metal piece, though enlivened by some genuinely enjoyable flashes.

Porcupine Tree are undergoing a natural and widely welcomed evolution, fuelled not only by the frontman's side projects – happily caught up in a surprising metal phase/detour (with Opeth) – but also by a never-dormant urge to explore alternative dimensions.

Fear Of A Blank Planet (2007) doesn't stray far from its predecessor: a collection of tracks ranging from pop-rock ballads to complex, oblique prog structures with a Crimson-esque flavour (the "The Power To Believe"-era King Crimson, to be precise) – it's no coincidence, in fact, that among the album's guests are Robert Fripp and Alex Lifeson of Rush. There's a sense, though, that Wilson and co. are struggling to find fresh ideas, confirmed by the glaring resemblance between a moment in "Sentimental" and "Train" (from In Absentia): the same sonic choice, an acoustic guitar marking out the same chords, with the same rhythmic phrasing. In short, a genuinely recycled riff – self-plagiarism, or conscious self-quotation?

The long suite "Anesthetize" might offer a few thrills: 17 minutes of accomplished, fluid progressions that never bore and never feel forced, a coherent compositional magma. The same can't be said of the title track, which opens with the same intent as "Deadwing" (not a case of relevance, then, but a flaw) and, as if that weren't enough, lacks the same versatility and pathos. "Sleep Together" even comes across as a rock ballad the Goo Goo Dolls could have written.

Two years later, The Incident edges toward the abyss. An album that's more insipid than outright bad, watered down within the grandiosity of a mini-double (74 minutes spread across two discs) that's half concept album, half not. The musical coordinates are the now-familiar ones, only with less class and fewer strong ideas: cascades of late-Floyd chords, Tool and Meshuggah by the yard (though the heavier moments are the best ones), a heavy deployment of keyboards and reverb – which lend plenty of atmosphere – and dreamy alt-rock melodies.

The solos are by now a shameless device for padding things out, but The Incident still offers a few interesting moments, sometimes packed into a handful of seconds: sadly, few tracks really stand out. Above all, the title track, a kind of metal-tinged trip-hop halfway between Massive Attack and Nine Inch Nails. A filtered, half-whispered vocal, deep circular guitar drones, then an explosion of hi-hat-driven drums over a frankly unheard-of rhythm. Murky, hypnotic, unsettling, it's the album's masterpiece and gives hope that the creative spark animating Porcupine Tree hasn't been extinguished for good.

It's a shame that by this point all one can admire in Porcupine Tree is their executional skill: let's hope that in the future they can rediscover new, more compelling paths. What's certain, though, is that good old Wilson is wrong when he insists on claiming his music defies categorisation: his personal playlist on the band's official website overflows with progressive rock. And it's the music from that list that, time and again, turns up in the grooves of his records.

In 2012 came the live album Octane Twisted, a collection of snapshots from the stages of "The Incident Tour".

With the release of his first solo album, Insurgentes, in 2008, Steven Wilson began his successful solo career, a situation that, whether he liked it or not, marked a halt for Porcupine Tree.

In November 2021, however, came the news nobody expected: the band was working on a new album, thirteen years after their previous one.

Preceded by the singles "Harridan", "Rats Return" and "Of The New Day", Closure/Continuation was released on 24 June 2022, an album marking the English band's grand-scale comeback.

Colin Edwin doesn't feature this time around, but the Wilson-Barbieri-Harrison triumvirate brings to completion recordings made over the course of the last decade.

Anguish and restlessness are reflected throughout the lyrics of the seven tracks on the tracklist, but there's no doubt that Porcupine Tree's return is carried out with great style. Between the ferocity of the bassline that opens the single "Harridan" – among the album's finest passages – and the frenzied turmoil of "Chimera's Week", which closes the record, the album travels through jagged, powerful sonic structures ("Wreck The Plank") that put Wilson and his guitar back in the spotlight – an instrument he loved dearly at the start of his career, but which has increasingly been relegated to a gilded supporting role in his solo output.

There's room for enchanted acoustic passages ("Dignity") and for the inevitable, obligatory blending of the two main approaches that define the British band, where white-hot riffs intertwine with muffled melodies ("Of The New Day" and "Rats Return").

The album's title is perhaps missing a mark: a question mark, which ought to be placed after the two words that make it up.

Should Closure/Continuation be understood as the project's definitive ending, or as a new starting point? Only time will reveal the answer to that question; for now, what matters is having back in our hands a record from the band that, perhaps more than any other in the world, has sought to unshackle, expand and modernise – with admirable rigour – the blueprints of 70s progressive rock. An excellent record that offers a snapshot of one possible future evolution of rock music, thanks to endless cross-pollinations and interweavings split between grating noise and soaring melody.

Contributions by Emilio Saturnini ("Deadwing"), Alessandro Vagnoni ("Fear Of A Blank Planet"), Marco Sgrignoli ("The Incident"), Cristiano Orlando ("Closure/Continuation")

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google