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English text of Stephen Humphries’s essay from the booklet of Porcupine Tree — The Delerium Years / 1991–1997. The Russian version on this page was translated with the AI Grok 4.7. Stephen Humphries, stephenhumphries.blogspot.com.

A childhood in Hemel Hempstead

A rainstorm. An opportunity. Steven Wilson opened his bedroom window and gazed out at the wet streaks bulleting the tranquil street. The boy retrieved his microphone and leaned out of the bungalow to expose it to the elements. It wasn’t the microphone’s only brush with moisture. Steven once dangled it into a sloshy bucket of water. Don’t try this at home. Like a collector with a butterfly net, the young schoolboy used his microphone to snag sounds passing through the neighbourhood, including birdsong, barking dogs and storms. Once he’d finished recording the drumming rain, Steven listened back to his latest sonic acquisition. He slowed the tape down, sped it up and turned it over to listen to the sound of the rain backwards. Then he started to imagine how he could incorporate the texture into his early attempts at making music.

“It was probably horrible,” says Steven, laughing at the memory decades later. “Essentially I was experimenting with styles that I didn’t even realise had names at the time, such as musique concrète. I always feel anything can potentially be music. People laugh at me when I tell them I have a CD of recordings of electric fences made by a guy called Richard Harrison. The sound comes from the buzzing and humming of the electrical currents, but it comes across like ambient drone music. It’s pure sound, and to many it may not qualify as music, but to me it absolutely does.”

Steven Wilson remains a sonic magpie to this day. “There’s a track I was working on yesterday where I’m still using found voices and sound effects,” he says. But way back then he was creating experimental music without contemplating how it would fit into any grand design. If he’d been thinking in careerist terms, the earliest Porcupine Tree albums might have been robbed of their spontaneity, unpredictability, messy self-indulgence and sparks of magic. The recordings on this box set, made in that bedroom-turned-studio between 1984 and 1993, trace the nascent development of the young musician. Each successive album feels akin to a lens coming into focus, a transition from blurry shapes toward a clearer vision. There is also another story to be told about those formative years: how he forged an unconventional path to become an artist who trusted his own inner voice.

To begin with, Steven Wilson led a fairly ordinary childhood in Hemel Hempstead, a commuter town built north of London after the Second World War. The son of an electrical engineer, he was moved a year ahead at school early on because of his scholastic acumen. Though slight of build, he was happiest when he could wear the football strip of Queens Park Rangers and chase a ball around a field. Better that than attending to the dull labour of practising piano and guitar for the lessons his parents had conscripted him into. Music was little more than an academic exercise.

That changed on 25 December 1976. Steven can’t recall the gifts he unwrapped that day, but he can tell you that his father gave his mother a copy of Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby and she, in turn, bought her husband a copy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. The nine-year-old boy was entranced by the sounds emanating from the family turntable. Best Christmas ever.

“From that point on, football became completely irrelevant to me,” says Steven. “Music took over my whole life.”

It didn’t take long before his passion for listening to music developed into a need to understand how this magical thing was created. At age 12 he ventured into the attic to retrieve the nylon-string classical guitar he had abandoned after giving up music lessons. He also appropriated his father’s Farfisa electronic organ.

Though bitten by the musical bug, Steven didn’t attain musical superpowers overnight, as his noise-tolerant neighbours could probably attest. Despite his limited proficiency on the instruments, he began constructing cover versions of his favourite records, recreating them one instrument at a time. Sometimes it meant he had to become a musical MacGyver. The 12-year-old used a bronze napkin holder he had created during metalwork class as a substitute for a bottleneck, which he still uses to play slide guitar even now. He improvised other ways to compensate for missing equipment.

“I didn’t have a bass guitar, so I just sped the tape up to play a bass line on a guitar so that when the tape was then slowed back down to the right speed, it sounded like a bass guitar,” he recalls.

The results were below-fi. The aspirant producer relied upon sound-on-sound, a technique of building a piece of music, layer by layer, by bouncing the sounds back and forth between two tape recorders. It was akin to someone holding a phone receiver up to another phone receiver and hoping that the two people at either end could conduct a clear conversation. His father had a better idea. He constructed a four-track recording device that became, as Steven puts it, “the centre of my world.”

Some fathers bond with their sons over fishing reels. Mr Wilson bonded with his 12-year-old over a homemade multi-track recording device. The electrical engineer didn’t stop there. He also built an echo machine and a vocoder.

“Sometimes I’d play my dad a record and say, ‘How can I make this sound?’” Steven recalls. “I played my dad a Tangerine Dream track and said, ‘Dad, I want a sequencer.’ He said, ‘I can do that.’ But he wasn’t a musician and didn’t know that most music is in 4/4 time, so he built me a nine-step sequencer. So everything I wrote with a sequencer from then on had to be in an unconventional time signature, nine or three or multiples of three. Perhaps that’s why a lot of my music is more skewed to peculiar time signatures. He would always get something a little bit wrong because he wasn’t a musician, but those flaws became the foundation, in many respects, of my sound, because I was having to work with those peculiarities and quirks. I didn’t have the same gear that everyone else had. It made me think about music in different ways.”

The musician’s parents were supportive in other ways. They drew upon reserves of forbearance when their adolescent suddenly favoured black as his colour of choice. They didn’t exhibit signs of a Mary Whitehouse-like panic when Steven started listening to Iron Maiden, a group whose album covers featured a skeletal zombie with Einstein hair and the most murderous grin since Jack Nicholson in The Shining. And they didn’t lodge noise complaints when their 12-year-old, then in the thrall of other New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands such as Diamond Head and Saxon, formed a heavy metal group named Paradox that rehearsed inside their small home.

Paradox got to play their secondary-school disco, perhaps disappointing those attendees who had hoped to break out their John Travolta dance moves that night. It was the apotheosis for the group, which had a shorter lifespan than a drummer for Spinal Tap. But Steven’s interests weren’t narrowly confined to the denim-and-leather genre. His bedroom reflected his expanding music tastes. The insouciant expressions of David Sylvian, Prince, Marillion, The Cure, Pink Floyd and Joy Division stared out from posters on the walls. A precarious shelf housed an ever-expanding collection of vinyl records, their vertical spines lined up like a colourful barcode. To feed his indefatigable musical curiosity, the teen regularly visited the local library and checked out albums he had heard about or that looked interesting. One day he shared his enthusiasm for experimental classical compositions with the music teacher at his school.

“He was absolutely astounded to discover that there was actually somebody in one of his classes that was genuinely interested in music,” says the songwriter. “I went to a school where music was not encouraged. In fact, these days the secondary school I went to is now called a sports college, which gives you an idea of where the priorities were then. In music class, the teacher would get thirty kids together and give everyone an instrument, like a shaker or tambourine or glockenspiel, and get them to bash their way through a standard. If you think about a job like that, it must be pretty soul-destroying. The day that he discovered I was interested in music, he became a bit of a mentor. He lent me some of his own records by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and John Cage, introducing me to very experimental music. He even recorded one of my first compositions, which was for piano and electronic treatments, called Distances. I worked for weeks on that. I innately felt like a serious composer, despite no academic training at all.”

Prayer for the Soul

Another adult who played a formative role in Steven’s music was Alan Duffy. A few years prior to establishing Imaginary Records, the label that started the trend of tribute albums, Duffy placed an ad in one of the weekly music papers about trading tapes of rare psychedelic music. The 14-year-old in Hemel Hempstead responded to the 26-year-old’s ad. Duffy not only passed along some tapes but also, unsolicited, gave Steven a series of lyrics he had been writing. Duffy’s lyrics touched on a magical island where people can fly, a fish that pops its head above water and witnesses Armageddon, Merlin the magician casting spells for Marilyn Monroe, and that time when a toad gave sixteen kangaroos a lesson in water ballet. Not exactly inspired by the gritty workman’s songs of Bruce Springsteen, then.

“Alan was very much into the whimsical, surrealist children’s literature of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear,” recalls Steven. “It’s one of the bedrocks of psychedelic music. If you listen to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds or any of Syd Barrett’s stuff, those influences are in there. Alan wrote lyrics in that style.”

Those words would later be utilised on the earliest Porcupine Tree albums, On the Sunday of Life..., Yellow Hedgerow Dreamscape and Up the Downstair.

“I started writing songs with those lyrics because I wasn’t really interested in being a lyric writer or a singer. I haven’t seen him since the mid-’80s, but I assume he still gets the publishing royalties!”

The first time Steven incorporated Duffy’s lyrics into a piece of music was during the summer of 1983. Steven recruited fellow Tangerine Dream fan Simon Vockings, who lived down the road and owned a modular synthesiser, to make electronic music. Their group was named Altamont.

“When you’re at that age and have a passion for music, you just get together with anyone else in your vicinity that has a musical instrument,” says Steven. “I was always the one editing things into ‘albums’. He just came over for the fun of making some music, but then a week later I’d present him with a cassette with artwork and track titles. ‘Hey, here’s the album we made last week.’ I’d edited and overdubbed various sections to create 20-minute pieces. I was the one who was always interested in the architecture of music.”

As well as containing the long instrumental pieces, the duo’s sole cassette album, Prayer for the Soul, featured two more conventional songs using Duffy’s lyrics, Split Image and Watching Statues. It was distributed through Duffy’s Acid Tapes cassette label. Then, as now, Steven wasn’t strictly monogamous when it came to music projects. He had concurrently founded a four-piece group, Karma, with Tom Dussek on keyboards, Pete Rowe on bass and Mark Gordon on drums. Duffy’s lyrics once again came in handy on the group’s October 1983 album, The Joke’s On You. The four-track cassette included the earliest versions of Small Fish and Nine Cats, both of which would later be repurposed as Porcupine Tree songs. Karma’s style of music might be euphemistically described as retro-forward.

“I had missed the ’70s, so, although I could go back and discover the albums of King Crimson and Pink Floyd, I couldn’t go see those bands at their peak. Marillion, for me, was almost my connection back to an era that I had missed. Me and my friend Mark, who was the drummer in Karma, started off going to see Marillion in local pubs. Suddenly they were signed to EMI and were on Top of the Pops. We followed them around. Karma was very much influenced by that so-called neo-progressive style. It was very derivative. But it was fun!”

Amid all the musical activity, something had to give. Little priority was given to schoolwork other than English. “Literature appealed to me,” says Steven. Result? The 16-year-old failed a number of his O-level exams.

“My parents were crushed and were very disappointed. I felt terrible, actually. I made a real effort to knuckle down and retook a lot of the exams and did much better the second time. But I knew that they were disappointed. It must be strange for a parent who wants to encourage a child, but at the same time you’re terrified that there’s no career there. In one way they did everything they could to encourage me, but in another they would gently try to discourage me. They weren’t telling me to give up music, but they were trying to introduce me to other possibilities. The truth is, I wasn’t interested at all.”

If anything, Steven took writing and recording even more seriously. Not that he became overly serious. Exhibit A: Karma’s next album, The Last Man to Laugh (1985), featured an epic memorably titled A Peace of Earth and Good Swill to all Pigs Parts 1&2. The four-piece band graduated from playing the school disco to proper gigs at pubs around Hertfordshire. They also sold their cassettes through the pages of Melody Maker and Sounds.

The Incredible Expanding Mindfuck

During his two years of studying A-levels, Steven also met the person who in some ways would be the catalyst for him creating Porcupine Tree: Malcolm Stocks. The two met the way so many bands were formed in those days, by placing ads in weekly music papers. Malcolm, one year older than Steven, lived one town over in Berkhamsted and appeared to be a budding guitarist. In truth, it’s fair to say that Malcolm’s abilities on the instrument never quite flowered.

“Malcolm wasn’t trying to be a career musician,” says Steven. “But what he did have was a fabulous record collection. He got me into things like Van der Graaf Generator and Gong, because I didn’t know about bands like that until I met him. He was a very good friend and someone who encouraged me.”

The duo shared a sensibility for absurdist humour. As such, they were both quite taken with a fictitious band named The Dukes of Stratosphear that released its debut record, 25 O’clock, on April Fool’s Day 1985. The affectionate homage to 1960s psychedelic music, featuring a Disraeli Gears-style album cover and tracks such as Bike Ride to the Moon, was a pseudonymous side project by several members of XTC. For the occasion, singer and guitarist Andy Partridge went by the name Sir John Johns, bassist Colin Moulding dubbed himself The Red Curtain, guitarist Dave Gregory adopted the moniker Lord Cornelius Plum, and drummer Ian Gregory is credited as E.I.E.I. Owen. Read the last name out loud. Producer John Leckie was dubbed Swami Anand Nagara. Put it this way: if Spike Milligan had been under the influence of magic mushrooms, patchouli oil and the sound of 12-string Rickenbackers, he might have concocted a Goon Show episode about a hippie band like The Dukes of Stratosphear.

So in 1987 the two friends were inspired, in turn, to dream up their own fake psychedelic groups. Malcolm imagined a group called The Incredible Expanding Mindfuck. Steven named his fabulist creation Porcupine Tree. They went so far as to contrive elaborate backstories about the preposterously named musicians of each group. Sadly, the antics of Sir Tarquin Underspoon, Mr Jelly, The Expanding Flan, Timothy Tadpole-Jones, Master Timothy Masters and their loyal crew members Sebastian Tweetle-Blampton III and Linton Samuel Dawson have largely been lost to the annals of rock history.

“We were basically creating an amalgam of many of our favourite musicians,” says Steven. “We would take inspiration, for example, from Daevid Allen’s life. He was an Australian hippy who had started Soft Machine and Gong and spent time as a life coach. We would take stuff from the Grateful Dead, Ken Kesey and the Acid Tests. Syd Barrett and Peter Green would have been in there somewhere, too. We would borrow elements from the lives of many of the musicians we listened to in order to create our own imaginary band’s mythology.”

For the record, none of the aforementioned rock legends were ever accidentally shipped off to Africa inside a gorilla suit, which was the fate of one of the musicians in The Incredible Expanding Mindfuck.

The onset of adulthood and its attendant responsibilities burst the bubble of those halcyon school days. Karma fell apart and Steven’s parents made it clear that it was time for him to support himself with a proper job.

“I went to work for a computer company called McDonnell Douglas, who make airplanes, but at the time they had a very big information technology department,” says Steven. “I had a company car and I pretty much had my own diary and I had my own clients and I was doing well.”

Many musical dreams have foundered upon the rocks because of the siren’s call of occupational stability. But Steven strapped himself to the mast of his deepest priority. “All the time, I was making music. Every spare minute I had, I was playing, writing and recording.”

At this stage Steven was still unsure what his primary instrument would be, and in 1986 he joined Pride of Passion as keyboard player. The group boasted the prestige of including former Marillion bassist William “Diz” Minnitt. In fact, Steven replaced another former Marillion member, Brian Jelliman. But Pride of Passion was about as stable as the isotope inside Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant that same year. The band changed its line-up, its musical direction and its name, to Blazing Apostles. By 1987 it was over.

In the meantime Steven had met and started writing songs with a talented northern singer and lyricist, Tim Bowness, another great find in the music-paper classified section. Bonded by a shared love of pop music, art rock, British folk music and Scott Walker, the duo began recording music as No Man is an Island (Except for the Isle of Man). The name seemed like a good idea at the time.

So much for the serious work at hand. Steven also enjoyed messing around. For fun, he started to create music to fit the mythology he and Malcolm had created.

“I would ring him up and say, ‘Hey Malcolm, I’ve recorded the first Porcupine Tree album,’ and I’d bring it over and play it for him. Out of that came early songs like Space Transmission and some of the other things which are on the first record. Malcolm was really the person I was making that music for, just to amuse us both.”

Aided, abetted and egged on by his co-conspirator, Steven dashed off numerous Porcupine Tree songs over the next two years. The music frequently borrowed the psychedelic tropes of other groups, from Soft Machine to Pink Floyd to The Dukes of Stratosphear. Malcolm, in turn, had a go at creating music for The Incredible Expanding Mindfuck, but shortly afterwards he relocated to Devon in 1988 and The Incredible Expanding Mindfuck consequently dissipated from lore to legend, from legend to myth. That is, until Steven later resurrected the fake band’s name for a side project of krautrock-inspired albums in the mid-1990s.

Porcupine Tree, too, might have been relegated to the dustbin of history if not for a burgeoning underground scene of neo-psychedelic music. Steven noticed a potential audience for his playful recordings.

“There was an artist called The Bevis Frond, who was pretty visible in the late ’80s, and actually still going strong to this day, making psychedelic music, quite lo-fi and all made at home. He was getting a fair deal of attention for it. I remember sending a tape to him. Nick Saloman is his real name, and he very kindly called me up and gave me a list of people he thought I should send my tape to. One of the people was Richard Allen, editor of Freakbeat magazine.”

The Nostalgia Factory

When Richard Allen wasn’t co-editing the psychedelic music publication, he could typically be found at underground festivals, watching bands play in a field until the sun came up. The free-festival scene, frequented by New Age travellers, gypsies and hippies, merged with the dance-music rave scene in the late 1980s. One band in particular epitomised the blend of the various factions. With its blend of space rock, techno and ambient music, Ozric Tentacles became, in Richard’s words, “the house band of free festivals.” Their cassette tapes sold thousands of copies. Other groups tried to emulate their success. Freakbeat not only reviewed cassettes by upcoming bands, but also included flexidiscs with the magazine. Richard and Freakbeat co-founder Ivor Trueman decided to capitalise on the nascent scene by starting a record label named Delerium.

“At the time, I was getting lots of tapes,” recalls Richard. “A tape turned up with a really boring insert. It just had two balloons on it and it said ‘Play Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm by Porcupine Tree.’ It had a really neatly handwritten letter. At the time I was only in my early 20s and I was still living at home with my parents, and so the tape kicked around my bedroom for months, along with many other demos and promo cassettes. Fate highlighted Steven’s tape when Tim Preece, a dear friend of mine, who appears as a fake member of Porcupine Tree in the very first promo photo shoot, was heading to a free festival and wanted a tape to play in his car. I grabbed a tape from the pile and gave it to him and it just happened to be Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm. When I arrived at the festival in another vehicle, Tim came up to me and said, ‘That tape you gave to me is amazing!’ I thought, ‘I’d better listen to that then!’ I remember listening to it for the first time on my Walkman when I was cycling to work, and I specifically recall listening to Radioactive Toy and then rewinding it and playing it again. I could see some commercial potential in it, particularly in America.”

When he got home that evening, Richard called Steven to see if anyone had shown any interest in the tape and offered him a slot on a planned Freakbeat compilation album. “I had been holding onto the tape for a while and, at the time, I thought it was amazing that nobody had already offered him a record deal but, in retrospect, I can’t imagine there were many labels queuing to sign a band that played that kind of music.”

The first Delerium release, a compilation titled Psychedelic Psauna, featured underground stalwarts such as Ozric Tentacles, The Bevis Frond and Magic Mushroom Band, and also lesser-known groups such as The Coloured Plank, Cosmic Kangaroos, The Jasmine Love Bomb and Marshmallow Overcoat. Sobering thought: many of these musicians have gone on to name children. Needless to say, Porcupine Tree’s Linton Samuel Dawson didn’t seem out of place in such hallucinogenic company.

Richard’s mail-order company, Freak Emporium, produced a limited reprint of Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm in 1989 and also released its follow-up, The Nostalgia Factory (...and other tips for amateur golfers).

“I hit on the idea that if we put out the tapes with a weird-looking sleeve, people who were buying Ozric Tentacles tapes would buy it,” says Richard. “It was a bit of a con, because I packaged Steven’s music to look like a festival band. But they weren’t. I think in the minds of people who bought it, Porcupine Tree were a bunch of way-out hippies living in a farm somewhere and making this amazing music. In some ways it was manufactured, but that fits in with the spirit of what Steven had done. We managed to make his joke into a reality.”

On the Sunday of Life...

The tapes each sold several hundred copies. Richard then proposed releasing the material as two separate double LPs.

“He said, ‘We’ve had a really good response to the compilation and the cassettes, so we would like to put out your cassettes as albums,’” says Steven. “I said, ‘To be honest, I don’t think a lot of the stuff is good enough. Let’s instead collect the best music from both cassettes and make one double album.’ And that album became On the Sunday of Life...”

Steven set about compiling and re-sequencing the best of the cassette music. Richard came up with a list of potential album titles on an A4 piece of paper for Steven to choose from, while Steven’s friend Mike Bennion created the album art of a woman diving through an orange landscape, seemingly suspended high up in the sky.

“Steven came up with the idea for the album art,” reveals Richard. “He and Mike Bennion the designer borrowed the concept, funnily enough, from a 1930s railway poster of a woman diving in a swimming pool. They then transposed the pose of the swimmer onto a skyline above a town. From the outset Steven wanted Hipgnosis-quality album-cover artwork, which was a bit of a headache for a small label with no budget, but his vision was the right one.”

You’d never suspect that Porcupine Tree’s proper debut album wasn’t made under the influence of anything stronger than a cup of PG Tips. Not after hearing Jupiter Island and Linton Samuel Dawson, psychedelic ditties with helium vocals that sound like Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz.

“Linton Samuel Dawson and Jupiter Island were trying to tap into the vibe of tracks like See Emily Play, Tomorrow Never Knows and Bike Ride to the Moon, psychedelic pop tunes with weird sonic stuff going on,” says Steven. “Maybe I’m proud of them because they’re not things I’ve subsequently refined. I never really did anything like them again and I’m actually still very happy with them.”

Steven’s love of rock music shines through on the song The Nostalgia Factory, which features a wah-wah guitar solo over hyperactive drum-machine programming. Indeed, Third Eye Surfer and On the Sunday of Life... (previously titled Nun’s Cleavage and Clarinet Vignette, respectively, on the original cassette releases) are the only tracks on the album to feature real drums.

“I took a fabulous John Marshall drum solo from the Soft Machine album Six and played over the top of it,” reveals Steven. “Later on, when I became better known, I had to clear all that with John. But at the time, of course, I didn’t think it was going to be an issue. I just used to steal stuff from records. I stole flute motifs and drum rhythms. But, in my defence, this was the golden era of sampling. The Beastie Boys, DJ Shadow and De La Soul were constructing entire records from samples. So it wasn’t like I was doing anything particularly unfashionable. Quite the opposite. I was doing something that was quite hip. I was just sampling from records to give my records a broader musical palette and a wider vocabulary of sound. It was only later that I had to go back and replace all that stuff.”

Sometimes the samples were unconventional. And the Swallows Dance Above the Sun, a groovy rocker that bears the influence of the “baggy” funky drum sounds of Madchester bands such as The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays, begins with an ominous voice that intones, “Did you know that bad girls go to hell?” It concludes with the rather alarming non sequitur of a voice that says, “I want you to put Felix’s penis on me.”

The source? Old sexploitation B-movies directed by Doris Wishman, the so-called female Ed Wood, whose filmography includes Nude on the Moon, Keyholes Are for Peeping, A Night to Dismember and Dildo Heaven. You won’t find these movies on Netflix.

“There was a TV programme on Channel 4 in the late ’80s called something like The Incredibly Strange Film Show. For me it was essential viewing because I discovered Luis Buñuel, Russ Meyer, John Waters and Sam Raimi. At the time you couldn’t even rent Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies because they’d been branded video nasties. It was the equivalent of discovering underground music. Because I wasn’t really confident as a singer, I was always looking for other narrative elements that I could hang instrumental music on. A lot of that was using found voices and snatches of dialogue. And the Swallows Dance Above the Sun is a great example. Compared to a lot of other pieces on that record, the lyrics are a little more serious, so I punctured the atmosphere with a moment of absurdity.”

On the Sunday of Life... includes a number of off-kilter interludes, such as a daft science-fiction soliloquy (Space Transmission), a tape machine unspooling into chaos (Message from a Self-Destructing Turnip), and what sounds like backward Russian voices over a Frank Zappa-like guitar jam (Queen Quotes Crowley).

There was plenty of head-trip music, too. The meditative melodies of Music for the Head and the title track float on cosmic currents of flute and sitar. Listen close to the pensive slide-guitar instrumental It Will Rain for a Thousand Years and you’ll hear one of Steven’s home recordings of a rainstorm. Best of all is the classic space-rock epic Radioactive Toy, re-recorded for the album. The lyrics, written by Steven, reflected the Cold War fears of the era he grew up in.

“It was inspired by Threads, which is one of the most harrowing pieces of filmmaking I’ve seen in my life. It came out around the mid-1980s. I saw it again recently. We watched it on the tour bus, actually, and it’s still as powerful as ever. A lot of culture at the time was inspired by the spectre of nuclear war. You think of films like When the Wind Blows and records like Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which has that Four Minute Warning dialogue on it. Radioactive Toy taps into those fears.”

As Richard Allen had predicted, Radioactive Toy had crossover appeal. BBC radio DJ Mark Radcliffe regularly played it on his show.

Steven: “I remember the first time my mum heard my music on BBC radio she was really excited. Much more than I was, in fact! I think that she was beginning to understand that maybe I did have something that could develop into a career.”

The same year as On the Sunday of Life... was released, Steven’s band with Tim Bowness, now with the abbreviated name no-man, were signed to One Little Indian Records and also received a publishing deal. Steven made a crossroads decision. To the astonishment of McDonnell Douglas, their promising young employee resigned immediately.

“I ended up working for them for five years. I thought it would only be five months! I could finally go to my mum and my dad and say, ‘I’ve got a record contract and I’m giving this up.’ I didn’t hesitate for a second. I think a lot of people might have said to themselves, ‘OK, I’ve got a good career here. I’m earning a good wage. I’ve been doing this five years now and I’ve got a lot invested in this. Wouldn’t it be wiser to stick with it?’ But I still knew that my destiny was to be a professional musician.”

His sideline in Porcupine Tree was another handy revenue stream. “Steven did have to run On the Sunday of Life... past One Little Indian due to his no-man recording agreement but, thankfully, they passed on it,” says Richard.

Both Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm and The Nostalgia Factory were reissued on cassette that same year in a limited edition of 300 copies each. Three years later, Delerium released Yellow Hedgerow Dreamscape, a limited-edition compilation of material from the two cassettes that hadn’t made it onto On the Sunday of Life...

Voyage 34

Heard the one about the man who took an LSD trip and met himself coming down a staircase? The tale of “Brian,” who was reportedly crushed by the experience, was recounted on the 1966 documentary album L.S.D. Richard Allen passed the album on to Steven and suggested that he incorporate it into Porcupine Tree music.

“It’s presented as documentary, but it’s clearly staged,” says Steven. “It was basically propaganda that was created in order to dissuade kids from taking LSD. Although the whole thing is presented as real, it does smack of being scripted. I think that’s part of the appeal of it. There’s something very kitschy about that. It was crying out to be set to music.”

As someone disinclined to use his nose like a vacuum cleaner, Steven couldn’t have been less of an authority on mind-altering chemicals. Nevertheless he was fascinated by drug culture even if he never wanted to be a part of it. The one time Steven experienced an underground festival put on by Freakbeat, he felt wholly out of place among the attendees. After all, it’s not every day you encounter the sort of people who would hang around with the Tibetan Ukrainian Mountain Troupe, a circus commune that lived in vans and a converted double-decker bus.

“It was a lifestyle I wasn’t interested in at all. The psychedelic thing for me was always like playing a role.”

Voyage 34 played up Porcupine Tree’s supposed counter-culture bona fides. The original sleeve art, designed by Richard, even nicked the swirling spiral pattern and quizzical liner notes from the Timothy Leary album L.S.D. Originally intended as the second half of a double-album follow-up to On the Sunday of Life..., Voyage 34 was released as a single instead.

“It was trying to span the worlds of ambient techno and electronic music, and the worlds of progressive rock and psychedelic music. I sampled Van der Graaf Generator and then used a David Gilmour-like guitar pattern as an anchor for it. At the same time, it was positioned to be very much in the world that The Orb and Future Sound of London were operating in: ambient trance with a four-to-the-floor pulse and electronic rhythm.”

Voyage 34 also includes a vocal sample from the Dead Can Dance song As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins.

“I had a DAT tape full of samples I’d lifted off records of Lisa Gerrard’s extraordinary voice and Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, the female Bulgarian singers. When I was looking for something that would be a top line for this instrumental, I would reach for that DAT and see if something would fit. There was a lot of serendipity involved because you had to find something in the right key, the right rhythm or the right feel. That Lisa Gerrard sample just seemed to fit beautifully over the top of what I had.”

Steven always regarded Voyage 34 as a one-off exercise in the style of music that was popular at the time. “There was only so much I felt I could do with that approach to music. Ultimately, I felt my strength lay in creating music with more structure and song elements,” he says.

The single reached number 19 on the NME indie chart due to its adoption by dance DJs who picked up on it, helping to further Porcupine Tree’s reach. Delerium also released a remix by electronic group Astralasia that was intended for chill-out rooms in nightclubs. Their remix cheekily tweaked the narration sample to say, “This trip really is necessary.”

Richard Allen: “I remember a few years later, I was at The Marquee and I was talking about Porcupine Tree. A girl overheard me and she was raving, ‘I listened to Voyage 34 fifty times while I was tripping. Porcupine Tree really knew what they were doing with LSD. They blow my mind.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her Steve hadn’t touched anything stronger than a glass of wine.”

Up the Downstair

For Steven Wilson, May 1993 was a momentous occasion. It was the date that the two nobodies in no-man were seemingly destined to become mainstream stars following the release of their debut album, Loveblows & Lovecries — A Confession. That same month, Porcupine Tree released its second album.

As its M. C. Escher-like title suggests, Up the Downstair is headspace music that merits accompaniment from a lava lamp. The album cover even looks like a blurry psychedelic blob. The album artwork came from Dutch brothers Nop and Win Machielse, who had sent some photos to Delerium.

Unlike the previous Porcupine Tree release, Up the Downstair was conceived and recorded as a proper album, although Richard Allen still had a hand in track selection.

“Steve presented me with a number of demo tracks and asked me if I thought they fit in with the overall marketing strategy I was pursuing. I remember that I rejected a funky number with a train sound in it called The End of Music and another track because they were much more towards Steve’s Donna Summer sensibilities. The only thing close to that style left on the album is Synesthesia. There were also some tracks that later appeared on the Staircase Infinities mini-album, one of which was called Navigator, the title of a poem I wrote that Steve took a liking to. Unfortunately he couldn’t get the words to fit the music so it remained an instrumental.”

Burning Sky and the epic title track combine the space grooves of The Orb, the ambient dub of Future Sound of London and the psychedelic explorations of Steve Hillage, yet they’re stamped with Wilson’s musical personality and a greater progressive-rock sensibility. The snappy Synesthesia offers an early peek at Wilson’s ability to craft shorter pieces with big melodic hooks. It’s also the first time that he layered vocal harmonies, a technique that became a signature feature of his music.

Like its predecessor, the album includes several interstitial tracks such as What Are You Listening To, Monuments Burn into Moments and Siren.

“They serve as a breathing space between the more substantial works. I liked the idea of giving them titles. In naming them and making them part of the track listing, you’re telling the audience, these tracks may be short and incidental, but they’re just as important to the overall musical journey.”

The dynamic ballad Always Never, which ends with a mushrooming guitar blowout, showcases Steven’s use of light and shade. Perhaps the most enduring track is the closer Fadeaway, which gently seesaws between the melancholy downpull of the whispered vocal and the sanguine updraft of the guitar refrain.

The album is also notable for its contributions by several future full-time Porcupine Tree band members. Colin Edwin, Australian by birth, British by naturalisation, was a couple of years behind Steven at school. Steven invited him to guest on Always Never.

“Colin was a bass player and I wasn’t,” says Steven. “I wanted the music to have more of a band identity. That was important to me. I was boring myself by doing everything on my own. I wanted to bring in other voices and other musicians. Whereas I might have just played something quick and dirty on the track, Colin added a more thoughtful approach to the bass part.”

The title track includes keyboards by Richard Barbieri and vocals by his wife Suzanne.

“At the time, I was working with Steven as part of no-man, which was his main project at that point, with Tim,” Barbieri recalled in a 2012 interview. “He said that he had this side project called Porcupine Tree and would I be interested in playing on it. I said, ‘Yeah, fine.’ His enthusiasm rubbed off on me. I went around to his place and listened to some of the stuff and it was very kind of spacey and trancey. He wanted a lot of old-style analogue electronics, which was perfect for me. So I brought around all my old stuff and just started jamming with the music and trying things.”

Barbieri committed sounds to a DAT tape for Steven to sample.

“Part of the vocabulary of Porcupine Tree developed very early on from the way that Richard approaches keyboards,” says Steven.

There’s one other future Porcupine Tree band member on these recordings: Gavin Harrison. Dissatisfied with the drum sounds on the original recordings in 1993, Steven recruited the drummer to record new drum parts for the album in 2004. That move may seem akin to George Lucas altering his Star Wars movies years later, but the songwriter rejects the comparison.

“Unlike George Lucas, I had to! I needed to replace the drum loops that I had sampled from Miles Davis, or negotiate a settlement as I did with John Marshall on the previous record. At that point I thought, let’s just have Gavin play the drums anyway, because some of the drum-machine programs were pretty primitive. The brief to Gavin was, don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Stay pretty true to the original patterns that I programmed. Gavin made it sound human and organic, less like an album of glorified demos.”

The second Porcupine Tree album was made under vastly different circumstances from the debut no-man album. One Little Indian had dictated the direction of Loveblows & Lovecries. By contrast, Steven had far more autonomy in making Up the Downstair, even though Richard had played an A&R role in the final track selection.

The no-man album struggled to find an audience. The Porcupine Tree album was a modest success.

“Up the Downstair got an amazing review in Melody Maker, the equivalent of a five-star review. The best thing that ever happened to me was not being successful early in my career writing compromised music. If it had been, I could have been locked into a pattern and a career path that would have made me very unhappy. Failure was the best thing that could have happened to me at that time. It made me say to myself, you know what, forget it, I’m not going to write contrived mainstream music. I’m just going to do what comes naturally and if that’s a 30-minute ambient piece or a 3-minute pop tune, so be it. That set the template for the rest of my career.”

Though no-man continued and would later flourish artistically, the balance of Steven’s time started to shift toward Porcupine Tree. He put a live band together and played his first shows under the name.

“There were a lot of good things happening, which honestly weren’t happening with no-man,” says Wilson. “It was like we were trying really hard with no-man and getting nowhere, and I was hardly trying at all with Porcupine Tree and getting some interest. So it was suggested to me by Richard Allen that it would be a really good idea to put a live band together. I was really resistant, because I hated playing live.”

Allen returned with an offer Wilson couldn’t refuse: an opportunity to play a session on Mark Radcliffe’s show on BBC Radio One.

“That was the clincher,” says Wilson. “Wow, that’s big.” Wilson cobbled together what he might have imagined would be a makeshift live unit. He called up Barbieri, who had become a valuable ally. The keyboard player had performed on a track on no-man’s debut album, helped out on a mix of Voyage 34 and infused the title track of Porcupine Tree’s Up the Downstair with dark plumes of inky textures.

“He was someone I knew was into that kind of music and had never had the chance to work in a rock band,” recalls Wilson. “He’d always been in these rather exquisite art-pop projects. I knew that his background was more rock music.”

For his part, Barbieri responded to Wilson’s enthusiasm, work ethic and obvious talent. “He had a respect for my role and for what I’d done before and what I was contributing to the band,” says Barbieri. “That was enough to keep me happy and interested in being in that band environment.”

Wilson also called up Colin Edwin. The bassist, a schoolmate of Wilson, had already guested on Up the Downstair. On Always Never, Edwin played a bassline that bobs as serenely as a fisherman’s float in a rippled pond. Wilson completed the rhythm section by recruiting Chris Maitland, a splashy drummer from Cambridge who had played on no-man’s second tour. Maitland, a handsome fellow with long, dark, curly springs of hair, had a flamboyant rock ’n’ roll flair about him. He tended to dress as if he’d stepped out of an Errol Flynn pirate movie.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Steven just thought, well, who have I got in my address book? I’ve got one guy,” says Maitland. “I don’t know whether it comes down to: is someone available? Can they cut it? And do they seem a nice enough guy that I can ask them what I want them to do, and can they bring something to the table? I reckon it’s as simple as that.”

“We weren’t four people who’d sought each other out,” says Edwin. “We’d been put together in a sense. Steven had worked with all of us in different areas, but it was certainly a mesh of personalities that worked quite well. I guess we complemented each other.”

During the band’s week-long rehearsal, each musician worked to adapt to Wilson’s material, including his original drum-machine programming. “When I turned up to rehearsal, I tried to replicate his drum parts,” says Maitland. “He stopped and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I thought, oh, he’s cross with me. Why? He said, ‘That’s not what I got you into this band to do. I want you to do your thing. That’s just my drum-machine version.’”

Porcupine Tree’s live debut was at The Nags Head in High Wycombe on 4 December 1993. Over the years, the now-shuttered pub hosted acts such as John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Blondie, U2 and the Sex Pistols. “I promoted the show after the local promoter pulled out after a dispute with the venue and tried to cancel the gig without telling me,” says Allen. “On the day of the show, the landlord was bemused and said he’d had calls from all over the country!”

In the case of Porcupine Tree, the audience didn’t know what to expect. An aura of carefully cultivated dark mystery preceded them. The landlord may have worried that Porcupine Tree would prove as volatile as Throbbing Gristle who, infamously, caused a near riot in the venue when frontman Genesis P-Orridge poured fake blood over his head, even as band member Cosey Fanni Tutti doffed her top, and then threw a table into the audience. But Wilson mostly looked down at his Stratocaster and hid behind his curtain of Gandalf-length hair. Maitland kept his shirt on. And not so much as a guitar pick was thrown into the audience. That’s not to imply Porcupine Tree were dull. First time out, they sounded extraordinary. By the time Maitland closed the show with a sucker-punch flurry on his drum kit during Not Beautiful Anymore, the audience was baying its enthusiasm.

“The very first Porcupine Tree gig was absolutely packed, although it was a small place,” recalls Edwin. “No one had any idea who was in the band, or what the band was, or anything. A guy called Alan Duffy had written some of the original lyrics. I clearly remember someone coming up to me and saying, ‘Which one are you, Wilson or Duffy?’”

The Sky Moves Sideways

Despite the band’s gigs, Porcupine Tree was still very much a Steven Wilson effort at that time. By 1994 he had not only completed work on no-man’s second album, Flowermouth, but was also pretty far along on the third Porcupine Tree album.

“When we played live that first time, which was December 1993, Up the Downstair had come out earlier that year and The Sky Moves Sideways was probably half done,” says Wilson. “It was going to be another completely solo thing. In fact, at that time my plan was that the album would be just this one track. So The Sky Moves Sideways would be one 50-minute piece.”

But Wilson’s enthusiasm for The Sky Moves Sideways had waned since the first live shows with the band. For the better part of a year he had been recording the complex opus off and on in his bedroom studio, nicknamed No Man’s Land. Wilson utilised ADAT, the same kind of magnetic tape used in VHS machines, so the tapes sometimes got chewed up. The creator had a master tape. Wilson painstakingly pieced together the interlocking and tessellated parts of The Sky Moves Sideways, but the linear format made it difficult to move sections around and change the arrangement. “It’s like putting a jigsaw puzzle together,” says Wilson.

“What is the most satisfying way to sequence these parts that tells a satisfying story? But let’s just say that one of the reasons I’m not so proud of The Sky Moves Sideways is that not all of it did work. Because it was tape, I was kind of stuck with this form. I remember at the end I was tearing my hair out and I was thinking, it’s all rubbish. God, I wish I could start this from scratch now that I’ve got this band. It would be so much better that way.”

The Sky Moves Sideways remained in limbo while Porcupine Tree played more live gigs. Within the first six months of 1994, Porcupine Tree had even played two shows in the Netherlands. Eager to capitalise on the momentum, Wilson convened a live session at Doghouse studios in Henley in July. Barbieri was overseas at the time, but the line-up was augmented by one of Edwin’s pals, percussionist Rick Edwards. The result? A 40-minute jam titled Moonloop.

“I think it was the anniversary of the moon landings,” says Edwin. “I can remember being in the studio and doing the recording and then going into the little chill-out room in the studio with a TV. When I came out, there was a documentary on the TV about the moon landing.”

Wilson traces his own lunar fixation to a vinyl record of Walter Cronkite’s Man on the Moon that he had discovered in Oxfam. Perhaps one reason why Moonloop is so chilled-out is that it was a subconscious reaction to the particularly hot day of the session. Wilson later edited the piece and added a constructed coda to it. “I can remember Richard Allen, the band manager, sitting there and watching us while we were playing,” says Edwin. “I had this thought in my mind, that it shouldn’t be a self-indulgent jam. We should play something listenable. Having an audience, having somebody there, made us perhaps a bit more restrained. But it made for a more involving listen.”

Wilson felt Moonloop was by far Porcupine Tree’s strongest material to date. His conundrum was that he had already invested so much time on The Sky Moves Sideways. To abandon it would be like walking away from a half-constructed bridge. He decided to call in additional builders. “During the very last part of The Sky Moves Sideways recording process, I thought, okay, let’s try and get these guys involved with this record,” says Wilson. “I think Chris overdubbed some live hi-hat to the album, not live drums, which has a lot more human feel. Richard added some keyboards.”

Wilson made additional changes. He abandoned the idea of creating a single piece and, instead, split the title track into two parts. They became bookends to three new pieces he had written. Rather than include Moonloop on The Sky Moves Sideways, Wilson opted to hold it for release as a single. The A-side of that single was a languid, acoustic-based song called Stars Die. It was a band recording that hinted at the later direction of albums such as Stupid Dream and Lightbulb Sun. “In hindsight, I would definitely have put Stars Die on the record,” says Wilson. “It’s the strongest song that I had from that whole period. Maybe there was also some kind of allegiance to the idea you could make these really strong EPs and singles and they didn’t have to be taken from albums. I always loved that.”

The blue sleeve of the Stars Die single depicted a burning piano falling from the sky and about to crash into a footbridge in Henley-on-Thames. In retrospect, Wilson wishes he had used the Stars Die artwork for the cover of The Sky Moves Sideways. The cover art of Porcupine Tree’s third album is fairly sedate. A red telephone box stands as a lonely sentinel in a rocky, alien landscape. Wilson and the late photographer Claudine Schafer took photographs for the sleeve next to a mountain in Wales. Next, a design studio used an early iteration of Photoshop to create a composite image for the sleeve. The result looks like a cross between the cover of Who’s Next and a 1970s episode of Doctor Who filmed in an abandoned mining quarry.

“It was very expensive,” says Richard Allen. “Looking at it now, it looks very amateurish. At the time, it was something that was quite cutting edge, because that technology had only just started coming through.”

The sleeve of The Sky Moves Sideways looks like a budget version of Hipgnosis, the design studio that created beautifully crafted and iconic covers for the likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. “It was all about pushing the right buttons to attract the right kind of audience,” admits Wilson.

The music had, after all, shifted from the space rock of earlier albums toward a progressive-rock sound that channelled Pink Floyd. That band had been a notable influence on Porcupine Tree since Radioactive Toy. “I think that I was aware that there was an appetite there for someone that would be more true to that sound and spirit,” says Wilson. “You have to understand, at this point in time I’m doing anything I can to get a foothold in the industry so that I can be a professional musician. I’ve given up my day job. I’m not making money, no-man’s not selling any records. I do music for commercials to try and keep myself going. I was aware that Radioactive Toy had gone down phenomenally well and so, I guess, I kind of made a record that I thought might do well.”

The Sky Moves Sideways includes exhalations of David Gilmour-like guitar, exotic siren-song synthesiser straight out of Welcome to the Machine, and The Great Gig in the Sky-style wordless singing courtesy of vocalist Suzanne Barbieri, Richard’s wife. Even the drum-machine program seems to mimic the relaxed-wrist patterns of Nick Mason.

To be fair, although The Sky Moves Sideways is too overtly influenced by Pink Floyd, Wilson’s musical ambition elevates it from mere pastiche. The Sky Moves Sideways Phase One includes a movement with an almost jungle-house rhythm, shifts into an ambient interlude that drifts along latitudinal currents of Colin Edwin’s bass, and explodes into a freak-out flute section courtesy of long-time Steven Wilson collaborator Theo Travis. Phase 2 boasts multiple six-string solos by reluctant guitar hero Wilson. Indeed, the music was far more ambitious than what Pink Floyd was doing at the time on The Division Bell.

As a change of pace, Wilson brings a dramatic snarl to the riff of Dislocated Day. The centrepiece of the album is a classic ballad, The Moon Touches Your Shoulder. Wilson sings the unabashed love song over harp-like ripples of keyboard and layers of electric and acoustic guitars that bubble and burst, ebb and flow, surge and recede. To this day, it remains an aural joy. Dislocated Day, The Moon Touches Your Shoulder and Prepare Yourself were the last completely solo Porcupine Tree tracks for quite some time.

Back in the early 1990s, progressive rock’s Dark Ages, The Sky Moves Sideways stood out from its peers. “I always remember the gig we did at a festival in Holland for The Sky Moves Sideways tour,” says Allen. “The audience’s minds were blown because they were like, we just saw a progressive band that doesn’t sound like Genesis!”

Simon Clarke, who later launched Carbon Nation: The Independent Porcupine Tree Magazine, had read a review of The Sky Moves Sideways that piqued his interest. “I went into a record shop and I saw the blue vinyl edition for a fiver. I thought, I’m having that. I slapped it onto a turntable and pretty much instantly thought, this is everything I’m looking for from a new band.”

Porcupine Tree fondly revisited The Sky Moves Sideways Phase 1 at its landmark shows at Radio City Music Hall and the Royal Albert Hall in 2010. But the musicians view the third album as a transitional one. “I didn’t really know what Porcupine Tree was or what it was going to be at that stage,” reflects Barbieri. “Maybe Steven didn’t, because The Sky Moves Sideways was the first sprawling, progressive album with very large musical landscapes and soundscapes, and quite different from Up the Downstair. It was changing quite quickly right back then. I’m not sure how Steven feels about it. I actually prefer Up the Downstair, to be honest.”

Wilson seconds that opinion.

“It’s one of those times in my life, and there have only been a couple, where, by the time something came out, I wasn’t interested in it. I was already somewhere else. In some ways it’s ironic, because now I’m a solo artist and I’m doing exactly what I want. At that point in time, I think it was better for me to be working in collaboration with other musicians. The thing is, when you’re young, you tend to wear influences on your sleeve. You could say that I still do that, but I think the difference now is that I have a very strong musical personality of my own. Perhaps then I didn’t. So The Sky Moves Sideways, when I listen to it now, I hear a lot of obvious references. I think that’s why, at that point, I thought, okay, I need to make this a band now. I need to be part of a pooling of musical personalities rather than just carrying on doing what I was doing.”

On the fourth album, Porcupine Tree would transform into a proper band.

Signify

Looking at the cover of Signify, you might think to yourself, those Edwardians were a kinky bunch. But the image of a vintage-dressed woman bound and suspended by ropes isn’t the period piece it appears to be. Graphic designer John Blackford, who later directed the video for Porcupine Tree’s Strip the Soul, had trussed up his girlfriend for a photograph in his portfolio. When Wilson met Blackford via a mutual acquaintance, he was immediately struck by the image. “I thought, that’s amazing, can we use that?” says Wilson. “It related quite well to the song Waiting, which has a slightly pervy undercurrent. The song has a line in it about waiting to be tied up. There was something that resonated just enough for me to think, you know what, this could be a perfect cover.”

The lyrics to Waiting touch on some of the extreme ways in which people seek escape from themselves. Elsewhere on Signify, Sleep of No Dreaming, Every Home Is Wired and Dark Matter explore similar existential themes. “It’s probably the first time Steven started thinking about themes and topics and ideas,” says Barbieri. “They’re observational lyrics, really. You suddenly got the sense that the songs are about something.”

Wilson can pinpoint the exact moment the theme began to emerge.

“Dark Matter started out as a song called Tour Song, and it was all about the mundane life of being on the road. I remember Richard Allen saying to me, you can’t release that. The lyrics obviously mean something to you, but to other people it will sound dreary and boring. So I reworked it in a more universal way to be about the ongoing struggle most of us have to do something significant with our time on earth. That was one of the early songs that I wrote for the record, and it span off into looking at religion and various other things that people use to try to make sense of the gift of life. In many respects, that has been the subject matter of nearly every album I’ve made ever since.”

When Signify was released in 1996, it seemed more in tune with the musical zeitgeist than The Sky Moves Sideways had been. Popular music had lost the bright, lush, synthetic sounds of the 1980s in favour of stripped-down and elemental aesthetics. Grunge had reached its apex, Britpop was in ascendance, and trip-hop was making its mark. Signify didn’t fit into any of those areas, nor was it overtly influenced by them, but the album had a harder edge and grittier sensibility. A big influence on its music was krautrock.

The German music of the 1970s, characterised by its clipped motorik rhythms and chilly textures drawn from classical, jazz and psychedelic music, was back in vogue at the time.

“In my defence, I loved krautrock long before it became trendy,” says Wilson. “I grew up listening to Can, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Popol Vuh.”

Wilson indulged his obsession in those artists by creating a fake krautrock band. He resurrected the name The Incredible Expanding Mindfuck, IEM, for the project. Richard Allen didn’t want to release IEM on Delerium. At Wilson’s suggestion, he created a new label called Chromatic. Following a familiar template, IEM was packaged as if it was an underground group with a rich heritage. The personnel on the first two IEM albums included a certain drummer named Jennis Clivack.

“The history of it is that it’s one of my silly made-up names,” explains Maitland. “When it got to Steven’s IEM albums, I thought, wouldn’t it be nice, instead of always playing with the same old people, and this is different music, why don’t I go under a pseudonym? So I called myself Jennis Clivack on the first two IEM albums.”

The krautrock side project spilled over into Signify. The title track has its roots in a Wilson cover version of Hallogallo by Neu! Wilson’s original demo starts out as the Neu! song and segues into his own composition. “The idea was that Signify would be like Metallica playing Hallogallo, which kind of makes sense if you listen to it,” says Wilson.

Edwin, also a long-time fan of German bands such as Can, co-wrote Idiot Prayer. “We didn’t consciously sit down and say, let’s do a krautrock track,” he says. “You pick up on an idea with a certain beat and you fall into that area. I came up with, I guess, a pretty strong riff. Once you have a strong foundation, it becomes easier to build on top.”

Elsewhere on the album, the acoustic-based Waiting Phase One and the delightful vocal harmonies of Every Home Is Wired accentuated Wilson’s pop hooks. Maitland relished the opportunity to sing backing vocals on the album and on stage. “I thought I was being Freddie Mercury,” Maitland chuckles. “I’ll sing anyone’s harmonies.”

The drummer has the distinction of writing the only Porcupine Tree song not to include a Wilson credit. Light Mass Prayers consists of striated layers of Maitland’s vocals recorded by Wilson. “I felt so supported by him. Every time I said, I’d like to do this, he’d say, all right,” recalls Maitland. “I grew up on all that Cambridge choral stuff. I still love choirs. The way that track faded out, like as if it was slowly disappearing into the distance, that’s what I was trying to achieve in Light Mass Prayers. Something atmospheric.”

Wilson’s renewed interest in heavy rock, which had been mostly neglected since his early teens, was reflected in the buzz-saw guitar riff of Sever. A hint of things still to come in later years. It’s one of Barbieri’s favourite songs on the album. “Suddenly we’re playing Mellotrons and Hammond organs and it all just felt more organic,” says Barbieri. “It’s the first time we all went into the studio together and played as a band. We did our own overdubs as well. It’s the first time we were involved and consulted on things and we put in ideas and our own kind of arrangements. It started to feel like a band then.”

Intermediate Jesus, a composition credited to the entire band, emerged from a jam session at a studio belonging to Katrina and the Waves in Cambridge. Additional improvisations from the session were released on the album Metanoia. Though Signify still has elements of Porcupine Tree’s earlier space-rock sound on Intermediate Jesus and Idiot Prayer, the band had begun to temper its cosmic jams in favour of more articulate songs. Dark Matter, a moody piece that suddenly plunges into a black-hole maelstrom of keyboards and guitar, showcased Wilson’s compositional growth.

Though the Porcupine Tree founder wrote most of Signify’s songs, as he would continue to do on every album, his band helped develop the record’s vibrant sound. “I was pleased with the whole album on a sonic level,” says Edwin. “Regardless of how involved I was in any particular part of it, I thought it was a really good album from start to finish.”

For Wilson, Porcupine Tree was no longer merely a side project to his activities in no-man. It had become his primary focus. “Signify was the album where I really felt it was a band,” says Maitland, who relished the freedom to come up with drum parts such as the complicated left-hand patterns of Waiting Phase Two. “It was the closest we got to all being involved, all working hard, all working in the same direction.” Barbieri, Edwin, Maitland and Wilson put their shoulders down and got to work on promoting the album.

Coma Divine

On Sunday 10 November 1996, Porcupine Tree’s Signify tour wound up at a grotty venue called The Richmond in Carlisle. The attendance tally: 61 people. Wilson was embarrassed that Richard Barbieri, who had previously been in a world-class touring band, was now playing in venues that Wilson likens to toilets. Put it this way: the dressing rooms made the infamous toilet cubicle in Trainspotting look like an Armitage Shanks showroom.

“A lot of people I knew said to me, why are you doing this? But I’ve got quite a good intuition about people and about their talent. I kind of believed in what we were doing,” says Barbieri. “It also helped having Chris there because, although he hadn’t had a high profile, he had worked quite a lot professionally before. So he was always obsessing about things: looking good, sounding good, and just the whole professional idea of putting on a show. And so the two of us were constantly fighting to try to get the production level raised, even when we were playing small pubs and clubs.”

The admiration is mutual.

“He and I were constantly trying to tidy up the stage from Steven’s wires and bloody tool boxes,” laughs Maitland. Early fan Simon Clarke rates Porcupine Tree’s stage show, created by Ozric Tentacles’ lighting technician Jasper Johns, as an impressive display for such small venues. “You get into the little club and there’s a backdrop projecting oil slides, very Floyd ’67. Loads and loads of dry ice,” says Clarke, who recalls they were a damn good live band.

Porcupine Tree typically employed one roadie, who drove the gear in a converted telecommunications van nicknamed the horse box due to its resemblance to an equine transport vehicle. When the musicians weren’t squished up in the front of the horse box, they often carpooled in Wilson’s Ford Sierra and used Maitland’s mobile phone to coordinate with the tour manager. Whoever was driving typically controlled the tape deck. “There was only one band that we could all agree that we all liked, and that was Zeppelin,” says Maitland. “It felt grand. The four of us, in this car, getting slowly bigger and better. We all knew why we were doing it. That was the point, it seemed to me, where our differences were making us unique and we were enjoying our similarities.”

The band developed a number of in-jokes, often instigated by Maitland and abetted by tour manager Glenn Povey. For example, during a 1996 show at the Cambridge Boat Race, each band member discovered they’d received a different set list. Wilson had a no-man set list, Barbieri had a Pink Floyd set list, Maitland had a Queen set list, and Edwin had a set list consisting of novelty hits such as The Birdie Song.

“Camaraderie becomes very important,” says Wilson. “If you’re enjoying each other’s company then you can put up with stuff. Humour is a big part of that. Chris is a very funny guy.”

Despite touring in less comfort than a travelling pantomime troupe, Edwin recalls that the band endured it all with grace. “Generally, there was quite a good atmosphere around the gigs,” says the bass player. “I always felt that, as long as we could carry on, we would reach an audience eventually.”

During the Signify tour, the audience had begun to change. Out went the space-rock crusties who could talk your ear off about ley lines and stone circles. In came progressive-rock geeks. Porcupine Tree’s support slot on the 1996 Marillion tour, a welcome change from playing with acts such as Ozric Tentacles and Amon Düül II, accelerated that shift. “I loved improvisational music and love space rock and Hawkwind and all of that stuff, but I didn’t identify with the kind of archetypal fan of those bands,” says Wilson. “Whereas I did identify with more of an archetypal fan of Marillion: professional people who loved good-quality music.”

Though Porcupine Tree shows remained sparsely attended, there was one tour stop that had boosted morale ever since The Sky Moves Sideways: Italy. Credit Nicola “Nick” Vannini, the owner of Italian distribution company Audioglobe, which still distributes Porcupine Tree to this day. Vannini made it his personal mission to get Porcupine Tree played on the air. “A radio station in Rome called Radio Rock absolutely fell in love with it,” says Allen. “It was on rotation during the day. They were playing Radioactive Toy constantly. We had no idea this was going on. I remember seeing sales of records in Italy from the statements I was getting from our UK distributor. And then we got an invite from Radio Rock to play a gig. They said, we’ll fly you over and we’ll put you up. We had no idea what to expect.”

Before show time in Rome, Porcupine Tree’s roadie went on stage to check the gear. To this day, Chris Maitland recalls the roar of over 1,200 people inside the sold-out venue. For a band accustomed to playing to fewer than 100 people on many nights, it was staggering. The audience even sang along to Radioactive Toy. “It gave us an insight into what could happen if we got the same kind of exposure in England or America,” says Wilson. “It was insane. It was a little glimpse of being a rock star. Beautiful Italian women queuing up at the door. What’s not to love?”

Italy was the obvious place to record a live album. It helped that Barbieri’s sister, Rosemary, who sadly died in 2006, was able to use her fluent Italian as a translator and also help out on the merch stand. The band returned to Rome in 1996 to record its sold-out shows at The Frontiera. Wilson figured that they’d be able to find something usable from the three nights. He still ended up rerecording all his vocals and many of his guitar parts.

Even so, the double album, released in 1997, captures the group’s verve and vigour. “When someone says to me, I want to buy one Porcupine Tree album, which one should it be? I would probably say Coma Divine, because it gives a breadth of material up until that time,” says Maitland. “It’s still my best advert for what I did with Porcupine Tree.”

Allen admits that if it weren’t for Italy, he and the band may have called it a day. “Delerium made no money from Porcupine Tree until Coma Divine, as everything we made was reinvested in the next thing. What kept Porcupine Tree going was Freak Emporium, my mail-order business. That funded it, plus the fact that the guys in the band never took any money. It was, essentially, a self-financing, non-profit machine.”

If anything, the disparity between the band’s success in Italy and the lack of a breakthrough elsewhere revealed the limits of Delerium’s financial resources and clout. By then, Wilson was writing pieces such as Even Less, Piano Lessons, Pure Narcotic and Stranger by the Minute for the next album. The new songs signalled a more radical departure from the band’s earlier material.

“It was the first time I’d really written a song-based record,” says Wilson. “I think we all probably sat down with Richard and said, well, this is a record that really should have a shot at the mainstream. Delerium, for better or worse, is known as an underground psychedelic, space-rock label.”

The band signed to Snapper for its next album, Stupid Dream (1999), but retained Richard Allen as its manager for several more years. Wilson praises Allen’s work ethic and unerring belief in the band. “He had an office. He had staff on the premises. Let’s just say he had credibility. It wasn’t just some bloke working out of his bedroom,” says Wilson. “He was fearless as well. He would ring up the editor of Melody Maker and might be told to get lost. I would never do that.”

Porcupine Tree’s tenure on the Delerium label produced a wealth of material that bolsters the case for the band’s greatness. Even in its infancy, Porcupine Tree produced music that often holds up decades later. For all its flaws, Delerium was perfect for Porcupine Tree in one crucial respect: it afforded the fledgling band the sort of patient freedom it may not have found on another label. It served as an incubator for the musicians to experiment, hone their sound and coalesce as an extraordinary unit. Delerium transformed a fake band into a real one. Take another bow, Richard Barbieri, Colin Edwin, Chris Maitland, Steven Wilson and Delerium Records.

Stephen Humphries
stephenhumphries.blogspot.com

Steven Wilson on remastering this box set

These albums have been mastered twice before. The original CD and vinyl releases came out at a time when I didn’t pay much attention to mastering. Because of my fairly basic home-studio setup and recording inexperience, my mixes sounded rather eccentric in places, and there are all sorts of other issues that could have been corrected, but weren’t. For better or worse, those original editions on Delerium basically represent the sound of my actual mixes pretty faithfully.

When the albums were first remastered for upgraded editions that came out between 2002 and 2005, it was the first time I had the chance to really focus on the mastering and compensate for some of the mix problems. But while I corrected some things, I mastered the albums with a lot of compression, and added what was in retrospect unnecessary brightness and low end. In my defence, this was at the height of the loudness wars, when everyone was trying to make their CD louder than everyone else’s. Again my relative inexperience, this time with mastering, meant that the editions came out sounding over-processed and over-compressed.

So this third time I think I’ve got it right. Over the last ten years I’ve learned a lot, not just from making my own music, but also from mixing other people’s, about maintaining the dynamics of the music and not overdoing EQ. I’m not saying it sounds wonderful, because the recordings still betray their origins, recorded and mixed by someone still learning how to make records, using an early generation of mid-resolution digital recording technology: ADAT multitrack mixed down to 16-bit / 44.1 kHz DAT. But at least now I believe they sound as good as they can.