|
(Fall 2005) by George Dionne
Porcupine Tree defies classification. They can be hard and heavy, they can
be sad and melancholy, or they can be experimental and eccentric. Now matter
what style they choose, Porcupine Tree always delivers in presentation and
sound. Although they've been around for more than ten years, the U.K. based
group
is just starting to make a name for themselves in the U.S. Currently on tour
in support of their latest Lava Records release Deadwing, frontman Steven
Wilson
took the time to give us a little history on the band, what they're currently
up to, and discuss all of the other musical ventures he's got his hands into.
Rock
Is Life would like to thank Flat, Ron, Llowell, Karl ehm... no, and Martha
from the Unofficial Porcupine Tree Forum for helping with the
questions.
RIL:
If I knew absolutely nothing about Porcupine Tree, how would you describe
the group’s music to me?
SW: Mostly the band has tried to draw more toward the
golden age of albums which is really the late 60’s to 70’s. Then punk came along and
washed all that away. There’s like a ten year period where albums became
the premier art form for music. What was important was bands could make a
strong forty five minute statement and go out and tour on that music. In
a way, Porcupine Tree were looking back at that era of rock music, and at
the same time were aligned to the future in being contemporary as well. I
think it’s important that any band worth it salt really is always embracing
new technology, embracing new musical styles, and is not content to be some
kind of vehicle of nostalgia.
There is a sense of learning from the past,
but learning from the future. I think that’s why the band appeals
to a lot of people who have become slightly disenfranchised by the last
twenty
or twenty five years of music, which has become increasingly more kind
of shallow. I think there are still a lot of people out there who miss
the likes
of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Todd Rundgren, Crosby, Stills, Nash,
and Young, and The Beach Boys Beach Boys; people who really valued ambition
and experimenting
with music, but still value a great melody. That is the force behind Porcupine
Tree. We don’t want to do that for any misguided nostalgic reason,
but at the same time we feel there are a lot of lessons to be learned from
that musical era.
RIL: Porcupine Tree sort-of started out as a joke didn’t
it?
SW: Yeah, kind of. I think it’s probably true to say that most bands
start off in a bit of fun. Most bands start off as a few friends getting
together in a garage to bash out some tunes, so it’s not unusual for
a band to start out in a spirit of fun. I guess with Porcupine Tree I took
that one stage further in that it was just me, but I kind of invented this
whole mythology imaginary band, but in the scope of stretching back to the
early seventies. I took it a bit further than most people would. It was the
whole material background that went along with the band that was kind of
jokey, but the music from the beginning I felt was something special. I guess
I felt I tapped into something.
RIL: Your latest album Deadwing is actually based on a movie script you
wrote, can you tell me a little about the script itself?
SW: I can tell you a little bit. I mean, the pictures
getting made eventually so I can’t tell you too much. It’s basically a very surreal ghost
story, very European in flavor, as opposed to Hollywood. Its quite melancholy
throughout, there’s a lot of dream sequences, a lot of playing about
with past, present, and future. The story and the characters are quite dire
and pretty quiet, so in that sense it has a lot more in common with American
film makers like David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick. Those film makers are more
in style with the European traditions. In some respects, I guess people describe
our music that way, melancholic, dreamlike, cinematic. In many respects it’s
the next logical step. It was great for us as a band to base one of our records
on that kind of stuff.
RIL: You released Deadwing with a regular mix and a 5.1 mix. You’ve
done this with a few albums in the past. Does this mean that sound is more
important to you than lyrics?
SW: No, I think there all part of the same package.
I write most of the music myself, in other words the melodies, the chords,
you know…Even the
arrangements for me are a whole package. It’s a whole sound. The lyrics
are as much of that sound as the melodies or the chords. Its very important
to me that the words have some depth to them, and its very important to me
that the production has some depth to it. Working in 5.1 kind of allows you
more possibilities with creating levels in the production, creating a sound
world where people can really immerse themselves in. If you listen to the
stereo mix of Deadwing there’s a lot of stuff going on, and sometimes
in the stereo mix that kind of little detail gets lost which is a shame.
So when you’re working in the surround kind of spectrum, you can really
pick out, pull out, some of those subtleties and immerse the listener in
the whole sound thing that is Porcupine Tree.
I guess I always felt that
a band like Porcupine Tree could be a poster child for that kind of sound,
because we do work very hard on the production and depth of the sound,
and the detail of the sound. I think people like to show off there systems,
you
know it’s like when everyone was going out and buying Dark Side of
the Moon to show off there stereo sound. I would love to think that everyone
was going out and buying Porcupine Tree CDs to show off there surround system
at home. That seems to be happening, although we haven’t been a million
record selling band by any stretch of the imagination. We have won awards
for our surround mix, and some stores use our DVD for a demonstration disc.
That’s kind of gratifying.
RIL: You’re actually going to try and create 5.1 sound on
the current tour, correct?
SW: No, we‘ve had to abandon that idea. There were so many problematic
things. The problem with surround sound in a concert environment is quite
simply this; you cannot have the whole audience standing in the sweet spot.
In fact, you can’t really have more than ten people standing in the
sweet spot. We tried very hard to get around that, but at the end of the
day, if you have a big square room, most people are going to be standing
near one of the speakers. Closer to one of the speakers than all the others,
and it just doesn’t work unfortunately. I think it’s possible
to do it in a perfectly designed room were you can fly the speakers above
the audience maybe, but in practical terms, and unfortunately working in
our kind of budget constraints, it just doesn’t work out. We really
wanted to do it.
RIL: None of the set lists that have been posted online show that
Porcupine Tree have opened up with a song called “Arriving Somewhere But Not
Here” except for the June 3rd show in Seattle. Was that a commentary
on the venue?
SW: No. It was because we did two nights there in Seattle, so we decided
to do two completely different sets. I think we did the same thing at one
other venue in Europe. We appreciated the people that had bought tickets
for both shows, so we wanted to give them something different. We played
the song both nights, but the second night we decided to open with it to
create a different kind of dynamic flavor to the show
RIL: Deadwing is your 8th full length release, did you think you’d
ever get this far in the U.S. since you debuted around the grunge era?
SW: We got lumped in with so many different things.
In some ways it’s
a testament to the uniqueness of the band. We’ve been called so many
things from hard rock to metal to progressive rock to grunge. Everyone has
always tried to categorize us and we’ve never been real comfortable
in any category. To be honest, for many years we just felt that America was
just sort of beyond our understanding. It’s such a complex place, and
it takes such hard work. To begin with you need much more financial support
to be able to tour America, particularly with our show. We take out films
and multimedia, and because of the complexity of our music we need to have
a large crew.
It wouldn’t have been possible without the support of
a major record label, and to be honest, I think we were surprised as anyone
that six albums into our career we finally landed a major record deal. When
the band is all in their thirties, you don’t expect that to happen.
We were in Europe thinking we’re never going to get a chance to crack
America, so we’ll just have to forget about it. It’s been nice
to see over the last couple of records, the band kind of explode and grow
kind of steadily. We have gone from selling two to three thousand records
in America and playing to fifty people, to selling forty thousand and selling
out thousand seat places. It is very gratifying to us, so now we can tour
America pretty self sufficiently.
RIL: Through your online store you release rare and limited pieces of music.
One series I noticed popping up is Steven Wilson Covers, what are they?
SW: Well basically I’ve always loved the idea of singles. It’s
the most popular of formats and I love the idea that the single still has
that kind of vibe to it; where you can cut a couple of tracks one weekend
and press them out the next week, and have them out the next. One thing I’ve
always wanted to do that I’ve never done is to do another interpretation
of other artist’s songs. Porcupine Tree never covered anyone’s
songs. I had this idea to do singles with the most unlikely cover versions.
The cover versions of Pink Floyd were the last covers that people would expect
me to do. I picked songs that I felt I presented in a completely different
way, that made people see them in a completely different way.
For example,
the second one I picked was an ABBA song that was beautifully recorded,
and because it was an ABBA song, I don’t think anyone appreciated it or
took it seriously. It’s called “The Day Before You Came”.
It’s a very traumatic post-divorce song, and I did it, stripped it
right down, and I did it for acoustic guitar and voice. That kind of thing
appeals to me; being able to present songs like that in a very different
context, to get people to look at them in a very different way. In each case
the track I would chose would be inspired by a twisted cover version. Everything
is simply called “Cover Version” so people don’t know
what the song is until they literally spin the disc. I’m recording these
and pressing them very quickly; doing packaging, and hoping to turn it into
a complete series, and perhaps a box set. I love doing stuff like that. You
know, I’m a collector. I’m a music lover. I like to write and
I love it when other artists do that kind of thing.
RIL: That’s a really fan-friendly thing to do for that fan
that just has to have everything. Fans dig stuff like that. These days
you are playing
live with bands like Anathema, Opeth or Robert Fripp. Is this a conscious
decision to stay in the prog/metal niche and not to try to reach an indie
audience?
SW: I think it’s just a question of touring with bands we like and
feel our audience likes. It’s never been a conscious decision to steer
away from anything in particular. Robert Fripp is one of my idols, it’s
a no brainier. Opeth similarly is a band that are very good friends of mine.
A lot of our fans like them and visa-versa, even though they are a lot heavier.
It has worked out very well. I can’t say we would rule out perhaps
bands that were a little bit more different or alternative to what we were
doing, but that opportunity hasn’t arisen as yet.
RIL: You actually keep yourself quite busy with outside projects.
Two projects in particular involve Bryn Jonesand and Aviv Geffen (Read
CD review); These two artists are
considered by some to be controversial figures because of their beliefs.
Have you ever feared backlash by fans because of it?
SW: I haven’t feared it. I expected raised eyebrows at the least. Actually,
the two people you mentioned Bryn and Aviv were on the opposite sides. I
mean, Bryn was very much pro-Palestinian and actually advocated suicide bombing,
which was very controversial. He actually believed in their cause. Aviv,
although he is Israeli, is kind of on the opposite side of the fence, quite
literally and philosophically. He also believes that the Palestinians should
have the occupied territories back and have there own state established;
although, he doesn’t believe in their methods. In that sense, I certainly
got myself immersed in that particular part of the world and some political
issues without really needing to.
In both cases I got evolved with them because
I admired there music. It’s quite coincidental that there both kind
of bound up with the same issue. In both cases I tried to keep politics out
of the mix when we made the collaborative effort, with Aviv particularly.
His own music is part of what he is, an Israeli artist. His music reflects
his struggle. Blackfield was supposed to be an international record. We didn’t
write about politics, we wrote about age old concerns like relationships
and all that stuff. But there has been some interest purely around the fact
that an English artist had chosen to collaborate with someone from the Middle
East. That’s not something very common, and that has been something
that has created interest in areas of the press that wouldn’t normally
be interested in it.
RIL: I actually listened to the Blackfield album before I listened to my
first Porcupine Tree album. I have to tell you that it was awesome.
SW: It’s a beautiful record. Aviv writes such
classic pop songs, and in some sense it’s great for me to be disciplined
in working with that kind of format. I tend to be more complex in the way
I construct stuff. I’m
very bad at sticking to the three or four minute format.
RIL: It has a lot of that melancholy that Porcupine Tree has…
SW: Right, but is has the pop song fell which is a
very hard thing to do. People think that writing great pop tunes is easy,
it’s not. It’s
one of the most difficult things of all to do.
RIL: How and when did you learn to play the guitar?
SW: Well, I kind of learned with a group of friends.
It was a group of friends that I had in school when I was ten or eleven years
old and everyone was
into music. We were all kind of teaching each other to play chords, but
I very quickly became interested in writing. That was the thing that sort
of set me apart. While everyone else was out learning Beatles songs, I
was trying to use all that I’ve learned and try to write my own songs.
I never learned the guitar properly. I never had lessons and I never took
it seriously from the point of view of being a virtuoso. I was never interested.
I was always interested more in knowing just enough to be able to write,
produce, and make records. That’s the difference between someone
like Robert Fripp and me. He still to this day, practices two hours every
day; scales and all that stuff. I’ll quite happily not pickup a guitar
for months. I’ll pick up a guitar when I need to make a record or
when I want to write a song or want to get an idea that’s in my head
out. The guitar for me has kind of become a tool of my songwriting and
production, rather than being a musical instrument to be something I can
show off on. I’m not a virtuoso
RIL: Did you have any other ambitions other than being a professional musician?
SW: To be honest no. I think as long as I can remember
it’s all I’ve
wanted to do. I wanted to make records as soon as I discovered pop music.
I fell in love with the whole feel of the record, and I come from a time
where vinyl was still the predominate form. I just fell in love with the
whole idea of making records, and I wanted to know how people did it; and
what created these magical pieces of vinyl. Ever since I can remember, that’s
all I wanted to do. I’d like to make my movie though.
RIL: What’s that music playing in the background where you
are?
SW: I was just listening to a test pressing of a
project I have called Bass Communion. It’s ambient drone environment music; very minimal, very
creepy. I’ve just done a record for an American label which is going
to put it out on vinyl. I was just checking out the test pressing and seeing
if the vinyl was cut properly
RIL: It sounds good so far. Most of the material I’ve heard
from you has been right up my alley.
SW: It’s probably my labor of love, my favorite of all my projects.
It’s incredibly minimal by my standards. It’s inspired by EVP
(Electronic Voice Phenomena). You know there was a movie about it with Michael
Keaton? Terrible movie, but EVP itself is a hit.
Previous Page |
|
STEVEN
WILSON
