Absolutely! I did not jump on the train until Signify but I will be an active reader until we reach that one
Go for it. I came in at Voyage 34 and much prefer their earlier material. They lost me after Deadwing.
Porcupine Tree – Album by Album, Song by Song I’ve really been enjoying Mark Winstanley’s similar thread about Rush (and even reading along a little on his thread about The Who). A few people, at least, said they would be interested in doing a song by song on Porcupine Tree, so here it is. I’m not going to try to live up to Mark’s amazing standard here, but I’ll do my best as time allows. I got introduced to Porcupine Tree (PT) while engaged on a European Rush fan forum (t-n-m-s.com – it’s still active, but I haven’t been on it in a LONG time - thank you Chris Quartly!). I got introduced to Steve Hoffman Music Forums when the Porcupine Tree Forum went defunct. Someone who is/was a member here suggested to many of us Porcupine Tree fans to try this forum out (it feels rude not to say "thank you", but I can't remember who it was...). So that’s my path. Rush led me to Porcupine Tree and Porcupine Tree led me here - and I'm quite enjoying my stay and flabbergasted by the amount of musical knowledge that exists here. Porcupine Tree’s music is a little more difficult to catalog, linearly, than some other bands like Rush. They’ve released multiple versions of most of their albums and many non-album tracks. They also release demos and out-takes, etc., etc. To keep this organized, I’m going to map our journey on Porcupine Tree’s primary studio albums, taking each in turn, and add the related material, live sets, for that album before moving on to the next. There are two compilations that defy inclusion with any single primary album (Stars Die: The Delerium Years and Recordings). Those will be addressed immediately after Signify and Lightbulb Sun, respectively. As for the song by song strategy, there are some tracks that are best taken together, so I’ll just do that when it seems right and I’ll probably take some of the more obscure albums in one shot as many people may not have heard them (I’ll provide YouTube links where I can). Album order: · On the Sunday of Life… (with YHD and the original three tapes) · Up the Downstair (with Voyage 34, Staircase Infinities, Spiral Circus, Radio Active) · The Sky Moves Sideways (with Moonloop, Transmission IV, Men of Wood) · Signify (with Insignificance, Metanoia, Coma Divine) · Stars Die: The Delerium Years – 1991-1997 · Stupid Dream (with its singles – except tracks on Recordings) · Lightbulb Sun (with Warszawa and its singles – except tracks on Recordings and) · Recordings · In Absentia (with Futile, Deluxe Version, live tracks) · Deadwing (with Lazarus, DVD-A tracks, Rockpalast, Arriving Somewhere) · Fear of a Blank Planet (with Nil/Blank Planet Recurring and various live sets) · The Incident (with various live sets) As with Mark’s threads, we’ll take Sundays off to allow people to catch up. There may be some days that I can't post, but I'll try to either tee up a couple of days worth of posts or at least warn you all. The lyrical content may occasionally lead to some pointed disagreements. Let's try to keep it civil and not insult one another. For example, I'm pretty diametrically opposed to Steven Wilson's take on religion (when we get to Signify, that will manifest itself), but that doesn't stop me from enjoying his music or from liking people who DO agree with him. It's funny - there is one poster on the Rush thread with whom I'm pretty opposite politically, but we are in near total agreement about what songs we like by Rush and why (at least so far). Tomorrow’s post will be a little band pre-history and then we’ll launch into the music associated with On the Sunday of Life…
Just to given an example of how I think this will flow: Week 1: Monday: PT Pre-history and general biography Tuesday: On the Sunday of Life... general album discussion + any commentary about the original 3 tapes (particularly the O.G. It will Rain for a Million Years) Wednesday: Music for the Head / Jupiter Island Thursday: Third Eye Surfer / On the Sunday of Life... Friday: The Nostalgia Factory Saturday: Space Transmission / Message from a Self-Destructing Turnip Sunday: Day Off / Catch-up Week 2: Monday: Radioactive Toy Tuesday: Nine Cats Wednesday: Hymn / Footprints Thursday: Linton Samuel Dawson Friday: And the Swallows Dance Above the Sun Saturday: Queen Quotes Crowley / No Luck With Rabbits / Begonia Seduction Scene Sunday: Day Off / Catch-up Week 3: Monday: This Long Silence Tuesday: It Will Rain for a Million Years Wednesday: Yellow Hedgerow Dreamscape - general album discussion + any commentary about "The Cross" (which is omitted from the current version) Thursday: YHD - Side A (I don't know that a song by song will work all that well for YHD) Friday: YHD - Side B Saturday: YHD - Side C Sunday: Day Off / Catch-up Week 4: Monday: YHD - Side D Tuesday: Voyage 34 - general album discussion Wednesday: V34 - Phase 1 Thursday: V34 - Phase 2 Friday: V34 - Phase 3 Saturday V34 - Phase 4 If this feels too fast or too slow, speak up!
Some resources for folks: Official Website: STEVEN WILSON - THE FUTURE BITES™ OUT 12TH JUNE 2020 (porcupinetree.com just links to the store now) A great source of info on the songs/band: Porcupine Tree The "complete" discography (for Steven Wilson - including PT): Voyage PT [The Complete SW Discography] - This Trip IS Really Necessary! (this is a couple of years out of date and it's AMAZING how much has been released since this was updated).
How about adding I.E.M/No-Man/Bass Communion/Blackfield records as well? No-Man track by track discussion could be fruitful, and I personally think SW fans are missing out on No-Man tracks the most. Regarding I.E.M/BC/Blackfield, can we discuss them one album at a time, since track by track discussion would be almost impossible as most won't be familiar with Bass Communion/I.E.M..
You're welcome to listen to the tracks before Signify and comment. It's great to hear the reaction to music from people who are new to it.
I've been thinking about tagging on SW's other projects at the end of the PT discussion. I know the "Steven Wilson" material pretty well, but I've not been a huge fan of his other projects and I'm not sure how well suited I am to organize the material (particularly for BC and No-Man, where there is so much material). I did just pick up his Bass Communion album "Sisters Oregon" from band camp. Mostly it was because I have friends living in Sisters, Oregon and I've been there many a time. I'd be curious if anyone knows why he named the album that.
If you'd allow me, I could help. I'm a big BC/I.E.M./No-Man fan and sometimes parts of No-Man and BC material made their way into PT songs, so highlighting those would help.
I'd be happy to let any and all help on the discussion. I'm aware of some of the cross-over, but not all (like the instrumental beginning to "A Cure for Optimism" being sourced in a BC song - can't remember which at the moment). Please do add and we can swing into No-Man, I.E.M., Bass Communion, Blackfield, and Steven Wilson after PT. We could even have a brief discussion on some of the more obscure projects like Altamont.
This is a fabulous thread idea! Totally into reading what people have to say! I would say that adding BC, No-Man, Blackfield, etc. seems like a monumental task. Where SW begins and ends in relation to PT with some of these other projects seems like a conundrum that would last quite a lot of pages.
Ok folks, to take advantage of the enthusiasm, I'm going to start this now. I live on the west coast of North America, so my morning is a lot later than most of yours. Maybe I'll make a habit of posting the next morning's lead the night before. Porcupine Tree Porcupine Tree was created by Steven Wilson in 1987, as a joke/experiment in Psychedelia. The "band" was completely invented with strange names and back-stories. Steven had another band working at the time called No Man Is an Island (Except the Isle of Man) - a collaboration with singer Tim Bowness. However, Porcupine Tree ended up being more popular than he expected and soon it dominated his time and he began to take it more seriously. He had created three cassette tapes for a mail order service by a psychedelia magazine/record company and the company worked with Steven to compile a single double-album as the band's first proper release (On the Sunday of Life... - 1991) After his second album (Up the Downstair - 1993), demand got high enough to require a live performance. Steven had worked a bit with Richard Barbieri on the second album and invited him and two other musicians he knew and had worked with on No-Man to fill in the live band. After the third album (The Sky Moves Sideways - 1995) that also included collaborations from his "live" band-mates, he decided to make it a for-real band. The first album they released together was Signify (1996). The band went on to release six additional core albums and additional E.P.s, etc. until their dissolution in 2010. Band Members: Steven Wilson - vocals, guitars and other instruments. Richard Barbieri - keyboards Colin Edwin - bass Chris Maitland - drums and backing vocals - until 2002 Gavin Harrison - drums, 2002 - forward John Wesley toured with the band starting in 2002 and provided additional guitars and backing vocals live, but was never considered a member of the band. Pictured below on the day of their first live gig are Chris, Richard, Steven, and Colin. For me, I LOVE every single track from Stupid Dream (1998) through Fear of a Blank Planet (2007) and many of the tracks before and after that. My temptation was to rush through the first album, in particular, but I think there may be much love for On the Sunday of Life... and the other early material. I only learned of the band about 2002 or 2003, after In Absentia. When did you get to know Porcupine Tree? Any interesting stories about meeting the band, etc.? Was anyone in their early fan club - getting the "transmission" cassettes, etc.? Have fun and enjoy the music everyone! My next post is going to be the first part of a more detailed early history taken directly from the booklet for Stars Die: The Delerium Years 1991-1997. It may more than many of you wanted to know, so feel free to skip it if you're just here for the music.
"Originally, I never intended to be a singer," confessed Porcupine Tree's vocalist, frontman and mastermind Steven Wilson during a talk with Voyage 35 fanzine. He's made other confessions in interviews regarding his formative years - about having had no interest in learning the guitar; or having been more interested in messing about making noises than in playing songs; or even to never having bothered to learn the guitar part for Stairway to Heaven. Many years later, with a diverse and sprawling history of successfully realised projects behind him, it seems strange that someone with such an apparent lack of ambition should have achieved so much. But to read things that way is to misunderstand the way. Steven Wilson has always taken care of his art. Although he's claimed, with some justification, that "my main interest is still sonic experimentation and production... I enjoy playing guitar, but it ahas always been a means to an end for me." Steven's imagination has always been tempered by a knack for craftsmanship in the best sense. In Porcupine Tree (or in any of the other projects that occupy Steven, educate him and nourish his music), he's always spent time on ensuring that he knows how to make things work in the best way, and how to allow expression to come through unhindered. This has ultimately meant gaining control over the big picture before working out the more indulgent detail. What's always separated Steven Wilson from the pack is the tenacity to chase his ideas into solid form, a remarkable lean efficiency in his working methods, and the ability to learn his way around obstacles. And it's made him part of that exclusive group of self-sufficient studio auteurs that includes Todd Rundrgren, Prince, Mike Oldfield and Stevie Wonder. Like them, if Steven's ever really wanted to achieve something musically, he's simply learned how to do it himself and then done it. Not that it's always been quite so assured and measured. Born in 1967 and brought up in the placid London commuter town of Hemel Hempstead, Steven began experimenting with recording technology when he was eleven years old - second-hand Revox reel-to-reel tape machines, some microphones and his own long-discarded, long suffering childhood guitar, which he bashed and scraped in order to manipulate the sounds on tape. A far cry from the usual pattern of starting off with a few Beatles songs. However, by the age of fourteen, Steven was following a straighter path. He'd taught himself to play guitar and keyboards, and to sing well enough to front a teenage progressive rock band called Karma, which he then hustled around venues on the north side of London's commuter belt. While not juggling Karma and homework, Steven kept himself busy elsewhere. He stared a lifelong practice of listening widely across as many musical boundaries as he could, he learnt other instruments, developed his production skills, and began transforming his bedroom into a workable recording studio - the very same No Man's Land from which most Wilson music still emerges. He also dragged other school friends into a series of "bloody awful" musical experiments. One of these was an embryonic young bass player called Colin Edwin - despite a three-year age gap, the boys had befriended each other after continually meeting at local gigs or during practice sessions at the school music department. "I always thought of Steve as a music addict," laughs Colin. "I used to go round and we'd listen to records for hours. He first turned me on to all sorts of things - Hawkwind, Magazine, King Crimson, Mahavishnu Orchestra, as well as more obscure music like the ECM catalogue. At one time he had so much vinyl on his shelves that the fell down! He was constantly working in the studio. It grew every time I saw it - more wires, boxes, and stacks of tapes..." By the mid-'80s, Steven had a mass of original material which he began to circulate around the music world. "One demo made No. 4 in the Sounds 'DIY chart'... There were also several cassette compilations that I contributed to, at least once under my own name. These kind of things were very popular in the early eighties in the wake of the 'industrial' ethic." Before he'd left school he'd become a fully-fledged engineer and producer, by 1988, he'd set up an art-rock project called No Man Is an Island in collaboration with singer Tim Bowness. This was to evolve into the far more sophisticated No-Man, and gain Steven his first record contract as well as a burst of attention in the imminent new decade. But to find the sparks that ignited what was to become his most successful project, you'd need to go back a few years and introduce a couple of other people. One of these, Alan Duffy, lived and breathed psychedelia. He was also an embryonic underground tape mogul and hopeful psychedelic poet. "I must've met Alan when I was about fourteen or fifteen years old. He was twenty-six at the time," recalls Steven. "He was advertising in one of the music papers I was reading, interested in trading tapes. We started trading and he sent me some of his lyrics very early on, even before he knew I was into being a musician. I just started writing songs using his lyrics, and we did that for a couple of years, just for fun really." Some of Steven's early musical efforts, such as Altamont, emerged on Alan's Acid Tapes cassette label. "Then I lost touch with Alan for years. And then, when Porcupine Tree began to ferment in my mind, I reached over and there were the lyrics." The other key player in Porcupine Tree's prehistory was Malcolm Stocks - one year older than Steven, on stop further up the local commuter line (in rock'n'roll Berhamstead), and encountered via another music press small ad. While not an accomplished musician himself, Malcolm was the kind of friend every emerging musician needs. Someone who knows and loves the obscure albums you talk about, who triggers ideas and builds confidence, who'll share the ride and make the early steps of work less lonely. "We were both massively into psychedelia at the time," Steven remembers. "We would go on shopping expeditions down to London and Malcolm would come back with bags full of '60s and '70s records. We would listen to them and then I would go off and do a pastiche - that's how a lot of those early tracks came into being." "The first thing we ever did together was an improvised version of Saucerful of Secrets," agrees Malcolm. "I'd only been playing guitar for a year at the time and wasn't really good enough, but we had a similar taste in music and seemed to get on together. He was already a good guitarist and keyboard player, and was recording all the time with home-made equipment that his dad made for him... including the famous four-track recorder with no erase head! The first impression I had of Steven was a fairly chatty, friendly, open guy; someone whom I could get along with. The second impression, once I knew him, was that he was extremely musically gifted and that he had that drive; he was going to do it on his own terms, he was not going to give up and was going to make it somehow." "We used to meet up in the weekends and just record something. Steven was into Stockhausen at the time, so he was into doing avant-garde pieces. The first things we did together were very avant-garde. For the backing track on one piece, he'd put a microphone outside in the street the night before and just recorded whatever went on - dogs barking, people walking past - and then played it backwards. Then we started writing songs, and after doing that for a year or so we said to each other 'You take a week or so to record an album and I'll record an album.' But he had more musicianship than I did... I was struggling to translate ideas onto the guitar then, so I ended up doing the psychedelic guitar bits and silly voices. I'd call myself the sorcerer's apprentice, in a way, but also maybe a catalyst." Malcolm is still sitting on a stockpile of unreleased recordings like Radioactive Grandma, Extract from the Son of the Cutlery Variations, The Hairdryer Symphony ("It was only one hairdryer, though"), Aquatic Banana, and Fun with a New Head. All of which demonstrate the playfulness of their teamwork, as well as their initial debt to the work of underground rock icons like Gong, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, Fred Frith, and Frank Zappa. Oddly enough, despite the trippy feel of a lot of the music, the usual teenage drug dabbling was not part of the process as neither Malcolm nor Steven could be bothered with it. "This theory that proper psychedelic music can only be made by drug users - I've always disputed that," Steven asserts. "I've always believed that true psychedelic music simply comes when the power of the imagination is unleashed. Some musicians use drugs to do that, some do not - Frank Zappa chose not to, for instance." "Porcupine Tree was about four years in the making," Malcolm remembers, picking up the story. "It was us mucking around with instruments and seeing what happened. And then the band itself started off as a joke, really..." One of the bands Steven and Malcolm were listening to at the time was The Dukes of Stratosphear - XTC's lovingly unhinged tribute to the psychedelic era, complete with insane pseudonyms and bogus history. Steven's response was partly one of admiration and partly "If they could do this, why couldn't I?" And Malcolm was more than happy to egg him on - "I said 'Why don't you do an album and try to sound like as many people as possible?'" And so it was that, one evening, a sense of inspired and ludicrous mischief led Steven and Malcolm into writing the fake legend of an imaginary underground band called the Incredible Expanding Mindf**k, and of the chaotic and comical career they'd forged through the world of '70s psychedelia. "We had to tone it down a bit because it was a bit over the top and ridiculous," chuckles Malcolm. "Stoned band characters being sent to Africa dressed as gorillas, and that kind of thing..." While still giggling over this, the obvious next step was to use Steven's talents to fake actual recordings of the music. Invented characters like Mr. Jelly, Timothy Tadpole Jones, Tarquin Underspoon and Sebastian Tweedle-Blampton III fleshed out the personnel of their imaginary band, while Malcolm (still in charge of glissando guitar and rants) opted to call himself Solomon St. Jermain. For reasons he still won't divulge, Steven settled on the name "Porcupine Tree". (to be continued...) ~ Dann Chinn, "Misfit City", Autumn 2000 (from liner notes to Stars Die: The Delerium Years 1991 - 1997)
Excellent thread... I came late to PT, I had been recommended to buy Coma Divine by someone on another music/hi-fi forum, but at the time a new expanded version was due to be released so I waited. In the mean time In Absentia was released which I duly purchased and loved from the opening chords onward. I then worked back to the beginning of PT and hoovered up vinyl versions of the albums where I could (or CDs if I couldn't, often buying the Vinyl later on when available). Looks like my listening over the next few weeks will include PT albums in chronological order (definitely no hardship). I have the following PT albums/EPs On The Sunday Of Life (Vinyl/CD) Up The Downstair (Vinyl/CD) Voyage 34 (Vinyl/CD) Moonloop (Vinyl) Yellow Hedgerow Dreamscape (yellow vinyl) Staircase Infinities (CD) The Sky Moved Sideways (Triple Vinyl/CD) Coma Divine (Triple Vinyl/Double CD) Signify (Vinyl/CD) Metanoia (CD) Stupid Dream (Vinyl) Lightbulb Sun (Vinyl) Recordings (Vinyl/CD) In Absentia (Vinyl/CD) Stars Die - The Delerium Years '91-'97 (CD) Warszawa (CD) Deadwing (Vinyl/CD) Fear Of A Blank Planet (Vinyl/CD) We Lost The Skyline (Vinyl) The Incident (Vinyl/CD) Anaethetize (Vinyl/DVD) Atlanta (Download) When you include the Blackfield, No-Man, IEM, Storm Corrosion and solo albums* to the list, plus bands where SW has an association e.g. behind the mixing desk or whatever like Anathema, Opeth, Pineapple Thief** then he has cost me an absolute fortune over the years and that's before you add in the cost of live shows. I can't say I wasn't warned, the guy who recommended Coma Divine said that once you 'got' Steven Wilson then you were hooked, he was right. *I never really got drones so Bass Communion isn't really on my radar. **I can't remember what the connection is apart from Bruce Soord being a fan, I did see Pineapple Thief supporting Blackfield so they definitely know each other.
I am all-in on this thread. SW has plenty of great stuff outside of PT, but I personally would rather see Porcupine Tree stay the main focus here instead of bouncing from project to project. PT is its own entity.
The plan is to go through Porcupine Tree and then, as people like, to hit some of Wilson's other projects.
