Steven Wilson

an American music manager who had been involved with 90s pop princelings Hanson. Leff had heard Porcupine Tree and loved them. He saw them in the lineage of the great progressive acts of the 70s, the ones who could serve great musical epics on one hand while hitting the pop charts on the other.

Leff arranged a meeting with the band with the blessing of Porcupine Tree’s current manager Richard Allen, owner of their original record label Delirium. The American talked a great game: Porcupine Tree deserved a major label record deal, and he was the man to get them one.

Wilson was intrigued despite himself. “We were, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ But the more I talked to Andy, the more I started to take him seriously.”

Amazingly, Leff wasn’t bullshitting. He got an in with another guy named Andy – Andy Karp, an A&R executive at Lava Records in New York. Karp was a rare breed even in 2000: a genuine music fan with posters on his wall and a working knowledge of 1970s Genesis B-sides. His love of old-school prog was offset by the kind of business savviness that reasoned there was an audience for a band like Porcupine Tree even then.

“That was the notion,” says Wilson. “That there was a gap in the market. There were a lot of people out there who love this kind of music, whatever you call it – progressive rock, or art rock, or whatever.”

Wilson met Karp and was won over by his passion for music and the fact that Lava’s parent company Atlantic