Reunited prog-rockers Porcupine Tree on surviving their rift: ‘You can’t help but feel bitter’
In Air Studios in London early this year, I watch three men play music together for the first time since October 2010. When they walked off the stage at the Royal Albert Hall nearly 12 years ago, two of the three members had assumed that the band remained a going concern. But Steven Wilson, their frontman and guitarist, had decided that was it for the group, at least for the time being. Only he hadn’t told his bandmates. Or their management. Or their label. Or anyone.
Wilson had begun Porcupine Tree in 1987 as a lark – a pastiche of old English psychedelic rock, along the lines of XTC’s Dukes of Stratosphear. But he felt hemmed in. What had started as a side project had become the thing people knew him for – and expected him to deliver more of. “I’d started to think: ‘This is not what I’m supposed to do,’” Wilson says over a video call, a few days after that in-person get-together. “Certainly, this wasn’t supposed to be the all-encompassing dominant strand of my professional life. I wanted to go off and work with other musicians; I wanted to do other styles of music.”
He says he felt resented by the drummer, Gavin Harrison, and the keyboard player, Richard Barbieri, for being the one who got all the attention; he felt his musicianship was being judged. “I didn’t feel particularly liked or respected in the band – or at least if they did have respect, it was never vocalised.” So Wilson didn’t bother saying anything to them. He just left, leaving Porcupine Tree as a perpetual loose end. For a couple of years, the other two waited for Wilson to return. But then they read interviews in which he would talk about his solo career and deny any
interest in their band.
“You can’t help but feel bitter and hurt,” says Barbieri, who found himself in the same situation as when David Sylvian walked away from Japan at the end of 1982. “You get to a point of critical and commercial success and, at that very point, it’s just dragged away. And, of course, it’s not easy for the members to just carry on. It requires a lot of time before you step back into a career. But for the person at the front, they carry on with the same manager, the same record label, the same fanbase, the same publisher, the same promoter, the same agent. So it’s very painless for them. But it leaves people behind who spent as much time working as they did, so it’s tough.”
Harrison lived near Wilson and from 2012 they jammed every so often, so he was less fussed by the interviews. “I’d think: ‘Well, I had a cup of tea with him last week and he didn’t say anything like that to me.’ But I think, from Steven’s point of view, it was somewhat of an internal competition between a band he started and himself, between the two different things going on in his mind, and I think he wanted the audience to at least not focus on when Porcupine Tree was coming back and focus on his solo career.”
Wilson’s continual refusal to address Porcupine Tree’s future meant that the band’s legend grew in their absence. They became the prog rock band that got away (not something that would necessarily have pleased Wilson, who hates the term).
After such a long time apart, one might expect a certain sloppiness, but to the lay listener there is none of that. On the other side of the glass, the trio appear to be in perfect sync as they run through Harridan, the opening track of their new album, Closure/Continuation. The bass and drums wrap around each other like vines, intricate and entwined, and keyboards break like waves over them. It is complex, thorny but melodic music. And then the three players stop, exchange words quietly and start again. For the couple of hours I watch, that is what they do: run through one song, over and over again.
Closure/Continuation has been in the making since the days when Porcupine Tree appeared to be over. The jams Wilson and Harrison had undertaken over the past decade were revisited during lockdown. Tapes that Barbieri had sent to Wilson in later years had been worked up into songs. The three men did all the recording in their own homes – hence them not having played together since 2010 – and ended up making their new album without anyone knowing.
The title reflects their uncertainty over the band’s future. “We didn’t have to make this record,” Wilson says. “It’s not as if we’ve come back because we’ve been offered $10m to tour America. We’ve not come back because our solo careers have failed. We thought it’d be fun and we had some good material. I think that’s partly reflected in the title of the album: I genuinely don’t know whether this is closure or the start of another continuing strand of the band’s career.
“If it is closure, I think it’s a really nice way to do it. Or we might call each other up a year from now and say: ‘Hey, that was fun. Should we do it again?’ My guess is probably the former. I think it probably is the last record we’ll make and probably the last tour we’ll do.”
Barbieri says: “I know Steven will go into solo mode once this is over. And it depends where that takes him. Porcupine Tree can only really come from Steven wanting to be part of it.
I’m quite happy if it is closure. I’m quite comfortable with that. Because we’ve made a good album. And I think we’re going to end on a good vibe between the three of us. There’s not going to be any kind of negative feelings.”
That said, being in a group isn’t easy. Wilson talks about the Venn diagram in any band – where what music they can actually play is limited to the intersection of their tastes – and how it circumscribes ambition. By the end of the first time round, he says, “we ended up having this archetype of a Porcupine Tree song: little bit of a metal riff, emotional vocals, chorus, then a clever bit in the middle, then some tricky time signature stuff for the musos. By the time we got to that last album, that last tour, it just wasn’t interesting enough for me any more.”
It frustrated the others, too. Harrison loves soul, funk and jazz, but there was no room for that. Barbieri, too, noticed that his preferred “very minimalist and slowly evolving atmospheric approach” is not of huge interest to the other two. At least, they all agree, Closure/Continuation is made up largely of true co-writes, rather than being driven by Wilson with lesser contributions from the other two.
Then there is the amount of effort involved. Barbieri, 64, frets about his concentration span. For Harrison, 58, the physicality of his drumming is a more pressing issue. “How much longer can I really carry on playing this kind of music at this kind of level? Other bands I’ve been playing in don’t require such heavy, physical playing. Porcupine Tree was always the hardest-hitting job that I did. In King Crimson [of which he has been a member since 2014], a lot of the members were well over 70, and I don’t picture me playing the drums like this in my 70s.”
In Air Studios, you can see what he means. As the trio work through Harridan, Harrison’s drumming is that mixture of precision and thunder that seems physically impossible; Barbieri – the best soundscaper since Brian Eno, says Wilson – washes the music like a watercolourist; Wilson drives it forward on the bass, before tracking his vocals on his own. “Singers always want to be in a different room when they sing,” Barbieri tells Harrison in the control room. “I had one who had to be in a different country.”
When Porcupine Tree play live in public again, it will be to bigger crowds than ever before; arenas await. And when the tour ends and the three of them leave the stage, who knows if it will be the last time? “Maybe it will be a closure to the whole thing,” Harrison says. “I’m not saying we’re going to break up in 2022. But 2010 was a weird sort of ending – or not-ending. It would be nice to go out with a bang. If that’s what it’s gonna be.”
• Closure/Continuation is released on Music For Nations on 24 June