The Rest of Both Worlds Online

The Lizard Meets Steve Wilson

Author: The Lizard
First published: September 2000

Another carbon copy of the last couple of interviews – someone who has worked with Marillion and Fish, and who has their own projects also of interest. As with earlier interviews, I started by asking Steve about Marillion – I’d heard he claimed to have been at their first ever gig…

“I was at their first ever gig. I was told it was their first ever gig by Mick Pointer very early on. I didn’t know it was the first gig when I went to it, because I’d never even heard of the group, but they were co-headlining with a band called the Chiltern Volcanoes, who were a local group that the brother of my friend was in, so they were kind of like punk, you know, and Marillion, rather strangely and incongruously, were on after them and if I’d not stuck around to see what they were like, I’d probably never have come across them until much later. That was in Berkhamstead Civic Centre in 1980 – I remember it well… Not.”

But Steve fell out of love with them a bit when they got a bit more mainstream?

“I didn’t fall out of love with them – what happened was is that my musical tastes changed. When I discovered Marillion, when I went to that gig, I was about 10 or 11 years old and it was an amazing thing to see a band doing that kind of material, as I was just kind of discovering that kind of thing for myself. Then as the 80s progressed, I got into all sorts of other music and I probably lost interest in them around the time that they became hugely successful. Because, as is my wont, and I know I’m not the only one like this, the more obscure something is, the more I tend to be obsessive and love it. It’s a terrible, terrible affliction – it’s silly but it’s the way I am, and I’m not the only one. The point where they became hugely successful, circa Kayleigh, I just lost interest. I can look back now with hindsight, that word again, and see that they were producing much better work than they had been earlier on - Clutching At Straw is I think probably my favourite album of theirs now – but at the time I preferred to move on to something else ridiculously obscure. I don’t know what that would have been, but …

“Krautrock?” I suggested.

“Probably Krautrock – Can or something like that. You know, something weird, or Zappa - something like that. And so, I didn’t stop liking their music, but I stopped being obsessive about it, and I think around 89-90 I stopped buying the records. I didn’t hear them again until I signed to Hit & Run Music, and started to get them free. And I heard Brave and I thought: Wow – this is a really great album. So I started getting the albums without having to buy them, so I kind of got into them again by default really. Which was nice, cos I thought they were very good records. So, just to qualify that slightly – I didn’t fall out of love with them, I just moved on to other bands and other genres and other styles I guess.

More recently, Steve worked on marillion.com – what does he think about where they are going now?

“I thought it was a great record. I thought it was a really great record. I hadn’t heard the previous one – I have now, but I hadn’t heard the previous one when I worked on it. People kept saying to me that the production wasn’t very good, they were trying something different and it kind of worked, but kind of didn’t. And I heard it afterwards, and I realised what they’ve done on marillion.com is to take the successful aspects of that, and dispense with the less successful aspects of that, and maybe brought elements back of their classic sound. I thought it was a very strong record. I mean I was disappointed that some – not the ones I mixed ironically – but I thought two or three of the songs were great and would make great singles. I was very disappointed they didn’t get released. And I just thought Go was stunning – a stunning piece of music. I loved working on that.

“What can you do when you get involved that late in the process, though? You told me once before that you didn’t put anything new in, anything that wasn’t already on the master tape”, I said. Steve replied – “I’ll try to explain to you what I do, what I did. I think some people don’t really understand what mixing is, what you can do with mixing. I was given the raw recordings if you like. So, for example, there would have been a drum performance, a bass performance, obviously. But then, in addition to that, there would have been a number of alternate keyboard parts, alternate guitar solos, where they weren’t sure which one they liked the best. Various vocal ideas, backing vocal ideas. So what I would do is I would try to create the sound world that all these various parts kind of live in.

Steve went on to explain further: “So, for example, I did a lot with h’s vocals whereby he had two, sometimes more than that, interlocking vocal parts. So what I would maybe do is make one very kind of tinny, like it’s come through a megaphone, and one of them very up front and very close. So you get different kind of perspectives, and you create this kind of sound world where the various elements will link together , gel together in an interesting way. So you get perspectives and dynamics to the music. So that’s one aspect, for example. Another aspect – I think one of the main things I did on Go!, for example, is I just took a lot of stuff away. By all accounts, from what the band tell me, they had been working on that track harder than they worked on any other track on the album, with the possible exception of Interior Lulu, in the sense that they had just been labouring over how it was put together, the structure of all the various parts, and got to the point where they just didn’t know whether it was good, bad or indifferent. They just lost perspective of it completely.

So what I would do is come in and be like an objective ear, or a subjective ear, whichever way you want to look at it, and just pick through what I felt were the elements that best gelled together as a piece of music. And so, for example, the introduction on the album is reduced to just a throbbing bass, which kind of bounces from speaker to speaker, and just a weird keyboard sound. There were about eight or nine other elements originally on the tape, which I just took away. I said look, you just don’t need this – this is more interesting, this is an interesting element, let’s take this and use this as the introduction to the song, kind of build it in a very dynamic way, to the peak. So things like that, just creating those kind of highs and lows in the track.

They have been working together so long now that I gather a lot of the time they are not even there together when they are working on their parts, so they all come and tend to play over everything. So, there’ll be wall-to-wall guitar all the way through the track, wall-to-wall keyboards all the way through, but that obviously doesn’t create the most interesting track. Dynamically speaking, you’ve got a very consistent kind of sound texture, so what you want to do is try and create the highs and lows, so it’s just a case of doing that I think. So that’s kind of what I did and I think that’s what they needed, because they were kind of self-producing and when I went back and heard Radiation I kind of realised what they missed from not having someone come in and kind of do that, is that that album doesn’t have the richness of sound and texture, and it doesn’t have the highs and the lows, and the space that I think that the new record has. It’s just my opinion, obviously, maybe you disagree, but I felt that was what I was able to bring.”

I did agree. “There’s certainly more highs and lows, more contrast in it. Take someone like Trevor Horn who is probably one of the best producers around, what you’ll notice that he does is like halfway through a track he’ll suddenly take something out, that’s been there, and you haven’t noticed it before, and you notice it because he’s done that.”

Steve: “It’s a richness of sound – I can’t explain exactly how you do it, you just experiment with the elements that you have. The other thing of course, as I’ve already said to you, is creating it so that the track always feels like it is introducing something new at every turn and so the ennui doesn’t set in, as regards the listening experience. If you have everything from the beginning, then there’s nowhere to go, except to take things out, which kind of takes the track down rather than up. It’s fine to take it down, but you’ve got to go up again. So just that is what I guess I brought to the record.

I asked if it was the first time he’d mixed something that he wasn’t involved in: “No – I mixed an album for a group called Cipher last year as well, which was very different, but I enjoy doing that because it’s all the fun part without all the hard work. All the hard work, all the tracks and all the arguing has been done in a sense, and you’re given the tapes and told to go and make a record out of that, which I find great fun. I wish more people asked us to do it.

“Specially with the amount of money you can charge once you get a name for doing it!”, I suggested, to which Steve said, “That’s never been my motivation unfortunately. That’s probably my downfall” I was going to come onto that later, so I asked how many fans he thought they picked up by supporting Marillion – the music is not radically dissimilar. Different, but I know a lot of people that have been Marillion fans for years that like what Porcupine Tree do.

“I honestly couldn’t tell you – it’s one of those intangible things, isn’t it. I mean people ask me all the time how many fans you pick up by running an ad in the music press, you just don’t know.” “Or appearing on South East news, which apparently you were on yesterday”, I suggested. “Was I really?” Yes, something about Tommy Vance… “There’s a new radio show. Yes, cos I was down at the radio show and then… I didn’t know they were going to show my bit though.” Apparently it was at lunchtime the previous day I pointed out that they were Gig Of The Day  in that morning’s Metro (a free paper given away on the Tube… ambient prog combo or something.

“You see, I don’t know how much those kind of things make a difference. My philosophy is always that you make the record in a vacuum. You don’t make the record with any commercial considerations, you make it purely for yourself. But once the record is made, then I’ll pretty much prostitute myself in any way I feel I can that’s not totally inappropriate to bring the music to as many people as possible. I’m not saying that’s why I did Marillion – I did Marillion because I love the music and wanted to work with the guys, and we’ve been friends anyway for a long time. But in answer to your question, I honestly don’t know. You probably have more idea than I do, because you know all the old school Marillion fans . I don’t know how many of those guys have got into us. But I think yeah, you’re right, there is certainly a crossover in terms of the musical similarities. There’s probably a lot of people that would like what we do.

Time to get off the Marillion story and change camps. I suggested that many people have said that Fish is far more interested in the words than the music, whilst one could argue that Steve is probably the other way round?

“No, I get quite into the words now. I don’t see myself being a great lyric writer or anything, but no I do spend a lot of time over words.” So why did he make them so illegible in the sleeve of Stupid Dream? “Ah! Well that’s because I don’t believe you should really read lyrics divorced from the music. I think a lot of people have this tendency to try and elevate rock lyrics to the level of poetry.” As in fact Fish himself would probably claim, I pointed out.

“But I think Fish is one of the exceptions that possibly could make that claim. Not all of it - some of it is more in the spirit of rock ’n’ roll lyric writing – but some of it, you could possibly claim, is quite interesting taken in isolation from the music. I would not make that claim for mine. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t take care over them. I take care over the musicality of the words, as much as I do the words in themselves. I think Fish does both – Fish has times where, certainly in the early days. I’m sure he’d be the first to admit that his lyrics were actually verbose to the detriment of the way they would sort of fit the music. Things like The Web and stuff like that. But certainly recently, I think, his lyrics have been the best of both worlds really, in the way that they do read very well off the page, and they do work very well musically too. But that’s really the reason I did that. It’s a little bit of an obnoxious thing to do, I know, but I didn’t really want people analysing the words outside of the musical context. I’ve kind of relented slightly on this album, because so many people complained, and I found myself having to e-mail lyrics to people all the time and I’m fed up with having to do that. ‘Please send me the lyrics – I can’t read them’. So this time I’ve relented and I have put them there.

I am proud of the words, but obviously for me if you read the lyrics, you only get twenty percent of the effect. You only get a hundred percent of the effect when you hear them sung with the proper emotional kind of resonance, if you like, in the musical context that they are intended to be in. That’s when they’ll hopefully have the emotional kick they’re supposed to.”

That said, the fact that Fish is not really a musician, did he let Steve get on with the music side of Sunsets, which many people describe as the best album Fish has done. “I get people that say to me it’s either that one, or the first one he did, which I haven’t heard, so I can’t comment. I’m very proud that people feel that way. Yes, Fish is a lyrics writer and he’s a singer. He will rely on whoever he is working with, to basically create the sound world – that word again – that what he does will fit into. So in that sense, it’s very enjoyable for someone like me to get involved, because I was given carte blanche to create a new sound for Fish. And indeed, every new person he works with will basically have the opportunity to create a new sound for his words and his voice to fit into.

But of course he’s such a strong personality, so distinctive, that whatever he does, he will stamp his personality on indelibly. So it’s very difficult to do something stylistically that wouldn’t work, because whatever Fish sings on ends up sounding like a Fish track. I can’t say the same of me, for God’s sake. So yes, I’m sure he’d be the first to admit that he’s not musical, he does rely on his collaborators to create the sound for each of his records, which is why so many of his records do have a distinctive sound”.

I then asked the fan a lot of Sunsets-lovers would love to ask, namely whether Steve could see himself working with Fish again? “I like Fish a lot – he’s great fun and I would love to something again with him. I doubt if in the near future I would ever have the time to spend that much time on a project with him again. Like for example on the last record I just spent a day playing guitar – I’d be very happy to do that for him again or maybe write a song or something for his new record. But [Sunsets] was quite an intensive period – a real emotional rollercoaster as well – so it was a great experience for me. So yeah, maybe. I haven’t fallen out with him or anything, he’s still a very good friend.”

Steve finally played live him at Haddington, though. “Sort of, yeah…” he grinned. A lot of people did think his guitar wasn’t plugged in… “Well, I didn’t think it was plugged in, until I heard the CD [Fish] sent me the other day and I can actually hear myself on it, but…” Wes had previously assured me that Steve was plugged in, but came through on his acoustic pickup which is why it was very quiet out front. “Yeah, it was very quiet, but I mean it was just a token thing. I mean obviously I didn’t need to be there, but it was just a nice thing for me and Fish and maybe some of the fans as well. It was a gesture.” It was a nice thing for Steve? With only twenty minutes warning? “Oh all right”, he conceded. “It was a bit stressful, but it was a gesture. A gesture to the fans.”

Time to move onto Steve’s own projects – Porcupine Tree, IEM, No-Man and Bass Communion. Why so many? One band’s enough for most people isn’t it?

“I don’t understand why. I’m a professional musician, okay – I don’t do anything else. This is what I do – I make music. It doesn’t take my whole life, you know - Porcupine Tree does not take up my whole life. Let’s say even if we made a record every year, which is not very likely. We spend three months making a record, three months touring – what do I do the rest of the time? I don’t understand? What do all the other bands do? That’s one point I will make. The other point is that I meet a lot of people in the industry that have got to the point where music is their career, but they’re not necessarily still excited by music, if you know what I mean. It’s like their career – it’s like ‘Oh I have to make an album’, but to be honest it can equally be going to the office every day; it’s become just another job to them. It’s never been that way for me and, touch wood, it never will be. I still find myself massively enthusiastic about music.

I still buy twenty, thirty CDs a month, I still find so much new music that inspires me, and as I am constantly finding new music that interests me, I am constantly inspired to create music in all sorts of styles and genres. If you listen to all the projects, they are all stylistically very different and distinct from each other. So that, in a way, is the answer. I can’t do everything that I want to do musically in Porcupine Tree -–for a start it’s a band and everybody has a say in what will go on a Porcupine Tree record. It would be ludicrous for me to suddenly come out with the next Porcupine Tree record as a two hour double ambient CD. It would be ridiculous, it would be career suicide for a start. So what makes a lot more sense is to start parallel projects or have other projects, so that people that are interested in me as opposed to just in Porcupine Tree, can explore the other music that I like to make.

Or they can choose to ignore IEM or Bass Communion and they’re not necessarily disappointed that Porcupine Tree has let them down, you know. Porcupine Tree continues to forge its own path. Porcupine Tree are very much in the tradition of a classic rock band -  clearly the other projects that I have are not and in that sense they give me more, and less, freedom to do what I want.”

I asked about who he writes – does he sit down to write some songs for Porcupine Tree, then take some lyrics from Tim Bowness and write some music, or does he just get ideas and jot them down and put them in the appropriate pile. “It does seem like it should be that case, but if you think about it, if you look at the music, Porcupine Tree are a project orientated around songs, Bass Communion and IEM are what I would call soundscape projects. So the bottom line is if I sit down and I write a songs on my own, with singing, and a verse and a chorus and some kind of conventional subject matter, by default it’s going to become a Porcupine Tree song, for the simple reason that I don’t write songs for No-Man on my own, I write them with Tim – we write together. So it’s actually a lot more easy than you might think. If I write a song on my own, it’s Porcupine Tree, if I write a song with Tim, it’s No-Man, if I do some kind of ambient soundscape thing, it’s Bass Communion, if I do some weird psychedelic Krautrock wig-out, it’s gonna be IEM.”

Porcupine Tree was originally a solo project and Steve still writes the songs. Yet he has previously described it as “a democratic band unit” – if they’re all his songs, how does that work? “Well, just because they’re my songs, put it this way: I write the songs and I submit the songs to the group. It’s at that point that the control over the project becomes a lot more democratic, because they’ll say to me “Nah, don’t like that one, yeah we like that one”, and we’ll discuss which songs, of mine, they think are good enough to record for Porcupine Tree. At that point, they will also start working on their own contributions to those tracks, then we’ll discuss the running order for the album, the artwork that goes on the record, where we’re gonna tour, how we’re gonna tour… So the only part of the process is the writing really, where I am making decisions on how bits will fit together and how vocal melodies go. Beyond that, I’m just another pleb in the band.”

As he mentioned the artwork I asked about Lightbulb Sun, whose artwork is by John Foxx, the guy that founded Ultravox and had some excellent solo albums. How did that come about? “Well, he’s a professional photographer, that does design. We came across him as a designer. We had a few people submitting ideas for the record sleeve and his was the best. He does still make records, but he doesn’t make a living from it now – he makes a living from his design. He designed the front of the book covers to all the Salman Rushdie paperbacks, for example. He does book covers and all sorts of other design – theatre programmes. That is what he does. There you go, you didn’t know that did you?” And I had to admit I didn’t, in spite of having several of his albums. Steve was getting the upper hand on me, which was not a good sign, especially when he added, “Hey ho. A polymath, as they say. A multi-talented guy.” I confessed, “I’d probably just say…” “A multi-talented guy, yeah.”, Steve kindly finished my sentence for me. I’d get my own back -  he hadn’t seen some of the later questions!

I tried to counter what he had just told me by pointing out that the demo version of Even Less on the Limited Edition CD single is musically pretty damned close to the final one, the main difference, in fact, being the lyric change. “OK – that one is quite similar, yeah.”, he had to concede. I was getting some points back, so I pressed this issue, asking why he made the lyric change, why the complete removal of all the religious references. “Well, because I thought those lyrics were terribly glib. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but when I do a demo, the lyrics very often are quite intuitive. Intuitive, first-things-that-come-into-your-head-type things or just little scribblings in a notebook that fit the meter of the music and fit the meter of the vocal melody that I have in my head at that time. And so, they’re not always the greatest lyrics, they’re not always the lyrics I want to be immortalised on the final version.

But, we went out on tour and played like a demo version of the live track as well, and I was using the same lyrics, but I thought they were terribly glib lyrics. All this thing about God and Jesus, very over the top really. About the same kind of time I decided that I wanted to make Porcupine Tree songs much more personal and directly related to my life. I think growing in confidence as a songwriter has led me that way really. It’s something I always wanted to do, but didn’t really feel the confidence in the first place. I believe that the most emotionally powerful songs are songs that are written, ironically, from a very selfish perspective, because I think that songs that are written in the first person from a selfish perspective, self-indulgent if you like, tend to connect with people because people can always relate. There’s some things that people sing about that everybody else has experienced. So rather than continuing to write about abstract concepts, and you know I have done that a lot – everything from nuclear war to space to my feelings on religion, organised religion, and that song was continuing in that tradition originally.

I just said No, I want to write much more about my life and my feelings and my emotions and I felt that would probably mean that the tracks would begin to speak a lot more to other people. And so it has come to pass, to continue our religious metaphor theme here. There’s a song on the new album called Feel So Low, terribly, terribly self-pitying, depressing but very emotionally raw, and I’ve had some rather strange, and some quite nice, e-mails about that, you know. People really feel some kind of empathy with that. I’ve never had that before and that kind of proves my theory in a way, that the more personal you become, the more self-indulgent you become as a songwriter, the more people kind of connect with what you write about.

I have made similar comments to Wes – there’s nothing miserable about him on a day-to-day basis, but he writes miserable, miserable songs. And now the songs on Lightbulb Sun – they’re all negative emotions. “Yes, but for me there are two halves of the album. There is a set of songs that are very kind of depressing and self-pitying, what I call the relationship songs, but don’t confuse songs about loss for negativity. For me, sometimes loss is something that is quite nostalgic – it can be, in a perverse way, quite positive. It’s looking back on something. You know, childhood is something I look back on with a mixture of sort of repulsion and nostalgia. And songs like Where We Would Be, I hope, although they are kind of nostalgic, and it is about a loss of innocence, are very warm. They have a very warm, positive emotion – at least to me when I perform them, whereas on the other hand, songs like Feel So Low obviously have a very kind of negative and melancholic quality to them. So there is a difference I would draw there – I don’t think the album is completely down in the dumps…”

Which isn’t quite what I said, but Steve continued. “Just coming back to your point about Wes and the fact that Wes obviously is a very nice guy, seems very well-adjusted, very positive. I would consider myself to be in that category too! I feel quite happy with my life – I’m not a morose individual – and I’ve been asked “Are you as miserable as your songs would suggest” and the answer is, of course, No I’m not. But that in a sense is part of the joy of being an artist – you have got this means of catharticism which you can use to get…” I was looking confused at this point, as Steve asked “You know what cathartic means, surely?” “Yes I do. I’m just not sure that was the noun.”, I replied.

“Catharticism?”, repeated Steve. “Mmmmm. Catharsis?”, I suggested. “Catharsis, beg your pardon. Okay don’t print that”, he said and laughed, knowing me well enough to know I would. “Catharsis, yeah – there is this opportunity to get these negative emotions out”, he finished.

I know Steve well enough to know that he’s got a good sense of humour and know Wes to be a very funny bloke, it’s just there’s loads of people going “Oh they must be such depressing people” and it’s like “No – not really”. Steve agreed with me, and went back to Fish as an example.

“No, I mean Fish has written some bloody miserable songs as well, but he’s a mad Scotsman, you know. He’s like a constant source of amusement to anyone who spends any time with him. But that’s the point really, that from a personal point of view, as a lover of music, the music that I find the most uplifting and most beautiful tends to be the saddest music. I find things like Steps, and stuff like that, utterly depressing. That for me is, like you know, that’s depressing music.” I agreed that it does remove the will to live sometimes. “Exactly, but that’s all supposedly joyous and uplifting.” But it probably is if you’re 12 though. “Yeah, but…”, tries Steve. You just get up and dance around to it, I point out.

“Yeah, but… that’s the point isn’t it. When you’re 12 you don’t realise that life does have this other side. It’s not all fucking wine and roses, certainly not when you’re 12 I hope!” Sweets and cola, I suggest as an alternative. “And Pokemon”, he points out. “And the thing is that when you grow up, you realise that there is this kind of miserable side to life as well, you know, and the amplitude of your life tends to be reflected on how great a time you have and how miserable a time you have. I mean, Fish is a great example. Fish has a great time, but he has had some terrible, terrible experiences. I haven’t had really terrible experiences, but I’ve seen enough of life to know that there’s a lot of shitty stuff that goes on out there, and I’d rather write about that than bloody, you know, trying to give the impression that everything’s hunky dory all the time, because it isn’t.”

I decide it is time to change the subject radically and move onto digital recording and ProTools. “I don’t use ProTools, I use LogicAudio. It’s very similar, but yeah…” People say that the records suffer sonically, but I’ve always found Steve’s overall sound to be very rich. However, he does a certain amount of processing – he already commented that he processed h’s vocals when he did the Marillion stuff, and someone told me you used AutoTune a lot on Fish’s vocals on Sunsets.

“I didn’t – Avril Mackintosh did. I had nothing to do with those – Fish wouldn’t let me anywhere near his vocals. Avril was somebody he’d worked with for many years and had a good working relationship with, but she tuned them, yeah.” But again, some people say you’re taking away from the music doing that – what is Steve’s opinion? “The rough edges? I’m not the kind of artist who can do really rough, warts and all, recordings. I just can’t do it. I mean I really admire people that can – people like Neil Young and the Velvet Underground. I love those records, they’re absolutely fantastic, all out of tune, badly played and badly produced, but there’s something – the spirit there is fantastic and they’re great records, some of the greatest records ever made. I can’t make records like that – I wish I could, but I can’t, I just can’t do it. I guess it’s just the way I discovered music was through bands that had very hi-tech standards for production and playing and all that kind of stuff, and I’ve never really been able to get that out of my system.

“So did you fuck around with Coma Divine before you put it out? Clean it up?” I asked. “Oh yeah!” he agreed, readily. A lot? “No, not a lot. But that’s the hardest record I’ve ever had to do because I was constantly resisting the temptation to…” “Redo every single track?”, I suggest. “Er, yeah, absolutely! But we didn’t, and I’m pleased to say the only thing that was redone again were the vocals. But that was actually more for a technical reason – the vocals had so much spillage from everything else, that I was unable to get a good sound on the vocals. So the vocals were redone on Coma – not all of them, but about 75-80 percent of them”.

Coming back to the original point, Steve says, “On digital, you’re right, there is always the availability, and therefor the temptation to clean things up to the nth degree, past the point at which it makes artistic sense to do so and actually to the point of clinicism – I think that is the right noun, isn’t it?” Not actually wanting to let this degenerate into a discussion of grammar, I agree. “Clinicism and sterility. And you’re right, that is a really serious danger. All I can say is I hope on my records I avoid it”. Steve goes on to say that he feels “the pros far outweigh the cons” and then give me the other side of the coin.

“If you’re working on tape, okay, you’ve got say 24 track tape. You are not in a position to take ten drum takes, keep them all, and compile the best drum take. You have to commit to one drum take. So for example, because drums take up about twelve tracks on the tape already you cannot afford to keep taking drum tapes – you have to make the commitment – I’m gonna erase the one I just did, even though I liked some of it, and go for a better one. You can drop it, but basically you’re only allowed to keep one drum take. With ProTools and LogicAudio you can in theory record ten drum takes, some of which the drummer might be fucking awful, except he does one amazing fill and he can never reproduce it. It was totally off the cuff, totally spontaneous, totally rock ‘n’ roll. You can keep that, even though the rest of the take was diabolical. And you can edit that into your master take, so in some senses you are retaining more of the spirit of the performance, and not less. Do you understand the point I am making?”

I’m not totally sure I do, and say you can argue it the other way round and say you’re cheating. He’s got a good enough bunch of musicians that maybe he shouldn’t need to do that. “This is my whole point about making records. Some people look upon making records as purely a documentation process – you document the way the band play live. I’ve always felt that to be bollocks. For me the greatest records are the records which used the possibilities available in the studio. The Beach Boys, The Beatles, you know, the great innovators in production in the late 60s – what they did was they said “Okay we don’t care that we can’t do this live”. Look at a track like A Day In The Life, by The Beatles – how the hell could they ever have reproduced that live? Of course they couldn’t. It didn’t stop them from exploring the possibilities of the studio.

That’s always been my first love – production. I enjoy playing live, but for me that’s not what enthuses me most about being a musician. I love making records, I love the possibilities that being a record producer gives you. You can record guitar solos then flip them over and play them backwards, you can do all sorts of things like that. You can slow things down, speed things up. You can take instrumental combinations that would be totally unfeasible live and put them together. I’ve done tracks, and it’s given me a lot of problems. Tracks like Stranger By The Minute that are impossible to play live for one reason only, that the vocal is very closely miked and barely above a whisper, whereas the band are going hammer and tongs behind me. That is only achievable in the studio – you cannot do that live, for obvious reasons. Now, should I throw that track off the record, because I can’t do it live? Course not. There are arguments for and against – for me, I love what you can do in the studio and I do think ultimately, with hard disk recording, you can retain more of that spontaneous spirit and not less, for the reasons that I just explained to you.”

Although I kind of agree with most of what he says, I am not sure about the last point. How can a compiled take be more spontaneous, but I decide he has thought about this more than I have, so decide to ask about some of the other lesser-known things he has done. What’s all this about him working with Uri Geller then? Selling out? Steve laughs – “Uri Geller? If you think I sold out with Uri Geller you’d be fucking horrified with some of the other stuff”, which of course was like a red rag to a bull, or a feeder line to a Lizard maybe. The editor had insisted I ask about the adverts, jingles, etc.

“Okay, Uri Geller – you might just as well ask me about anything. I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of adverts, theme tunes, jingles, sessions for people like Uri Geller. I mean that was like a day last year. It’s just one of the many things I’ve done.” Just more embarrassing than most of the others, I suggest? “No it’s not”, Steve said very firmly, egging on the Lizard even further. “Oh go on – tell me the embarrassing ones then.” “I’m not going to. But trust me…”, Steve said. I decided to do the Jeremy Paxman, and pursue him on this issue; “What adverts have you written?” “I’m not gonna tell you”, he states firmly, proving that Paxman does deserve to get paid more for his interviewing that I do. Time to resort to childishness – “Bounty, the stronger soaker-upper”, I sing. “Is that yours?”

“Close. I haven’t done Bounty, but I have done chocolate bar adverts. Let me turn this around and ask you a question, right? I’ve already explained to you I’m a professional musician – do you think I make any money from being in Porcupine Tree?” “Not enough to live in Hampstead, mate, no”, I concede, realising that Steve is now stealing my role of interviewer. Two minutes earlier I was trying my Paxmanesque masterstroke, now Steve has taken complete control. With a chuckle, he repeats; “Do you think I make enough money to live on, not even just in Hampstead, but in any circumstances, from doing the music? Bearing in mind the music I make, the sort of music I like to make, do you think I can possibly make a living from doing that? Okay, I should be able to…”, he concedes.

I am now answering the questions! “But that’s the point – you’ve got the ability to… Take something like Shesmovedon, which… Okay, it’s all dependent on getting the same fucking airplay that you don’t get, although you’re beginning to.” Steve thankfully, goes back to answering my question, letting me feel I am still in control of the session. “Let me paint two scenarios for you. A musician, right, basically loves to make music – that’s his first love. He’s not interested in making money, he’s not interested in being famous, he just likes making music okay. He’s got two choices.

Scenario one, he does exactly the kind of music he likes making, he makes absolutely no compromises at all, makes no compromises on behalf of the industry that he is in, being commercial, being mainstream, selling records, blah, blah, blah. In order to do this, however, he has to do other stuff – he has to do adverts, he has to do theme music, he has to make money somehow in order to survive as a musician and in order not to compromise in what he believes is the point of his life – the most important thing he does in his life, his music. That’s scenario one.

Scenario two, he decides not to do the other stuff, but in order to survive as a musician, he has to start making compromises in his own music. The record company is saying, “Well, you could sell a lot more records if you got someone to do a remix of your record with a forced floor dance beat. We might be able to get it played in the clubs” or something. Because he’s in a situation where he has to be able to live, he’s constantly thinking where the next bloody mortgage payment’s gonna come from. He can’t help himself, and he starts to make compromises like that.

Now, I’ve been in both those scenarios – I don’t ever want to be in that second scenario again. In the early years of No-man, we were in that situation. It was all I had at the time, didn’t do any of the advert stuff, didn’t have income from anywhere else. I had to make a living from No-man. We had pressure from our record company to come up with pop singles in the style of The Shamen, who were very big at the time and on the same record label; to have remixes done by people like The Shamen and we did all that and I never forgave myself for doing it and I am never going to do it again. And I think the lesser of two evils is to be able to do the bread and butter stuff, cause at the end of the day nobody… Okay, you’ve heard about this Uri Geller stuff, but ultimately nobody knows about this stuff anyway – it doesn’t matter. I do a job, I get paid, I go off and I do exactly what the fuck I want with my career.”

He then holds his hands in the air, one moving up, one moving down and points out that he doesn’t do “as much as I used to of that, because Porcupine Tree are selling more records and of course as, ultimately, I would like Porcupine Tree to be able to support me financially and I hope one day in the very near future we will reach that point. At this point Porcupine Tree and the other, it’s kind of going like that [at this point he waves his hand] and hopefully at some point this will reach zero. But no, Uri Geller is something I did last year – it took me a day, it’s one of many jobs I did last year to make a bit of money. So, is it selling out? I think the other scenario is much more deserving of that accusation.”

I’ve got him onto a touchy subject, so I decide to calm things down by suggesting he could get sponsorships from Boots for advertising their nasal sprays. “Well, that would be nice. I spend a fortune on that stuff.” I was going to do lots of jokes about musicians sticking stuff up their noses at this point in the interview, but decided to carry on with some more sensible comments, so I pointed out that the last time I was there at the Scala, I was standing next to Wes and Rothers. Steve seems to have a lot of respect amongst his peers…

“Steve’s coming tonight I think. And h as well. Well, I’ve just worked on their record, so they probably felt they couldn’t not come. I don’t know, erm… well I think Steve probably liked the record, probably likes what we do, otherwise I wouldn’t have been asked to work on… Yeah, well, you know… there are still some musicians out there that like music, believe it or not, still buy records by other people. Is that so surprising?”

Just as I think I have things back under control, Steve asked me about the incident with Fish and Mark Daghorn & Tony Turrell that had kicked off from the ROBW web site. I summarised the basic details for him, including the fact that Fish had mentioned that I was lucky he hadn’t broken my legs. So, I asked Steve, “if there was a fight between you, Marillion, Wes and Fish, who’d win?” “A fight? What, a fist fight?”, he asked, bemused. “Yeah.” “Oh come on, that’s silly… Fish would win easily.”, he said. my money would be on Wes, I pointed out. “Wes?!?”, Steve screamed, as if I had suggested Julian Clary, so I pointed out Wes’s black belt in Tae Kwon Do. “Has he? Well, I didn’t know that, did I.” I had him now – Steve was definitely beginning to sulk. I took my opportunity to tease him further, “Well there you go. So you’d have picked the wrong person on your side”.

At this point the whole discussion got very silly indeed, which any other publication would certainly cut, but this is ROBW, so I will mention that Steve tried to claim he was right by suggesting “But Fish would lift his kilt and everybody else would be in… you know.” Steve then realised, “This is getting a bit frivolous now.” “But”, I pointed out, “it was always going to”, to which Steve could only say, “I know”.

Back to real questions. At the end of Stop Swimming, there is a sound right at the very end, which I always thought was a needle lifting off a record and I was told I was wrong. “No – it’s a malfunctioning Hammond organ”, explained Steve. “It’s a malfunctioning Hammond organ…” I repeated slowly, thinking he had misunderstood the question. “Yeah, and it was singing to itself and it kept clunking and it was very eerie, because we were out in this studio in the middle of Wales and this place is in the middle of nowhere. It’s really late at night and we had the mikes up in the studio on the Hammond and suddenly we started hearing this clunking noise and, to me it sounded like coffin lids closing. So this is like spooky and it just kept doing this, so we recorded it and the one at the end of the album, for me it’s like the coffin lid closing on the record – CLUNK! But yeah, it’s a Hammond, a malfunctioning Hammond.”

“It’s funny, I’ve had some people e-mail me on this record, Lightbulb Sun, because there’s some places on the record where the hiss amplifies, is deliberately accentuated and people write to me saying “ Oh I think my copy must be faulty” and some people just don’t get it. I’ve always loved, you know, accentuating the hiss and the stuff. It’s like the Marillion record, I found that bit of jamming through one of the songs, underneath, and there’s like loads of leakage from the guitar, and I thought this is great, and luckily they liked that idea. I love all that stuff, you know – ‘audio verit�’, ‘Low-Fi’ – and that’s part of that really. It’s just a Hammond making very strange, and not totally deliberate, noises, and I left the sound on and stuck it on the end of the record.”

Talking of the new album and, in fact, the then-current single 4 Chords, I pointed out that I had heard Marillion fans accusing the beginning “Six of one and half a dozen” lyric of referring to Marillion. “Noooooooo”, said Steve very slowly, as if he had no idea what I was talking about (not for the first time in the interview!). “It was one of the compilation albums, wasn’t it”, I pointed out. “Oh was it? I didn’t know that. Oh God no” I started to tell Steve of the comment from the previous PT gig I’d been at, where my mate Dobbin said “As opposed to a million chords that made four quid.” “Is that Spock’s Beard?”, asked Steve, which was funnier than my story anyway.

Since he had mentioned Spock’s Beard then, I asked “If you’re not Prog, what are you?” “If we’re not Prog, what are we? We’re a rock band. Are we Prog? Do you think we’re Prog?” He was trying to take control again, but I was wise to this by now. “I don’t even know what it means”, I cunningly ducked the question with. “We have elements of Prog, certainly. Is that all we do?” I decided to go back to cynicism, as it had worked better earlier. “You’ve got songs about space aliens, but you haven’t got any about elves and hobbits. That would guarantee being Prog, I think.” “It probably would, yeah”, agreed Steve. “Give Chris a three minute solo – that’d be Prog”, I suggested in addition.

“God, he solos all the way through the gig anyway. God I don’t know – are we Prog? Some people call us Prog. I don’t see us as a generic band at all. I just don’t see it. I’m not generic in the way I listen to music – the influences I have don’t come from a genre, so I don’t think of us as… I don’t know – many people can call Marillion prog I suppose. For me they’re just like a good rock band, great songs, good players,…”

“Pigeon-holing, what is it good for!”, I sang, to the tune of War. “Well, I think it’s good for journalists. When you’re starting out as a band, people don’t know what you sound like, a journalist has got to write about you, how is he people to go out and buy your record?” “Say they sound like Pink Floyd”, I replied, since this was what Porcupine Tree got from journalists for a long time, but Steve confessed, “Well, it worked for us. Although I hate that…” “Oh, but come on”, I protested. “There’s loads of bits that do”

“Yeah, there used to be, and I think it’s totally fair to point to some of the music and say Pink Floyd, early on certainly, and I would be the first to admit that that was very helpful for us in the sense that it sent a lot of people out to buy the record that would not have done so otherwise, if the review had just said: oh they’re an interesting rock band and they’ve got spacey textures and things. But Pink Floyd, bless ‘em, haven’t made a decent record for years and I suppose people were hankering after something to fill the void. And our records, certainly a few years ago, did kind of. I don’t think they do now at all, but it certainly helped us a lot, as indeed we were talking earlier about whether the Marillion connection has. They’re intangible things, you can’t say, but I’m sure we have picked up people because of the Pink Floyd comparison, I’m sure we’ve picked up people because of the Marillion connection. I hope we’ve reached a point now where people just think that we’re a band that sounds like Porcupine Tree.

We still get compared to Pink Floyd, but Marillion still get compared to Genesis. Journalists have very long memories, in the sense of if you do something they don’t like – shit tends to stick, you know. But recently, we’ve been compared to Radiohead as much as we have Floyd. I don’t know, comparisons probably are important for journalism, but other than that, naaaah, who cares.