Three's company - Porcupine Tree return with Closure/Continuation

News that Peter Gabriel is recording what fans hope will become a new album was a painful reminder that the famously dilettante singer hasn’t actually released any new music for 20 years. Given how long it takes to physically manufacture a new album these days, with our new-found love of vinyl, that interval could stretch to 21. 

It’s a point that resonates with Steven Wilson, founder, lead singer, guitarist and latterly bassist of “alternative” band Porcupine Tree. In November they announced their first new album since 2009, but it has taken until now for Closure/Continuation to appear. But what, though, is eight months when the album has actually had a gestation period of an entire decade? 

In the 13 years since that last release, The Incident, Wilson, drummer Gavin Harrison and keyboard player Richard Barbieri have done their own things: Wilson, a series of acclaimed solo albums that have finally achieved for him some mainstream attention; Barbieri has focused on his own solo releases while Harrison has undertaken numerous gigs with various outfits including King Crimson.

The band’s last hurrah came 12 years in October 2010 with the tour for The Incident culminating in a prestigious, sell-out show at the Royal Albert Hall, a milestone for a band that had been used to playing venues a fraction of the size. The Incident was played in its 55-minute conceptual entirety which, Harrison states during a Q&A session on the day of Closure/Continuation's release, was limiting. Barbieri says that he needed a break, particularly from two decades of the album-tour-album-tour cycle. 

Picture: Facebook/Porcupine Tree

Wilson is more forthright: in his excellent recent autobiography, Limited Edition Of One*, he describes the awkward atmosphere as they prepared for the Albert Hall gig, even admitting his own insecurity as a frontman about to perform at the biggest show of his career. However things ended 12 years ago, the trio (original bassist Colin Edwin’s relationship with the band can be classed as ‘estranged’) is open and honest about it, and make that clear during the Q&A (in Kingston-upon-Thames, by chance, Wilson’s birthplace).                              *Full disclosure - yours truly is mentioned in a chapter about David Bowie

It certainly hasn’t proven to be a barrier to reform and record and release an album with as deliciously ambiguous a title as they have. Not surprisingly, they won’t be drawn on whether Closure/Continuation implies future collaboration under the PT brand. Wilson, in particular, felt pressure to justify the redux: “I wanted to make absolutely sure we had a killer record,” he told Music Week. 

“There’s so many precedents for fans putting pressure on bands to get back together, and when they do come back, it’s very mediocre and watered down, with all that intensity and momentum they had in their prime no longer there. We were conscious that we wanted to make one of the best records, if not the best, we’d ever made... Almost by stealth, we’d created one of the strongest albums we’d ever made.” 

With Closure/Continuation going straight to No.1 in the British, German, Dutch and Swiss album charts - a first for either the band or its constituent members - the ‘cult’ of Porcupine Tree may finally be catching up with something many have known for a long time: they deserve greater awareness and greater success. “The legend of the band seems to have grown,” Wilson added to Music Week, “to the point that we have more people interested now than at any other time during our previous lifetime.”

 Of course here I must reluctantly address the room-sized elephant that is the ‘P’ word: prog. For much of his career, Wilson has been tagged - lazily - as some latter-day saviour of progressive rock, the last Jedi keeping alive a flame lit all those years ago by Sgt. Pepper, Bowie, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, et al. While he is no doubt flattered to be included in such exalted company, I know the prog thing rankles. “We are ‘alternative’,” he explains to the Kingston audience, acknowledging that journalists - mainly - have an inherent need to categorise. “[Porcupine Tree] took this element of complex, conceptual rock,” he recently told Super Deluxe Edition’s Paul Sinclair, “and we fused that with Richard’s sound design and approach to keyboard textures, Gavin’s interest in polyrhythms, my singer-songwriter sensibility, even elements of electronic music, industrial music – even metal music – and we put it all together in a way that was completely intuitive and unselfconscious.”

I know from personal conversations I’ve had with Wilson that his musical heroes, like David Bowie or Kate Bush, managed to be creative, inventive, never derivative – progressive – without having to labour under a label. “I would love to believe that after 30 years doing this, and having made lots of many different kinds of music over the years, that this notion that I’m somehow easily categorisable in one genre shouldn’t apply anymore,” he said in the SDE interview

Despite Wilson’s growing reputation as a solo artist (his last album featured a vocal contribution from Sir Elton John, and Nile Rodgers remixed one of its singles), Porcupine Tree is still very much an entity in its own right. In truth, the post-Albert Hall hiatus didn’t really last all that long: in 2012 Wilson popped over to Harrison’s house for a cup of tea which turned into an impromptu jam session between mates. With Harrison drumming and Wilson riffing away on a borrowed five-string bass guitar, they came up with Harridan, the formidable opening track of Closure/Continuation, which marries Wilson’s funk-like thudding to a distorted electric piano. All reminiscent of the jazz-fusion elements of the singer’s first couple of solo albums as well as PT’s own distant past, perhaps providing a subconscious bridge to the future.

The mood becomes more reflective with On The New Day, a solo Wilson composition, with its gently strummed chords and message of hope wrapped into a soothing (and, under five minutes in length, short) interlude before the “miasma of sound” that cues up the single Rats Return, and its acidic – and contemporary - take on tyrants. Wilson has talked of a more stripped back approach to Closure/Continuation, especially with his own guitar playing. Past PT outings tended to feature a lot of proto-metal riffing, but on Dignity Barbieri and Wilson produce a beautiful, melodic epic, underpinned by a ‘less-is-more’ acoustic guitar with only flourishes of jangly electric to punctuate the verses. Wilson will hate me for saying this, but it is reminiscent of the Genesis era I still enjoy the most, post-Gabriel and pre-MTV, when whimsy met a gentle form of rock with the albums Wind And Wuthering and …And Then There Were Three.

Picture: Porcupine Tree

Wilson’s point about wanting Porcupine Tree to be viewed in a category of their own is best exemplified by Walk The Plank, another Barbieri/Wilson song and one that lends itself more to Depeche Mode than any rock music convention, being sonically sparse, with a cold keyboard breeze floating through it. Similarly, the contemplative Chimera’s Wreck finds Harrison and Wilson confronting ageing in a near-nine minute workout that will no doubt be a highlight of the forthcoming tour for the album, which will bring Porcupine Tree to London’s SEC Arena for the first time.

Whether that gig in November (on my birthday, as it happens) proves to be another final hurrah for PT remains to be seen. The three are coy about whether or not they will do more – there is, Wilson says, a deliberate ambiguity to the title, which just lacks a question mark on the end. Wilson’s next solo album is already being prepared, and given his relentless ethic, with the remixes and side projects, it could be a while before Porcupine Tree meet up again for a lunch, and someone brings up the question, “What if we…?”.

Closure/Continuation may have taken ten years to produce, but that has been largely the result of Wilson, Barbieri and Harrison chipping away at it periodically, like an ambitious model railway layout in the attic, painting a station figure here, or a trackside detail there in the evenings or weekends when there’s nothing else on. It certainly is a work of passion, and one where the songcraft, musicianship and inventiveness is cleverly considered and expertly executed. “I don’t think we would have gone ahead and released the record, if we felt it was simply more of the same,” Wilson told Super Deluxe Edition. “It wasn’t a contrived reinvention,” he adds, “but nevertheless, it was a conscious attempt to reinvent, and I think, a successful one. It’s simply, this is what we do when we get together.”

2020: the antidote

Back in June I waxed somewhat lyrically about the re-release of The Blue Nile’s fourth and final album, High, and how Messrs Buchanan, Bell and Moore’s mellifluence was the perfect antidote to these sulphurous times. Well, guess what? Those times are still with us, and the need for a soothing balm is as acute now as it has ever been. Step forward, then, Tim Bowness.

One of the UK’s much-respected but not universally-known singer-songwriters, his collaborations with - full disclosure - my friend Steven Wilson date back to the late 80s and the formation of ‘no-man’, an outfit once described by no less an organ as the Melody Maker as "conceivably the most important English group since The Smiths”. Over the last 33 years, the Bowness/Wilson partnership has generated seven critically acclaimed albums, including their most recent, the “disco epic” Love You To Bits. When not in each other’s professional company, the pair have focused on solo interests - Wilson, with the equally revered Porcupine Tree and latterly, albums on his own, with Bowness working prolifically on five solo albums of his own (including his last, the highly rated Flowers At The Scene, which included contributions from Wilson, XTC’s Andy Partridge and 10cc’s Kevin Godley) and a plethora of collaboration projects. But now comes his sixth, Late Night Laments, which pretty much does what it says on the tin - a soothing collection of nine songs (14 on a limited edition CD with extras) which evoke the intimate, even claustrophobic state of late night, headphone-wearing consumption of atmospheric music. That description, though, probably doesn’t do Bowness any favours: Late Night Laments is no ambient gloomfest, but certainly does provide a timely reflection of where we find ourselves today.

“50% was written in late 2019 and 50% was written in early 2020,” says Tim of a creative process that went right up until the first signs that something more than just a flu outbreak was going on. “From the very first tiny newspaper article on the new coronavirus, I was aware of what was happening,” Tim recalls. “It was no surprise to see it go from a small piece on page 20 to taking up the first 20 pages of the paper by late February.”

Notably, the album was formally finished on the day lockdown was announced in the UK. Some of what it covers was certainly prescient. “My main worry was that some of the themes - hate crimes, generational divides, terrorism, social exclusion, etc - would be irrelevant in the face of the virus. As it turned out, a lot of the subject matter seems more current now.” Perhaps inadvertently, Bowness realises that he’d tapped into the emerging reality. “On one of my last listens through [in preparation for release], I became so absorbed in the experience that when the album finished I had to gradually re-remember that ‘lockdown’ and ‘the virus’ were real things. The music (or my exhaustion) had made me forget what was happening in the outside world and for a few moments the all-too depressing reality we’re living through seemed like far-fetched fragments from a bad dream.”

The result is an album of reflective, stripped back consideration, written from the perspective of an individual, late at night, enclosed in the almost claustrophobic intimacy of a living room, the outside world shut out by headphones, the music channeled from source to ear by the shortest of routes. The cover art, by longtime artwork partner Jarrod Gosling, almost says it all. “The artwork does provide a good insight into the album, I think,” says Tim. “There is a sense that the music is quite beautiful and comforting, while the lyrics represent a harsh dose of reality. I imagined the album as being like someone trying to immerse themselves in their own special world of favourite books, favourite albums, familiar furniture, while in the background the constant hum of global news is serving to puncture that state of grace.”

Bowness’s own ingestion of culture played some role in that, with songs like Darkline evoking the music of 60s spy thrillers. No surprise: “Late last year, I went through a phase of reading le Carre books,” Tim reveals. “Although they’re sometimes dismissed as genre thrillers, they’re actually well-written and frequently emotional pieces of work. There’s a real sense of sadness in his writing and a great depiction of how small lives can be sacrificed to the supposedly greater good of national politics or religion." Added to that is his love of 60s spy films and the scores of people like John Barry in the Bond and Harry Palmer series.

Late Night Laments is certainly a tonal shift from Bowness's last outing, no-man’s Love You To Bits, with its themes of relationships-lost framed by a clubland-infused electronica. “I think it was a necessary shift in direction,” Tim says about his latest direction. “What I do is often a reaction to what I’ve done previously, so albums can be a continuation of the most recent work or a complete rejection of it. In this case, the songs emerged totally spontaneously and were very different from the dynamic Love You To Bits and the eclectic Flowers At The Scene. I didn’t intend to write a late night ‘headphones album’, it was what naturally came out.”

One Last Call was the first track out of the bag - and closes the album (“The beginning became the end”), and concerns itself with idealogical terrorism, albeit written ambiguously as also a love song. Between these two points, it sets the sonic template for the entire album, all atmospheres, subtle bass motifs and Bowness’s own emotive, intimate vocals. “I didn’t intend to write a late night ‘headphones album’,” he says. “It was what naturally came out. Once I’d written One Last Call, the album title, album direction and album cover came to me pretty much immediately.”

The themes bubbled up as he went. The album’s opener, Northern Rain covers something I can closely relate to, the progressive demise of someone with dementia, but while this might sound depressing, the song is, in Tim’s own words, more about “coming to terms with ever-shifting change and being replaced.” I’m Better Now takes a nihilistic view on hate crime, seen through the eyes of a perpetrator, and examined through the prism of society’s increasing division, especially the polarities that politics here and in the US have been tainted with in recent years. “I wanted to present an extremist view and an extreme act in a way that ‘almost’ made it appear normal. The banality of evil,” says Tim. Elsewhere, We Caught The Light, written in the early hours of New Year’s Day, tapped into a “strange sense of foreboding” Bowness had that 2020 “was going to be significant and not in a good way”. “We caught the light,” he sings over a gentle melody, “but missed the signs”. Makes you pity those journalists who’ll be compiling the end-of-year retrospectives in December.

To make the album Bowness tapped into his expansive network to call on the talents of people like co-producer Brian Hulse, whose drum machine programming plays a constant part in the album’s sensuous textures, as well as Steven Wilson to mix the project. The joy throughout is that everything is perfectly weighted. Nothing - not the vocal or the instrument - is ever overplayed, with contributions by Porcupine Tree bassist Colin Edwin and former Japan keyboard player Richard Barbieri (who has long featured in both Bowness and Wilson’s work) adding subtlety, rather than obvious virtuosity. A case in point is the delightfully slowburn Darkline (inspired by a typically black-humoured Warren Zevon comment during his final days), on which Barbieri contributes a muted scream of a synth solo that just works in the piece.

If One Last Call, the first song written for the album provides its “emotional template”, according to Bowness, it’s impossible not to draw reference to the aforementioned Blue Nile, with whom many positive similarities can be drawn. Perhaps this is no coincidence, given the involvement of The Blue Nile’s recording engineer Calum Malcolm. “I’m a huge Blue Nile fan, and have followed the band’s work since the beginning,” says Tim. “I particularly love how they manage to humanise imaginative electronic soundscapes. My voice is totally unlike Paul Buchanan’s, but there’s no doubt that the feel of and the textures in The Blue Nile’s music have an influence on what I do since the beginning of my music making.” Another reference is Peter Gabriel - himself a huge part of The Blue Nile’s source code - and it’s with some pride that Bowness, a longstanding Gabriel fan, is now signed to his Real World organisation in a publishing deal. “I greatly admire the label and studio and have long been a fan of Peter’s, so it’s a lovely association. Hopefully there will be creative and career repercussions as well.”

Late Night Laments is, then, a fantastic addition to Bowness’s canon and, he says, the unpredictable nature of the directions he takes each time could lead him anywhere (“As many of my albums are a reaction to what I’ve just completed, you can expect a full-on K-Pop extravaganza or a detour into Noise Metal!”, he says, maybe jokingly). But there is no rush. This is an album that will get plenty of play, especially throughout the remainder of this particular shit show of a year. It does indeed recall the ambient brooding of The Blue Nile, but also Talk Talk and Prefab Sprout. Significantly, though, it also recalls the wooziness of One World, one of my favourite John Martin albums. That closes with the eight-minute Small Hours, a lot of Echoplex and the sound of geese recorded on a tape recorder taking flight from a nearby lake, amongst other ambient sounds. Previously it had been my go-to source for late night listening. With this new work by Bowness, I’ve found a successor.