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.”