Porcupine Tree: A Retrospective
At a time when the underground music scene was just starting to surface in popular culture, a friend of mine recommended Porcupine Tree, check them out, she said, you’d be intrigued. Little did I know in those adolescent years moving towards my early twenties, P Tree, as I called it, would feature so heavily in my life.
I’ll confess I’ve never been one who discovers or stumbles upon underground music. But luckily enough, I’ve always had friends around me who’d do the digging. Somewhere in early 2003, I got my first taste of the band. Stupid Dream, Lightbulb Sun and In Absentia; these were the three albums my friend shared with me. I never bothered looking into the band then, not even to uncover their earlier gems. That habit developed much later in my life.
Porcupine Tree was hailed as the Pink Floyd of the nineties. And rightfully so. What made the former legendary also got Porcupine Tree its fair share of glory. It wasn’t the underground scene, or what the band spoke as such, but it was their sound. Oh, the sound of Porcupine Tree. Rock, psychedelic, experimental. You can slot the band in various debatable genres, but you could never debate its sound signature.
Sonically, Porcupine Tree spoke a new language. Fresh, eclectic, with a unique ability to draw you in, captivate, and fascinate you. Some might argue that the song writing wasn’t the best, or deep enough, or even go as far as calling it pubescent. But Porcupine Tree was never about that, in my mind, it was never supposed to be. It was a sound that touched you, moved you, spoke to you, with you, for you. You never really hummed along to any of its songs; yet, they held a close place in your heart.
There were many songs that featured in strange parts of my life. ‘Halo’, ‘Hatesong’, ‘Lazarus’, ‘Way Out Of Here’, ‘Open Car’, ‘Sleep Together’, ‘Piano Lessons’, ‘Fear of a Blank Planet’ and many more. The opening of ‘Russia on Ice’ became a song I slept to, a lullaby, if I may. ‘Trains’ was the song I tested before buying a 2.1 Bose speaker system, and in the coming years ‘Arriving Somewhere’ became my anthem — the mantra, the sound, the song became a part of me.
But Porcupine Tree was not about a few songs making it big. And I truly understood that in the summer of 2007. I had taken to writing a screenplay at that point in my life, and was penning down a skeleton as such, a broad storyline. A film layered with mood swings, seething, simmering along with each scene. A film punctuated with sound. To get the mood right, and to help me write better, I’d made a list of what parts of which songs will feature at what time in the movie, right down to its seconds. It also features one of the best sexual encounters I’ve ever written, one, I’m yet to practice. None of the above selection featured lyrics, it was the sound propelling the narrative forward, arresting it, or pulling it back, whichever the script demanded. And it’s not like they had scored for what I was writing, or I was writing with the score in mind. It was just the way the sound was engineered. It was magic…it was science.
Over that decade, I met my share of fans, but two of them stood out. Firstly, the woman who introduced them to me! She went on to uncover Steven Wilson — the founder of the band, and started following his projects closely, exposing me to Blackfield along the way — another venture of Steven Wilson. She went on to review his upcoming albums professionally, and thereby opening her own world to music. Not that Steven Wilson was the reason behind it, but he played his part.
The second one was someone I met at a social event, and her love for Steven Wilson and the band was borderline obsessive. She too, loved the band for its sound, something that struck a chord between us. And that’s how our friendship began, or as the song says, ‘the start of something beautiful’.
7 years back, our then dream, to see Porcupine Tree Live, came true when the band came down to perform at the nation’s biggest college festival. While, I was just excited to see them perform, my friend had hit crazy fan mode, wearing a Steven Wilson t-shirt (one was hard to come by at the time, even digital printing wasn’t big). The night is still etched in our memories. While there were underwhelming bits, the band lived up to its hype with a set list that mirrored most playlists we had on our iPods.
Porcupine Tree stayed with me long after that concert. A few years back, I had moved cities for work; an experiment that lasted barely a month, but the one happy memory from that time was watching ‘Arriving Somewhere’ being played on the video jukebox of a local bar — something that’s rare even now. Years later, as I sit down and type this, I can only look back and smile. It reminds me of how much I loved their sound, ironic for a band that’s popular for ‘Hatesong’. But that’s the relationship I’ve had with the band. I don’t equate life choices/decisions/phases/emotions with music anymore, but I’m glad, that when I did, it wasn’t supplemented with grass, but with a tree, a thorny one at that.
