Porcupine Tree are a British progressive rock band formed in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England. The most successful project by musician Steven Wilson, as evidenced by its growing popularity, Porcupine Tree is also one of the most original and creative groups of its generation. With their mix of early progressive rock, psychedelia, ambient and (more recently) metal as well, they have crafted a body of work quite impressive for its diversity, and the distinctive quality of the sound in their recordings. All this shouldn't come as that much of a surprise, given the fact that self-taught audio engineer and producer Wilson is very well famed for being a hard worker, and listens to many different genres of music for inspiration, as he once commented: "I like so many different types of things and they all go into the melting pot if you like that produces the music of Porcupine Tree."
Steven Wilson: lead vocals, guitars, piano, keyboards, hammered dulcimer and bass guitar. He is also the main songwriter. Richard Barbieri: synthesizers and keyboards. Colin Edwin: bass guitar. Gavin Harrison: drums and percussion.
In 1987, Porcupine Tree began as a solo project for Steven Wilson, and in some ways, it was born out of a joke.
Wilson: "It was something that I started doing as soon as I had the money to buy my own studio equipment. When you've got a studio in your house you tend to do things you wouldn't do when you're paying to go into a professional studio, where you're watching the clock all the time. The one thing I wanted to do, because I had a great love of late 60's/early 70's psychedelic and progressive music, was to make my own slant on that."
"When I decided to let other people hear the music, the first thing I did was to put together a cassette just to send out to a few people, and also to sell through a few companies who would put you on their mailing list. At the time I was paranoid that if I was honest about the source of the music, people would think that it was just another guy in his bedroom messing about. So to go with the first cassette I created a booklet, which related a bogus history of an imaginary band to try and give the tape a bit more weight so as to make people take it a bit more seriously. It was very tongue in cheek! It was suggested that the band met in the early 70's at a rock festival, they'd been in and out of prison and they'd been busted on various occasions! It was a bit of fun. But of course like anything that starts as a joke, people started to take it all seriously!"
