Steven Wilson Reveals Porcupine Tree Secrets & The Truth About Coldplay & Radiohead

what's your biggest failure stephen i've done everything wrong in a sense my career has been a noble failure chris martin is an example of someone who really loves to be at the center of the universe the last album was this great artistic statement even that sounded a bit contrived i do have a frustration that perhaps radiohead got away with a lot of stuff the porky pantry and myself and my solo crew don't seem to have got away with it essentially making very obviously conceptual rock music things that the mainstream media traditionally sometimes have taken the piss out of welcome to disrupters i'm rob moore and on the show we have the king of progressive rock it is official google it stephen wilson it surprised me that stephen holds nothing about talking about radiohead muse chris martin and coldplay how the music industry has radically changed over the last 30 years he talks about why he left the band porcupine tree why he reformed and the uncertain future of pop music oh and i'm a massive fan so you'll probably see a side to me you've not seen before but before we dive in make sure you like this video subscribe to the channel and turn the notification bell on stephen are you the most underrated musician ever i think i come from a tradition of people that have operated outside of the mainstream and kind of reveled in that so in the sense that if you exist outside of the mainstream then you're not beholden to this kind of issue and problem of coming up with hits you know i don't have any hits you know one of the reasons i'm you know fortunate when i go on two with my band with his pocket pantry one of my solo tours is i can actually play whatever i want because i don't have anything that people are expecting me to play right so although i would be the first to admit that that has also had a downside i mean i've been frustrated over the years that i don't you know i can't get in a taxi with a taxi driver and say oh so what do you do so i'm in the music business oh anything i'll have heard of no you know i'm thinking so many of my friends like even my friend nick begs from uh from my back my solo band cadger google he had this big hit in the 80s too shy everyone knows too shy so he can say oh yeah i had too shy oh i know that song i don't have anything like that but i think over the years i've also acknowledged to myself that there is a positive side to that to not be beholden to this kind of um contract with the devil if you like that you you are expected to come up with hits so what i what i my career kind of has existed outside of the mainstream i'm what you would call the quintessential cult artist in the sense that i have a large audience very flatteringly i have a large audience very gratifyingly i have a large audience who kind of expect the unexpected and i don't underestimate how privileged i am to be able to say that i can essentially do whatever i want and the fans they might complain they might not like it but they will give me the benefit the doubt they will listen and they will learn to love it or not and i realize that actually that is something quite unusual so i don't know if that answers your question or not i'm sure there are people that are much more talented than me that are even less known than me but certainly i would fit into that definition of a cult artist yeah well i've got my own answer to that question i think you are the most underrated musician ever well thank you i think yeah is that i mean is that underrated i mean that's or maybe your talent's not known by enough people maybe that's a different way of saying it yeah and obviously i've always felt that you know there's always been a part of me that's been frustrated that the music to me has never felt like it was particularly difficult or willfully obscure or willfully uncommercial there's something about not all of my songs but some of the songs are quite i think they're quite accessible and yet radio has never played them because they've decided for whatever reason i'm the guy that does prog rock or whatever it is whatever their preconception is of me it's excluded the possibility to get my songs played on the radio to get on tv british tv or tv anywhere in the world so i've kind of existed outside of of the conventional the traditional media exposure that you expect to get if you're an artist that has accessible music i've never had the benefits of that and that has been really frustrating i mean i'll be very honest with you i have been very frustrated by that now the reason i say that is of course that for some people it's almost a dirty word to say that you success you aspire to be successful and i do in a way i fell in love you know when i was a kid i fell in love with you know pop stars like prince prince was my idol i wanted to be prince you know notwithstanding the fact i didn't have any anywhere near his talent or charisma but the idea the magic of the pop star the pop icon i completely fell for that i wanted to be a pop star but i didn't want to be a pop star at any cost i wanted to be a pop star with integrity as prince you know had integrity so to come up to come time and time again to come up against that kind of brick wall of not being able to get on the radio not being able to get on the tv that i always thought lesser bands seem to be able to negotiate that with relative ease and i just for whatever reason never was able to get that kind of exposure and again i say that with the caveat that i think there is a there is a plus side to that i have my anonymity um i can't imagine what it must be like to be someone that literally cannot go and kind of go out on the street without being recognized in a hassle i don't have that you know problem if you like but there is always that side of me that felt like the music should have reached more people than it has and what and what is music what is the what is the creative process if it's not that kind of wish to touch as many people as possible with what you do and to see yourself reflected back in the mirror of an audience so in that sense it has been a frustration too yeah well hopefully we'll get into that a little later okay so um i was having a little bit of a debate stroke argument with harry over there right um harry's been helping us with the show for about seven years and we're both big into music and i basically said to him that stephen's the king of progressive rock and porcupine tree are better than radiohead and i'm a big radiohead fan me too um so that's quite a thing and harry was like nah so do you know what i googled i googled right who is the king of progressive rock and i just want to show you what comes up okay in massive black letters yeah guitarist stephen wilson yeah yeah how does that make you feel well it's in some ways it's coming back to what we talked about before it's obviously simultaneously incredibly flattering but it's also it's a reductive kind of version of what i do so i you know i don't know how familiar with my whole sprawling back catalog which is a big massive fan okay so i've done everything from ambient music to electronic pop music to extreme metal with opeth to and obviously i have done a lot of progressive rock and i've worked with a lot of other progressive artists but i've also worked with pop artists i've worked with tears for fears i've worked with you know the who i've just done a mix for so in that sense this idea that you can reduce a musician to a single kind of sound by the king of progressive rock to me that's very flattering but it's also frustrating because i think it's part of the reason why i have never been played on the radio and it's part of the reason why i have never been on later with jules holland i've never been a lady with just one for example that's crazy we should campaign that well you think every british artist pretty much has been on like i mean how many seasons 28 seasons is that there's actually no british artist that hasn't been unlated with jules holland is there a reason for that do you think i think it is that preconception that i am the guy that does prague rock and prog rock is not something we cover in the mainstream it is a it is a cult underground form of music which is largely true because of course if you think about it the tradition of progressive rock is all about the idea of the album it's not about singles it's not about three-minute pop songs okay some progressive rock groups over the years had a kind of freak single you know whether it's pink floyd having another brick in the wall or whatever but generally progressive rock artists and i'm using very broadly led zeppelin you could include in the idea of progressive rock hardly even released singles but the point is that they came through an era when that was you were able to just be bloody minded about it say we're not going to release things i'm just going to make albums because this was 70s 60s 70s this was the year when people were curious about music people would go to shows there was only two or three tv channels you know and and so people would discover music in a much more organic way now to really reach a large audience you have to have so much impact in so many areas streaming physical radio media down and those things take a lot of clout and a lot of power which is why it's really the only very sort of commercial pop artist i think when was that let me ask you this question when was the last time you can remember an artist clearly from the tradition of rock music breaking through to the mainstream in a big way yeah i can't think past i would say i'm going back late 90s 2000s i can't go beyond like rage against the machine i would say coldplay maybe right you could say start mmu started exactly yeah i would say coldplay and muse yeah true yeah to actually break through internationally in a mainstream way as a rock hotter you're talking 20 more than 20 years could you argue though when they became well known they weren't really rock anymore well i think they adapted and that's one of the good things that's one of the the good things in career terms about someone like chris martin is he seems to be very canny he's very aware of you know the last album having the collaboration with bts for example he's like whatever i can and elton john's always been very good at that too you know doing a duet with whoever is the current pop-up so these guys stay these older sort of statesmen if you like stay relevant by adapting but you're right do you think that's selling out to a certain degree it depends on how well how well you kind of do it i guess i mean someone like david bowie on madonna they were always very good at adapting and it didn't it felt like they kept their integrity somehow so when david bowie did drum and bass in the mid-90s it felt somehow like he was still doing it with some integrity or some natural curiosity he wasn't purely careerist but i think there's there's a degree of cynicism of course to adapting to whatever is you know flavor of the month in terms of what the radio or streaming services are focusing on i've never been very good at that and i think have you tried then well i've tried and then hated myself so i've tried because i've been put under pressure by um a record label for example the album's amazing we just need one song we can get on the radio and then that will create this doorway that all these people can walk through and discover your amazing and of course it sounds great when people say that to you oh yeah you know if i can just give people this doorway to walk into my world they've got this incredible catalogue of of you know you know really ambitious creative whatever rock music they can explore but when i've done that i've always felt a little part of me has been unable to hide the fact that it is a contrivance i feel like people can hear the lie do you know what i mean yeah and and i and because i guess i hear it myself and i guess i feel like they can hear the there's a slight insincere strand to it so i've learned from my mistakes not to do that is there a song in your catalogue that is that song yeah i mean for example on an am called dead wing from from 2004 of 200 sorry yeah 2005 i think there was something shallow yeah love that song i think it's good were you being ironic then calling it shallow or no i wasn't oh that would have worked well how could it work yeah um it's good okay it's good okay i'm very happy you think that to me i just remember the circumstances we'd written the rest of the album i'd written the rest of the album i delivered to the record company and they said we can't get any of this played on american we were assigned to an american label at the time we can't get any of this played in american rock radio can't you just go and write something four minutes you know which still has the pokemon tree dna yeah and i went away and i created that song shallow which to me it's successful at what it does but it's not completely sincere in the sense i can hear there is an element of contrivance from from me and i cannot unhear that when i hear it do you not play it live now then we don't play it live we haven't played it live since 2006 that tour we haven't played this license that too there's just something about it that just felt a little bit too insincere and you know again this comes back to this idea and it wasn't a hit anyway by the way so it didn't succeed when it was supposed to and you know the one there's and it's called jello i love the irish yeah and of course if there's one truism for me it's this that if you're gonna fail fail on your own terms there's nothing worse than failing with something you don't believe in yourself i'm sure you must have had other people say something maybe not actually okay but i definitely agree with you if you you know if you're going to fail at least fail do some doing something you completely you're completely invested in but how would you have known unless you tried well i did try and and i felt slightly grubby slightly grubby even though you know i should say i can listen back to it now so actually that's pretty good it's a pretty good rock and roll song yeah but it fits in that album and it does and it does fit in your eye and you're right and actually it arguably probably gives the armor balance you know in terms of accessibility but at the time i felt like i've been slightly bullied bullied is too strong a word but slightly pushed into doing it for a reason that was not anything to do with music it was to do with marketing and that partly because i i grew up completely obsessed with the magic of music you know i think this is one of the things just before we started recording i was talking about this idea i have of the music industry what people perceive to be the music industry is actually two very different industries there is the music industry and there is also the entertainment industry and to me they are to almost they're too much completely the antithesis of each other in the sense that one of those industries is about identifying what people want and giving it to them entertaining and the other industry the music industry for me real musicians whether you're talking about you know you were talking about phil anselmo from pantera are we talking about tom york from radiohead real music someone like elton john has been able to spam the two but we'll come on to that in a minute maybe um the real musicians the ones that you really feel have kind of come into the industry because they have some kind of inner vocation they're in love with the idea of making music of being creative of taking without wishing to sound pretentious taking something within them and drawing it out and it is a very so i think you know true creation is a very selfish act you shouldn't be thinking about what somebody else is going to make of what you do i mean this is the van gogh thing van gogh who never sold a painting during his whole life you know very sad in a way but has since obviously gone on to become one of the you know the legends of the art world but that idea that he was so self-obsessed and so selfish and self-indulgent which of course is often used as a very negative to be self-indulgent it seems very negative but actually there's something very pure about being self-indulgent i'm making music to please me not the fans not you and if you like it that's great and i will do everything i can to help push the music out there once i've made it but you know what i'm going to make it in a vacuum i'm going to make it in a completely selfish way i'm not thinking about what anybody else wants from me what anybody else what anybody else expects from me least of all managers or record companies and i'm going to put it out there and then once i put it out there i'm very happy to play the games i'll go on tv i'll go i'll go and talk on podcasts and newspapers i'll do anything i can to market the music as long as the music itself was made in a very selfish way and i think that is the fundamental difference between the two sides of the music industry the music industry and the entertainment industry the latter of which will always say what do the fans want what's going to sell the best let's contrive to make that to fill that gap in the market and i can't i found i'm very i'm incapable of thinking in that way at least if i do think in that way i start to feel a bit grubby what's the biggest risk you've ever taken walking away from porcupine tree initially for the best part 12 years because everyone said i was mad and i didn't care i wanted to work with different musicians i wanted to be able to hop from genre to genre without being told by my band mates we can't do that we can't do this this is really fascinating because i've gone on the opposite journey in that i used to be an artist i've always been into rock metal and pure music that never sells out um i loved showbiz by muse and then progressively disliked them when i felt they became a stadium band loved first album maybe two of coldplay then they progressively became a stadium band and i was just an artist i was similar in the i want to do paintings that aren't necessarily commercial they are an expression of self this was say 16 20 years ago now i'm an entrepreneur and i teach a lot of people to be entrepreneurs and i don't mind saying i make really good money out of it and i think i've learned to accept the fact that for there to be value exchange there's the producer and the consumer so is there an argument to challenge what you said by saying an artist whose art is selfish and it doesn't get seen or liked by anyone and it's not for anyone what is it is it not just a vacuum and are we not here to please people these people who buy our music so the counter argument to that you're absolutely right of course you are but the counter argument to that is actually if you create something in a very selfish way if you take your own experiences and you channel them into your music of course there are other people that will empathize with what you do of course there are none of us are islands in that sense we all have a kind of shared human consciousness we we all understand you know what it's like what it's like to you know um unrequited love loss regret you know nostalgia for childhood all of these things which are all things i write about in my music for example are kind of universal themes and if you work in the field of creating melodies which i do accessible melodies then of course again you're going to you've got you are going to find you have an audience and as i say i've never been afraid to go and promote my music on in the belief that actually what i do is quite accessible but i think the point is that i don't come at the music from the point of view of what do people expect from me what do people want from me and part of the reason for that is that the artists i grew up admiring very much and i'm sure you admire them too were the bowies the pink floyds the lead zeppelins the beatles the most successful pop group of all time you can't look at the beatles career trajectory and tell me that they were ever they hardly ever did the same thing twice for a start and yet they were able to confront the expectations of their listeners all the time and take them on this journey with them now of course they were in a position of privilege they had the power to be able to do that they were the beatles you know when you're the beatles people listen even if they don't necessarily what the hell what strawberry feels forever what the hell are they doing on that that's not she loves you but it's the beatles so i'm going to listen to it two three four five six times ah now i get it and i think that if you another another good example would be something like frank zappa no one can tell me frank zeppa ever did anything except to please himself he was you talk about disrupters on your show he's a classic he's he's a contrarian completely and i'm a little bit of a contrarian one of my philosophies has always been if i'm not upsetting a big proportion of my fanbase with each record i've probably i'm probably not doing the right thing because i believe a lot of what is special about artists like bowie beatles floyd's the zeppelins of this world and you know radio had another great example i mean radiohead were poised let's not forget radiohead at one point were poised to be the new you too okay computer they could easily have become and they took an unbelievable you know right turn into the world of electronic music kept all their integrity and somehow managed to keep most of their audience too which is a trick that you know very few people ever pull that trick off but i think that idea of being contrary and maybe this is something that's a little bit unique to the music industry and one of the reasons why perhaps the music industry you may tell me i'm wrong because obviously you've talked to a lot of people over the years in different fields maybe there's something interesting unique about the music industry in the fact that the idea of confronting expectations of your audience is in a way what potentially can give you a longer career that if you just keep delivering the same thing ramstein do it though they do that i actually really admire them for making the same album 20 times ac dc yeah yeah a lot of people would say there's not a skill in that i think there's a massive skill in there no you're right and there's always the exceptions that approve the rule yeah and ac dc was the example i was going to get acdc has made the same amount for 45 years or 50 years and slayer have haven't that slayer and they are one and they are some of the biggest acts in the world um but i wonder if there are as many people i mean let's let's take a band like slow for example slay is a great example to me slayer created the definitive record almost 40 years ago reigning blood one of the greatest if not the greatest thrash metal album ever made in a sense everything else they've ever done i could argue and i'm playing devil's advocate here everything else they've ever done was superfluous and they're actually seasons in the abyss wow all right come on okay everything after sees okay but do you see what i'm saying the point is that at that point their reputation was kind of immortal and they could have gone out and toured for the next 50 years yeah on the basis of reigning blood there's there's an argument to say that metallica have done the same thing you know really they haven't made an album that their fans have really liked since the black album or master of puppets and yet they remain one of the biggest bands in the world ramstein is the same i don't think their current record for example would have sold anywhere near what an album 2012 a lot softer isn't it yeah but essentially you're right it's the same they they've got this formula but i think it is the law of diminishing returns if you make the same album i think you can sustain your life following people will always want to go and see ramstein because they got one of the best live shows in the world but people will sort of think to themselves i don't really need to buy that new album do i is it it's the same with ac dc i don't suppose anyone you know they're never going to have the same sorts of back in black because essentially they're still playing that same furrow um isn't the other side of that though everyone's waiting for the next in absentia with you or okay computer with radiohead once you've made something so seminal a lot of the fans want another rehash of that don't they you're right like i'll just say it because i just want to i am a massive fan of your work i always like meet a lot of my fans on this show and i never really know how to say it i always think you should just say it and be honest so i have listened to everything you've done and there is always a part of me that wants to hear a bit of in absentia again like i hate myself for that because i like the expression you're going on i'm the same with artists i like too of course i am a part of me is always wanting i think the point is that you when you fall in love with a particular artist or a particular band there's a door that you walk through into their world and it could be in the case of porcupine tree a lot of people walk through the door being an absentee door it was our first album on a major label it was a first album on an american label we had a good promotional budget behind us it was a great record and recorded very beautiful in a good studio a lot of people discovered us through that record so they walked into our world when you walk through a door into somebody's world there is a sense that nothing else will ever quite live up to that ever again it's like first kiss yeah first love i was going to say that it's first love and you and in a sense what's what a great artist will do or or a willful artist will do in a way is kind of recognize and acknowledge that that i will i can never give you i can as you as the listener i can never give you what you want ever again you could give us a bit though couldn't you but what i would rather do is confront your expectation and give you something completely different that initially you say i'm not sure about this but it's stephen wilson or it's pokemon tree so i'm gonna i'm gonna give it the benefit of the doubt i'm gonna listen a little and you might not ever like it as much as in absentia but you at least you might get something else out of it um this is the all i can say is this is the way it's worked with me with the artists i really love over the years whether it's you know another great example would be neil young neil young who goes from making [ __ ] you know country tinged acoustic albums to making full-on grunge albums with crazy horse to making albums where all the vocals are through a vocoder he's done everything he's he's done it to the fact you should try and interview him he got sued by his own record label you know that story no i don't i i became more aware of him when he went after joe rogan but well so in the 80s he got signed by geffen david geffen signed him for a huge amount of money he released a series of albums that resulted in david geffen suing him for not making it i forget the exact the exact wording of the lawsuit but it was like making albums that sounded insufficiently like neil young this makes me want to interview him even more i think he'd been amazing because basically he's gonna write that down he ended up making a um what is it he delivered he did a rockabilly album he followed that with an album where all the vocals were through a vocoder like electronic he then followed that with a country and western album and of course this is not what neil young this is not not one neil young fans it's certainly not what you expect when you just signed neil young and paid him x million dollars and and geffen ended up suing neil young for making records that sounded insufficiently like neil young there you go that i mean that's confrontational and i've always is that not too much of a [ __ ] you to your fan base though absolutely yeah but i think i think those things because i'm a bit of a contrarian i've always loved those stories you know like lou reed delivering to us i mean lou reed having his big hit with um transformer in the 70s and following and following up following up delivering that to rca the follow-up album four sides of guitar feedback an album called metal machine music another very famous story from the music industry of a classic [ __ ] you from an artist to his record label because they basically said to lou oh you've had this big hit walk on the wild side what give us more of them give us a whole album of walk on the wild side and of course that's kind of what the fans might have wanted and expected too but lou being contrary famously so delivered four albums of guitar feedback and said to rca right [ __ ] you'd release that's my follow-up record did you hear the story of klf when they were invite to play at the brits and they got a heavy metal band and they played 3am eternal through a death metal i didn't know that yeah their um documentary just came out i was a big fan of those when i was a kid every time people expected him to do something he went somewhere well he went down [ __ ] you later that was bill drummond wasn't it yeah i know the stories about them burning a million pounds and and uh yeah i mean but you know the that i think that kind of pranksterism um is is a is a part of it obviously but you know and of course there is a lot of a lot of a lot of that you can look at it and you can say well you're just basically shooting yourself in the foot you're you're destroying your own career i like that even on yourself yeah i kept a bit a bit of me likes that a bit though a bit of me like that i mean listen i love the fact i mean like you i've done pretty well for myself in in the business and i'm very fortunate i don't underestimate how privileged again i am to be able to say that i make a very good living from what i do by essentially being quite selfish um and i don't know how i've kind of arrived at that point i wonder if tom york asked himself the same question you know because they seem to be a band of willfully kind of confronted expectations all the way along but at a much lower level i find myself in a similar position uh i would just like to say at this point not at a much lower level well i mean in terms of in terms of public awareness yes i mean obviously everyone knows radiohead very few people will not but but in terms of what i've done it's been a similar kind of approach to my career my last album was my last solo was almost entirely electronic which a lot of people took is that future bikes future bikes yeah and a lot of people took that as a [ __ ] you and it would have been a [ __ ] you if it wasn't for the fact that i loved the record i loved making it and i was completely invested in it stylistically it wasn't like i think sometimes people think i sit down and say right what can i do that's really going to piss off my fans pop music and i don't i really don't i grew up loving pop you know some of the first music i ever loved was abba donna summer the bee gees i fell in love with pop long before i fell in love with fell in love with conceptual rock music or the new wave of british heavy metal which is the first music i really identified with i showed you how old i am which is the first music i ever identified with when i went to secondary school i remember buying the first maiden album saxton's wheels of steel and i loved that music and i identified with it but long before that my parents had got me listening to pure pop and i love pure great you know great pop for me is just as elevated as conceptual rock music in my mind and i've never understood that kind of snobbism that some rock fans have towards pop but i but at the same time i recognize that in my demographic that attitude does prevail so if i do make an electronic pop record as i did with my last record it's going to upset people but and part of me is kind of enjoying that it upsets people but at the same time i completely believe in the record i'm completely invested in it so it's not like that lou reed thing where he just goes off and deliberately does something to us i'm not i'm honestly not doing that but i do love those gestures i love those gestures bowie was doing them all the time in his career you know and bowie i think in many respects is is and always will be the coolest rock star the coolest pop star we have ever had and we'll ever have um just because so many people cite him as a seminal influence he was in the mainstream but he was also in the world of you know high art conceptual art he seemed to be able to span all of these different worlds he seemed to be able to make people believe in whatever he did that he was doing it with integrity because i think he was i think he genuinely was a very curious soul and that and he had no kind of boundaries or snobbishness about doing a piece of pure pop or going off and doing a collaboration with william burrows or you know whoever or andy warhol or whoever and i think that is something that's always appealed to me so i've always kicked against this notion so this is a long way we're coming right so it's fine we're circling right back to this is why i kick against slightly this idea of that i have this this reductive version of me the king of prog rock yeah i do it's very flattering don't get me wrong and i do do a lot of progressive rock i do but it doesn't to me in my mind it doesn't define me and i will take great pleasure in upsetting anyone that thinks that i should just churn out more for once of a better expression progressive rock it's one of the most difficult things to come to terms with i think as an artist if you're an artist you're so you're supposed to have integrity you are bearing your soul how does that tie into the idea of selling yourself that inherent paradox in you have to be able to sell yourself in order to continue to do what you do hey quick one would you like to start a business scale a business create multiple streams of income get better financial education and knowledge build a personal brand monetize social media work from home create a side hustle if you'd like any of that go join my members area rob dot team cost you less than a large coffee one third of the price of netflix you can cancel any time with no contract learn earn invest build multiple streams of recurring income digital assets quicker easier and cheaper zoom master classes live event meetups ask me anything lives exclusive content that we can't put on youtube because it's too controversial it's all at rob dot team for less than a large coffee go join now at rob dot t-e-a-m something you said before which really excited me before we even went live was this notion of music versus entertainment because i've not really ever thought of it like that because i'm just a fan of music i'm not in the industry so i'm a voyeur rather than the porn star not actually in it and so i have a probably less educated view than you in a non-musical view but i also have a when i get fanny about something i really i'm a proper fan about it so muse and coldplay two bands i really loved when they broke through showbiz really great rock album like that was like how how i thought radiohead would continue and didn't and you know the the early coldplay one maybe two albums and then they became a stadium pop band for me and you said there's the music industry in the entertainment industry and i guess people would think i don't know nine inch nails early might be music but simon cowell pop band might be entertainment but what about later muse and coldplay where do they go on the music entertainment scale so obviously with everything there is a grey area obviously there is now we mentioned elton john for example earlier on now elton john has made some of the great for me some of the greatest uh you know rock music of all type rock or pop if you want to define him as a rock artist certainly one of the greatest pop artists of all time but i think one of the reasons he's been able to sustain such a long career is he's also been very good at adapting with the times and associate associating himself and i think bowie was good at that too madonna is a great example sheeran does it a lot yeah yeah absolutely and i think they're very good at identifying who to surround themselves with at any given moment in time so there's an element of that certainly in the career of elton certainly the career of madonna madonna was very good at identifying who was the current big pop producer who was at the cutting edge of making pop records at any given time um and then bringing them in to be the production team on a new record bjork did a bit of that too you know michael jackson i think did a lot yeah so these people i think are very canny in the sense that they recognize that they're always the same but if they change the scenery around the coldplay aren't the same i know they're drummonies so no coldplay music so i think i i i've never met the guy so i can't say but i think chris martin is an example of someone who really loves to be at the center of um the universe he is in love i mean you only have to look at his choice of you know ex-wife you know he married a hollywood superstar i think he's in love with the idea of being a star being a celebrity being an icon and i get that you know again i grew up with prince and he was my idol and he was there was none more sort of cool than prince and you know in the public island prince at the time i do get that and i think he allows that to because the last album with the collaborations with bts and all those things it to me it felt very cynical and a very cynical attempt to regain some ground in terms of being a at the very peak of the pop industry whereas i feel tom york couldn't give a [ __ ] and there was a time remember when coldplay and radiohead were kind of a similar kind of in terms of coolness and you know they weren't dissimilar musically even but clearly they had very different um aspirations at the end of the day and i think you can hear that in the music but then if but then even the previous coldplay album i think what was it called every everyday everyday life yeah that was his attempt i think to make something that would be seen as his great artistic statement unfortunately even that sounded a bit contrived like that was why he was doing it and i think there's a pro he seems to be now stuck in this kind of and again i've never met the guy and i'm just all supposition and i have a lot of respect for by the way i think he's got an incredible written some amazing songs but there seems to be this constant pull in his in his mind does he want to be seen as this great artiste tom york or does he want to be a cheering and i don't think you can it's a hard thing to pull off to be both and i think i can probably count the figures of one hand the people have pulled that off elton might be one of the few um and even then i don't think anyone would argue that ellen has produced the quality of work that he did in the first 10 years of his career that even he i'm sure would admit that was his you know his imperial phase so the prince is another example in the 80s prince was just seemed to be doing whatever he wanted and completely reshaping pop music in his image in the way the beatles did in the 60s when you have so much power and you have the world's attention on you that you can almost shape the future of pop music which would it with whatever you do sounds scary yeah i would say beatles in the 60s bowie in the 70s elton john maybe to an extent they're so they're so ubiquitous they're so powerful they have so much attention on them prince in the 80s that they're able to actually influence the future of pop kanye west to an extent in this century i think has had a little bit of that such an icon beyond just the music industry that they're able to shape not only people's perception of pop but also fashion and other things that go along with pop i wonder if it will ever be possible for someone to have that power again in the music industry because music has slipped down the list of things that matter to young people um when i was growing up i'm sure when you were growing up music was probably the top of the list of things the way you defined your personality as just express yourself to others and as distinct from your parents so the first thing you would do to make yourself different to your parents was choose music choose music that they would never listen to like for me it was metal yeah so i grew up listening to my dad's pink floyd records and my mum's donna summer records and abba records but at some point i was like okay now i've discovered metal now i'm a different i'm a different person to to the way my different to my parents because i like this music and for years for 50 years i think that was the number one way whether it was hip-hop or you know electronic music or metal extreme metal music or whatever it was northern soul whatever it was it was the number one way that kids because when i went to high school it was the it was all the specials it was madness it was the two-time thing that was what kids were really into and parents didn't get that you know so i don't know if that's true anymore i think pop music is now something that's part of the landscape of of growing up but it's not the number one thing it's more likely to be something to do with social media and because of that i think no one is really paying enough attention to what pop musicians are doing to really care if they're confronting their expectations or moving music forward so music in that sense has become more about what's familiar not what might have been unfamiliar when the beatles released strawberry fields or when bowie came out with ziggy or when prince came out with sign of the times and that obviously makes me a bit sad because i grew up believing in the power of music to be able to do that to change the way people thought about the world whether it's through lyrics or music or the way music was presented and that's been a tough thing because i've seen that change during my career i started in the professional music industry in 1992 30 years ago when it was still possible i mean this is in the slipstream of the whole grunge movement and nirvana no question were changing everything they were changing the way people thought about rock music they were changing the way people thought about how they dressed movies were being made you know that were influenced by slacker or grunge that aesthetic and that's the last time i really think rock music had that power uh i can't think of any time since then we're rock maybe when oasis were at their peak it had that kind of cultural impact but then even then only really in the uk not internationally so one of my questions was how has the music industry changed in the 30s you've been in so maybe we'll tap into that later we've got one thing that's outstanding in what we've been talking about and then i'll move on to question two seriously yeah it wouldn't be the first time i did say we could get into this though so i'm only joking um i used to think that bands that sold out i.e became mainstream stadium bands as a hardcore maybe slightly one of those snobby music fans i will admit that i used to think that was selling out and then when i became an entrepreneur and helped a lot of other people do that and i now have this which i believe is a piece of art a podcast is a piece of art i am acutely aware of what my audience also wants or need and i have to be acutely aware of what will work on social media sometimes i can do a little bit of a [ __ ] you to social media by like i don't care if this goes viral or not i'm just doing this because i want to but if we don't get out there i don't see this art as the true expression of his art because it's not being seen so i kind of like you know everything dies in a vacuum okay so i i and cause i've got this old like i'm a bit of a snobby music fan um versus this i've definitely not sold out but i have commercialized myself as a an entrepreneur which is what we do so i now look at bands like coldplay and music just just because we've been using those examples there are others and actually look at them and go fair play you know you had a chance to go big and travel the world and meet all these cultures and i mean play a stadium full of 100 000 people and give people what they want and entertain them fair play whereas i'd have been disgusted at say that me saying that you know the thought of radiohead never playing creep because that's what everyone wanted them to play i just loved that right um but now but like the fans want creep so play him creep or surprise him on a double encore and play creep yeah see i'm definitely in the former character what do you think about that paradox well that's the word isn't it it is it is a complete contradiction in terms it's it's one of the it's one of the most difficult things to come to come to terms with i think as an artist a pop musician rock musician whatever it is is that you do constantly walk this kind of impossible tightrope which is you're an artist you're so you're supposed to have integrity and i think this is where maybe it's different to a lot of other industries and maybe there isn't a parallel in terms of what you know the industry you're involved in um in the one of the things about pop music is one of the myths that grew up around pop music was that you are bearing your soul when you create something and a lot of artists do to be fair they really do so how does that how does that tie into the idea of selling yourself now there are many artists through history some very famous that have clearly never come to terms with that that paradox for you to use your word i don't think kurt cobain ever came to terms with that paradox brian wilson from the beach boys almost destroyed him um there are other examples sid barrett the the the the guy who formed pink floyd lasted one album before he completely burned out never came to terms with that inherent paradox in you have to be able to sell yourself in order to continue to do what you do and what you do therefore how can it be completely divorced from the idea in the back of your mind whether subliminally or subconsciously or consciously that you have to appeal to enough people to make it so you can do this again in two years and that is of course it's always in the back of my mind but here's the thing i've come to realize over the years by trial and error that actually the records that do the best for me and the ones that seem to have given me my career are the ones where i don't think about my audience and i think i'm very fortunate in that respect um the few times my very first band the band i got something my first record deal with was a band called no man and we made quite a commercial and quite at that time quite contemporary sounding pop electronic pop music and we were getting unbelievably i mean we got signed because we got single of the week in some one of the big newspapers at the time melody maker it was called and it was a big thing in those days if you if you were an unsigned band and you got single the week in melody maker you guarantee all the record companies would be knocking in your door the following week and they were and we chose to sign to a label called one little indian at the time they had bjork and the shaman and they were doing really they were they were the hip label we chose to go with them and we were getting unbelievable reviews but nobody was buying the records we couldn't translate that in to an audience the meantime for fun in my studio because i was developing my little home studio i was doing these what i call pastiches of old psychedelic and progressive rock under the name porcupine tree just for fun thinking no [ __ ] has ever gone on here this old [ __ ] and sending out a few tapes to a few people and then mark ratcliffe from radio one started playing this one song every night on his radio one show which one was that radioactive toy and suddenly overnight almost this thing that i thought was a joke in the best possible sense i mean i loved it don't get me wrong but something that was completely an anachronism out of time no one's going to want to hear this completely left leapfrogged over this thing that was supposed to be giving me my big pop career which was getting all the money pumped into it getting all of the you know all the the cool remixes were working on our stuff nobody was buying the records and yet we were getting amazing press press were falling over themselves to give us these superlatives and porcupine tree which is this uncool thing that kind of you know was a reference back to the time to the 60s and 70s and here's another thing there's nothing more passe than what was cool 10 years before i think it takes about 20 years so i'm doing this in the late 80s so music from the 70s was like the uncoolest thing you could possibly imagine in the 80s in the 90s it began to be rehabilitated partly through bands like radiohead you're obviously referencing back to conceptual rock but in the 80s you couldn't get arrested doing that except there were actually a lot of fans that wanted to hear that they didn't care about what was fashionable and i started to i've got a little record deal i started to sell records and i started to get to the point where i had to put a band together for this pretend band after two albums i put a band together because porcupine tree had been this kind of imaginary band where i just played everything myself and it became almost this accidental career when it was supposed to be this other thing that was getting all the plaudits that was supposed to give me give me my career so it taught me a lesson but actually when you don't care you're not really thinking you're not you're not necessarily aware that what you're doing is has an audience or not these are the things that are actually going to ironically more likely to give you a career and so this pattern is repeated throughout my career the more willfully uncommercial i think something is the more it seems to have created a career for me my last album the pop album it didn't do actually as well as the previous record even though it was much more commercial and the one before was called the the one before the so the future bites the which which was a much more popular i had elton john on it nile rogers did a remix it was had everything everything was right about it in terms of i mean it came out in covid which was a bit of an unknown obviously it did well don't get me wrong it did well but it did it didn't do as well as the previous record which had been this really heavy conceptual prague rock record so and that one's called hand cannot erase yeah actually there was one album in between it was kind of a transitional but but you take my point is that it seems to be it seems to be a pattern in my career that the more uncommercial i think the more the less i think in terms of oh that could get played on the radio or oh that could do well you know um the less successful it's been and the more i thought to myself you know this is really self-indulgent no one's going to buy this those are the ones that have got me the got me to where i am and it goes right back to those early days when porcupine tree was just this little self-indulgent bedroom product project project that was something i did in my spare time from the band that was supposed to give be giving me the big pop career fascinating it taught me a lesson yeah so while i completely recognize that for most people it might work completely the other way it's always seemed to be the other way for me and i guess i should you know and part of me is obviously very grateful for that yeah so has writing progressive music cost you millions of album sales and millions of pounds yeah probably probably it has yeah but then i say that with the caveat that i don't think i would i may not have been very good at doing anything else so you know again i have made some more commercial i've made more pop orientated records because i love pop two they haven't tended to be the ones that have done well so i have to probably acknowledge to myself that perhaps i'm not as good at doing that as i am at doing the more progressive and more what i what i prefer to call the more conceptual rock music i seem to be better at doing that perhaps or let's just say this i think i stand out more yeah when i do that it's not that i'm bad at doing the more direct pop orient or electronic music but perhaps i'm competing in a much larger field there where it's harder for me to stand out i stand out when i do progressive rock i seem to be very good at it um apparently so um has it cost me millions of sales of yes because that kind of music has always had a problem in its relationship with the mainstream partly because it is about the uh the idea of the album as a continuum as a musical journey as something you expect your listener to sit down and listen to from beginning to end without interruption dark side of the moon being the poster child for that idea 45 minute new piece of music how do you sell quote unquote progressive music in three minutes and of course the the music business has always been and no no could it not be progressive to figure that out well is that a double paradigm yeah yeah i mean sorry going outside i love that idea i love that idea that perhaps well and perhaps there are people i have you know because if you if you think of songs like paranoid android by tom york he thinks one of his greatest achievements i think is getting a five minute song on the radio amazing yeah yeah bohemian rhapsody bohemian rhapsody is one of the most ridiculously avant-garde experimental ambitious pieces of pop music to ever get to number one in the charts not only did he get to number one it got to number one for like a million weeks and it's now one of the best selling you know so of course it is possible is it still possible now in 2022 i would love to be proved wrong but i don't think so because i just i think the indus the the attention of people like because it's so fractalized now about you know again like they're coming back to this point that everyone was looking what a queen gonna do next what a radiohead gonna do next what are the beatles gonna do next people just don't think like that anymore now maybe they do with some maybe they do some urban artists but they certainly don't with rock artists there isn't that allegiance oh there is but the fan base is you know smaller and smaller in terms of that kind of allegiance to a particular artist so in terms of brought in broader terms the way the media and the mainstream look at bands now they're no longer interested in what are they going to do next and part of the reason another part of the reason for that is just the proliferation of content now and i use the word content advisably because that's the word most of the industry uses now we no longer make music we create content but i also have to acknowledge that it's largely true i mean they call porn on only fans content now so you've got music and porn all called content and films movies movies now are content for streaming services not netflix that's what movies are or tv shows so what's the word for that is that called homogenization probably yeah probably yeah but tell us how you feel about that well obviously to me that whole that whole idea is incredibly ugly the idea that what i do is content for spotify or content for you know title or whatever it is but at the same time i have to acknowledge to myself that is that's largely true and so coming back to my original point the incredible proliferation there are more people now making music than at any other time in history partly because it's so easy buy a laptop you get garageband on your app or mac you can go in there you can load up some loops you can record yourself rapping or whatever through the speaker you can and there are songs that have been hits that have been recorded in in that way because actually the quality is phenomenal you know when i started the industry to make a pop record you had to you had to go into a thousand pound a day recording studio for a month to do that you had to have a record deal etc etc etc so now there are more people making music than any other time in in history i think spotify i don't know the exact figures i'm off the top of my head i think it's something like spotify have 50 000 new songs added every day it's ridiculous you have people's attention for if you announce a new record now you have people's attention for about a day wow i would say about a day conservatively a bad day um if you're an artist like you know porcupine tree for example we came back with our new record big announcement when we came back yeah the band are back after 10 years and everyone got really excited for about a day and actually i'm still excited by the way okay thank you thank you i lasted a week but largely speaking there was a peak of course there is a peak and i'm sure you must find this in your in whatever industry you're involved when you come out with something you have an incredible engagement for a very relatively short period of time and that period of time seems to be getting shorter and shorter certainly with in my industry too what we should have done is we should have dropped the album that day which is of course what a lot of the urban artists do a lot of the like beyonce she just released her new album she dropped it at like a few days notice there was no pre-release video as far as i know i might be wrong about this but certainly a lot of urban artists are doing this whether it's drake i think taylor swift released two albums during lockdown at like a day's notice a lot of these artists they literally release their album and they say i've made a new record here it is now that is very different to the way i was always told you mate you you create an album campaign album campaign you release a single three months before you release another single two months later at least another single a month later and then you release a single the day your album comes out it doesn't work anymore for a rock artist like me or porcupine it doesn't work anymore what happens is you announce porcupine tree we're back we're coming out with a new album incredible engagement everybody rushes to hear the new song they really like it they go and pre-order the album a month later you release a here's another song from the new album 50 if you're lucky another single few weeks later 10 if you're lucky and the reason is of course that the fanbase have already pre-ordered the album they're just waiting for it now and everyone else they've been bombarded with the pre-release hype of another 150 albums in the time between you so that constant bombardment of artists releasing new albums trying to get your attention and this is why i think you know it's hard for people i mean i'm in my 50s now it's hard you know that expression teaching your grandma to suck eggs you know i'm old school but i've had to adapt to try and think of ways to promote records out of the box because clearly the old approach doesn't work anymore and i see every day my friends of mines bands they're still doing the old model we're going to release a big song three months before and build up to the album it build up is the wrong word it doesn't it dwindles the engagement gradually dwindles and i think that's why the urban artists have really adopted that kind of approach here's my new album and it's available now go and listen to it now people are excited at that moment so give them the music right then give it to them right then but of course i remember when i was a kid buying records and and a couple of singles would come out before the album and you'd get really excited and momentum would build and then on the day you'd be in the record shop buying the copy as it came into our price records and of course that is that is like something from the steam age now so you ask the question how's the industry changed in my time and and of course it's changed beyond recognition in a way that most of my generation struggle to adapt to really a lot of pop music to me sounds like glorified playground chance they're not even melodies they're just playground chants that become memes and that's why i think very few of the songs of today will prevail in the same way that perhaps the songs from the 70s or even the 80s the 60s prevail and are there any other ways you've learned to adapt to the changing music world and let me double this question up i don't normally ask two questions simultaneously but we'll try this i also understand you don't really do much on social media well i personally don't yeah that's yeah if i never look at it that's what i thought because i've been trying to get you on social media for a while on the show sorry yeah we're here so i i never look up so but now this is interesting because there's a very good reason for that which comes back and i don't want to sort of labor the whole thing we talked about length in the beginning of this interview again the reason i don't go on social media is because i don't want to know what fans are saying because it's hard to be completely immune from what somebody says of course it is you know i've often said that one of the things about being on stage for example is you can be in a room full of 3000 people 2999 which are all going abs all going absolutely nuts for you singing along to the words of every single song and clearly having a really great time and there might be one person that looks like they're having a miserable time they're not enjoying it they're yawning they're bored they look bored they might be in the front row the second or third or whatever the whole show at that point in my mind becomes just for that [ __ ] person you are why you know this is for you now but that's it this this is in trying to turn them round or just being frustrated by them i don't know but i think you must have this too i mean you you know this is the thing if a hundred people 99 of them say they love what you've just done and the one person that's the one that sticks in your crawl that's the one you cannot get over your mind why is it that i don't have unanimity and everyone doesn't love this and i think that's human nature to to always get stuck on those criticisms the negative things and to kind of almost almost you know like willfully block out of your consciousness all the positive things that people were saying just remember that one thing that negative and that's what i mean about that one person in the audience the whole show becomes about them at that point and of course it should be the opposite it should be the opposite and it doesn't but i think that's very natural and i'm not immune to that so part of the reason why i don't go on social media is because in the days when i did you know one it's compulsive you know when you get into reading comments on it becomes a compulsion you start going back and checking every five minutes and there might be 20 really positive comments and then one comment saying oh i don't really think this is not as good as you know it's not as good as the usual stuff oh i don't i think we think he's gone off here and they probably wouldn't say as nicely as that nowadays would they well and that's the other thing is that there's a lot of belligerence you know on particular social media this this whole sort of black and white thing belligerence you see it on amazon the reviews on amazon tend to be five or one star very little in between it's either the best thing you've ever heard in your life or this is the worst thing i've ever heard people talk very much in the kind of polarized about everything politics movies pornography whatever it is the news they'll talk in very belligerent polarized terms in a way that you would never say that to somebody's face no you would never i would never say that to somebody in somebody's face if somebody said to me that what what do you what do you think in my new album i might say i can see what you do but it's not i didn't i didn't really connect with me the way that maps your last album did but on an amazon review or a facebook review or an instagram review they'll say in that way that is so obnoxious so belligerent so offensive and i don't know if people don't realize that a lot of the time the artists do go and read this [ __ ] they do of course they do um i know some quite big pops you know mega stars that i've worked with i've remixed their stuff and even they people you would think would be way beyond that point even they they're on social media every day checking what people are saying about them um [Music] and you think why are you doing you don't have to do that even people are i'm not saying this is one of those people but even someone else you know those kind of people that statute even they go on social media see what people are saying about i learned the lesson early on to not read anything because it doesn't matter how positive 99 of people are that one percent will ruin your week will ruin your week most of the time it's just some kid in a basement in ohio well they never have a profile picture because i have loads of them on my lives loads of them well you mean people look like christmas so yeah yeah but 90 of them don't really know who you are they never have a profile picture yeah they're just like you said some kid in their pants in a basement yeah who's probably got some issue with the world at large you know or some agenda yeah um it's not that kind of music anyway you've made them you've made an album that isn't their kind of music that you didn't go i mean this is what i mean but i was talking about how i love to constantly change direction and do different things because part of the bargain there is that i have to understand i am going to disappoint people i accept that and i think i said to you semi-facetiously early on but there is an element of truth to it that i always feel like unless i'm upsetting some people i'm prob i'm probably not evolving and i like the idea so of course part of the feeling of that i'm evolving changing is i'm going to upset some of the older fanbase but i don't really want to read exactly what they're saying because it's it's all about what agenda they have you don't know what gender they have what pain they're in yeah exactly i've just made an electronic pop record they might be one of those fans who came from the death metal tradition to my music which sounds like you might be one you know that's kind of more of a more comfortable direction yeah can i tell you how i found porcupine to do this i want to trees what you think i googled bands like radiohead oh wow okay well i i can i'll be double honest i was both excited and scared to tell you that well i love that you know i'm a massive i mean as you can tell tommy will be one of the people i would look to look up to in terms of the way and johnny greenwood the way they've conducted their career but i'm trying to get them on the show i'm hoping to make that happen yeah yeah i mean i think it'd be fascinating but i to either or both of them yeah um how does that make you feel that a lot of people's entry into porcupine tree might have been radiohead amazing amazing i'm i'm you know you're not a bit pissed off that they're sort of gone beyond prague and you're because you said you were frustrated but i don't blame that for them for that i i do i do have a frustration that perhaps radiohead got away with a lot of stuff that porcupine tree and myself and my solo queer don't seem to have got away with you may like amnesiac well i love amnesiac i love that pyramid song i think is one of my my favorite radio what's a song you know they get away with ex but sorry could you explain what getaway means because so i think so here's the thing i think radiohead get away with essentially making very obviously conceptual rock music using a lot of what you might call progressive rock tropes clever triumph time signatures um you know weighty lyrics about the human condition i'm saying in a slightly sarcastic way but of course i love all that and i do that too you know waiting lyrics about the human condition things that the the mainstream media traditionally sometimes you know have found to be worthy of taking the piss out of not embracing but radiohead seemed to have got away with it in a sense that they have been completely embraced when i rationalize it to myself i say to myself okay what's the difference the difference is that radiohead came from the tradition of alternative music they came through the same era as brit they were seen as part of a scene that came from alternative culture whereas i was very obvious right from the beginning about my roots i love pink floyd i love yes i love king crimson i love all this old uncool i loved all this uncool music radiohead were much kennier than me about that they they never said they still don't admit as far as i know um you know and of course that's a simplification they've obviously got many more influences but then so have i so i understand in a way why um they got away if you like with wearing like their kind of conceptual roots when i didn't when we didn't also they never i had me i have i had a metal aspect pokemon tree have a metal aspect in in our music um metal is always something the mainstream media again always have a slightly distant relationship with you know um so i understand there are reasons for it but i don't hold it against them i think they're one of my favorite i think you know i love everything about the way they've conducted their career yes i'm [ __ ] jealous because i for example the way johnny greenwood has transitioned into movie soundtracks i'd love you know i'd love to have his life and his career and i've never managed to transition into to movies even though people have called my music over the years cinematic it's one of the words that gets used more than any other and i've never had the opportunity to so yes i'm frustrated i'm very jealous but at the same time i hold no grudge against them i think they are one of the greats so yes i'm very if you found if that's how i found pork yeah so i'm very and i and i hope i hope you're not alone in the way that you you know that's a great doorway to work walk through and i found opeth through porcupine trees yeah so i mean i i don't know how people can live not knowing about black water park yeah amazing record like or porcupine tree i say this to harry all the time a lot i keep trying to get harry into porcupine tree and the only thing he likes porcupine tree but he's not yet in love with them and the reason he isn't is because he hasn't given them yet enough listens because i said to harry normally you know you want to listen to music so you go to familiar when you want to listen to music but some bands like porcupine tree like definitely like blackwater park from opath you need 10 listens and i was writing a book it was paradoxically it was called multiple streams of property income and i just somehow um what's your 12-minute masterpiece song called uh you've done a few of them arriving somewhere but not here not that one um which album anesthetized yeah on anesthetize that song two i think it is anesthetized that's it and it just came on and i got a chance to listen to it 12 times because i was writing a book and i was listening to it in the background right and some music you have to listen to it 12 times to appreciate it what do you think about that i think you're absolutely i've really asked the question i've just gone well well you had you've you've raised that you've raised the quote you've thrown it up into the yeah as a thought and i would i would totally agree with your thought i think that the music this again circles back to the conversation we were having about uh you know what role does music play now in in 2022 do people engage with music in the way that you engage with music and i think the answer is no so whereas in 1973 somebody might have gone and bought darks over the moon and gone home and listened to it 20 times before it clicked somebody might have bought okay computer in 1996 and gone home and listened to it 20 times you need to you need to i don't think people do that anymore harry you need to do that well maybe i don't know maybe but i think it's also you know listen does music doesn't if not everything appeals to everyone obviously it doesn't um but i think it's also there's also an element of it depends you know again i've used this metaphor of walking through the right door sometimes i'm very ambivalent about a band until i hear a certain song and then it's like ah yeah i get it and then i go back and i rediscover the back catalogue and i'm like okay there's loads of gems that come out now i get it now i've i i buy into what they're trying to do here i've had that so many times i mean i was quite late on to the you know getting into radiohead um but then when i heard things like pyramid song and paranoid android i'm like oh okay there's something really extraordinary going on here i'd better go back and listen and of course then it all fell into place did you review in rainbows i did for robert yeah i tried to find it yeah i was fascinated to us because i love that album i gave it five out of five oh wow yeah naturally so yeah i just want to ask you what your review of that album was because you reviewed it and i can't find it it's funny because most of the thrust of that that review and we're going back to 2009 now are we 2010 so 10 years 12 years ago most of the thrust of that review was a lot of the stuff we're talking about that we should treasure whatever we think about radiohead we should treasure whether you like this album or you don't whether you like the fact that they have gone off on this kind of weird trajectory when they could have become the new u2 or whatever we should treasure them for that because this is what real artists and real creative forces do they reinvent themselves they confront the expectations of their audience but they they win over a lot of those people because people believe somehow in this notion of integrity they feel the integrity coming through the music i always feel that with everything those guys do in a way that i don't perhaps feel it whatever chris martin does bless him and again i think chris martin is an incredibly talented guy and i've written some amazing songs but there's something about way the way he conducts his career i never completely believe it i always believe it with ray and this is exactly what i wrote in that review i said this album hasn't clicked with me completely i've only listened but i'm going to give it five out of five because i feel the integrity and i believe in what they're doing and i i love the fact that this band exists and they're doing this right at the center of the mainstream we need more people to be doing that now what's happened in the 12 years since of course is that less and less artists are able to do that and sustain any kind of profile in the in the mainstream to the point going back to our earlier discussion about name the last time a rock band really broke through to the mainstream it's incredibly tough now because of the proliferation of music people listen to a song once and if it doesn't get straight away doesn't matter there's 50 other songs that have just been uploaded to spotify the same day um so it tends to be the more banal the more immediate a lot of pop music to me sounds like and i hear this because a lot of my my step children sing these songs a lot of pop music to me sounds like glorified playground chance they're not even melodies they're just playground chants that become memes they become things that the kids chant to each other and that's why i think very few of the songs i'm using i'm using inverted the songs of today will prevail in the same way that perhaps the songs from the 70s or even the 80s the 60s prevail because they are they haven't really got melodies that's why abba will prevail forever the beatles will prevail forever i wonder if a lot of these songs from now will prevail because a lot of them just seem to be it's it's that sort of just hooking somebody in with that kind of playground chant thing and that's the way it seems to be to get people to engage from that very first listen and that's a trick that i clearly don't have but i don't know if i want to have because coming back to your point that i think it takes takes a few listeners yeah sounds like maybe there's an opportunity for some disruption somewhere then is it at points like this because culturally we we need some disruption maybe there's a the music industry yeah i think i think the rocket particularly in the world of rock music which of course is the thing that's most beloved to me there hasn't been any disruption to use your work which is why i love the i love the title of your podcast i'm very flattered to be even considered to be one but i but i think that this is what's been lacking in rock music this notion of disruption of um there have been there have been people that have tried you know there have been a few bands that sort of know that royal blood you know um they had a couple of big big records but it didn't seem to proliferate beyond a sort of alternative hipster crowd it somehow didn't quite go beyond i think a lot of the time it's about the one song the one song can just explode the the smells like team spirit you know a song like that that song changed rock music there's no question i just got a few little shivers there when you said that it changed but it did it changed it didn't only change rock music it changed the world of cinema it changed the world of fashion on how they managed to time it with doing the video in a gym with a lot of school kids exactly but when you think about it how much of that was planned and how much of it was just pure serendipity yeah who knows probably mostly the latter and i think that's partly is that sometimes you can't contrive for something it's like this whole thing about kate bush he's running up that hill now it's like how could you plan for that yeah you know you could nev you could never contrive for something to like that to happen that's so i guess some the producer of stranger things just like that song and thought oh you know that song might work and suddenly it's become her biggest hit ever and those things i think are almost it's almost chaos theory you can't you can't plan for something like that to happen there's no way nirvana could have planned and of course kurt cobain reacted very badly to to that degree of of you know being thrust into the very center not just of the music industry but of the whole cultural world fashion world and everything influ you know the whole grunge aesthetic influencing fashion and movies and literature and that but it was really that one song that one song kicked in the doors and changed everything um and it could it could be that that one song is just around who knows it's not going to be by me that's for sure i'm too old and miserable now but but i think it is it you know the pop industry tends to be about it still is about young it's about younger people generally speaking if you want something to really um to really sort of engage and explode culturally it has to come from the younger generation i think and why do you think that is i think generally speaking i think the younger demographic still drives well i say that i think that has changed that's another thing has changed because for example in terms of physical product now actually selling cds and records it's pretty much only the older generation that still buy records but the stream the world of streaming is very much you know driven by um a younger demographic um which is why urban music is so dominant now because that is what here's another question for you i was oh i was sorry i'm turning the questions again sorry when was the last time you were walking in the street or driving in your car and you pulled up alongside another car and you heard something other than hip-hop music coming out of the window of that car or something other than urban music coming in yeah because i can't think of the last time i heard rock music pop music i used to hear it all the time when i was a kid you know or in my 20s nevada will be blaring out metallica with blowing up pink floyd led zeppelin black sabbath now it doesn't matter who they are could be a young white kid could be a middle-aged jewish guy doesn't matter who it is guarantee it'll be hip-hop music coming out i like hip-hop music don't get me wrong but why all pervasive now so dominant what's the answer to my question by the way with have you heard someone no i was the guy in lamborghini and ferrari playing heavy metal trying to rebel against that when was the last time you pulled up alongside someone else playing heavy metal out of their car window i i don't even think i ever have i mean i used to i used to occasionally you know it would be metallica usually doesn't matter you know there used to be this thing where um there would be different musical tribes um [Music] and i'm not saying you could look at somebody and kind of guess what musical tribe they were in but there was definitely an element of that now i don't think it depends it doesn't matter what your cultural background is yeah more often than not you pull up against alongside the car you're walking by it's always hip-hop urban music has become so dominant i think in the 20th in the 21st century so far so far perhaps in a way that that i mean maybe you know maybe 60 70 years ago um people were complaining that rock music had done away with big band music i used to hear glenn miller coming out now it's all this newfound psychedelic rock music i don't know maybe it's just getting older do you think we've become two middle-aged men that we used to look at 30 years ago well sadly we have you know even though we probably i mean i used to say you know i used to look at my dad so i'll never become my dad you know there's no i could of course i have of course i've become my you know i listen to what my step children listen to and it's like that just sounds like banana you know it's like a computer wrote that song which is no different to my dad saying all that time ago that's not proper music they should learn to play their instruments it's exactly the same yeah it's exactly we all ultimately become our parents i've done everything wrong from the style of music i chose to make from the way i walked away from a success potentially just about to be huge successful band at their peak to changing musical direction just when the fans thought they had me figured out in a sense my career has been a noble failure [Applause] right we have got 14 minutes until we hit your extended deadline is that not the deadline but the extender is that going to work for you i told you i talked a lot yeah that's all good what we do is we do a quick fire round okay and we normally finish out on this i'm going to try and sneak a few of my longer ones in there so if you do about a 15 second answer on each one okay then we're going to get them all in okay i'll try all right great are musicians paid fairly 15 seconds to answer that seriously well it wasn't it was one of my long ones but we'd be here for a week i'm not going anywhere stephen no i can't answer um it's a very very difficult question too it's not a simple answer a question to answer there's obviously no doubt that music has been devalued by by streaming and by the internet um but the genie is out of the bottle you can't put him back in now people expect music to be available for free there are other ways to monetize music touring merchandise if you have a fan base um you can now using sites like bandcamp you can go direct to your fanbase and maximize your income of course we're not paid fairly through things like streaming services of course not um that that must be obvious to anyone yeah would you rather have one million cash in hand or one million more fans oh fans absolutely every time i couldn't give a [ __ ] about money could not give a [ __ ] about money and i say that from the very privileged position where i've made enough to not have to worry about money but to me now i would rather make a thousand new fans than have a million pounds do we have true freedom of speech today i think it depends who you are i'm at a low enough profile that i can pretty much say what i want to get away with it but i see some people that are much more higher profile that are victims of cancer culture so i don't think you can you you can't be you can't be elton john and say what you want but you can be stephen mullen say what you want so be careful what you wish for in terms of profile i guess in that sense what's your favorite song that you've ever written either solo or in your bands oh [Applause] it's really it's really hard to get it down to just one uh there are that sounds arrogant doesn't it sounds like oh i've written so many amazing songs um every song i've ever written i have reservations with obviously but but there are three of four that i'm really really really proud of um i'm going to be very very obnoxious and facetious now and say that my favorite songs are always the ones i'm working on at any given time i'm working on my next solo record now and i'm incredibly proud right now of the songs i'm about to release next year could you name those three or four that you've already done well i really like there's a song called the raven the refuse to sing the title track of this house i i i think that's a great great yeah it's a it's an epic it's i'm really proud of that of that particular song um so that that would be that would be one um [Music] wow um [Music] on the future bites my last solo record there's a song called king ghost which i'm really proud of um and uh let's pick one more for you let's pick i mean the whole in absentia record you you you said that was one of your favorites i'm incredibly proud of that whole record uh it's probably the most listenable would you say porcupine it's it's got a really nice balance of accessibility but without losing any of this so as an album i would perhaps always say to people if that was the first time they'd ever heard me i'd say go go listen to that record just a quick random one was drive home written about how you feel when you're being driven home because you know when i was a kid being driven home by my parents and a half fall asleep in the car and it's dark there's a feeling there that i think everyone at some point can relate to feeling good at points in a car i just randomly wanted to i think i think interesting because you pick up on something it's a very specific sort of um feeling you had you you kind of associate with childhood i think i tap into a lot of that in my songs nostalgia for childhood comes up time and time the the image of a train comes up in my song so many times and i know why it's because i grew up near to a train station and when i was going to sleep late at night i would often hear this kind of hissing sound of trains coming in and i associate it with childhood and that kind of feeling of just drifting off to sleep which is kind of the way it feels like what you're talking about with the driving how you're kind of dozing off to you feel very kind of warm and comfortable and safe and yeah exactly cocooned in a way and i and i associate the sound of trains with a very similar feeling so i think my answer to your question is i think that's in there but almost subconsciously it's in all my songs the actual song itself was based on a kind of ghost story that a friend of mine developed but yeah i mean that feeling absolutely is in there yeah what's the biggest risk you've ever taken the biggest risk i ever took was walking away from porcupine tree initially for for the best part of 12 years because everyone said i was mad and i didn't care i i wanted to do something different i wanted to work with different musicians i wanted to explore different musical styles and i wanted to make i wanted to be able to hop from genre to genre without being told by my band mates you know we can't do that we can't do this and that's all part and parcel of being in a band is you do have to you have pressure also not only from the fan base that we talked about yourself pressure internally from your other bandmates you have to find a common ground i walked away from that for the best part of well as i say we our last show was 2010 and our next show is going to be in september so 12 years i walked away from that i think that was pretty brave because we were doing pretty well were your band members a bit upset by that yeah but they also understood why i was doing it yeah had it been brewing for a while or did you just wake up one day and go it was funny because um i published a i published a book earlier this this year called limited edition of one and the first chapter i i did i just didn't want to do that linear thing i was born in 1967 and my parents were quantity surveyors i didn't want to do that so the first chapter is i'm on stage at the royal albert hall which was our last ever show and you're inside my head and i'm looking at the crowd all going mad and i'm looking at my manager and record company thinking this is the pinnacle this is the we've we've arrived we've got the band to sell out the royal albert we could have done three nights blah blah blah and i'm standing there looking out of the audience saying okay i've had enough of this and it was and the ir the obviously the thing is it was the complete opposite of what i think everyone expected me to feel and i and i felt like yes this is an achievement this is an arrival but it's also an ending time to do something else i am not going to allow myself to get sucked into this machine where we're expected now to and this goes back to the beginning of our conversation more of the same more of the same make another album like that two years later go and tour it for two years make another album like that two years and it's so easy to get tied into that in the music industry um so that answers your question no i i didn't i didn't really acknowledge to myself until that very last show and i say that in the book i said until that moment i'm standing on stage that last show i don't think i'd even acknowledged it to myself that i wasn't going to do it anymore and when you did it for how long was it never going to happen again before it did happen again i didn't know i didn't know i mean we were kind of developing material going back to 2013 but i wasn't that excited i didn't i didn't really want to commit to doing another album and a tour until lockdown rolled around and then locked down i cancelled two tours during like two solo tours to promote the future bites and i had big plans it was going to be a big conceptual multimedia show i was really disappointed canceled the tour and then suddenly we're all at home for two years we didn't know it's gonna be two years but we're all at home am i going to do so that's one of the reasons why i wrote the book i started a podcast of my own and i said to the guys podcast the podcast is called the album years and we just we pick a year and we just myself and my buddy tim bonus we just talk about music from that year our favorite albums well you know we followed the trajectory of artists careers through anyway we started a podcast i wrote a book and i said to the guys in pogba pantry you know what let's finish this material off that we've been working on and off and i originally i said to them maybe we'll just stick it out hush hush we won't do at all just put out the album on the hush hush of course as soon as the management found out and it's hard to say no you know so i'd say no oh my god pokemon oh wow we can do a massive we can do stadiums and arenas this time and we are you know um so we are doing um an arena tour which we never would have been able to do 10 years ago strangely it's amazing how the myth has grown during our absence well i'm really excited and i will be coming to watch you great i can't wait great um we've got like 932 questions left um what i'm going to do is i'm going to hold out in the hope that when you're promoting something big in maybe a couple of few years time we might be able to do a round two rather than trying to force them all in sure i'd be happy to yeah so what's your biggest failure stephen in what sense are you going to let me interpret in 15 seconds my career i mean you know i i i do in a way it's fun you know it one of the strange things is that people often interview me people like yourself or you know or just people i meet and they look at me as someone that has been very successful in my career in what i do you know if you look at my wikipedia page it says things like six times grammy nominated you know all this stuff number one and yet i don't think i quite managed to achieve what that thing that i imagined when i was 20 years old i have failed i have failed to become prince um which of course which of course was inevitable i don't mean that literally you know but i i have i have i in a sense my career has been a noble failure but of course it's more complicated than that but it it it's not what i imagined but i'm quite pleased in a way things have worked out anyway if that makes sense do you have a biggest regret i mean that you know if i could have gone back to the beginning of my career and just been a little bit more careful about how i might have [Music] presented myself early on and avoided the kind of what we talked about the pitfalls of being pigeon holed as a prog rock artist been a bit more canny about it then maybe it would have presented less obstacles in the sense of getting the music across um to a mainstream audience i was very very clear early on you know i said i love all these terminally unhit bands i love you love them you know and i was very honest in a way that tom york and johnny greenwood were very candy they never admitted to liking those bands um probably they had a very good uh you know team of people advising them don't say you like pink floyd i was like i love pink floyd you know um which in 1989 1990 was not a cool thing to say you like so maybe that that but i'm pretty pragmatic about my career i i i think things happen for a my wife is very much of the belief that everything happens for a reason i think everything has happened for a reason and it's all worked out in the end for me so regrets possibly the wrong word i understand previously you've said that you sacrificed family for music and now you have a family says has that changed well i mean when i said that i really believed it i didn't think i was ever going to get married and i really didn't think i was ever going to have kids and then i met my wife did you think you wouldn't or did you think you didn't want to both oh both i had no great compulsion to have children um so i thought and i was you know i was i think when i said that was already in my early 40s i really believed that i thought the the ship had sailed you know in terms of that that life for myself and obviously i'm known as someone that's very prolific and i always say to people one of the reasons i've made so many records is because i have no family commitments and and the truth is that now i have a family i do have less time i do i have slowed down a bit i'm being a little bit more um selective in what i release what i choose to release it's an album every two or three years rather than three a year now so that is a change yeah this show is called disruptors it used to have the word disruptive in it before we changed it what does the word disruptive mean to you well i i mean i this is why i was very flattered to be honest i i interpreted that as someone that seeks to challenge the prescribed ways you are supposed to go about having a career in a particular field and looking at your list of guests that you've had in the past i would say that's true of all of them so um i would love to think of myself as being in that tradition certainly yeah disruptive in the sense to to um perhaps change people's perception about how you can go about having a career in a particular profession i've done everything wrong you have to understand i have done on paper i have done everything wrong from the style of music i chose to make from the way i walked away from a potentially just about to be huge successful band at their peak to changing musical direction just when the fans thought they had me figured out i've done everything wrong and yet i've actually made a pretty good living so i don't know how that happens but that that to me is is a disruptive element i suppose i just want to say i think your music's [ __ ] amazing thank you very much and this has been probably one of the highlights of me in doing nearly a thousand episodes of this show well i'm sure you said that absolutely harry do i say that to him i guess no i do not say that so i just want to say a massive thank you well thank you very much i enjoyed it yeah we could have talked a lot more i know but um let's say i'm happy to do a follow-up here thank you and then i would love everybody listening to go down the rabbit hole of stephen wilson and porcupine tree because i think they're gonna have an amazing ride it is a roller coaster that rabbit hole but where should people start whether it's a live gig you've got coming up or whether they should follow or an album they should start with or all three let's do all three it's always hard because you it in some ways you need to know the agenda of the person that you're talking to i would say if you like like you like more heavy music i'd say yeah go and pick check out fear of a blank planet porcupine trees fear of a black planet or in absentia if you like more electronic music i would say definitely check out my last album the future bites um it you know so it really does depend on on the agenda but certainly um in absentia fear of blank planet the future bites um if you like more old-school progressive rock the raven that refused to sing is the album that was that the name of the album as well yeah yeah so that's that's an amazing song yeah yeah it's a very it's almost an old-school 70s progressive rock album a lot of my fans that's their favorite because that's what they like there's an album i really love called incentives which was almost more of a kind of an album influenced by shoegazer music cocktail twins and slow dive and i'm really proud of that one too so it does depend and i think that's part of the part of what i love about people discovering my music is that you can introduce them to kinds of music they didn't know they liked at least i like that's the idea i like that perhaps i can do that um and then what about live shows so we have a show coming up we're only doing one show in one show in each major territory so one show in paris one show in london and we're playing wembley arena on the 11th of november um and that will be the only we might do some festivals next year in england but i think that's going to be the only headline show we're going to do i was just going to make a note but yeah that's when we have when we move 11th of november i mean to every porcupine tree fan surely that's the dream isn't it i'd like to think so yeah will you play some old stuff as well yeah absolutely we're going to do the new record obviously but we're doing this is again coming back to the beginning of our conversation um because we don't have any hits we kind of liberty to sort of cherry pick things that we want to play i mean obviously we know there are songs that so like we are going to play anesthetize for example yes there are certain songs we know that our fan favorites trains we're going to do blackest eyes we're going to do yeah but we're also going to go back and pick some deep cuts from our cat a very american term i hate that anyway deep cuts from some of our albums that perhaps people won't expect us to play in fact one that we never played even at the time from in absentia family enough a song we never played live at the time you're allowed to say which one it is no i want it to be surprised okay i think i think it's part of the joy of coming to a show sometimes you don't know what the band again which is another thing that the internet has robbed to solve in a way everyone goes on set list yeah oh we're going to play that i used to love going to shows and not knowing but isn't it not isn't it nice to know there's a couple in there but the rest are a surprise yeah absolutely yeah but you know a couple already so i'm not going to tell you i thought i'd take my chance yeah right i think you have to go stephen this is absolute pleasure thank you thank you it's an absolute pleasure too yeah and thank you for having me our pleasure so what did you think about the interview let me know in the comments obviously i embarrass myself but hey we covered half the questions we could have covered this was a long conversation let me know what you think in the comments if you want to watch another disruptors interview with disruptive guests watch here and before you go make sure you like the video subscribe to the channel and turn the notification bell on and remember if you don't risk anything you risk everything [Music] you

Channel: Rob Moore

Views: 165,864

Keywords: rob moore, porcupine tree, steven wilson, progressive rock, steven wilson interview, chris martin interview, coldplay, steven wilson coldplay, steven wilson live, porcupine tree new album, porcupine tree live, porcupine tree interview, coldplay podcast, chris martin podcast, porcupine tree full album, music production, porcupine tree steven wilson, porcupine tree reaction, progressive rock bands, porcupine tree documentary, steven wilson full interview, chris martin coldplay

Id: xB1ZDhK2dLM

Length: 107min 14sec (6434 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 29 2022