It's growing cold
I'm growing old
Is this the only way to see the fire? – Porcupine Tree, Up The Downstair
Well, here we go. May 1993 saw the star of the 25-year-old UK underground musician and composer Steven Wilson from Hemel Hempstead rise to much critical acclaim, yet limited sales. Back in 1991 he had put out the first record under the name Porcupine Tree, “On The Sunday of Life”, which had essentially been his solo effort. The band of that name did not really exist as an ensemble at the time – the album sleeve notes contained a cover-up story on a fictional music band, called Porcupine Tree. In actual fact, a more promising future could be foretold for his other project, art-pop band No-Man, co-led with singer Tim Bowness, whose first full length was also due in 1993. To make Porcupine Tree a ‘real’ group, musicians were invited to join the project as Wilson needed a line-up for the planned live shows. Wilson managed to gather a line-up of three instrumentalists, namely, Colin Edwin on bass, Chris Maitland on drums and keyboardist Richard Barbieri of New Wave band Japan fame. The new record marked a substantial departure from the psychedelic roots of “On The Sunday of Life”(which was a more straightforward indulgence in psychedelic melodies and lyrics) to incorporate a wider range of genres – space rock, dance and Brit pop being some of the more easily recognizable, this daring sonic experiment occurring boldly at the time when progressive rock was something uncool and old-era.
For the early 90s were the times whose musical climate was shaped by grunge and post-punk, with bands like Nirvana occupying top positions on various international charts. And here – this, outlandish.
Sweeping soundscapes, delirious lyrics, an Orbish title track, a volley of drum machine rhythm on Burning Sky (to be replaced by current PT drummer Gavin Harrison’s pinpoint-precise live drums on the 2005 re-issue), generous throw-ins of Gilmour-we-love-you guitar solos that managed to keep their own originality, and what not, and there’s always a sense of mysterious space, acidic at times, not least emphasized by the ballady closing track, "Fadeaway", sounding like a repose from a long and arduous cosmic voyage. In short, "Up The Downstair" heralded what would become Porcupine Tree’s trademark and easy-to-recognize approach: It was a melting pot of soundscapes, time signatures, genres and musical eras, yet it brought along a sense of novelty. Drawing profusely on the late 60s to early 90s music, Up The Downstair never failed to say new things with the good old Latin vocabulary of progressive rock and then latest electronic music. Here was a clear statement: The mastermind behind this sonic excursion into the history of independent music was anything but a reclusive monolingual bore. Instead, Wilson turned out to be a polyglot-turned-polymath. He is so much like a musical Umberto Eco coming around with The Name of the Rose to flummox the critics and stun your average Joe of a reader with an amalgamation of literature genres, creating a novel that is neither a crime story entirely, nor a treatise on the Middle Ages, nor an excursion into the vices of obscurantism and virtues of true enlightenment, but a force of its own, one to be reckoned with, because it had been concocted by an unusually gifted alchemist of a musician, who just happened to have this irresistible urge to love his favourite music so much as to throw hints at it into his own record, experimental par excellence. And there was always a bit of a joke on the part of Wilson, wasn’t there?
As time flew, Up The Downstair turned out to be as much a monument of its own, as it was disparate from each subsequent Porcupine Tree record. The next full-length LP, "The Sky Moves Sideways", to be released in 1995, would mark a decisive turn on the experimental carrefour to a more Floydian-progressive rock sound, perhaps not least because by then the project would have emerged as a four-piece ensemble, where each of the other three musicians wanted to have their sonic say. As said, Richard Barbieri had stood at the forefront of New Wave and helped propel synth pop to tops of charts a decade before, Colin Edwin and Christ Maitland, new names on the music scene at that time, had been working out their own special rhythm section (so inimitable on the subsequent improvisational pieces "Moonloop" and "Metanoia", to name a few). Thus, Porcupine Tree ceased to be a solo project and was destined to at least partly sideline the public exposure to Wilson’s other pursuits to become his major source of creative input until his focus shifted to his solo career nearly two decades later. By then progressive music would have returned a good deal of its popularity, not least due to Porcupine Tree and not entirely without the foundation laid by Up The Downstair.
The principles of staying true to your creative identity were taken up another notch for Wilson in that seminal May of ’93. Twenty years and seven studio releases later the record has lost none of its freshness, novelty of sound, accessible audaciousness and this titillatingly proggy vibe.
Very very soon it became clear to all and sundry: Porcupine Tree could never repeat themselves. Never ever. And God bless them for this!
