Steven John Wilson is an English singer, musician, songwriter, and record producer. He was the founder of progressive rock band Porcupine Tree and collaborated with several other bands. For his long career in music, he earned critical acclaim and was nominated for Grammy Awards four times.
Background
Born on November 3, 1967, in Kingston upon Thames, London, Wilson was raised from age six in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. Steven was first exposed to music at the age of eight when he started hearing his father listening to Pink Floyd’s "Dark Side of the Moon," and his mother to Donna Summer’s "Love to Love You Baby," two albums that were pivotal in the development of his musical direction.
His father, an electrical engineer, built him a multi-track tape machine, and he began to experiment with overdubbing and developing a repertoire of production techniques.
Education
As a child, Steven was forced to learn the guitar, but he did not enjoy it; his parents eventually stopped paying for lessons. However, when he was eleven, he found a nylon string classical guitar from his attic and started to experiment with it; in his own words, "scraping microphones across the strings, feeding the resulting sound into the overloaded reel to reel tape recorders and producing a primitive form of multi-track recording by bouncing between two cassette machines." A year later, his father, who was an electronic engineer, built him his first multi-track tape machine and a vocoder so he could begin experimenting with the possibilities of studio recording.
Career
Early demo tapes started to emerge in the mid-’80s while Steven was still at school, and at the end of the decade, he created the two projects which gained him entry to the professional music world: Porcupine Tree and No Man. Porcupine Tree, which explored psychedelia, progressive music, and his love of ambitious seventies music, was initially an imaginary "band" which, in reality, Steven overdubbed all the instruments himself. This even extended to early demo tapes coming with a fictional written history of the band, and biographical info about the fictitious performers. Around the same time, Steven formed No-Man, his long-term collaboration with singer Tim Bowness. Influenced by everything from ambient music to hip-hop, their early singles and albums were a mixture of dance beats and lush orchestrations.
Meanwhile, things progressed with Porcupine Tree, whose increasing popularity was fast outpacing the imaginary pretext of an actual group. The second full-length album, Up the Downstair, was released in 1993 and was praised by Melody Maker as "a psychedelic masterpiece… one of the albums of the year." This was the first album to include keyboardist Richard Barbieri and bassist Colin Edwin, albeit only as guests at this point, the album was still effectively a solo project. The next album The Sky Moves Sideways was a transitional album featuring both solo SW and band pieces, but from then on it became a full band with the addition of Chris Maitland on drums. Further albums throughout the late nineties and extensive touring resulted in a string of indie chart placings and critical acclaim, many fans hailing them as the Pink Floyd of the nineties.
In 2001 Porcupine Tree was signed to American label Lava Records, under the auspices of Atlantic Records. Now with the support of a major label, and featuring new drummer Gavin Harrison, In Absentia saw the light of day in 2002, featuring a heavier sound than all the group’s previous works. It charted in many European countries and remains one of the top-selling Porcupine Tree albums. It was also their first album to be released in 5.1 Surround Sound, and won the "Best Made-For-Surround Title" award for the Surround Music Awards 2004. Its 2005 follow-up, Deadwing was inspired by a film script written by Steven and film-maker Mike Bennion and became the first Porcupine Tree album to chart around the world. The album won "Album of the Year" at the Classic Rock magazine awards, and its surround version received the "Best Made-For-Surround Title" once again.
The following year the band released Fear of a Blank Planet, which was nominated for a US Grammy, and won several polls as the best album of the year. Their tenth studio album The Incident was released in late 2009, and became their highest-charting album to date, again received a Grammy nomination, and was followed by another extensive tour that included arena shows and concluded with sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall in New York, and the Royal Albert Hall in London. 2010 ended with their status as arguably the biggest "underground" band in the world cemented.
In 2003 Steven quietly started to release music under his own name, in the form of a series of two-track CD singles on his own label Headphone Dust, each one featuring a cover version and an original SW song. The choice and treatment of the cover versions was unpredictable, as it featured songs by Alanis Morissette, Abba, The Cure, Momus, Prince, and Donovan. Stylistically these cover versions allowed Steven to expand his musical palette into everything from electronica, noise music and stripped down acoustic balladry. This led to his decision to record his first solo album of original music. Between January and August of 2008, Steven began recording material that would comprise Insurgentes. With 10 new tracks that ranged from ballads and anthems to all-out industrial noise assaults, the dark, cinematic, and richly textured disc represents two years’ worth of creative output and numerous recording sessions worldwide in studios from Mexico City to Japan to Israel. The whole process was visually documented by film-maker Lasse Hoile, and the work in progress Insurgentes film features footage of the recording sessions, surreal sequences, and interviews with Steven and many other musicians about what it means to be a musician in the age of iPods and download culture.
A second solo album Grace For Drowning was recorded in 2010-11 and released in September 2011 on CD, vinyl and Blu-ray formats as a double-disc designed to be listened to as two single albums, with the individual parts named Deform to Form a Star and Like Dust I Have Cleared From My Eye. The album received massive critical acclaim, and charted all over the world, notably charting in the top 40 in the United Kingdom, Holland, Germany, and reaching the Polish top 10. It was nominated at the 54th Grammy Awards for Best Surround Sound Album.
Shortly before the release of the album SW also announced his first solo tour, in Europe and North America. The first leg of the tour took place in October and November 2011 and contained songs from both Insurgentes and Grace for Drowning. The tour featured quadrophonic sound and many new visual elements. The second leg of the tour took place in April-May 2012, this time also taking in South America, and including a brand new 12-minute piece Luminol, which had been written specifically for the new band line up to play. A live DVD/Blu-Ray recorded in Mexico titled Get All You Deserve was released on 25 September 2012, again charting all over Europe (number 2 in Germany, number 5 in the United Kingdom).
Steven has become known for the high standard of his production and is a sought-after mixer and producer. Artists he has worked with in this capacity include the Norwegian artist Anja Garbarek, Anathema, and Swedish progressive-metal band Opeth for whom he produced and/or mixed four albums. Other projects include Blackfield, a collaboration with Israeli megastar Aviv Geffen which has now produced two acclaimed albums, and Steven’s drone/ambient/experimental outlet Bass Communion.
2012 saw Steven winning the "Guiding Light" trophy at the Progressive Music Awards 2012 and writing recording his third solo studio album, The Raven that Refused To Sing (and other stories) in Los Angeles with legendary producer Alan Parsons engineering. The album was released in February 2013. The album was a huge critical and commercial success, earning numerous 5-star reviews and charting well across the world.
The virtuoso band Steven assembled to record the album, Guthrie Govan (guitar), Adam Holzman (keyboards), Theo Travis (flute/sax), Nick Beggs (bass/stick), and Marco Minneman, accompanied him on a hugely successful world tour in 2013 that took in 78 shows across 22 countries. The United Kingdom shows included sold-out Royal Albert Hall & Royal Festival Hall shows.
Released on 2nd March 2015, via Kscope, Hand. Cannot. Erase. is a concept album; a mesmerizing, labyrinthine tale hewn from a vivid blend of fact and fiction. In musical terms, the songs are a more varied and esoteric bunch than those on The Raven that Refused to Sing, partly down to Steven’s aversion to repeating himself, but also because of the way it reflects its subject matter. One thing that has remained the same is the band, who are once again on hand to display their extraordinary skills and sensitivity.
On 12 December 2016, Wilson began recording his fifth solo studio album with engineer Paul Stacey in London. With the departure of most of the members of his solo band from prior album, Wilson will handle most of the guitar on the album, with Craig Blundell and Jeremy Stacey both contributing drums. Ninet Tayeb was featured on additional vocals and had a bigger role than she did on Hand. Cannot. Erase. Andy Partridge of XTC revealed that he co-wrote two songs for the album. On 5 January 2017, Wilson posted a teaser clip of himself and Ninet Tayeb recording a new song titled "Pariah." In April 2017, Wilson announced that he had switched record labels for the release, with the album to be released on Caroline International. Wilson also mentioned that harmonica player Mark Feltham is going to be playing on the next record and released a clip of him contributing to a song titled "To the Bone." Slovak musician David Kollar featured on three songs of the new record.
On 9 May 2017, the album was officially unveiled as To the Bone and released on 18 August 2017. Wilson will embark on major tours of the United Kingdom, Europe, and North America in 2018 to promote the album. For the tour, Alex Hutchings was introduced to replace Dave Kilminster as the guitarist of the live band.
On 12 March 2020, Wilson announced the release of the highly anticipated solo album The Future Bites. "Personal Shopper," the first single from the album, was released the same day.
Wilson is an atheist, fascinated by the subject of religion, and a strong critic of organised religion.
Views
Wilson is a vegetarian.
Quotations:
"I have a strong personality and I don’t need to hide it anymore."
“Progressive too often gets abbreviated to “prog,” which is a word I really loathe because it’s meaningless.”
“There's a lot of beauty to be found in sadness and melancholia. One of the things that you find time and time again - not just with music, but with literature - is that things that appear to be quite depressing on the surface can ironically be very uplifting and touching to other people. When you hear something that really reminds you that you're not alone in feeling sad, depressed, melancholic, angry - I think that can actually be a very cathartic experience.”
"I don't tend to write songs about things that make me happy. I tend to write songs about things that make me angry or melancholic or sad."
Personality
For live shows, Wilson plays barefooted. His habit goes back to his early childhood, where he has said, "I always had a problem wearing shoes and I've always gone around with bare feet." He has said that another factor in performing barefoot is the advantage it gives in operating his diverse guitar pedals. He has injured his feet as a result: in one of his early shows, he ended up with a syringe inserted in his foot and had to get a tetanus vaccine. He has said "I’ve stepped on nails, screws, drawing pins, stubbed my toe, I’ve come off stage with blood just coming out… I mean, I’ve had it all mate, but to be honest, nothing's going to stop me." He later started using a carpet, which reduced the frequency of such incidents.
Wilson does not smoke and does not use recreational drugs, except for an occasional drink. Wilson prefers to keep a low profile, following the example of stars like Radiohead, Pink Floyd, or Prince.
Interests
Music & Bands
Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Donna Summer
Connections
Wilson was not interested in starting a family for a long time as he believed that it would obstruct his involvement in music. However, in 2019 he married his girlfriend Rotem and adopted her daughters.