The Sonicbond Publishing Progressive Rock Sampler

Contents

Foreword

Closure/Continuation (2022) from Porcupine Tree On Track (Revised Edition) by Nick Holmes (to be published in 2025)

Talk (1994) from Yes On Track by Stephen Lambe. Revised version for future editions

Aphrodite’s Child – 666 (1972) from 1972: The Year Progressive Rock Ruled The World by Kevan Furbank

If I Could Do It All Over Again It Again I’d Do It All Over You (1970) from Caravan On Track by Andy Boot

Tarkus (1971) from Emerson, Lake & Palmer On Track by Mike Goode

Wind & Wuthering (1976) and the Spot The Pigeon EP from Genesis On Track by Stuart Macfarlane

Acquiring The Taste (1971) from Gentle Giant On Track by Gary Steel

Songs From The Wood (1977) from Jethro Tull On Track by Jordan Blum

1985: The Heart That We Have Live from Marillion in the 1980s by Nathaniel Webb

Meddle (1971) from Pink Floyd On Track by Richard Butterworth

Defector (1980) from Steve Hackett On Track by Geoffrey Feakes

1975: The Undercover Men From Van der Graaf Generator In The 1970s by Steve Pilkington

Foreword

Welcome to our progressive rock sampler.

Since Sonicbond Publishing launched at the end of 2018, we have published books that span most genres in popular music, from easy listening to psychedelia and from pop to metal. However, it is in the world of progressive rock that we have found our most comfortable home. This book features eleven chapters from books on some of the greats of the genre, including from our On Track series Yes, Genesis, Caravan, ELP, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Porcupine Tree and Steve Hackett solo. Our Decades series offers up chapters on Marillion in the 1980s and Van Der Graaf Generator in the 1970s and our Year In series has a chapter on Aphrodite’s Child’s seminal 666. This is just the tip of the iceberg, though, and for the up-to-date list, check out the complete stocklist at the back of this book.

The book contains two exclusive pieces that you won’t find in printed books anywhere else. Nick Holmes’ detailed chapter on Porcupine Tree’s Closure/Continuation can be found in the current E-book but not yet in the printed version. I have rewritten my own chapter on Yes’ ‘lost album’ Talk, released 30 years ago. Inevitably, when an author writes a book, it represents a snapshot in time, and opinions can change, as mine have done concerning this underrated album, following a commission to write a piece about it for Prog magazine.

As you will see, most of the books we have published concern artists from the classic era of progressive rock. I often get asked for (and offered) books on contemporary bands like Mostly Autumn, IQ and The Flower Kings, but I generally turn them down. Why? Because these artists are too close to home. Our books include criticism – of course, well-reasoned and well-explained – but criticism, nonetheless. If I have to meet these people at a festival or concert, I have to be able to look them in the eye. It would be hard to bump into Bryan Josh at an event when someone had just written how terrible Mostly Autumn’s Heart Full Of Sky (for instance) is. Which, by the way, it isn’t. Steve Hackett was typically gentlemanly about the publication of the book about his career. Others might not be so generous.

My thanks to Jerry Ewing at Prog magazine for the opportunity to present this e-book to you. My thanks also to Dominic Sanderson and Huw Lloyd-Jones for their hard work in putting the book together to a tight deadline.

Stephen Lambe

May 2024

Closure/Continuation (2022) from Porcupine Tree On Track (Revised Edition) by Nick Holmes (to be published in 2025)

Personnel: 

Richard Barbieri: keyboards 

Gavin Harrison: drums 

Steven Wilson: vocals, bass, guitar, keyboards 

Mixed by Steven Wilson 

Drums mixed by Gavin Harrison 

Produced by Porcupine Tree 

Additional guitar recording by Paul Stacey at Rosewood Music, Redhill, Surrey 

Additional guitar recording engineered by Ed Scull 

Field recording on ‘Dignity’: Inspector J (Jonathan Shaw) 

Voice samples on ‘Dignity’: Lisen Rylander Löve, Suzanne Barbieri 

Ambience sample on ‘Chimera’s Wreck’: Klankbeeld 

Recording dates: completed over a period of about ten years, ending in September 2021 

Release date: 24 June 2022 

Label: Music for Nations (Sony) 

Highest chart places: UK: 2, US: 90 

Running time: 48:01

Awards 2022:

Prog Critics’ Choice of the Year: 1; Readers’ Poll: 2

Classic Rock’s 50 Best Albums of the Year: 3 

Prog Readers’ Poll: Porcupine Tree – band of the year; Gavin Harrison – best drummer

Music Radar Readers’ Poll best prog guitarists in the world: Steven Wilson voted number five

Closure/Continuation is Porcupine Tree’s eleventh studio album. Released in June 2022, it reached number two in the UK charts, the highest chart position achieved to date by the band or by Steven Wilson as a solo artist. 

When the First Edition of this book was published in September 2021, it appeared that the band’s 2009 album The Incident was the last ever Porcupine Tree album and that the concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London in October 2010 was the band’s last ever gig. Although Wilson didn’t formally leave the band, and Porcupine Tree didn’t announce a split, for over a decade, it seemed unlikely there would be any new music or live shows. In the meantime, Wilson pursued a highly successful solo career, releasing six studio albums with a seventh due in autumn 2023.

As Wilson admitted in several interviews in 2022, in the interim years, he had naturally said the band would never return so he could concentrate on promoting his solo material. As he told Kate Koenig of Premier Guitar in July 2022: ‘I would say to people, No, forget it, we’re not coming back. But it wasn’t true. I was telling a white lie just to get them to focus on what I was doing at that point.’  

In the meantime – according to Wilson on the band’s YouTube channel in June 2022 – Porcupine Tree’s legend had grown while they were away: ‘We’ve done nothing for 12 years, yet the band are bigger than we ever were.’ He told Paul Sinclair of Super Deluxe Edition in June 2022 that when the band played one night at The Royal Albert Hall (capacity 5,300) in 2010, it was ‘the pinnacle… of our UK trajectory’ but that since then, he had done ‘multiple nights’ there as a solo artist. In November 2022, the band played at Wembley Arena (capacity 12,500) in front of their biggest UK audience to date. 

As Wilson explains in the opening chapter of his book Limited Edition Of One (2022), what should have felt like a triumph when the band finally played at the Royal Albert Hall left him feeling empty and unfulfilled. As he told Rob Moore in a YouTube interview in August 2022, this was ‘the complete opposite of what everyone expected to feel.’ The show was ‘an arrival, but also an ending, time to do something else.’ The ‘something else’ was the pursuit of his solo career, which had already begun in 2008 with his first solo album, Insurgentes. The financial risk involved was stark; Porcupine Tree’s 2009 album The Incident had charted at number 23 in the UK and number 25 in the US. By contrast, Insurgentes failed to chart in either country. But Wilson was less concerned by the lack of commercial success early in his solo career, than by the band no longer progressing. He told Michael Hann of The Guardian in March 2022 that ‘we ended up having this archetype of a Porcupine Tree song: a little bit of a metal riff, emotional vocals, chorus, then a clever bit in the middle, then some tricky time signature stuff for the musos.’ The Incident has some fine tracks on it, including the classic ‘Time Flies’, but as mentioned in the previous chapter of this book, there are signs of strain in Wilson’s voice on ‘Drawing The Line’, and the four songs on the second CD (‘Flicker’, ‘Bonnie The Cat’, ‘Black Dahlia’ and ‘Remember Me Lover’) feel unfinished and slightly half-hearted by Wilson’s exceptionally high standards. Wilson told Polly Glass of Classic Rock in August 2022 that it was ’the first album I think we made – and I know Richard [Barbieri] agrees with me, and Gavin [Harrison], too – where we started to repeat ourselves in a not particularly creative way.’  

Harrison and Wilson, who live very close to each other, kept in touch after the final Porcupine Tree show in 2010. They would meet up for a cup of tea and talk about their lives. In a very detailed and typically perceptive interview with Anil Prasad of Innerviews in 2022, Harrison said that ‘[Wilson] lost his dad very close to the same time I lost my mum.’ Wilson’s father died in May 2011, and the two men may have bonded over their shared loss, just as John Lennon and Paul McCartney had done decades earlier as teenagers who had both lost their mothers.  

Like Wilson, Harrison has his own home studio and they started jamming together in 2011. Wilson picked up a bass guitar that Harrison happened to have in his studio whilst Harrison improvised on drums. In the YouTube interview in June 2022, Harrison said ‘we’d never jammed like that before’ – previously when the band had jammed as a four-piece, it was difficult to move on harmonically. Barbieri added that there was ‘not enough focus’ when trying to write with four people, whereas with two, it was much easier. Before Closure/Continuation, it was very rare for Porcupine Tree to write together as a band. Wilson wrote almost all the songs on their previous albums, a notable exception being Metanoia (1998), a collection of instrumental improvisations written by the whole band.  

So, behind closed doors, and with no initial expectation that there would be a new album, Wilson, Harrison and Barbieri began to write new material. Wilson told Mark McStea of Guitar Player in August 2022 that he was comfortable and ‘pretty successful’ in his solo career, so he ‘felt able to collaborate with the guys on the songs and also to defer a bit of responsibility to them.’ 

Barbieri told Prasad that things became more active in 2016. He began sending Wilson ‘musical sketches… my success rate is usually about one in twelve with Steven, so I had to write a lot of things.’ Most of the songs were collaborations: Wilson and Harrison wrote ‘Harridan’, ‘Rats Return’ and ‘Chimera’s Wreck’. Wilson and Barbieri wrote ‘Dignity’ and ‘Walk The Plank’. All three wrote ‘Herd Culling’. Harrison told Prasad that there were long gaps between the writing sessions and that – perhaps surprisingly – none of the material was left over from previous Porcupine Tree albums, ‘it was all created from a brand-new perspective.’ Apart from a few samples, all the performances were by the three musicians who now made up Porcupine Tree – Wilson, Harrison and Barbieri – rather than using guest musicians as had often been the case on previous albums. 

The band had no record deal and weren’t working to any deadline. So they completely avoided the record company pressure that Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) had wryly satirised in his lyrics for ‘Have A Cigar’: ‘You gotta get an album out, you owe it to the people/We’re so happy we can hardly count’ (Wish You Were Here, 1975). Ironically, Wilson told Sinclair that he was writing for ‘the people’. He said: ‘For possibly the very first time in my career, I’m giving the fans what they want’. But he also felt the band had moved on: ‘It feels quintessentially like a Porcupine Tree record, but it also sounds like something fresh.’ 

The record sounds fresh for various reasons. It’s an amalgam of the rock sound of Porcupine Tree and the more electronic sound of Wilson’s most recent solo album, The Future Bites (2021). The latter album showed Wilson largely abandoning the guitar for keyboards and samples, with pop and disco a strong influence. Wilson’s voice is much stronger and more confident following his work on that album when he was encouraged by producer David Kosten to be more soulful and emotional. There’s more variety of tone, and his falsetto is much more powerful than on previous Porcupine Tree albums. Wilson admitted to Sinclair that The Future Bites was ‘not really anything to do with the world of progressive rock’, but Closure/Continuation ‘probably does fit into [the prog genre] quite comfortably.’ Despite this admission – he’s often expressed his irritation at his work being pigeon-holed as ‘prog’ – he said it still belongs to the unique sound world of Porcupine Tree, ‘it doesn’t sound like any other progressive rock, to me.’  

The album marks a retreat from the heavy metal riffs that began to appear on the run of four albums from In Absentia in 2002 to The Incident in 2009. There are fewer progressive metal moments on Closure/Continuation, and in a way that gives them more power. In a YouTube interview with HEAVY1 TV in October 2022, Barbieri said that ‘the metal moments that happen on the album are all the more exciting because of the wait.’ 

A major change is that Wilson plays bass. The band, which had previously been a four-piece, became a three-piece. Colin Edwin, who had played bass on all the Porcupine Tree albums since The Sky Moves Sideways in 1995 doesn’t appear on Closure/Continuation. On tour, the band hired American bass player Nate Navarro, who has played with Devin Townsend, Steve Vai and Marco Minnemann, among many others. Wilson told Stephen Humphries of Under The Radar in June 2022 that when he picked up the bass, he was already becoming a bit bored with playing guitar; he wrote the opening riff and chorus for ‘Harridan’ on bass. Approaching the bass as a guitarist allowed him to take a fresh approach: ‘I start playing melodies at the top and I play chords and I play things that proper bass players probably wouldn’t think to play.’ The ‘big heavy riff’ on ‘Rats Return’ was written on bass, as was the whole of ‘Chimera’s Wreck’.  

In a fan Q&A session on YouTube in April 2022, Wilson was asked whether the album has a concept, to which he simply replied: ‘No’. Prasad identified some loose themes – ‘Its songs reflect current socio-political challenges, existential concerns, superficial subjectivity, and supernatural intrigue’ – but no over-arching concept. On YouTube, Barbieri referred to the enigmatic title of the album: ‘The concept is the closure/continuation of the band itself.’ Writing the album over such a long period of time presumably made it more difficult for there to be an overriding concept. 

From 2002’s In Absentia, the band worked with Danish artist, photographer and filmmaker Lasse Hoile to create artwork and visuals. Wilson has also worked with him on some of his solo albums. As Wilson said on the band’s YouTube channel in June 2022, this time, the band wanted something ‘visually new’, so they approached The Designers Republic, whose work Wilson had long admired. Founded in Sheffield in 1986 by Ian Anderson, the company has worked with major brands such as Coca-Cola, Sony, Nokia and MTV. According to their website, the company is ‘credited with defining