Steven Wilson
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Steven Wilson (born Steven John Wilson on November 3, 1967 in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England) is the lead guitarist/singer and songwriter for progressive rock band Porcupine Tree. Steven is also a self-taught producer, audio engineer, bass guitar and keyboard player (among other musical instruments).
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[edit] Biography
Steven Wilson discovered his love for music around the age of 8. It began one Christmas when his parents bought presents for each other in the form of LPs. His father and mother received Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Donna Summer's Love to Love You Baby, respectively. The young Steven spent much of his childhood listening to these albums in "heavy rotation", as he once commented. Both LPs would influence his future song writing. He claims "...in retrospect I can see how they are almost entirely responsible for the direction that my music has taken ever since." With Pink Floyd leaning him towards experimental/psychedelic conceptual progressive rock (as exemplified by Porcupine Tree), and Donna Summer with her trance-inflicted grooves (which No-Man, Wilson's long-running collaboration with fellow musician, vocalist Tim Bowness initially adopted as its musical approach. Subsequently, the band's sound evolved and pursued a more meditative and experimental Talk Talk-esque approach).
As a child, Steven was forced to learn the guitar, but he did not enjoy it; his parents stopped paying for lessons. However, aged 11, Wilson rescued a nylon string classical guitar from his attic and started to experiment with it; or in his own words, "...scraping microphones across the strings, feeding the resulting sound into overloaded reel to reel tape recorders and producing a primitive form of multi-track recording by bouncing between two cassette machines." It was clear that the 11 year-old displayed an early fascination with different possibilities of arranging and playing with sounds.
It didn't take too long before he began to form bands with his friends from school and play live. However, the thing which kept him truly satisfied was experimenting with sounds and producing the recordings he made.
Between the years 1984 and 1986 he recorded material with underground bands Altamont and Karma. Some of those tapes have recently resurfaced due to the increasing popularity of Porcupine Tree. Wilson describes it as "...a bit like a painter having his nursery school paint blots on display..."
He was only 15 years old when he recorded a tape with Altamont, called Si Vockings. This particular work includes lyrics by Alan Duffy which Wilson later used for two Porcupine Tree songs: "This Long Silence" and "It Will Rain for a Million Years".
Around the same time he played with Altamont, he was also in a band called Karma, and they recorded two tapes: The Joke's on You (1983) and The Last Man to Laugh (1985), which contained the original versions of songs later used by Porcupine Tree, "Small Fish" and "Nine Cats" though not "The Joke's On You" (played live but not recorded).
Up to this point Wilson's diverse musical experiments contained avant-garde industrial, psychedelia (with Altamont) and progressive rock (with Karma). Steven's next step was forming the two most important bands in his life so far: No-Man and Porcupine Tree.
[edit] Side projects
Apart from Porcupine Tree and No-Man, these are other projects/collaborations Steven is currently working on or has been involved with in the past.
- Bass Communion plays host to Wilson's interests in drone and ambient music. For this project, he collaborated in the late nineties with Muslimgauze, and more recently with Vidna Obmana.
- Blackfield is the name of a recent collaboration with Israeli Aviv Geffen. Blackfield is similar to Porcupine Tree but differs in the fact that it is more pop-oriented.
- Wilson also releases under his own name. For this and other purposes he created his own record label Headphone Dust.
- Currently he is planning to record a collaborative album with Swedish band Opeth's singer, guitarist and composer Mikael Åkerfeldt and Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy. He is also producing the next album of Israeli band Orphaned Land, titled The never ending way of ORwarriOR.
[edit] Other appearances
- In 1988 Steven helped some friends in a band called Coltsfoot by playing on their demo tape Action at a Distance.
- He produced and contributed backing vocals, guitar and keyboards for Opeth on the albums Blackwater Park, Deliverance and Damnation
- Has also worked with OSI, Marillion, Fish, Cipher and Anja Garbarek.
[edit] Equipment
[edit] Recording studio
- Apple G4 running Logic 6.4
- Digidesign Mix TDM system
- Neumann U87 microphone
- Mackie 32-8-2 mixing desk
[edit] On stage
- Paul Reed Smith Custom 22 guitars, Singlecut and Modern Eagle
- Babicz Acoustic Guitars and Octane Acoustic/Electric
- Bad Cat two tone distortion
- BOSS distortion
- Carl Martin compressor
- Line 6 Echo Pro
- Custom Audio Electronics switching system
- Bad Cat Hot Cat combo amplifier
[edit] References
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Steven Wilson Headquarters
- Porcupine Tree Official Website
- Deadwing Official Website
- Steven Wilson's Complete Discography
- Steven Wilson's MySpace account
- No-Man Official Website
| Porcupine Tree |
| Richard Barbieri | Colin Edwin | Gavin Harrison | Steven Wilson |
| Chris Maitland | John Wesley |
| Discography |
|---|
| Albums: On the Sunday of Life... | Up the Downstair | The Sky Moves Sideways | Signify | Stupid Dream | Lightbulb Sun | In Absentia | Deadwing |
| Live albums: Coma Divine - Recorded Live in Rome | Warszawa | Rockpalast |
| Compilations: Voyage 34: The Complete Trip | Recordings | Stars Die: The Delerium Years 1991-1997 |
| DVDs: Arriving Somewhere |
| Related articles |
| No-Man | Bass Communion | Blackfield | Headphone Dust | I.E.M. |
