The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  The band did splinter, re-forming again for a tour—and one last album, as the label had contracted. Three of a Perfect Pair showcased even more of the creative schisms in the group—all in ways that worked for the music. The title track hypnotized listeners with a looping Belew guitar figure, then smashed the calmness with a scale-breaking Fripp solo that jumped from note to note with no obvious design. “Sleepless” was the first and only King Crimson song to be remixed as a club single.

  There was a tour—then another end to another experiment. As Bruford recalled, on Sunday, July 12, 1984, Fripp had breakfast with the group and announced its termination. Belew remembered it differently: reading Fripp’s pronouncement in Musician magazine, which had celebrated and published him throughout the years of experimentation. “That’s how I learned I was no longer in the band,” said Belew. “After that I went a year or two where I didn’t want to write songs anymore. I was kind of finished with all that. I realized as I said earlier that I didn’t really care that much about being a star and I cared more about being a musician.”75

  The liberated musicians picked up the careers they’d had before Fripp’s Discipline head-hunting. Levin, who had taken a pay cut to join the group, returned to session work. Bruford returned to jazz. Fripp himself teamed up with Andy Summers, more than two decades after they’d first met. With the end of the Police, Summers was game for experimental and instrumental music; the fame he’d earned in the Police gave the first Fripp-Summers collaborative album, I Advance Masked, a serious label push.

  Belew, at first, recorded some effects-heavy music that he thought could sell. “I wasn’t sure that King Crimson would ever happen again, and what I thought was, ‘What I want to do now is be a creative artist,’ ” he said. “I’m fed up with the idea of trying to make it in the music business on a pop level. So I created Desire Caught by the Tail, and it nearly bankrupted me.”76

  Belew’s next move was to join another group—actually, to take it over. The Raisins, an Ohio band that he’d seen before and liked, had a local following but no national reach. “I thought maybe I should give it one more big try, to have a band that could really be exciting, to write a lot of three-minute hit songs, and just see if that could happen again,” said Belew. “I was kind of inspired by the Police, because they came out of nowhere, and within a year they were huge.”77

  Belew’s friendly takeover of the band came with a name change: the “Bears.” Just three years after cowriting “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (Part III),” Belew was the front man of a pop group, revising some of their old material and collaborating on new ones. “Fear Is Never Boring,” one of their pre-Belew singles, was rebuilt with him sharing vocals and soloing after the hook.

  None of Crimson’s players were allowing themselves to backslide.

  “By the time John Wetton’s Asia had sold millions of copies of its bland radio-friendly pop in the 80s, the post-hippie extension of the counter-culture that was progressive rock, based on the idealistic impulses of the 60s, had finally run its course,” Bruford wrote. “The dream, or illusion, of individual and global enlightenment was over. Progressive rock, like the period that gave rise to it, was essentially optimistic.”78

  “The whole underlying goal—to draw together rock, classical, and folk music into a surreal metastyle—was inherently an optimistic ideal,” said Bruford. “At its best, the genre engaged the listeners in a quest for spiritual authenticity. We took ourselves too seriously, of course, and its po-faced earnestness could lapse into a moronic naivete, but it never gave way to bitterness, cynicism, or self-pity.”79

  FISH WAS GONE, but there was no talk of ending Marillion. There was no talk, really, of continuing along the path of Clutching at Straws. No one within the band was a natural singer, so a call went out for someone new. Steve Hogarth, who sounded nothing like Fish, was one of the try-outs. “I expected them to say, ‘we’re this big progressive rock band and we sell this many copies. It’s a good living, and do you think you can sing like this?’ ” Hogarth told author Jon Collins. “They said, ‘we’ve heard you singing, we’ve heard some songs you’ve written and we really like what you do.’ ”80

  Hogarth was flattered, but not sold. “To be honest, I wasn’t terribly interested in doing it,” Hogarth said. “I had no income and was completely skint.”81 With that motivation, and with some respect for what the band had done, Hogarth tried out and joined an all-day jam session. He tackled unfinished Marillion tracks, or attempted to. “I thought I was out of tune and horrible,” he recalled.82 But the band warmed quickly to Hogarth’s approach. Fish had swung wildly and emotionally; Hogarth exuded a sort of sincerity. “Everything just clicked,” said Rothery. “The minute Steve started singing it was like our whole creativity became supercharged again.”83

  Hogarth hesitated before signing on. Had he remained solo, he was set to tour with Matt Johnson, the artist who recorded and toured as the The. “Matt was about the hippest artist in England and Marillion were about the least hip artists,” said Hogarth.84 But soon enough, Hogarth was in, hauling along a red bucket of tapes containing song ideas that had never made it. When the band hit an impasse, a hand went into the bucket. “Easter,” a deeply literal song about the Irish rebellion, had been kicking around on a magnetic loop. Tolkien was out; lyrics about “a tattered necklace of hedge and tree” and “where Mary Dunoon’s boy fell” were Marillion’s now.

  The new Marillion introduced itself in 1989, with a set of songs called Seasons End. Mark Wilkinson, the painter who had produced the first four studio albums’ iconic scenes, had stayed with Fish. Marillion blew that off. “Graphic artists are so much quicker than proper artists,” said bassist Pete Trewavas.85 Instead, there would be a photo illustration, with four frames depicting both the literal seasons of the year and the ways in which Marillion had broken free from its past.

  Wilkinson’s revenge came when Fish released his debut, Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors. The painter had hidden insults in the artwork. Mark Kelly and John Arnison became derelicts, heating themselves by a fire. Steve Rothery’s white Porsche sat on a scrap heap. “It was mischievous,” Wilkinson admitted. “So was having my illustrated clown from ‘Fugazi’ drowning in a muddy pool.”86 The band understood exactly what Wilkinson was up to. “I told EMI I wanted all the albums destroyed,” said Mark Kelly.87 As a compromise, later versions of the album would ship with altered art; Kelly would no longer be mocked as a hobo.

  But there was no truce when Marillion toured and promoted the new music with Steve Hogarth. When journalists asked, the other band members were contrite: they had replaced a fallen-off singer with a dynamic artist. “He didn’t seem to be inspired anymore by the music we were writing,” Rothery said of Fish, with Hogarth at his side. “On the other hand, we didn’t like his lyric direction either.”88

  “Everybody keeps asking me if it was difficult, expecting me to say how difficult it was,” said Hogarth. “As soon as we made music, we just made bags of music.”89

  Seasons End did not sell the way that Fish’s Marillion albums had sold. The band shed the fans who had come in through the progressive revival, and through heavy metal. The new Marillion, with Hogarth amplifying tendencies that had bubbled under, was more raw and political. When it came time to record a follow-up, the band and label agreed on Chris Neil, whose progressive cred topped out with Mike + the Mechanics. “They’d seen how Mike Rutherford brought Genesis into the mainstream, and so they came to me,” said Neil.90

  The new Marillion was not a pop group, but it abandoned what had been so mockable about progressive rock. Hogarth had his own flamboyant stage presence, with costume changes and little set pieces; being hauled off stage by mysterious thugs was the most striking. But in his own words, Hogarth “smashed the progressive approach apart.”91 Fish, keeping up the progressive approach, hoped to surpass the old group’s success.

  “In musical terms it didn’t happen that way, or in business terms because we make more money than him,�
� said Hogarth, years later. “But it did pan out like that in media terms. If the Daily Mail ever talks about Marillion they still print a picture of Fish, even now. That’s a ghost we haven’t been able to lay to rest. But on all other fronts, it’s Marillion 1 and Fish 0.”92

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  THE NOSTALGIA FACTORY

  As the 1980s wheezed to a finish, a seventy-seven-minute cassette tape from an unsigned and unknown band began to arrive in the offices of underground music zines. The title and the act looked equally nonsensical; Porcupine Tree proudly presented something called Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm. The folded sleeve credited musicians like Sir Tarquin Underspoon (organ, electric piano) and Sebastian Tweetle-Blampton III (delay circuits) and Master Timothy Masters (oboe).

  It was a parody, sure—but a parody of what? The first sounds on the tape came from a keyboard, which started low and grew in volume until interrupted by a flute. A few strings were plucked in a vaguely Eastern style. Was this ambient music? No; the entrance of a drum machine, clanging as if a robot had taken control of Janet Jackson’s studio, put the lie to that.

  The tape spun on, and genres tumbled into genres as a theme slowly emerged. This was progressive music, albeit two decades after the music’s era had ended. It had the trappings of a garage band and the ambitions of Yes, or Pink Floyd.

  The fake “band members,” the “tripping musicians extraordinaire,” found their purpose in “The Cross/Hole/Yellow Hedgerow Dreamscape,” the final song on the tape. It began as a cover of Prince’s defiantly Christian anthem; it morphed into arena rock, with a dubbed “audience” cheering as a singer (Underspoon) invited them to turn on. “I’d like to take you on a journey with me!” he said, drenched with reverb. “Relax! Open your hearts to the universe. Let the light shine into your hearts. Be at one with the universe. Open your mind. Come with me.”

  This fantasy had sprung from the mind and hands of Steven Wilson, who was born on the outskirts of London in 1967, and grew up after the progressive moment had passed. Before he turned ten, he was listening to ambitious music through the filter of his parents. “I was discovering the Electric Light Orchestra and Pink Floyd through my father,” said Wilson. “He also had Tubular Bells. He had the big mainstream crossover art rock albums of the era. But my best friend had a brother who was five or six years older than us, and he’d been buying records in the seventies. He’d say, ‘Oh, you’re listening to Pink Floyd? Here’s what you really need to hear.’ And he had records by Camel, by Hawkwind.”1

  Wilson was transfixed, not least because the music had been willfully tossed aside by the culture. When he was eleven, he trekked to the Berkhamsted Civic Centre for a punk show—the Chiltern Volcanoes—but was early enough to catch some band called Marillion. “I recall that in one song Mick Pointer came to the front of the stage and played some flute,” he’d remember. “Although it made a pretty big impression on me, I don’t think I really expected to hear the name again.”2

  “We were hearing things like Genesis and these other bands we wouldn’t have come across either, because no one was listening to those bands,” he said. “We’re talking about 1980, 1981; no one’s listening to that music. All my friends at school are listening to the Jam, the Smiths. No one was listening to what was comparatively recent. It might as well have been a century ago.”3

  In his teens, Wilson started experimenting with a four-track recording system. By 1987, when the Porcupine Tree project started, he was recording reel to reel, but highly aware of his limitations. His “band” would owe more to Pink Floyd than to Robert Fripp because David Gilmour had drafted the simpler blueprints. “I was never a good musician, and I was never interested in being a good musician,” said Wilson. “So I gravitated toward the stuff that was easy to play. That allowed me to continue on my musical journey without having to be very good.”4

  The resulting songs, half whimsy and half ambition, went out to a few hundred people with hopefully overlapping tastes. Nick Saloman, who recorded as the Bevis Frond, suggested that Wilson send a cassette to Richard Allen, a journalist just a few years older, his tastes similarly unstuck in time. Other people navigated through the 1980s with electronic music and New Romanticism. Allen covered the new psychedelia, underground music that survived without much label support. And Porcupine Tree’s tape struck Allen as promising—memorable, but not perfect. In the short-lived, low-budget magazine Freakbeat, he praised the experimentation of the music, then panned the “long, calculated prog jams.”5

  Still, Allen was interested in where Wilson could take this. He was amusingly committed to the joke of Porcupine Tree as a band of fractured geniuses, rediscovered and newly put on wax. “It was very tongue in cheek,” Wilson explained. “It was suggested that the ‘band’ met in the early 1970s, at a rock festival. They’d been in and out of prison and they’d been busted on various occasions.”6

  Wilson’s second tape, 1990’s The Love, Death & Mussolini E. P., was just as cracked, down to a snatch of dialogue from the justly forgotten film The Amazing Transplant that ended one of the more serious songs with the phrase “I want you to put Felix’s penis on me.” Only ten copies of the tape were made, and Porcupine Tree remained a Wilson-only affair.

  Allen would help to change that. In 1991, he struck out and announced the formation of Delerium Records and courted Wilson for the label’s debut compilation. Porcupine Tree provided “Linton Samuel Dawson,” a short pop song with sped-up vocals. “I did all the press for the label, particularly for Porcupine Tree,” Allen would tell the blog Psychedelic Baby. “No other label was interested in this kind of music so it was a real uphill battle particularly for Porcupine Tree a band that to start with was completely unknown, had no fan base, couldn’t perform live easily and played lengthy psychedelic guitar based progressive rock at a time when ambient trance and electronic, dance music were hip.”7

  Allen bet again on Wilson, and signed Porcupine to his indie label. The first result of that alliance would be On the Sunday of Life, a mélange of everything Wilson had been doing. “It seemed on the surface to be the worst possible time to be trying to make that kind of music,” Wilson would admit, with some pride, to an interviewer. “Everyone was listening to Nirvana and Soundgarden and all of the sort of new grunge. Even the idea of a guitar solo seemed like it was completely outlawed. You couldn’t do things like that [let] alone 15-minute long tracks and extended improvised guitar stuff. It seemed like the worst possible time but . . . what I found was actually there was a lot of other people like me that kind of missed that creativity and missed that ambition in music.”8

  Delerium printed just a thousand copies of the new record. Interest, if there was any, would have to build from that low base. “It took 10 years before we got any serious interest,” Allen remembered. “It was essentially a war of attrition. If you know the music is of a good quality and keep going long enough someone will eventually take notice.”9

  But it did sell. The first thousand copies found homes. In time, twenty thousand units of Wilson’s shamelessly progressive record had moved. “This was pre-Internet, and there were no magazines writing about that music, and there were no radio stations playing that music,” Wilson said, years later. “You certainly couldn’t get that music on TV. So that process of building an audience and finding those people became a word-of-mouth one and a very organic one.”10

  As Wilson found a fan base, he built a band and began touring his material. Porcupine Tree’s mid-1990s music continued the scale of progressive rock, as produced by anoraks with keyboards. In early summer of 1993, Porcupine Tree released Up the Downstair, and with it, the first collaboration between Wilson and David Sylvian’s old bandmate Richard Barbieri. Barbieri’s electronic signature was all over the title track, ten minutes of music that welded together the dreamy pop ambience that was becoming popular with Wilson’s guitar work, which wasn’t.

  “It’s a strange and wonderful brew, taking in Orb ambience, FSoL dub, Metallica steel and all points in between
,” wrote Dave Simpson in Melody Maker. “I’m remembering Floyd and King Crimson and wondering whether they’re aware that their pioneering spirit has been re-incarnated in the Nineties. Mostly (and curiously) I’m reminded of the great 801, a ground-breaking ambient rock ‘super group’ formed by Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, who slayed the Reading Festival in 1976 and imploded soon after, leaving a myriad of musical possibilities unresolved. Here’s where the gauntlet is finally picked up.”11

  In just a few years, Wilson was being celebrated as the revivalist and torch carrier of progressive music. A press that had chased away his predecessors was intrigued; a fan base, which had shrunken but grown more intensely devoted, was buying the records. So Wilson traveled even further into space. “The Sky Moves Sideways,” split into two parts, was longer than almost any piece from the progressive era. Over thirty-five dreamy minutes, it advanced through ambient noise, to guitar solos, to native-style drumming, to Wilson’s thin but commanding voice reciting wide-eyed poetry.

  Wilson was not a show-offy guitarist. Like David Gilmour or Robert Fripp, he looked for spaces between the notes, and for feel. “When I was very young and first heard those King Crimson records,” said Wilson, “I would think ‘That’s just wrong. You’re playing the guitar wrong, mate!’ But the more you start to listen to Fripp’s playing, the more you appreciate his choices of notes.”12