Exclusive Interview: PORCUPINE TREE drummer Gavin Harrison states his case on The Incident

images courtesy of PorcupineTree.com

For nearly twenty years, the UK-based band Porcupine Tree has pushed itself and evolved with each album, emulating the true spirit of the term “progressive.” But Porcupine Tree is much more than another prog-band – in fact the label might just be too limiting for them. With each release, the band explores the boundaries of sound, blurring the lines between rock, jazz, and atmospheric ambience, taking the listener on a journey through metaphysical time and space, culminating in a torrent of emotions and experience.

The new album, The Incident is no different. One song, split into 14 chapters (plus a second disc with four unrelated cuts) sends the listener spiraling down the kaleidoscopic rabbit hole, wondering where he/she will eventually emerge.

Always a band focused on quality and musical perfectionism, several versions of each album make its way to the market, many times in limited quantites, which makes secondary market salesmen (like eBayers) froth at the mouth at the potential to squeeze some extra dollars out of the diehard completionist. It is here where we begin our conversation with Porcupine Tree’s extraordinary drummer, Gavin Harrison.

It seems like Porcupine Tree really has built in its own collector’s market, what with the different versions, limited editions and reissues of each album in the catalogue. Even with the new album, there is that limited edition 2-CD and 116-page book box set. I was actually shocked to see the $107 price tag on that. Who thought that was a good idea?

Not my idea! I think the thing is, with the download thing going on so much now, people really want nice packaged versions. There are so many people downloading albums. If you’re going to release your record with very simple packaging, people won’t see a reason to go out and buy it.

I understand that, I was just surprised that the price point was $107 for a CD, and it’s not even a secondary market price!

That is news to me. That’s got a huge book in it, right? I think I actually just signed one of those last night. I guess the market withstands whatever it will take. If you make a special, gold-lined box autographed by the band and set the price at $1000, if people buy it, then it must be worth at least $1000 to them. We’ve seen a trend in bands doing this kind of thing, selling more elaborate packages and being quite successful with it. Of course, they will only print a small number of them, because there are only so many people who will buy them.

You also are a band known for occasionally releasing special albums that are only available on your tours, like the XM discs. Are you doing that this time around, or are you planning another one?

As far as I know, we are not planning on putting together anything like that at the moment. The extra material we had after recording The Incident, we liked it so much that we included it on the album on a second disc. We really liked all of the songs, but they were too much for one CD. Last time, we released Fear of a Blank Planet and released Nil Recurring a few months later, but all of those songs were actually written and recorded at the same time. What we did differently this time was just released it all together, rather than waiting a few months to put out another piece of product.

We’ve always got things in the can that we could release, like live concerts, DVDs, all sorts of things. But we’ve learned our lesson in the fact that you need to time these things correctly. You don’t want to release too many things at once, because they won’t get the attention they need or deserve, especially from a press angle. If you just did an interview with a magazine about the album, they won’t want to interview you again three months down the line for the EP. If you’re going to release special edition stuff, you have to time it correctly.

I know this is going back a couple years, but were you shocked that you had gotten nominated for a Grammy Award?

Yes, it was very nice. But I was sure that we wouldn’t win, because The Beatles thing [Love] was such a big important remaster, which they’d spent so long doing. There really isn’t a bigger band than The Beatles, and this was one of the most important remaster / surround-sound mixes of all time, which George Martin had worked on. So every now and then, you’re going to come up on something like that that you just know you’re never ever going to win.

But on the flipside, you have won the “Best Progressive Drummer” in Modern Drummer Magazine’s annual reader’s poll for three years straight.

Yeah, well that’s very nice, too. I’m extremely pleased about that. I was actually quite surprised when it happened the first time back in 2007. Before that, I wasn’t mentioned in any of the polls at all, not in the top ten or anything. It seemed like it came straight out of nowhere. I guess it shows the popularity of the band, to a degree.

Well sure, you have a very devoted fan base. And that is something I wanted to touch on. You’re more recent tours have done increasingly well, despite the lack of radio/video support, especially stateside. Do you think that is a testament to the fans or the quality of musicianship?

No, I think it is has been a really, really slow burn. The band has been touring since 1993. Even when I joined the band in 2002, we were playing some really tiny places. And honestly, I think it’s been word of mouth slowly building up. Obviously the record companies and promotion companies have spent time and money on us, but we never thought we would go massive overnight.

We don’t write commercial singles that are suddenly going to be on the charts, and we don’t expect to go from playing 400-seat club to a 40,000-seat arena overnight. It’s been a very slow, gentle upward curve, which I think is good, because it’s not an overnight success, and I think it has longevity. People are coming not because of the hype of one single they’ve heard on the radio or on MTV; they genuinely like the show and they tell their friends.

So every year, it’s a sort of compound effect – more and more people are coming and bringing their friends along. Although for some people, we might seem an overnight success, honestly it’s taken us what, 17 years to become an overnight success?

Now, you say that you don’t write commercial songs, but you do have a few tracks in the catalogue that have a mainstream, commercial aesthetic, like “Lazarus” and “Shesmovedon”. They had been released as single EPs, but why were they never pushed as commercial radio singles? I could easily seem them riding in the same vein as Muse and Coldplay on the radio. Why has that never happened?

I know what you mean, but I really don’t know. It’s a mystery how songs become big hits. I’m sure you hear songs that are big hits but are actually quite rubbish. And consequently, you have songs you think are quite brilliant, but never connect. I don’t understand the inner workings of program directing and deejaying, and how that system pans out.

We have released singles in the past, on the advice of record companies. We even re-recorded “Shesmovedon” for Deadwing on the advice of the record company, because one DJ somewhere in the states said that it was his favorite song of all time and told the company that if we re-recorded it on Deadwing, he’d play it non-stop. Apparently, he didn’t play it at all. We didn’t want to re-record it. We thought it was a really bad idea to put it on the record, but the record company thought otherwise, based on the perception that this DJ would play the hell out of it.

It did kinda break up the feeling and conceptual flow of the album. I mean, one minute you’re being swept away into this very special, new listening experience, and all of the sudden, you’re jolted by a song you’ve heard five years ago.

Yeah, I know what you’re saying. We really didn’t want to do it. We even tried to hide it but burying the track five minutes after the last song on the album. But the record company announced it on their website. Before the record even came out, they gave the game away. It was meant to be a secret track, but you can’t really have secrets with the Internet these days. All it takes is one person to find out and then everyone knows. I guess you have to be really careful what you say these days. You say something to someone in a car park, and then it ends up in someone’s blog.

The last album, although it contained fewer tracks, felt like a very expansive, almost train-of-thought collection of sonic journeys. The Incident seems to pull back a bit with several shorter tracks, some of them not sounding so much as songs, but as musical interludes between chapters. Was this act intentional?

Oh yeah, definitely. They’re not meant to be treated as complete songs,well a couple of them could appear that way, but the album is meant to be experienced as one long song. And that is how we’re playing it live – one long track. So, if you come to a show, you’ll hear that 55-minute piece.

Is it easier to write conceptually?

Absolutely. I think it is much easier if you have a direction to go in, and you know where to go. If you’re just roaming around, it’s a bit more random, and you have to really think about how it’s all going to fit together. You might write a song that you think is really good, but it doesn’t work with the rest of the album. We wrote quite a lot of stuff in a sort of band jam, but most of it didn’t get used because it just didn’t feel like it sat well with the rest of the material.

It’s also got a very mature, film score-like, soundtrack-y quality to it. Did you look to any particular soundtracks for inspiration when you were putting The Incident together?

No, not really. I mean we’re all film fans, of course, but it wasn’t intended for that angle at all.

And juxtaposed with the maturity is a bit of a youthful energy. The album is very fluid and keeps the listener on his/her toes, because you guys really pushed forward with the musical, technical, and rhythmic experimentation.

Well, we always try to move forward in the true definition of “progressive.” We really do try to progress, if it’s by sound, by rhythm, or the overall concept – just try to keep moving forward. If you find a formula and just stick to it, you’re going to go out of date, and you’re going to dry up artistically. You’re going to run out of ideas.

Does being tagged with the label “progressive” limits you or damages your widespread appeal?

Well, it depends if you think “progressive” means Genesis, Yes, or Pink Floyd, then yes, I don’t think it represents us to be labeled in that old rock way. But there are plenty of newer bands out there like Tool or Radiohead who are doing much more modern things. I don’t really go along that well with genres, to me, it’s either good music or bad music. I don’t really get caught up in genres, because they are things that other people impose on the music more than you do.

Really, I’m a jazz drummer; I’ve come up playing in a jazz style, but nobody calls me a jazz drummer, because I play in a band that has been labeled “progressive.” I guess that’s why I’ve been dubbed the “Best Progressive Drummer” [laughs]! It is amusing to me, because I never listened or followed progressive music when I was younger at all. I was aware of those bands, but I haven’t got any of their records, and I didn’t grow up listening to any of their stuff.

And I think that is the primary charm of The Incident – it is truly a “progressive” album, not by the genre-definition, but by the active means of trying to evolve musically. When you sat down to write this album, did you sit down to discuss where you wanted to take it, or did you jam it out exploratorily?

I think the chemistry of the four of us is the personality of it. For better or worse, the four of us play together and make a certain sound. I think if we changed anyone in the band, the whole dynamic of the sound would change because of that difference. So, no, we don’t sit down to figure out where we want to go, I think it is a collective consciousness, if you like.

Do you actually write out your parts, or do you compose by playing?

I can write it all out if I had to, but I kinda shy away from that these days. If I write it out, then I’m probably going to end up reading it. And then it becomes harder and harder every night. I just jam off the top of my head.

Since Steven writes a lot of tranquil acoustic guitar and piano-based passages, do you find it challenging to be creative as a percussionist?

No, not really. Sometimes, I find the best thing to do is not to play at all. Sometimes it’s good to just drop out, because it becomes more dynamic when the drums do enter. There’s a bit more percussion on this record. I play the Korg WaveDrum a little bit, and it doesn’t always need the full drum kit for me to make it interesting.

When you’re putting together an album, do you consider how the tracks will come across live, or do you simply focus on creating the best album possible and worry about the live translation later?

Yeah, we don’t worry about how we’re going to play it live until we’re getting ready to play out. We don’t think about things being too complicated or difficult to play live. In fact, we didn’t even know how The Incident was going to sound live until two weeks ago, when we sat down and played it in our rehearsal room.

We don’t record together, so we really didn’t know how it was going to sound when we all got together and played for the first time. We played bits and pieces in the studio when we were recording, but we didn’t do it as a full four-piece until rehearsal time.

How does a song like “Drawing the Line” come together? There are so many layers and stylistic elements to it that I found it amazing that it came together as one, cohesive tightly-wrapped song.

Steve wrote that piece and then presented it to all of us individually. He had a sort of guide drum track on it, so I stripped that away and tried to imagine what I thought would best thing I could do with it. I think that is one of the most interesting songs on the album. In fact, I think that and “Time Flies” are the only two real ‘songs’ on The Incident that could be taken out and listened to independently…if you had to. If you had to make a single, I would think you could make singles out of either one of them.

I was just going to bring up “Time Flies”. That is another really remarkable piece of composition. There are seriously amazing things going on in that track. There is a moment at around the 10:30 mark where you take the recurrent beat and flip it around so it almost sounds like you’re playing it backwards. Was that something you just thought of doing on the fly?

Well, I always think like that. I actually wrote a book in the late 1980s called Rhythmic Illusions, which is about literally creating illusions with percussion rhythms – the way it sounds like you’re playing backwards, or when you’re messing around with the perception of where the “1” is, or making it sound like you’re playing a different tempo even though you’re not playing a different tempo.

There are all sorts of clever tricks you can do with rhythm if you truly understand people’s common perception of rhythm. If you understand what people are expecting, then you can mess around with that and that’s when you can create some really rhythmical illusions.

I noticed you do that a lot in the track “The Incident” itself. As I was listening to it, I found myself becoming a little befuddled trying to follow the rhythm.

Yeah, and honestly, that song is actually in the 4/4 time. Having the facility to play with time signatures is really when you can make great illusions work. I play around a lot with making odd time signatures sound like they are in normal time, and vice versa. If you know how to manipulate rhythm, you can create tension and release; let’s say in some Alfred Hitchcock moments.

And a lot of bands really don’t explore that kind of thing. The drums go “boom-baff, boom boom-baff” all the way through every song every night. But if you’re in a band that is has some element of progression, then you get the opportunity to really experiment not only with sound, but with the rhythms themselves.

Stripping away everything else, do you feel that expressing an emotional atmosphere is the crux of the Porcupine Tree sound?

Oh yeah! Just as in film, not everything is walking down Main Street with flowers little dogs running about. You can have all sorts of awkward and strange and uncomfortable atmospheres that can be beautiful. They don’t have to have the common perception of beauty; they can be something quite dissonant and angular. I think that is when you start to find those new angles and sounds, when you really try to get away from the standards of obvious rock-n-roll.

The straight song format has been around for nearly 100 years. The standard format of introduction-verse-bridge-chorus-hook has been explored to death. I think we’re taking a new angle. We don’t have to adhere to a strict song format containing an intro that is 8 bars long, then a first verse that is 16 bars long, then a re-intro that is 4 bars long, and so on. Sure, we can do that whenever we want, and we can pull a song around into that shape whenever we want to. But it’s more interesting to start a song at a strange angle and experiment with it.

That said, does it bother you that most Americans deem In Absentia and Deadwing as the definition of Porcupine Tree’s sound?

No, not really, those are the two best albums in my opinion. They actually are defining. You’ll have to put a few years between me and the new album before I can tell if it’s any good or not. We’ve worked on The Incident for so many thousands of hours over the past year, I really couldn’t tell you anything about it. I’ve heard it so many times that I’ve kinda lost perspective on it. I’ll probably be able to tell you in about three years time whether or not it’s a good album.

I mean, I like it, of course, but right now I’m so close to it, I can’t give a logical perspective of it. But yeah, In Absentia and Deadwing are great albums. Fear of a Blank Planet is still pretty recent in my memory to judge it, and Nil Recurring was a fun little thing. But it’s very personal when I’m listening to it as opposed to the general public, because I really don’t know what the general public’s perception is.

Even though the general public might like us to continue making In Absentia over and over again, that was probably the first Porcupine Tree album they heard that they liked. There are also older fans in Europe who only like the more space-rock, psychedelic albums before In Absentia. In fact, they hated that album. They hated the metal elements, they hated the heavy things, and they probably hated me, too. We definitely lost some fans, but hopefully, we gained more new ones against the few we lost.

Well, come on, every band has to evolve at some point.

Exactly, but I mean usually, the first album you find of a band that you fall in love with is the one that defines it for you. The Incident might be the first record some people have heard by Porcupine Tree. If they like it, they might go back and buy Fear of a Blank Planet, or they might by Deadwing and think that those records suck. Or they might even go further back and pick up Signify or Stupid Dream which don’t sound anything like the way we currently sound at all.

Are you surprised that Porcupine Tree has such a strong metal fan base?

Uh, yeah. We’re definitely not metal-looking guys with the long hair, tattoos, piercings and black clothing. I mean, we’ve been on some metal festivals, and we’ve seen the bands play before us and watched the crowds go crazy. And then we’d go on, play our heaviest stuff, and the audience doesn’t even move. I mean, we’re seriously playing the heaviest stuff we’ve got, and we’re still nowhere near the average metal bands, in their level of “metalness”.

We don’t conform to the traditions of metal, we don’t look like them, and we don’t really sound like them, but occasionally we’ll get mis-booked onto metal festivals, and then it looks like we’re going down really badly. Oddly enough, we found out that some of those fans actually enjoyed the quieter, gentler arrangements instead of the flat-out, full-on moshing right from the get-go.

So as a music creator, what do you want the listeners to get out of The Incident listening experience?

Everyone sees different things in the music that they like. I just hope that whoever listens to it finds something in the whole thing that they really enjoy – some pieces that they can relate to or give them some kind of emotional trigger. I think the album takes you on a journey, certainly!

See Porcupine Tree live on the following dates:

Sept.18 at Warfield in San Francisco, CA
Sept. 19 at Club Nokia in Los Angeles, CA
Sept. 21 at House of Blues in Cleveland, OH
Sept. 22 at Vic Theater in Chicago, IL
Sept. 24 at Terminal 5 in New York, NY
Sept. 25 at Ram’s Head Live in Baltimore, MD
Sept. 26 at Electric Factory in Philadelphia, PA
Sept. 27 at House of Blues in Boston, MA
Sept. 29 at Metropolis in Montreal, QC, Can.
Sept. 30 at Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Toronto, ON, Can.