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Steven Wilson
Steven John Wilson (born 3 November 1967) is an English musician, songwriter, record producer and audio engineer. He is best known as the founder and frontman of Porcupine Tree, as well as his solo career. Besides Porcupine Tree, he is also a member of several other bands, including Blackfield, Storm Corrosion and No-Man.
Wilson has released eight solo albums since his solo debut, Insurgentes, in 2008. In the years following Insurgentes, he released the acclaimed records Grace for Drowning (2011), The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories) (2013), and Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015). Wilson’s eighth studio album, The Overview, was released on 14 March 2025. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Wilson has made music prolifically and earned critical acclaim. His honours include six nominations for Grammy Awards: twice with Porcupine Tree, once with his collaborative band Storm Corrosion and three times as a solo artist. In 2017, The Daily Telegraph described him as "a resolutely independent artist" and "probably the most successful British artist you've never heard of".
Wilson is a self-taught composer, producer, audio engineer, guitarist and keyboard player, and plays other instruments as needed, including bass guitar, autoharp, hammered dulcimer and flute. His influences and work have encompassed a diverse range of genres including pop, psychedelia, progressive rock and electronic, among others, shifting his musical direction through his albums. His concerts incorporate quadraphonic sound and elaborate visuals. He has worked with artists such as Elton John, Guns N' Roses, XTC, Opeth, Pendulum, Yes, King Crimson, Fish, Marillion, Black Sabbath, and Anathema, and has built a reputation for his work remixing classic pop and rock records into new stereo, 5.1 and Dolby Atmos versions.
Born in Kingston upon Thames, London, Wilson was raised from age six in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, where he discovered his interest in music around the age of eight. According to Wilson, his life was changed one Christmas when his parents bought presents for each other in the form of LPs. His father and mother received Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and Donna Summer's Love to Love You Baby, respectively. It was Wilson's affinity for these albums that helped craft his guitar and songwriting abilities. He said, "In retrospect I can see how they are almost entirely responsible for the direction that my music has taken ever since." His interest in Pink Floyd led him towards experimental and psychedelic conceptual progressive rock (as exemplified by Porcupine Tree and Blackfield), and Donna Summer's trance-inflected grooves inspired the initial musical approach of No-Man (Wilson's long-running collaboration with fellow musician and vocalist Tim Bowness).
As a child, Wilson was forced to learn the guitar, but he did not enjoy it; his parents eventually stopped paying for lessons. When he was eleven, he found a nylon-string classical guitar in his attic and experimented with it; 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". A year later, his father, who was an electronic engineer, built him his first multi-track tape machine and a vocoder so he could experiment with the possibilities of studio recording.
Wilson said his taste in music diverged from his peers in the 1980s:
I grew up in the 80s, and it was a pretty bad decade for music. There were some interesting things developing, but everyone I knew wanted to be in Level 42, Simple Minds or U2. I wasn't interested in any of that, so I found solace in the 60s and 70s music that my parents were listening to. And I began to discover this wonderful era, what you'd call the great album era, from 1967 to 1977, from Sgt Pepper through to punk.
One of Wilson's earliest musical projects was the psychedelic duo Altamont (featuring a 15-year-old Wilson working with synth/electronics player Simon Vockings). Their only cassette album, Prayer for the Soul, featured lyrics by English psychedelic scenester Alan Duffy, whose work Wilson would later use on the first two Porcupine Tree albums. Around the time that Wilson was part of Altamont, he was also in a progressive rock band called Karma, which played live around Hertfordshire and recorded two cassette albums, The Joke's on You (1983) and The Last Man To Laugh (1985). These contained early versions of "Small Fish", "Nine Cats" and "The Joke's on You", which were subsequently resurrected as Porcupine Tree songs.
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Steven Wilson
Steven John Wilson (born 3 November 1967) is an English musician, songwriter, record producer and audio engineer. He is best known as the founder and frontman of Porcupine Tree, as well as his solo career. Besides Porcupine Tree, he is also a member of several other bands, including Blackfield, Storm Corrosion and No-Man.
Wilson has released eight solo albums since his solo debut, Insurgentes, in 2008. In the years following Insurgentes, he released the acclaimed records Grace for Drowning (2011), The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories) (2013), and Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015). Wilson’s eighth studio album, The Overview, was released on 14 March 2025. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Wilson has made music prolifically and earned critical acclaim. His honours include six nominations for Grammy Awards: twice with Porcupine Tree, once with his collaborative band Storm Corrosion and three times as a solo artist. In 2017, The Daily Telegraph described him as "a resolutely independent artist" and "probably the most successful British artist you've never heard of".
Wilson is a self-taught composer, producer, audio engineer, guitarist and keyboard player, and plays other instruments as needed, including bass guitar, autoharp, hammered dulcimer and flute. His influences and work have encompassed a diverse range of genres including pop, psychedelia, progressive rock and electronic, among others, shifting his musical direction through his albums. His concerts incorporate quadraphonic sound and elaborate visuals. He has worked with artists such as Elton John, Guns N' Roses, XTC, Opeth, Pendulum, Yes, King Crimson, Fish, Marillion, Black Sabbath, and Anathema, and has built a reputation for his work remixing classic pop and rock records into new stereo, 5.1 and Dolby Atmos versions.
Born in Kingston upon Thames, London, Wilson was raised from age six in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, where he discovered his interest in music around the age of eight. According to Wilson, his life was changed one Christmas when his parents bought presents for each other in the form of LPs. His father and mother received Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and Donna Summer's Love to Love You Baby, respectively. It was Wilson's affinity for these albums that helped craft his guitar and songwriting abilities. He said, "In retrospect I can see how they are almost entirely responsible for the direction that my music has taken ever since." His interest in Pink Floyd led him towards experimental and psychedelic conceptual progressive rock (as exemplified by Porcupine Tree and Blackfield), and Donna Summer's trance-inflected grooves inspired the initial musical approach of No-Man (Wilson's long-running collaboration with fellow musician and vocalist Tim Bowness).
As a child, Wilson was forced to learn the guitar, but he did not enjoy it; his parents eventually stopped paying for lessons. When he was eleven, he found a nylon-string classical guitar in his attic and experimented with it; 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". A year later, his father, who was an electronic engineer, built him his first multi-track tape machine and a vocoder so he could experiment with the possibilities of studio recording.
Wilson said his taste in music diverged from his peers in the 1980s:
I grew up in the 80s, and it was a pretty bad decade for music. There were some interesting things developing, but everyone I knew wanted to be in Level 42, Simple Minds or U2. I wasn't interested in any of that, so I found solace in the 60s and 70s music that my parents were listening to. And I began to discover this wonderful era, what you'd call the great album era, from 1967 to 1977, from Sgt Pepper through to punk.
One of Wilson's earliest musical projects was the psychedelic duo Altamont (featuring a 15-year-old Wilson working with synth/electronics player Simon Vockings). Their only cassette album, Prayer for the Soul, featured lyrics by English psychedelic scenester Alan Duffy, whose work Wilson would later use on the first two Porcupine Tree albums. Around the time that Wilson was part of Altamont, he was also in a progressive rock band called Karma, which played live around Hertfordshire and recorded two cassette albums, The Joke's on You (1983) and The Last Man To Laugh (1985). These contained early versions of "Small Fish", "Nine Cats" and "The Joke's on You", which were subsequently resurrected as Porcupine Tree songs.
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