By GERRY GALIPAULT

(Oct. 21, 2002)

It's not often a record company signs a band that already has a rabidly loyal fan base in place.

That's exactly what Lava Records got when it landed Porcupine Tree, the intellectual-rock quartet from England. Its brilliant label debut, "In Absentia" (released Sept. 24), exposure on MuchMusicUSA and MTV2 with the video for the single "Strip the Soul" and an upcoming tour opening for Yes should take the band from the underground to the mainstream.

"We've always had a strong word-of-mouth following and a very strong presence on the Internet," singer-guitarist-producer Steven Wilson said recently. "We have like 25 or 30 fan-oriented Web sites out there now. We're starting to pick up radio airplay and making videos for tracks off the record. We're getting support from all sides of the industry."

The last thing Wilson and band mates Richard Barbieri (keyboards), Colin Edwin (bass) and Gavin Harrison (drums) wanted to do, though, was alienate its original followers along the way.

"The worst thing we could do is give the impression to our fan base that we're now going off to something big and turning our backs on them, which is not the case at all," Wilson said. "In fact, if anything, this new record is a return to possibly more experimental territory for us after the last couple of records and we're taking (our fans) with us rather than turning our backs on them."

Porcupine Tree, a cross between the art rock of King Crimson and the modern rock of Radiohead, surprisingly had little trouble in attracting big-label attention when it returned to America last year for a tour. Label reps turned out in force.

Wilson says the music industry, looking for fresh new faces, may have finally caught up with Porcupine Tree.

"The whole musical climate had changed since we started coming out to America (in the mid-1990s)," he said. "With the success of bands like Radiohead and Tool, the record labels had kind of come around to the idea that it was possible to have a fairly willful, uncommercial band that could still cross over to a big mainstream audience and not necessarily compromise what they did.

"We were kind of in a position where we could choose where we wanted to go, which is kind of ironic after all these years. We definitely went with the label that got it and was prepared to let us do our thing, build on what we already had and give us more marketing and financial clout, which we always said we lacked."

One listen to sonically expansive tracks such as "Blackest Eyes" confirms that Lava got its money's worth.

"We wanted to make a record that has different levels to it, in the terms of songwriting and production," Wilson said. "We wanted the kind of record that people would like to come back and listen to over a period of time and in many different ways. It's like a headphone record, and at the same time, it's the kind of record you can have on in the background.

"It has strong melodies. It makes you want to listen from the beginning to the end, because it has a flow and a sequence to it. That's always been my goal, to bring back the idea of the album as an album, rather than just a set of 10 pop songs thrown together. There are people out there who appreciate that."

Yes lead singer Jon Anderson is one of those who appreciates Porcupine Tree, who will open for the prog-rock veterans in nine U.S. cities.

"They're doing exactly the right thing, the right songs and the right style," Anderson said recently. "You know, there's a bunch of these bands around and, to me, they're the next wave of modern music. It's a combination of King Crimson meets Yes meets Zeppelin meets grunge and Radiohead. It's nice to have one of them touring with us."

ON THE WEB: www.porcupinetree.com.

BWF (before we forget): The Porcupine Tree album discography - "On the Sunday of Life" (1992); "Up the Downstair" (1993); "Yellow Hedgerow Dreamscape" (1994); "The Sky Moves Sideways" (1995); "Signify" (Ark 21, 1998); "In Absentia" (Lava/Atlantic, 2002).

By GERRY GALIPAULT

(Jan. 15, 1998)

Progressive is one loaded word. Webster's defines it as "moving forward or onward," but it has a far different meaning in the rock world. Therein lies the quandary for the British rock quartet Porcupine Tree.

On its U.S. debut album, "Signify" (released Jan. 13 on ARK 21), Porcupine Tree travels trippy terrain carved by Pink Floyd and King Crimson, but singer-guitarist Steven Wilson and his band mates have more in common with Radiohead and Kula Shaker, taking the classic rock format and putting it in a modern rock context.

"My whole motivation with the project was that I felt there was a tremendous scope for someone to do something quite different with the '70s psychedelic space rock, whatever you want to call it," Wilson said recently, "but combining it with very modern influences and using modern technology. All those bands in the '70s, they were making use of the up-to-date, contemporary recording, the techniques that were available, and making something unique.

"The problem with some bands who take influences from that era, they really don't take on board the actual ideology or philosophy of the music. They just look away, recreating it for almost nostalgic reasons. I can't see the point of doing that at all."

Wilson, Richard Barbieri (synthesizers), Colin Edwin (bass) and Chris Maitland (drums) have been pushing the pop envelope throughout the 1990s, along the way gathering legions of mostly European fans, but they have been saddled with the label "progressive rock." It makes Wilson cringe.

"If you use the term 'progressive' in England, it's the kiss of death," Wilson said. "It's assuming that you sound like Genesis or something like that. They think of it as being very retro, very pompous and very naif. That's three things that Porcupine Tree are as far removed from as you can possibly be.

"To take the true sense of the word, you move forward to try and do something different. Progressive has become a way of labeling a specific kind of music that was popular years ago, and that's certainly not what Porcupine Tree is about. I'm not even sure I know what would be progressive rock. For me, progressive music now would be something like what DJ Shadow is doing, because that's using the most modern technology available and taking lots of different sounds and influences and combining them together."

Whether all that translates to progressing in the U.S. marketplace is another matter.

"I don't understand the American market at all; I don't understand how any band can become successful in America," Wilson said. "It seems the whole media thing is so fragmented. In England, it's very easy to become successful if you can crack two or three things, like radio on BBC Radio One, and if you can get good press in the NME or Q. They're so influential on the whole scene.

"In America, you have hundreds of radio stations, hundreds of publications. It seems to crack all of them, it's such a lottery. On the other side of it, you've got British bands like Bush who are big in America but are totally unknown here; I don't think they quite understand how it happened."