Colin Edwin was Porcupine Tree’s bass player from 1995 to 2010, playing on seven studio albums from Signify (1996) to The Incident (2009) before the band took a long hiatus. Edwin is currently a member of progressive metal band O.R.k., with American drummer Pat Mastelotto (King Crimson), Italian singer LEF, and Italian guitarist Carmelo Pipitone. John Wesley was the band’s touring guitarist and additional vocalist from 2002 to 2010. Edwin and Wesley have now formed the touring band Voyage 35 to play the early songs of Porcupine Tree. The band’s name is inspired by the early Porcupine Tree song, Voyage 34.
Nick Holmes Music spoke to Edwin online in August 2026 to discuss how Voyage 35 came about, the band members, the music they will play on their tour in September 2026, playing his Wal bass, the return of the Fruit Salad light show, working with Steven Wilson, and his thoughts on Syd Barrett…
Nick Holmes Music: How did the idea for Voyage 35 come about? I read that you were a bit reluctant and maybe even saw it as a bit of a joke, just as the original Porcupine Tree band was Steven Wilson’s joke that turned into a very serious enterprise?
Colin Edwin: I constantly get asked about Porcupine Tree, the never-ending recurring question. So if I do an album with O.R.k. or something, there’s always a period when you’re talking to the press, and inevitably the question comes up. I’m very aware that there’s been a lot of affection for the music. A couple of years ago, I started my own Substack, which was interesting because it gave me a bit more contact with people. A lot of people would write to me and say how much they enjoyed the music and how much they missed it. I hadn’t really thought about it for a long time.
And then I reconnected with Chris Maitland [Porcupine Tree drummer from 1993 to 2002]. It started as a bit of a joke; maybe we could play together again, but without any serious idea about what we would do – just get together and play. We ended up, over the course of a long lunch, discussing the music and how we approached certain tracks. This idea slowly came into my mind: that I could play with Chris again. As it turned out, Chris was a little bit reluctant, as he’s got a very busy schedule, but we did get to play together, and we did make a recording, which turned into an album, which was a low-key thing. It was just a studio jam.
But the amazing coincidence was that I was out on Christmas morning with my family and I bumped into a guy called Glenn Povey, who was Porcupine Tree’s original agent. And because I’d met with Chris, I did mention this to Glenn. I said, ‘How about if Chris and I got together and played some of the old Porcupine Tree music? Do you think anyone would be interested?’ And I didn’t hear from him for a few days. I thought maybe he thought I was mad. It’s a mad idea!
And then he phoned me up and said, ‘I think this is a really good idea. How serious are you? I can contact some agents, and we can make it work.’ Coincidentally, I had reconnected with John Wesley, who did some guest guitar playing on an O.R.k. track. And I put it to Wes. He knows the music inside out. He was the touring guitarist [for Porcupine Tree] for 10 years. If anyone can do it, he can. Wes was really enthusiastic, which I didn’t really expect. It took me by surprise. He said, ‘Hell man, I’d love to do that again!’
So the idea had a momentum of its own after a while. And you start taking it a bit more seriously. I did meet up with Richard Allen, who was Porcupine Tree’s original manager. And we were joking about it, you know, maybe I could go and do the old stuff. I said, ‘It’s never going to happen.’ But here we are. We’re just about to do our first tour, and it’s become a reality, I guess. I’m really looking forward to it, I have to say.
Nick Holmes Music: Can you introduce the band members?
Colin Edwin: Anyone who’s familiar with Porcupine Tree will know John Wesley because he was part of the touring setup for a long time. He wasn’t involved in the early years, but he did play a lot of the early material. When he first got involved, a lot of that stuff was still in the live set. Some of the stuff from Lightbulb Sun (2000) and Stupid Dream (1999) and so forth. So he’s familiar with it.
But then he told me he knew the music going way back because one of the early gigs we did was to support Marillion, and I believe that he was there at the time. I can’t remember this, but he said we met and he saw us play The Sky Moves Sideways (1995), or some very, very early material. So Wes was a really obvious choice for guitar player, and he did actually take on some of the lead vocals [for Porcupine Tree] at some point. He started off playing rhythm guitar, and then as time went on, he got more solos, and he had a couple of tracks that he sang lead vocals on.
I was confident that he could do it, and he was really enthusiastic about it. Now on drums, as it transpired, Chris’s schedule didn’t really allow for the tour. I’m very much in touch with Chris, you know; we’re really friendly. We meet up every now and again. And I’m hoping to have Chris involved at some point; I don’t quite know how, but he’s been very supportive and very enthusiastic. I think he’s going to come along and do a guest spot on the tour, and maybe at some point we can incorporate his playing as part of the set or something, but that’s down the line,
So I had to find a drummer, and it was a bit of a coincidence that the other band that I have, O.R.k., that I’m very busy with, usually has Pat Mastelotto on drums. Pat is American and lives in America, so he can’t always make every show. So with Pat’s blessing, we’ve done a few gigs without him, with a stand-in drummer. We had Alessandro [Vagnoni] join us for a couple of gigs, and I was very impressed with his ability to learn the set really quickly and play it like he’d been part of the band, but without stepping on anybody’s toes.
It’s difficult to explain, but some guys can come along and stand in, and they dominate everything, and they change everything. But there’s a professional level where you’re able to make it sound like you’re part of the band, and you’ve been there since year dot. You’re respecting the original parts, and you’re bringing your own vibe to it, but you’re not dominating things. And Alessandro did that perfectly with O.R.k. He stepped into Pat’s shoes, played the music beautifully, and on a personal level was really, really good to get on with,
Coincidentally, Alessandro came up to me and said, are you still in touch with Chris Maitland? And this is before the news of Voyage 35 had come out. And I said, yes, I speak to Chris. And he said, ‘Would you mind sending Chris some of my drumming? I’ve got a YouTube channel, and I cover all sorts of drummers, and I’m a big fan of Porcupine Tree’ (I didn’t know this, by the way) ‘and I’ve covered some of Chris’s parts.’ So I checked out his YouTube channel, and I think one of the tracks was Piano Lessons (Stupid Dream). But it’s not a tricky drum part; it’s a meat-and-potatoes drum part.
Nick Holmes Music: It’s quite a simple song, isn’t it, in a way?
Colin Edwin: Yes, but simplicity has a depth to it, right? Lots of people don’t understand simplicity. So I was curious that he had chosen this particular song, because it didn’t really show off his drumming ability. And I said to him, ‘That’s an unusual choice.’ And he said something which stuck with me: ‘Well, a good part is a good part, you know.’
So I thought he’s got the maturity to understand, and having played Pat’s parts and incorporated the music, he understands the bigger picture. That was the important thing that I got from him. So I rang him up when it looked like we had some gigs on the go, and he was immediately enthusiastic and said, ‘I’d love to do it.’ So that was an easy tick box. The first person I asked!
I’m really confident that he’s the right person because he loves the music, and he is familiar with the music. When we did rehearse earlier this year – we’re going to be rehearsing again – he had it all down. We’ve released a couple of songs now, and I think it’s obvious that he’s got that ability to make it his own. But he’s also able to assimilate what’s going on.
So I had a three-piece band, and the interesting thing is Wes does lead vocals, and Alessandro does backing vocals in the same way that Chris Maitland used to do. So I was thinking we may need another singer; we definitely need a keyboard player. And then I started thinking about LEF.
Nick Holmes Music: This is Lorenzo Esposito Fornasari, or ‘LEF’?
Colin Edwin: That’s right. O.R.k. is a big project for both of us. We work together a lot, and I wasn’t sure if I should ask him because we spend quite a lot of time together and it’s another project. But I thought back to when the first thing we actually did together wasn’t a project of ours; it was somebody else’s. There was a band called Ashes, which is our mutual friend Eraldo Bernocchi, an Italian singer called Raiz, and Bill Laswell. It was a three-piece project.
Ashes was offered a show in Italy, and Bill Laswell couldn’t make it. So I stepped in to do the Bill Laswell part, and Raiz and Eraldo were there. There was an Italian drummer who was great, and then there was Lorenzo [LEF] playing keyboards and singing. And from that, I got that he was a great singer, but he wasn’t focused on singing at that point. For that gig, his priority was to do the keyboard parts. And the music had a similar ambience to some of the Porcupine Tree stuff, but it’s more dub-influenced, more 90s trip hop dub vibe, but it still had this expansive ambient atmospheric stuff going on, which I could see was the thread with Porcupine Tree.
Then I started thinking, well, if I have Lorenzo, if I have Lef involved, then I don’t need another singer because we’ve got three singers and a keyboard player. So it’s a four-piece band again, which it was in the old days. So I asked him, and I’m still quite surprised that he said yes. You won’t have heard it yet, but we’ve been re-recording some of the set. A couple of songs have come out.
Nick Holmes Music: Yes, I’ve heard Nostalgia Factory (On the Sunday of Life…1992) and Even Less (Stupid Dream), which are now available to stream. And then there’s the Departures five-track CD, which you’ll be selling at the shows?
Colin Edwin: We didn’t really set out to do any recording, but this is our first foray into the world, and we have to let people know what we sound like. A few people asked me, ‘Isn’t it a bit pointless re-recording the Porcupine Tree stuff?’ And of course it is really, but people have to hear us!
People have to know what we sound like and understand that it’s not going to be a carbon copy. The idea is to bring it to life in a slightly different way with its own character. Of course, originally you had the four of us: myself, Chris, Richard [Barbieri], and Steve with a very distinct sound. Richard had his own approach and Chris had his own approach. I didn’t want to recreate that, not just out of respect for the originals, but for the fact that for a project to be ongoing and interesting for everyone involved, we’ve got to make it different. We’ve got to give it its own character.
I think the music always allowed that to happen. If you think about some of the very early stuff, it was very skeletal in a way. If you think about On the Sunday of Life…, there are drum machines, the keyboards are quite straightforward, mostly atmospheric pad sounds, and the bass was pretty much buried a lot of the time in the mix. So the three of us brought it to life in a sense; the live band had much more of a live vibe, which I think, to be fair to Steve, he couldn’t have done in his bedroom [his home studio] at the time anyway.
The Original Voyage 34
Porcupine Tree’s second album, Up the Downstair, was originally going to be a double album (like the debut, On the Sunday of Life), including the track Voyage 34, but it was decided that the album should be a single album only; the track became a single (1992), a remix EP (1993) and finally, in 2000, compilation: Voyage 34: The Complete Trip. The Voyage 34 story is based on a bad LSD trip. The spoken-word samples come from a documentary album called LSD, released on vinyl in America in 1966. The album describes itself as ‘a documentary report on the current psychedelic drug controversy!’ It promises to include ‘actual recordings of people under the influence of psychedelic drugs’.But despite this somewhat voyeuristic approach, the recording features one of the most prominent medical experts on the dangers of psychedelic drugs: Dr Sidney Cohen. In the early 1960s, he became concerned with the recreational use of LSD. He conducted experiments on the drug’s safe use as a therapeutic tool under close medical supervision. He later grew concerned about the drug’s dangers even when used in a medical context.It’s Cohen’s voice we hear describing the effect of the bad trip on ‘Brian’, whose progress is followed over a twelve-hour period in the documentary: ‘This young man never had a bummer in some 33 LSD trips. Every one of them was a delight, everything under control. He needed only to snap his fingers and down he came, anytime. But on voyage 34, he finally met himself coming down an up-staircase, and the encounter was crushing.’ It was Richard Allen – the owner of Delerium Records and later Porcupine Tree manager – who gave Steven Wilson a copy of the LP, suggesting it could provide musical inspiration.
Nick Holmes Music: On the Sunday of Life… was entirely a Steven Wilson solo album?
Colin Edwin: Yes, he was using an eight-track and drum machines and stuff. What he did was great, but as soon as the band came about as a live thing, obviously it was going to sound different. Chris did a lot of heavy lifting with the drum parts and making the dynamics, and that’s something I appreciate more now than I did at the time, because I guess at the time I was just in my own zone trying to build my parts around what was going on.
I think the music had the flexibility; it had the framework, and that’s one of the reasons why the original band worked in the first place, because it had a strong foundation that we could build on. We could give it some character of our own and a bit of a sonic identity, if you like. It’s going to be more exciting if that happens anyway; otherwise, you might as well just play the record, you know.
LEF has got a different approach to keyboards than Richard. I think of Richard’s approach as being more sound design stuff. He didn’t have a classical music background or a pianist background, whereas LEF has got that ability. So one of the things he’s been able to do is pinpoint some different harmonies, and they’re sometimes quite subtle things. He’s maybe using sounds that are influenced by the original sounds, but he’s able to re-harmonise a few things and bring a slightly different character to it, which is exactly what I wanted him to do. And he understands that as part of the job.
Nick Holmes Music: Yes, I noticed that at the beginning of the Voyage 35 recording of The Nostalgia Factory, the chords that come in very early on have a subtly different harmony from the original? It’s a small change, but it’s actually very noticeable, in a way?
Colin Edwin: Yes, he’s really brought out some different colours. Porcupine Tree didn’t release a live version of that. If we did, it would be a very obscure release, but I did find one on YouTube. I distinctly remember playing it live and working it up from the version on The Sunday of Life. With Voyage 35, we have tried to use the live version as more of a template, but we have expanded the middle section. I put in a little bass feature, more of an improvised bit. That’s the approach we’re trying to take with everything really.
Nick Holmes Music: On the Voyage 35 recording of Even Less, I noticed that you’ve got the spoken numbers at the end. So Steven has provided you with those tapes, has he?
Colin Edwin: No, that’s just a sample. I mean, that’s a radio station sample. So it’s not owned by anybody. Well, maybe it is owned by the CIA! Who knows? Steve did offer the use of his backing tracks, but I declined because I thought it wouldn’t be right really to use the original.
Some things might sound very close, but where we’ve had to use backing tracks, like on Up the Downstair [the title track of the 1993 album], there’s a few samples and there’s a drum machine, but I replaced the drum machine, I thought, with something a bit more beefy, a bit more contemporary. And some of the samples we decided not to use. Just because, well, they’re samples; it depends on your approach to sampling. But we thought, no, it was of its time maybe for Steve to have used them. He used a Lisa Gerrard sample from Dead Can Dance [As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins from Aion, 1990] on one track [Voyage 34]. And we thought, no, let’s just make something new. It’s not about recreating it like a painting. It’s about bringing some other character to it.
Nick Holmes Music: Nick Mason, for his Saucerful of Secrets band, takes the early Pink Floyd psychedelic stuff, and he seems to have stopped now at Meddle (1971). He doesn’t go as far as The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). He’s covering largely Syd Barrett-era material. But where will you stop in terms of Porcupine Tree?
Colin Edwin: My original idea was to do Coma Divine [Live in Rome 1997] because I was hoping Chris was going to be involved in the first lot of gigs. I thought that would be great because that was a great showcase for both of us, I think, you know, bass and drums. It’s very upfront, energetic performances, especially from Chris.
But as Wes got more involved, he reminded me that some later tunes would work. They were basically great crowd pleasers, if you like, when we did them. Hence we’ve done Even Less. I think we’re going to stop just before In Absentia (2002). So it’s the older material, the psychedelic stuff, a lot of which didn’t really get a look in later on. As the music changed, for sure, there was more of a metal influence later on, and the songs got shorter, and things got more compact, and they were more like songs as opposed to long instrumentals.
Nick Holmes Music: So basically you’ll finish with Lightbulb Sun, is that as far as you’ll go then?
Colin Edwin: Yes, I think so, that makes sense. From memory, the vocals weren’t a big part of the early shows. I was looking at a couple of set lists, and I got sent a few bootlegs, and we’d have five songs. We’d do this great long Radioactive Toy [from On the Sunday of Life], which was maybe 12 minutes long with a big jam in the middle. And we would do something like Not Beautiful Anymore[from Up the Downstair], which is an instrumental. There were a couple of other instrumental pieces. There was one called Is… Not [from The Sky Moves Sideways] and then there was Voyage 34 which just had samples, and there was hardly any singing.
So I was thinking, it’d be nice to get more singing in, an early set but with more vocals, and a few later tunes. I mean, we’re not going to please everyone because we’re going to have to balance it up. Some people are going to go, ‘Oh, you’ve got to do this obscure tune off The Sunday of Life’ – that no one’s ever played before and no one remembers. And I’m totally up for that. There’s a few things we never played live, and I thought it would be great to do them. So there’s a couple of surprises!
Steven Wilson on the original Voyage 34
Voyage 34 was an experiment in genre, as Wilson told Tushar Menon in the June 2012 edition of Rolling Stone India: ‘Back in the early ‘90s, there was an explosion in ambient music: a fusion of electronic music and techno music with the philosophy of people like Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream. I thought there was an interesting opportunity to do something that would bring progressive rock and psychedelia into that mixture.’
I think we’ve got a balanced set: some known crowd-pleasers and a few more interesting ones. And it will be a really good mix because it would be a set that would never have happened back in the day. We reached a point where we stopped playing The Sky Moves Sideways, and that was it. We never went back to it except for maybe one or two shows very, very late on. So it’ll be an interesting early years set, I think, for most people.
Nick Holmes Music: I’m going to make a personal plea now, and you can say no, but I would love to hear Hatesong from Lightbulb Sun, because of your prominent role. It’s one of your earliest writing credits, I think, isn’t it? I love the bass line on that.
Colin Edwin: Well, without giving up a spoiler, that is one that we’re going to do. I was keen to do that one, actually, because it was always fun to play. Yes, that was a co-write [with Steven Wilson]. That whole track came out of a trip to Istanbul where I bought a Saz, which is like a Turkish lute. I still mess about with it occasionally, but I had this demo with a chord sequence and everything done on the Saz with a drum machine. And Steve really liked it, and we worked on it together.
So the genesis of the track really was just a curiosity about playing the Saz. It’s a really interesting instrument. It has frets, but it’s like an Arabic scale. So you have notes that don’t sound right because they’re quarter tones, in between the other notes. It’s a fantastic instrument. I really like it. I still play it occasionally.
Nick Holmes Music: And the other one, this is a deeper cut, but it’s one of my favourites, Buying New Soul (from the Recordings compilation 2001)? Can I make a plea for that one? I think you played double bass on that? And you were involved in writing it?
Colin Edwin: I’m not sure that we’ve got round to that one, but yes, that was always a winner. We played that live quite a lot in the later years as well. So yes, I remember that one. That came out of a studio jam as well. And you’re right, yes, I did play double bass on that one. I’ve still got my electric upright, and it’s still something I’ll try and keep up as much as possible. But I’m not sure I’ve really got to the stage of having it at a live rock gig. It’s too difficult to mic up, and you get all sorts of feedback problems, and it’s very fragile.
Nick Holmes Music: So are you going to go back to the original instruments, particularly the Wal basses that you used in Porcupine Tree?
Colin Edwin: Yes, I still play the Wal fretless bass. That’s what I’m planning to do the set on because I think I pretty much exclusively played that bass from the early gigs, until the heavy metal influence kicked in a bit more later on. I did have a Yamaha bass that I played, but most of the recordings and things like Coma Divine and most of the live recordings you hear, I would have played the Wal bass.
The interesting thing about it now is that it’s a vintage instrument, although Wal is still going. I’ve got a slight reluctance to take it to certain territories where it might get damaged in flying to some gigs. We just had an offer to go to South America, which is marvellous, but there’s a lot of flying involved between the cities. I was thinking, do I really want to take my Wal? If it goes missing in Brazil, I’ll never see it again. I might have another second-best for somewhere like that, but otherwise the plan is to use that instrument.
Nick Holmes Music: I’ve heard there’s now a two-year waiting list if you want to buy a new one. So they’re still popular.
Colin Edwin: Sadly, the two guys at the very beginning of the Wal story are both dead now: Ian Waller [known as ‘Wal’] and Pete Stevens, ‘Pete the Fish’, as they used to call him. A few years back, it was taken over by a guy called Paul Herman, who was one of the apprentices, so he knew the business inside out. I had a really good chat with him last time I was there.
He was telling me it’s really hard to source components that last now, because the original instruments were built to last and they’re really solid. I never really had a problem that couldn’t be sorted really quickly with any of the Wal basses I’ve got. And they’re really well made. The woods are great. The components are great. You’ve got really solid tuners, all the bits you need.
Some instruments now – I’m not going to name names – but like a top name brand instrument, and I’m thinking, why has it got plastic knobs? You know, you’re paying thousands of pounds for something with plastic knobs! This is something that should never happen. It’s like buying a really expensive car, and you’ve got rubbish seats or something. And it seems that the world is ever more disposable and people don’t expect it anymore, which is weird. It’s like we’re going backwards in that respect, I think.
Nick Holmes Music: Watching Porcupine Tree videos, you seem very relaxed on stage. You often smile! Tell me about getting into that ‘flow state’ on stage where the music just seems to flow through you, as though you’re not actively involved?
Colin Edwin: Yes. It’s a curious mindset. One of the things that I’ve always enjoyed about playing music is the fact that you’re in the moment. They do call it the ‘flow state.’ It’s almost difficult to explain it, but the paradox in playing music is that when you’re worried about it, when you’ve got overriding concerns – and it might be to do with the venue, it might be to do with something in your personal life, or it might be to do with a technical problem – then it starts interfering with your mind.
But you can have a fantastic gig – and this sounds counterintuitive – and it actually sounds like you don’t care. But you have a better gig when you don’t care, when you’re just in the moment, when everything’s working right. And I imagine it’s like that for a tennis player; if the ball is coming towards you, you haven’t got time to do complex calculations. There’s a lot of intuitive hitting the ball and knowing where to move, and you don’t always get it right, of course, but a really good player has got that judgement. Any sportsman will probably relate to that mindset.
I’ve always enjoyed playing live. Sometimes it does feel slightly absurd. But I’ve always enjoyed it. On tour, you spend so much time doing things you don’t want to do or very, very boring things. The travel can be fun, but there’s also a lot of tedium, a lot of waiting, hanging around waiting for people to do things. And sometimes you’re away from your nearest and dearest, and you’ve got stuff going on at home you have to deal with whatever happens.
So I have to enjoy that time on stage; otherwise I couldn’t do it. That makes it all worthwhile for me. It’s not always about money, or recognition, or your ego or whatever. It’s just the pure enjoyment of the moment. That’s what I try and think about. I do sometimes think back to why I first got involved in music in the first place. I think a lot of musicians now who’ve been around for a while will tell you the same thing: that now we have to do so much more just to have a career. You have to think about your social media presence; you have to think about communication. When you deal with a record label now, they want a finished product. So you might be much more involved in doing things like artwork or writing the sleeve notes or dealing with somebody who’s writing the press release. All these things that were taken care of in the old days – those jobs have maybe disappeared, or people don’t want to do them anymore. So it’s up to you to be more hands-on than ever before. So with all that going on, it’s even more important now for me to enjoy that hour and a half, two hours, whatever it is, and get as much out of it as I can.
Nick Holmes Music: Your bass playing has a very distinctive tone and feel. And I think a really good example of that is Don’t Hate Me from Stupid Dream, on which you play bass. Later on, Steven Wilson on 4½ (2016) included a version with Nick Beggs on bass. I think you’re both fantastic players, but you sound very different from Nick. There’s something about your phrasing; it’s instantly recognisable as you?
Colin Edwin: Well, that’s good to know! I’m probably too close to it to really analyse it, but I’ll tell you a little secret about Don’t Hate Me. The song part is fairly straightforward. And I can remember that when we recorded it, I just wanted to do a very supportive root-note thing to underpin what was going on. Chris Maitland had a slightly displaced drum beat. So I’m playing a very straight, obvious line. When it got to the middle section where there’s the flute solo, and it alternates between the two, there’s like a semitone shift.
It was very spacious. What was presented to me was an empty canvas, if you like, with just the drums and no bass line at all. Steve didn’t have anything down as a demo or any idea. I can remember he just left me to it. He went into another room, and I just played, but I consciously ripped that off, I’ll tell you now.
They say talent borrows and genius steals. I completely ripped off Mike Howlett from Gong. And I was thinking about the You album, which was one of my favourites. It’s one of the few times I’ve consciously thought, ‘what would Mike Howlett do?’ And I did a Mike Howlett impersonation. But of course, I didn’t tell anyone this.
Some years later, Porcupine Tree and Gong with Mike Howlett on bass played a tour of America together. We did five or six shows. And I can remember playing Don’t Hate Me and getting to that part of the song. And I look out in the audience, and I can see Mike Howlett watching. It was too good an opportunity. I had to go and tell him. And I did say to him, ‘I don’t know if you know this, but I really tried to copy what you might have done.’ I don’t know what he made of it!
Nick Holmes Music: That’s a great story! But you just touched on it then; to what extent did Steven, when you were with Porcupine Tree, give you a bass demo that you pretty much followed, let you adapt a demo, or just leave a hole for you, as you said he did on Don’t Hate Me?
Colin Edwin: Sometimes Steve would already have a fairly developed demo, and deviating too much from the part would have been a different thing. So if he had a definite idea, I would have gone with it and followed it. So for something like Waiting (Signify 1996), for example, he had the idea for the bassline. So I would have just done my own take with my own feel for that particular line.
But if I wasn’t presented with a written part, so to speak, I would have listened to the drum part. I have the same approach now. If somebody sends me a part and I think it’s good, I’ll work with it. And I might try to be sympathetic to, say, what the drums are doing or change some small aspect of it to make it better in the bigger picture. But yes, sometimes he would have quite definite ideas about what to play.
For a few tracks, like Up the Downstair, for example, there was a synth bass. And when we played it live, of course, I had to copy the synth bass part, which was still quite a challenging thing to keep very consistent, you know. But then there’s a bit of freedom where it all goes into the big thrash at the end. You can just play off the drums, and there’s freedom in that part.
But yes, there was a mix really. He would usually agree with my ideas; if I thought I had an idea that would have improved something, he would usually agree with that. In the course of recording, in the early days, I would have gone to his place [No Man’s Land – Wilson’s home studio] to record. So we would then sit and listen and pick out the bits that we both liked, or he would have a suggestion that maybe we try this or whatever. So there was a collaborative production approach. But later on, I had more freedom really because I got into recording myself. So I would just record my own part, and I’d be producing myself.
Nick Holmes Music: Going back to the live show, you’re going to resurrect the Fruit Salad light show for the tour?
Colin Edwin: Yes. I think what changed later on was the psychedelic influence disappeared. Now, I always had a slight feeling that maybe Steve flirted a little bit with the psychedelic music and didn’t really understand the culture in the same way. So when he did Voyage 34, which was another track that he did on his own, he would say things like, ‘Why are all these hippies turning up to the gigs?’ And I said, ‘Well, you’ve made a record about LSD. You know, it’s part of the culture, right?’
I mean, some people are going to enjoy that aspect to it. It was part of the vibe. It was very psychedelic music. There wasn’t much drug use in the band, you know, but there certainly was in the audience. I could see that going on. And this is in the days when people could smoke inside concerts. So there was dope smoking going on, and we did hippie shows really. We did hippie festivals, and we did gigs where people were openly smoking dope. If you went to see Hawkwind at the time, it would be the same: they had a psychedelic light show, and it was all part of the experience.
Nick Holmes Music: I think that the same was true a lot earlier on when early Pink Floyd were playing at the UFO Club; they had quite a similar light show?
Colin Edwin: Yes, yes. I mean, they had the liquid wheels and stuff, and that was very much part of the vibe of the time. But I used to enjoy what Jasper Johns [not to be confused with the American painter of the same name] did for Fruit Salad, and I really thought he enhanced the shows because he was able to bring out elements in the music.
Later on, it got a bit more multimedia, and we were playing with video screens, which I enjoyed, but sometimes I would feel like I was just part of it because it couldn’t deviate very much. We played a song to a film, and the arrangement couldn’t change because the film was part of the production. So unless we did a new film, we couldn’t play that song differently. Whereas in the early days, when we did Radioactive Toy, for example, the lights were jamming along with the music in a sense. So when the music went quiet, the lights would go down. And when it went full-on, there’d be more stuff going on. So I always considered it a key part of those early shows. It was a big part of the presentation.
So it was just an idea: ‘What are we going to do production-wise for the Voyage 35 shows?’ And then somebody suggested, ‘Well, Fruit Salad is still going.’ They still do the Ozric Tentacles every now and again, some of those bands that have carried on. So we asked Jasper, and he was really enthusiastic about it. He’s got fond memories of doing the gigs and doing the lights, and he enjoyed the music and wanted to get involved. So that was a no-brainer, really, to ask him to come back. And of course, it will be different because the technology has moved on. So I think we will have some more filmic stuff going on, but it’s more flexible than it was back then, and in theory it should be a lot better because the technology around projections and screens has changed so much, and it’s so much easier now to do it all.
Nick Holmes Music: You’ve been very prolific with your other projects, but one that’s coming up very soon is Clowns and Jugglers, the Syd Barrett tribute for which you’ve recorded the track Apples and Oranges. Tell me how you got involved in that project?
Colin Edwin: Actually, it came a number of ways. It came through Richard Allen, who used to manage the band back in the day, who has got involved in Voyage 35. And he got a message from somebody who was putting it together. And I think he was initially a bit reticent about us getting involved. I don’t know why. And then we discovered that Mark Wilkinson was doing the artwork, and Wes knows Mark Wilkinson really well.
Mark wrote to Wes and said, ‘I’d really love to have you. I’m coordinating some of this; it’s quite a serious thing. It’s not just a dream. It is actually going to happen.’ And at that point, we said, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’ And I’ve always loved Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd’s early stuff, probably more than the later stuff.
There’s something quite special about the music of that period. It’s very whimsical. It’s very psychedelic, but it’s got its own internal logic. It doesn’t make sense objectively -the lyrics and the way he sings – but when you hear it all put together, it does make sense. I don’t know if that’s a strange answer to give, but I’ve always felt that way about it.
It’s almost like outsider music. Just to give you an example, my son did a fantastic painting when he was about three years old, but he’s too young to know what art is or what painting is. He’d used a roller, and it looked like a modern art piece. It was fantastic. And I used it as a postcard for years when I used to send postcards to my mum and stuff.
Syd Barrett has that quality. I guess he knew what he was doing, but you get the feeling it’s coming from somewhere else. It’s not coming from trying too hard. It’s very natural. And the way everything was put together was fantastic, really.
Nick Holmes Music: What reaction have you had to news of the Voyage 35 tour?
Colin Edwin: I will say that it’s been quite interesting to me. I’m quite pleased at the reaction that we’ve had so far. I’ve come to understand that the music is held in a lot of affection. It’s got a lot of affection from a lot of people, which is not something that I dismissed, but in my case, I’m always moving on and doing something different.
It’s very easy to shut yourself off from what you’ve done in the past. And also you have to believe, I think, if you’re a creative person, which I like to think I am, getting involved in different things and not just… you know, I haven’t done Porcupine Tree music for years and years.
Part of that process of moving on is that you have to feel that what you do now is as good as what you did back in the past. Because if it isn’t, then you haven’t learned anything. And of course, it must be better because you’ve got better judgment and better taste and better technical ability. But I can understand that the early stuff’s got an appeal to people still.
I’ve been really pleased to get such positive feedback about the whole project because, in all honesty, I did expect a bit of negativity. And that’s to be expected purely because people hold the old stuff in such high regard. So I did expect a bit of that. But now I think that’s a real minority. I’ve had so many messages from people saying, ‘I’m really glad you guys are doing this.’ I’ve really missed the music. I’m really looking forward to enjoying it again and seeing it live again. That’s what we’re doing it for, really. It’s enjoyment and rediscovery and creating that connection again.
I have to say, I think we’ve got a great band. The other guys, the two Italian guys, are fantastic. People are going to see that. And Wes is on fire just as much as he always was, you know?
Nick Holmes Music: The original track, Voyage 34, describes Brian’s 34th trip. He enjoyed all the previous LSD trips, but on Voyage 34, he ‘finally met himself coming down an up-staircase and the encounter was crushing’. What do you hope Voyage 35 will be like?
Colin Edwin: I think if Voyage 34 was the ‘crushing encounter’, Voyage 35 is the recovery, isn’t it? But also coincidentally, I believe it’s 35 years since that record came out. So that’s possible. I think it was 1991, so it’d be 35 years.
Nick Holmes Music: I think it was 1992, which is 34 years ago.
Colin Edwin. You’re probably right. Well, that’s close enough!
Nick Holmes Music: Thanks very much for your time – it’s been a pleasure!
This interview has been edited slightly for length and clarity.
For tour dates in September 2026, check out voyage35.com for details
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