Lyrically I arrived at a point where I was no longer interested in writing about abstract concepts, like war, religion, space… etc. These are very personal and emotionally raw songs.
Steven Wilson, on Porcupine Tree’s Lightbulb Sun (2000)
Steven Wilson’s latest album, The Overview, is inspired by the emotional and sometimes spiritual experience that astronauts have described when they look back at the Earth from space, known as ‘The Overview Effect’. Wilson often used space as a theme, particularly in the early years of Porcupine Tree, when the band was essentially a solo project. But on later Porcupine Tree albums, from Lightbulb Sun (2000) onwards, Wilson’s lyrical preoccupations turned first towards the profoundly personal on that album, and then to his broader concerns about modern society on later albums from In Absentia (2002) to The Incident (2009). The band then went on hiatus for over ten years while Wilson launched his successful solo career. This article reflects on Porcupine Tree’s space songs, album by album, and track by track. For Part II: The solo years, click here.
Space Transmission (On the Sunday of Life, 1992)
This is not really a song, but more a message from outer space. It’s a genuinely creepy monologue, uttered by a creature that’s been trapped on another planet, ‘for many eons’ by ‘You know who’, in complete darkness since going blind or ‘since the sun exploded fourteen centuries ago’. It could have come from a Doctor Who episode – it’s not difficult to imagine the song’s monster causing children to hide behind the sofa. We know nothing about ‘He who keeps me here’, but he regards himself as a competitor to God, so is apparently a supreme being. The protagonist appears to be a creature with ‘scales’, whose threats of revenge upon returning to Earth are as dark as the black liquid that seeps uncontrollably from its mouth.
It Will Rain for a Million Years (On the Sunday of Life, 1992)
This track is mainly instrumental; the lyrics are spoken, rather than sung. The protagonist is leaving Earth, presumably because a war or natural disaster has left the planet in such a dystopian state that the rain will never stop. He’s leaving in a spaceship, and in the opening lines, there are echoes of the David Bowie persona, Major Tom (from Space Oddity and others),
‘I locked myself inside the capsule
And watched the planet slowly turning blue.’
Bowie’s song describes the lonely Major Tom as being in a ‘capsule’, and the protagonists of both songs observe that planet Earth looks ‘blue’. The two songs share a sense of melancholy due to the inability to return to Earth, though for different reasons. The protagonist in the Porcupine Tree song will visit ‘worlds of crystal beauty’ but will never find answers, suggesting that his quest is existential rather than simply an escape from a ruined planet,
‘I’ve seen the past, I’ve seen the future
Beyond dimension and into empty space
Finding questions, never answers
Living time behind another face.’
The Sky Moves Sideways Phase 1: II. I Find That I’m Not There (The Sky Moves Sideways 1993)
This is the only section of the largely instrumental track The Sky Moves Sideways (from the 19994 album of the same name) that includes lyrics. It has a lovely, desolate feel, as the protagonist seems to disappear; first going off the map, before not being there at all. The lyrics blend the surreal and the poetic, suggesting space travel while evoking a journey to the inner consciousness. The vocals possess a contemplative introspection, enhanced by the use of echo, and a desperate, almost angry tone of despair.
‘We lost the skyline
We stepped right off the map
Drifted into blank space
And let the clocks relapse.’
Moonloop (The Sky Moves Sideways 1993)
Wilson was inspired to record a song about the Moon when, in an Oxfam shop, he found a vinyl copy of the spoken word recording, Man On The Moon, narrated by Walter Cronkite, the American broadcaster who anchored CBS Evening News for nearly twenty years. This instrumental track was recorded in July 1995, 26 years after the Apollo 11 Moon landing. In July 1969, as the Moon landing took place, Pink Floyd were in a television studio, improvising another Moon-themed piece. Floyd guitarist, David Gilmour, wrote in The Guardian in July 2009,
‘They were broadcasting the Moon landing, and they thought that to provide a bit of a break, they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called ‘Moonhead’ – it’s a nice, atmospheric, spacey, 12-bar blues’.
The sample near the end of Moonloop is a NASA recording of the Apollo 11 Astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, at Tranquility [sic] Base on the Moon, communicating by radio with Bruce McCandless, an astronaut at Mission Control in Houston. In a heavily edited recording, Neil Armstrong can be heard climbing down the Lunar Module ladder, describing the Moon’s surface as he sets foot on it. It was at this point that he made his most famous quote, which is not present in the sample, ‘That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind’
The track begins with what could be the sound of an ocean on the Moon. Early astronomers thought the sea of tranquillity, or Mare Tranquillitatis, was actually a sea, though closer inspection revealed it to be a dry plain created by ancient volcanic eruptions. Wilson’s distorted guitar provides space-rock stylings until around fifteen minutes in, when the song reaches a stasis point, and the above-quoted samples appear. The song has a trance-like, hypnotic feel, making it part of the space rock that began in the 1960s, with bands like Gong and Hawkwind, and resurfaced in the 1990s.
Stars Die (Moonloop EP 1994)
The concept of stars dying suggests that, in the long term, everything dies; that humanity is fragile and ephemeral, and that the Earth itself will eventually perish,
‘Tree cracked
And mountain cried
Bridges broke
And window sighed.’
The sample at around 2:30 is of President Richard Nixon speaking from the White House Oval Office to the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin when they were on the Moon. In what he describes as ‘the most historic telephone call ever made’, the President says the astronauts’ achievements have inspired mankind to ‘redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to Earth’. Perhaps the Moon mission brought hope. But the song itself doesn’t suggest peace and tranquillity will come to Earth. It ends with an image of humanity blasting off into space – astronauts in ‘hypersleep’, the deep coma-like sleep that’s essential for long-distance space travel.
A Smart Kid (Stupid Dream, 1999)
A quietly melancholy song about the infinite loneliness suffered by the protagonist, the last remaining human being stranded on planet Earth after what seems to have been a five-year nuclear winter. After ‘a chemical harvest was sown’, nuclear clouds obscure the sun. It appears there was a nuclear war, which the protagonist ‘must have won’: making the song title profoundly ironic. He has won an empty victory.
The nuclear war theme is related to Radioactive Toy (from On the Sunday of Life), in which the ‘toy’ grants ‘the freedom to destroy’. It would perhaps be foolish to describe Robert Oppenheimer – credited as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ – as merely a ‘smart kid’ like the song’s protagonist. The reality is much more subtle, but Oppenheimer later did express regret about the ‘sin’ that he and other physicists had committed: that once the knowledge that created the atomic bomb had been gained, it could never be lost again.
In A Smart Kid, the protagonist is waiting for an alien spaceship to arrive to rescue him from Earth. He will wait ‘until the sky is blue’. The implication is that it will never be blue again.
‘A spaceship from another star
They ask me where all the people are
What can I tell them?
I tell them I’m the only one
There was a war but I must’ve won
Please, take me with you.’
Last Chance To Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled (Lightbulb Sun, 2000)
The first part of this song is called ‘Winding Shot (Summer 1981)’, part of the more personal lyrical themes Wilson began writing songs about on Lightbulb Sun. It refers to the time when childhood turns into adolescence. In the summer of 1981, Wilson was thirteen and living in Hemel Hempstead, an English town about 24 miles northwest of London. Winding Shot is the name of a small cul-de-sac off Spring Lane in Hemel Hempstead. The nostalgia in the song is tinged with regret as summer comes to an end,
‘Summer went away
And we just weren’t the same.’
This part of the song ends with his childhood friend kissing him on the lips, as they reach that strange limbo of adolescence, suspended between childhood and adulthood; ‘Not grown-ups but not kids’. A rhythmic acoustic riff drives a short bridge, leading to an instrumental passage from which the song title is derived.
The title could convey an environmental message, something that’s become even more critical in the two decades since the song was written. But Wilson told Joakim Jahlmar of DPRP.net in March 2001 that, Last Chance To Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled is not about ecology. It takes its title from the edited transcript of a videotape dated 29 September 1996, from the leader of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult, who called himself Do (real name: Marshall Applewhite).
‘This planet is about to be recycled, refurbished, started over. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be destroyed; it doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. And whether or not you believe that this civilization is going to be recycled or refurbished is up to you. Now, the purpose of this tape is to warn you that this is about to happen and that it’s going to happen very soon. At the End of the Age, the planet is wiped clean… refurbished… rejuvenated.‘
On 22 March 1997, Heaven’s Gate published a macabre press release,
‘HEAVEN’S GATE ‘Away Team’ Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space
By the time you receive this, we’ll be gone – several dozen of us. We came from the Level Above Human in distant space, and we have now exited the bodies that we were wearing for our earthly task, to return to the world from whence we came – task completed.‘
Applewhite told his followers that they could leave Earth on a spaceship that would accompany the comet Hale-Bopp, which was due to approach the planet in early 1997. Tragically, despite a claim on the Heaven’s Gate website that the group was strongly against suicide, 39 cult members (including Applewhite) were found dead in a San Diego house on 26 March 1997. The track ends with the song title’s chilling words, spoken by Applewhite before he joined his followers in a mass suicide, achieved by consuming a mixture of apple sauce, vodka and barbiturates.
Herd Culling (Closure/Continuation 2022)
This track opens with the visceral lines,
‘Son, go fetch the rifle now,
There’s something in the yard.’
These words throw us immediately into a compelling psychodrama. Wilson has the ability of a poet or scriptwriter to enter a story halfway through – the narrative gradually unfolds as the song progresses, teasing the listener to extract the meaning of the song, wondering who the ‘strange gods’ are,
‘Did you fall to earth to cull a herd?
Strange gods above the earth
These are things you just won’t believe.
In the shackles of the night
There are lights up in the sky…’
Wilson revealed the song’s meaning to Anil Prasad of Innerviews before he later retracted, saying he would prefer listeners to make up their own minds. Those who prefer not to have their views influenced by Wilson’s thoughts should skip the next paragraph.
Wilson told Prasad that the story of Skinwalker Ranch, near Ballard, Utah, inspired the song. Several accounts suggest that the ranch has been plagued by paranormal activity and UFO sightings, and several books, films, and documentaries have been published about it. The song describes the family’s attempts to defend themselves against aliens, ‘strange gods above the earth’ who may have landed to ‘cull a herd’ of cattle on the ranch. He told Prasad: ‘I remain sceptical when it comes to the UFO stuff and government coverups. But I love the stories.’ His scepticism is echoed in the chorus of the song, which consists of the single word ‘liar’, resentfully muttered at first, then viciously spat out as his venom increases.
Sources
Gilmour, D., My moon-landing jam session (The Guardian, 2 July 2009)
Press release, HEAVEN’S GATE “Away Team” Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space (22 March 1997)
Applewhite, M., Last Chance to Evacuate Earth Before It’s Recycled; Edited Transcript of Videotape (Heaven’s Gate website, 29 September 1996)
Jahlmar, J., An Interview with Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree (DPRP.net, March 2001)
Prasad, A., Porcupine Tree Collective Action (Innerviews, 2022)
For Steven Wilson’s Space Songs Part II: The Solo Years, click here