Porcupine Tree Concerts Setlist

Porcupine Tree is an English rock band. It was formed in 1987 in Hemel Hempstead, United Kingdom. It started as a solo musical project, the sole founder being vocalist, guitarist, bassist, and keyboardist Steven Wilson (born in 1967 in London, United Kingdom).

Porcupine Tree has quite a unique origin story. Wilson and his friend, Malcolm Stocks, decided to make up a fictional band and give it a fascinating history. In its original form, “The Porcupine Tree” was a fictional psychedelic rock band from the 1970’s, whose members were also in and out of prison. They created flyers, wrote their history, and even recorded some music to build up a lore around the band. In the meantime, Wilson was playing in the art-pop duo “No-Man”.

In 1989, he released the first full project he did under the Porcupine Tree name, an album on a cassette titled “Tarquin's Seaweed Farm”. It included an inlay detailing the band’s fictional history, with fictional band members such as “Sir Tarquin Underspoon” and “Timothy Tadpole-Jones”. This tape got into the hands of Richard Allen, a music magazine editor who was also starting up his own label. He asked Wilson to contribute a track to his new release, a psychedelic rock compilation album titled “A Psychedelic Psauna” as Porcupine Tree.

The fictional band from Wilson’s imagination started to become real. The Porcupine Tree debut album came out in May 1992, with the title “On the Sunday of Life…”. Wilson played all the instruments and performed all the vocals on the tracks. However, the record failed to gain any significant commercial traction.

So, Wilson went out to form an actual band out of his odd project. Bassist Colin Edwin, drummer Chris Maitland, and keyboardist Richard Barbieri joined Porcupine Tree in 1993. With a full line-up together, they started to perform live Porcupine Tree concert shows as well. They released a total of 9 studio albums together between 1993 and 2009. The first one to get on the OCC charts in the UK was their 6th one, “Lightbulb Sun” from May 2000, which peaked at the #161 spot.

In early 2011, however, they announced the break-up of the band after frontman and founder Wilson decided to focus on his solo career instead. The psych rock band’s hiatus lasted almost exactly a decade, as in November 2021, they announced that they’re back together and they would release a new album in 2022. That new Porcupine Tree album came out in June 2022, with the title “Closure/Continuation”. They also went on an international Porcupine Tree concert tour. The band’s current line-up is made up of the founder, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Wilson, keyboardist Barbieri, and drummer Gavin Harrison.

The biggest hits in the Porcupine Tree setlist to date are “Where We Would Be” (2002), “Trains” (2002), “Arriving Somewhere But Not Here” (2005), and “Anesthetize” (2010, a 17-minute long titular track).