When Steven Wilson was a teenager living in Hemel Hempstead, he read a short story by the American science-fiction writer Thomas M Disch. An outspoken satirist, atheist and gay man in the 60s (he ultimately committed suicide in 2008), Disch was a troubled individual. The story in question, Descending, is a punishing, bleak tale of an unrepentant layabout who takes the down escalator in a shopping mall and finds he can’t get off it.
For Wilson – who also became fascinated by serial killers and the darker reaches of humanity – that image had a lasting impact. You could call it a precursor to the menacing, industrial shades of his catalogue. Chiefly, though, it planted in his head the idea of the never-ending staircase. From Porcupine Tree’s first ‘proper’ album Up The Downstair to their 2005 song Arriving Somewhere But Not Here, it’s become something of a recurring motif; a metaphor for an endless descent, like Thomas Disch’s dystopian escalator. Or for life as a stairway to… somewhere.
“I think a lot of my songwriting over the years has been very loosely related to this idea of it being about the journey, not about the arrival, the process and not the destination,” he says today, sitting outside
