Limited Edition of One: How to Succeed in the Music Industry Without Being Part of the Mainstream, by Steven Wilson with Mick Wall. Constable, 2022. 375 pp.
I don’t often do book reviews, but lately I have embarked on a heavy schedule of reading music biographies (for reasons), and this is one of several in the pipeline. Since I’ve reviewed some of Wilson’s solo albums on this site, I figured I’d extend the favour to his book.
Limited Edition of One is Steven Wilson’s chance to talk about himself in long form, touching on all sorts of topics along the way. The style is informal and accessible, not all that different from long interviews, or articles that he has written: I have no doubt that this is his voice. Apart from his annoyingly persistent habit of using the first-person-reflexive pronoun as a subject pronoun, it is relatively error-free, so there was probably some kind of editorial eye cast on it. There aren’t a lot of pictures, and the ones that are there are black-and-white and relatively low-res, scattered throughout the book. This review is for the paperback.
Anyway, on to the meat.
Genre-wise it falls into that fuzzy area between autobiography and memoir. It certainly provides us with some of the historical highlights of his life: we learn something about his family and his upbringing, we learn something of his early bands and musical experiences, we learn something about his history with the outfits (No-Man, Porcupine Tree, Blackfield) with which he is most closely associated, as well as his solo excursions and collaborations – in fact, we learn something about a lot of things.
The key word here is “something”. The information we get on certain topics appears to be heavily curated: there was a lot that was not said that one might have expected. For example, his discussions about Porcupine Tree, the most important of his projects, is surprisingly sparse (more on that later). What we do get is a lot of Steven himself – interests, attitudes, likes, dislikes, and once in a while even insights. This is not a huge surprise, though – I mean, consider the source. Lack of ego was never one of his problems.
The book is only vaguely chronological, with the first part of it focusing on his childhood and adolescence, including his early days of music discovery and fledgling attempts at bands. While it jumps about in time, Wilson does hit on a number of themes that are covered in one or more chapters, and which I have explored below.
1 The importance of music to him in all its permutations and possibilities: not just its discovery, but how it works, both in terms of how it connects emotionally, and how to create it with whatever technology (or lack thereof) that is available. This is probably the most relevant theme in the book: it is the story of the foundation of his musical persona.
These accounts of his insatiable musical curiosity, and the origins and development of his wide-ranging, eclectic musical tastes are probably the most authentically honest parts of the book. It is clear how much he loves music, loves exploring its nooks and crannies, finding joy in very odd places – and as it happens, it is the part of the book I can relate to the most (which probably explains its appeal).
We are not that distant in age from each other, and when I started out on my own musical journey, I encountered a lot of the music that he did. I didn’t pursue most of it with the same ardour, but yeah, he talks about music I am very familiar with, including the “silliness” of some of that late-60s British proto-prog. I would add a few things to that list, such as The Small Faces Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake album, and maybe Ron Geesin’s and Roger Waters’ Music from the Body. I even owned a Stockhausen album (albeit briefly). Van der Graaf Generator and Peter Hammill were hugely important to me back in the day, and I still regard Hammill as one of the greatest lyricists in modern music. Shriekback, Magazine, and of course Japan were among my 80s mainstays. I won’t lie – he scores a lot of points for that discussion. Nostalgia FTW.
2 Music-making technology. I found his approach to this interesting, because he is not a gearhead: rather, his relationship with technology seems to be entirely practical. He claims (and there is no reason to disbelieve this) that he doesn’t really understand the minutiae of how the stuff works, as long as he can figure out how to turn it to his own ends. His father made several types of processors for him that were decidedly not “mainstream”, which clearly prepared him for the task of getting the sounds he wanted with the equipment at hand.
The intersection between his deep understanding of music as an emotional vehicle, and the use of technology is most obvious with his remixing projects. I wish he had spent more time talking about that and his relationships with some of these artists, particularly Robert Fripp and Ian Anderson, as he fought through the old tapes and takes, trying to recover what the original artists intended. He wrought true magic with Jethro Tull’s Aqualung.
3 The music industry. This is another relevant theme that I think merited a deeper dive, although a lot of the discussion around the recording of the Porcupine Tree album In Absentia deals with issues of promotion and popularity.
He has been around long enough to observe first-hand the changes that have occurred to the industry over the decades: the death of radio as a vehicle for both releasing and discovering new material, and how promotion has to be done in the age of social media (pre-order! Pre-order!). Algorithms and machine-learning-generated playlists, in a commercial environment dominated by just a few major players have largely eliminated the opportunity for new artists to be easily or accidentally discovered.
I think there is some irony here: he clearly aimed to be commercially successful but never quite got there, and he has lamented this fact more than once over the years (this is not an uncommon theme throughout many interviews); but on the other hand the changes to the music business he discusses were occurring during his most active years, and given that, it is unlikely he could have “made it” anyway – at least without major compromises in what he does and how he does it.
4 Collaboration. He has an entire chapter on the importance of working with others, discussing individuals like Robert Fripp, and David Bowie, who are famous for their collaborative work; and other similar discussions are scattered throughout the book. We meet the very earliest collaborators on PT; Aviv Geffen and Blackfield; Mikael Akerfeldt; and of course Tim Bowness as his life-long friend/collaborator/partner in No-Man. He acknowledges the importance of having others around who share a musical vision; however, there is a clear ambivalence. As important as the input of others might be in theory, he has passed that point in his career where conceding even some control or decision-making to others is a possibility. Being a member of a band is no longer in the cards, and I presume that includes a resurrected Porcupine Tree.
5 Family. We start out with his early upbringing, in a relatively normal English family, and are introduced to some of his more eccentric and tragic relations. It is clear that he is extremely attached to his parents. The section on the decline of his dad was especially sad and poignant; I remember when his father passed away because I was literally stepping out the front door to attend the Blackfield concert when the message popped up that the show had suddenly been cancelled. We also learn about his eventual marriage and rather unexpected role as a stepfather, something that I suspect startled a rather large proportion of his fan base, given the intensity of his musical focus over decades (and things he said in multiple interviews).
In the end, after reading the book, did I learn anything about Steven Wilson that I didn’t already know or suspect? And how does one succeed in the music industry without becoming part of the mainstream?
The answer to the first question is: Not really. Limited Edition of One is Steven Wilson’s ego on display more than it is a particularly useful autobiography. I was aware of much of his general history if not the details, and I certainly do not consider myself a fan. I have listened to a lot of his output, and I like some of it quite a bit, but most of it has made little impact on me. I spend no time at all following any fan groups. The things I didn’t know, such as his propensity for making lists, or his borderline-tedious evangelism about vegetarianism, were of relatively minor interest and didn’t add much to my understanding of Steven Wilson the musician.
As to the things I did want to know… well, they got short shrift. As I noted earlier, there is surprisingly little about Porcupine Tree. I think it is not unreasonable to expect more than a handful of pages on the outfit that had the most profound influence on the success (however he defines it) Steven Wilson has achieved. There is almost no mention of the formation of PT as a performing entity: Richard Barbieri, Colin Edwin, and Chris Maitland just pop into existence in the book, with no word on how they came to be in the band. We are told more about his early musical collaborators than we learn about these guys. Similarly, at some point Maitland disappears in the metaphorical puff of smoke, to be magically replaced by Gavin Harrison. Likewise there is very little about the Porcupine Tree discography with the exception of In Absentia and The Incident. One can’t help but wonder whether he really does want to distance himself from that band – and if that is the case, all the justifications (given in the book) for why he resurrected Porcupine Tree ring a little hollow.
The second question? Well, it depends on what “success” in the modern music industry even means any more. Perhaps there is a buried irony in the subtitle of the book.
Steven Wilson never “made it” in the conventional sense, in that he doesn’t sell millions of records or get billions of streams or play in arenas or require a retinue of functionaries to stand between him and the fan base (his only concession is that someone else runs his Facebook Page). He has spent quite a few years making sure we all understand just how much he is not part of the music mainstream, but we knew that anyway. Still, in terms of the music he makes – in the niche, as it were, where the vast majority of his fans reside – he is pretty much iconic. And this success boils down to the dedicated fan base that has been with him since the Porcupine Tree days: everything follows from that. He commented more than once how Porcupine Tree in its dormancy seemed to take on a mythic status that it never had during its active phase – but the only person to blame for that is Steven Wilson himself: by ignoring it he elevated it to legend. Meanwhile, that fiercely dedicated fan base was happy to let him do whatever the hell he wanted, while they waited for Porcupine Tree. Therein lies his success.
