Pop shouldn't be a comfortable slipper. It should shock and surprise you and confront your expectations.
— Steven Wilson
I always wanted to create my own musical world. That takes time and must be earned, and it does mean sometimes confronting the expectations of the audience.
When I was growing up, I was always looking for the most willfully uncommercial music: Whether it was Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa or King Crimson, that's what attracted me.
I grew up listening to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance - these are the bands that I actually grew up with, and I always had these things in my taste, too. And I always loved industrial music as well: I listened to Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire. And shoegaze bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine.
I've never been one of those people who say, 'Oh, well, if you play this kind of music, you can only like these kinds of bands.'
It's always lovely to discover that the people that you kind of look up to are actually very down-to-earth people.
I left school, and I went to work in a computer company. I was in my late teens.
I'm not one of those guys who can just take a guitar into a room and come out with a song. I need all my instruments dotted around.
The real artists are ultimately people who don't consider their audience and are almost incapable of considering their audience. They can do what they do and fire themselves up.
When it comes to being in a band or going solo, one is collaborative, and one is not. But generally speaking, when going solo, I am the boss. People can contribute ideas, but I am the boss. When collaborating, you make compromises and look for a common ground.
I grew up listening to a lot of very smart pop records by artists like Kate Bush, Talk Talk, Peter Gabriel, Prince, Depeche Mode, Tears for Fears, The The.
If you live in the city, you only have to look out your window to see enough that would make you feel that you don't want to step outside your front door ever again.
What I do is I basically make records to please myself first and foremost, and so one of the most important things for me as a musician and a writer and a producer is to feel like there's always a sense of evolution and reinvention with each record.
When I was younger, I worked for several years composing music for commercials, but I was very happy to give that up. I didn't really like it, it was a way of financing my bands.
Israel is a wonderful country, especially Tel Aviv.
I think there's something very peculiar about living in the city and not part of the major metropolis; that actually makes it remarkably easy to disappear.
It's nice to be in the position where you're the guy with the vision, but you're able to work with people who can bring your vision to life - and then some.
Every time the mainstream media talk about progressive rock, they wheel out a clip of Rick Wakeman in a cape. For me, it's one of the most ambitious forms of music. The problem is that when it doesn't work, you end up with Emerson, Lake and Palmer doing symphonies with 60-piece orchestras and revolving pianos, which I think is ridiculous as well.
One thing I have found over years is that if you change direction, the initial reaction tends to be very polarized, but as the music gradually filters through and fans start engaging with it on its own terms rather than comparing it to what went before, the appreciation and acceptance of it increases.
Like anybody, I look around at the world that we live in, and I find it hard to be completely positive about everything that's going on.
In the mid- to late '70s, there was no one better than ABBA at writing and producing great pop.
My musical tastes are very diverse. I just never felt like listening to certain kinds of bands. There's too much great stuff out there.
I think 'genius' is an overused word.
I think anybody who likes Cardiacs, they tend to be quite evangelistic about them for obvious reasons. They're not a band you can be on the fence about.
My favourite chord? Bb6th with added 9th.
The definition of an artist, for me, is someone who is quite selfish about their creativity.
I think most people can relate to the feeling of love spilling over into obsession.
That's what made me fall in love with music in the first place was the idea of being able to take listeners on a journey across forty or sixty minutes.
We live in a world dominated by fear and paranoia.
You cannot please everyone, and I think that what's important, ultimately, is to make sure you please yourself. If you start trying to please other people, you'll just go around in circles.
It's possible that Israel will be my second home, but it won't be my only home.
I grew up with vinyl records and remember the pleasure and the kind of buzz that I got from buying a beautiful vinyl record with the sleeve and the lyrics - all that kind of tactile experience that you could get from an old vinyl record.
I myself lived in London for 20 years, and I never knew my next-door neighbors. I never knew what they did. I never knew their names. They didn't know what I did for a living, and they didn't know my name.
I've played to audiences where people are sitting there with their arms crossed, just kind of watching. Although they might be having a great time, and they might be really enjoying the spectacle, if I'm not getting anything back, it does affect the way I perform and project.
I think that's part of the battle of defining yourself as an artist. You're constantly fighting the pressure from outside to be pigeonholed and deliver more of what people already liked.
Ultimately, I'd like to create a body of work where every album has its own personality and a reason to exist within the catalog, not just 'more of the same.'
It's too easy now to find music, and it's therefore too easy to dismiss music, particularly music that doesn't hit you the first time you hear it.
So many things influence me in one way or another. Some might be surprising, but that's OK.
I never made a distinction, really, between music and sound. Let me explain what I mean by that. I grew up near to a train station, and the sound of the trains became a very important part of my world. It was a very musical sound to me.
People who like progressive music tend to sneer at the idea of a kind of punk aesthetic, and people who like alternative indie rock or punk rock tend to sneer at what they see as the pretentiousness and pomposity of progressive music.
'Routine' was written on piano, and you can hear that. But then you listen to 'Happy Returns,' and you can tell it's definitely been written on guitar, with that singer-songwriter-y strumming quality.
I have a thing for major 7ths. They've got a very mournful, nostalgic quality to them.
We had an extreme reaction to Storm Corrosion. We were proud of it, but it divided the audience. The metal fans were divided. Some went with it. Some hated it, since it wasn't the progressive metal supergroup they were waiting for.
My fifth record is, in many ways, inspired by the hugely ambitious progressive pop records that I loved in my youth.
My first love is making records, and whatever's necessary in order for me to achieve that, I'll learn how to do it.
I think my fans are much more open-minded than some other bands' fan bases are.
Every time I make a new record, some of my existing fans are going to like it, and some are not. It's inevitable, and it's part of the deal. It's part of the job description.
I really love the combination of Israel and England. They are completely different. The British are very private and keep things to themselves, while Israelis aren't that way. In England, I couldn't make friends with people in the supermarket or people who work at my bank or post office, but in Israel I can, and I like that.
I think there is something about the Internet which gives people almost an opportunity to role play and to create a facade, an image. I see that as quite a dangerous development because I think what we call social networking, Twitter, Facebook, etc., is actually quite antisocial.
Jazz drummers traditionally are not always prepared to just hold down the beat; it's like they're soloing the whole time.
