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.
