About the band: Porcupine Tree were a British progressive rock band formed by musician Steven Wilson in 1987. Originally their sound was more like psychedelic rock, but after 2000, it turned more to heavy prog. After ten well received and highly influential studio albums, the band split up in 2010, allowing frontman Steven Wilson to develop his solo career. Both the band and Steven Wilson solo are among my all-time favourites. Porcupine Tree currently have four songs in my list of about 200 best pop/rock songs of all time.
About the song: the title song of the 1995 album The sky moves sideways, long before the band became famous (well, at least in prog circles). The song is cut in two, to start and finish the album. This is a rather obvious reference to their main influence of the time, Pink Floyd. Even the structure of the song resembles that of Shine on you crazy diamond, which does not imply that it plagiarizes the original: this epic of the nineties can hold its own, with beautiful atmospheric sound, ambient mood, and convincing instrumental solo's. I have been reluctant at first to combine the two phases to one song (like I did for the Pink Floyd masterpiece), but in the special edition double CD, the band actually include an alternative version that combines the two phases into one. I still opted for the original version though, which is slightly more effective. Surely one of the best prog rock epics to be released after the golden age of the seventies. Run time 35:27.
