PORCUPINE TREE mainman Steven Wilson spoke to Metalunderground.com recently about a number of topics including his new solo album, Insurgentes. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Metalunderground.com: You’re in so many bands and you’re probably the main musical director in most of them, so what was the impetus to finally create a solo album after all these years? What did you hope to achieve musically that you couldn’t in your other projects?

Wilson: "What I wanted to do for the first time was create a record that would be a complete picture of me and all my musical personalities. It’s not something I think I could have done at any other time. I think it’s taken me a long time to make a record where I could bring all those seemingly disparate elements together. It’s not something I think I could have done at any other time. I think it’s taken me a long time to make a record where I could bring all those seemingly disparate elements together. I mean, we’re talking about a record which does span everything from piano ballads to pure industrial noise to prog rock to psychedelic to pop to shoe gazer anthems. It’s a very eclectic record and I think it does hang together and it is a cohesive piece. I don’t think it would have been even if I made it five years ago. I think it would have been too eclectic for its own good. It takes a certain amount of experience and a certain age of a musician to be able to pull off that record, to make it work. I hope it does work."

Metalunderground.com: I think you follow the ROBERT PLANT model, as it were, of always looking for new musical territories to explore rather than looking over your shoulder at the past. A lot of other musicians are content to stay in a comfort zone and make variations of the same record over and over again.

Wilson: "If I was still making the same records as I was when I was a teenager - a completely different person - that would be very bizarre, wouldn’t it? And yet there are some bands, like AC/DC, still making the same record. I mean, Angus [Young] was 17 when they made their first record. He’s now 53, or whatever, and he’s still making the same record. That seems bizarre to me. What I’m doing doesn’t seem strange. The people who don’t change, that does seem strange to me. Or maybe that’s just me."

Metalunderground.com: What are some of the best metal records you’ve heard recently and what are some of your formative metal influences, some of the classics?

Wilson: The first music I really got excited about was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. When I was 10, 11 years old, there were bands like IRON MAIDEN, DIAMOND HEAD coming out for the first time. I loved both those bands. I also liked bands like SAXON and they would come through my little town outside London. We’d go see them play live, me and my friends.

And then, to be honest, I really lost touch with metal for about 20 years. I got into progressive music and Kraut rock and psychedelic music and really lost touch with metal music. I probably didn’t give it much credit for being musically sophisticated. Then, around the turn of the century, the turn of the millennium, in 2000, I suddenly got turned on to this whole scene of extraordinarily ambitious metal groups. It almost answered a question that I’d had, which was, 'Where are all the interesting musicians going now?' Because they certainly weren’t forming interesting progressive-rock groups.

I found most of these guys were forming extreme-metal groups. And I’m talking about bands like MESHUGGAH. And Meshuggah was the band, more than anything else, that turned me back onto metal and the idea that you could have brutal music that was also complex and groovy. It wasn’t necessarily clever or flashy, it was just brutal and powerful but also had sophistication. Then, of course, I got the invitation to work with OPETH and discovered their music. Meshuggah and Opeth are the two most significant metal bands I’ve discovered. The French band GOJIRA, I think are really special. If you like Meshuggah, Gojira are definitely taking that kind of road, as it were. I like MASTODON a lot. I think they’re a very special band."

Read the entire interview here.