Gavin Harrison is one of the finest drummers of his generation. He loves the creative process, and he likes to keep busy. But as he admits to MusicRadar: “Being in three bands around the same time is tricky.”
Juggling his recording and touring commitments between those three bands has proven a daunting task. His tenure with Porcupine Tree began in 2002, followed by King Crimson in 2008 and The Pineapple Thief in 2016.
“There was a quite a lot of time where I was in King Crimson and The Pineapple Thief at the same time,” Harrison says. “And I don’t like to come off one tour and then the next day go out on another tour. I need time to recover and to change my mental hard drive.
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“These tours are planned so far ahead, a good 18 months in advance. So I would carefully select time periods. I would say to The Pineapple Thief, ‘We could do something in this period. I know King Crimson are not gonna be busy in this period.’ I already know that because we’re talking about shows booked long in advance. So that was easy to manage.”
Harrison recalls his negotiations with King Crimson’s guitarist and leader Robert Fripp and bassist Tony Levin.
“There might be times where Robert would have suggested, ‘Can we do a tour next fall?’ And maybe Tony would say, ‘Oh, I’m touring with Peter Gabriel.’ Or I would say, ‘I’ve already got a tour planned.’ And Robert would say, ‘Fine, okay, we’ll move it to the following spring.’ All these things had to slot together.”
Due to Porcupine Tree being on hiatus between 2010 and 2021, there was less overlap for Harrison to deal with.
“By the time Porcupine Tree came back , King Crimson had stopped,” he says. “Plus, we went through the whole COVID thing, so I didn’t really have to juggle Porcupine Tree and The Pineapple Thief too much.”
Harrison is on tour with The Pineapple Thief in early 2027. The band’s 16th studio album, Far And Wide, was released in October 2026.
As for the futures of King Crimson and Porcupine Tree, Harrison says: “Well, King Crimson is completely inactive. So, I haven’t left it, I haven’t joined it – it’s just inactive. There’s no news in the King Crimson world at the moment.”
Asked if he would work again with Crimson if Robert Fripp made the call, he replies: “Yeah, if I could, sure.”
Recently, Porcupine Tree’s frontman and leader Steven Wilson stated in an interview with Prog magazine that the band had not managed to complete much new music. “We’re a long way from it being an album’s worth,” he said, “so it could be years.”
Harrison gives MusicRadar a rather different story.
“Porcupine Tree is still an ongoing concern,” he says. “We are writing another album. And next year we’re hoping to get together and finish that album off.”
Looking back on his time with King Crimson, Harrison has named Discipline as the most challenging Crimson track to play. The equivalent in Porcupine Tree’s catalogue is the epic track Anesthetize from the 2007 album Fear Of A Blank Planet. It’s a track so quintessentially prog that it features a guitar solo from Alex Lifeson of Rush.
Harrison says of Anesthetize: “That a song is incredibly hard to play if you play the whole thing – 17 minutes. From a drummer point of view, your heart rate probably gets up to maximum in the middle.
“The hard bit is that when you play it live as a 17-minute song you play the first five or six minutes all on the toms. The muscles in your arms really start aching, because you’re only playing the toms. So if you haven’t paced yourself carefully, your arms are really, really tired by the time you get to the heavy section in the middle – the bit where you really need them.”
Another Porcupine Tree song that’s a favourite of Harrison’s is one that he co-wrote with Steven Wilson – Start Of Something Beautiful, from 2005 album Deadwing. “That one is really heavy to play,” he smiles.
He finds it difficult to pick favourites from his years with The Pineapple Thief.
“At the moment, I’m just concentrating on the new songs from the new album,” the says, “as we’re now rehearsing them. My head is full of those songs. But I’ve always liked Our Mire [from 2020 album Versions Of The Truth] and White Mist [from 2018’s Dissolution]. And the first song I ever recorded with The Pineapple Thief is called In Exile. We still play that song a lot, and it always goes down well.”
Harrison has a wide-ranging approach to recording and miking his drums.
He explains: “I’ve got this drum kit in my home studio close-mic’d. I also have some overhead mics, mics from the ceiling.
“I’ve got this massive hall. The room is about 50 foot high by 50 foot wide, and I have some microphones placed out there. So I’ve got this massive reverb and ambient hall sound. I record that on four different mics out in the hall.
“I’ve got options when I come to mixing. I can mix it dead dry, close mic’d. Or I can have more of an overhead sound. I can have a massive hall sound, or anywhere in between.
“For all intents and purposes it’s like you’re in a dry drum booth. So I’ve got that sound, and the big hall, and all this overhead stuff. I record on 20 mics, and then I can I can mix it any way I feel like.”
He works closely with The Pineapple Thief’s vocalist and guitarist Bruce Soord.
“The way we do it is I do a stereo mix of the drums, and I send that to Bruce, and he mixes everything else to my stereo mix. We keep updating. He’ll send me that mix with his mix on top, and then he’ll send me a drum-less version, and I’ll do another mix. That could happen 10, 15 times over a month for each song.
“So I keep refining the drums based upon how I’m hearing the guitars, the bass, the keyboards, the vocals. ‘Ah, okay, now I need a little bit more of the underside of the snare, or maybe the bass drum should have more attack.’ I make decisions, and then I’ll print another stereo mix and send it to Bruce. I always mix the drums, and he mixes the rest of the band.”
From studio to stage, his kit remains unchanged.
“It’s exactly the same,” he says. “I would use exactly the same cymbals, the same tuning. I might use different mics on tour, only because I don’t want to take out these kind of quite fragile studio mics. Some of them are valve mics. They’re not really tour-worthy. We’ve got a slightly different selection of mics, but other than that, the drum kit is identical.”
![The Pineapple Thief – Nothing But The Truth (2021) [Blu-ray] | Full Live Concert HD - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/T3mKWtHMZOE/maxresdefault.jpg "“Porcupine Tree is still an ongoing concern. We are writing another album”: Gavin Harrison on the future of Porcupine Tree and King Crimson – plus his tips for miking drums and getting through 17-minute songs without collapsing 21")
He finishes on one small but important detail.
“I’ve always liked the K-sounding Zildjian cymbals,” he says. “I’ve always liked darker sounding cymbals, actually. I don’t need the super high-frequency shiny sort of quite brash things, and I know Robert Fripp doesn’t like that either. I remember putting up a post one day about Zildjian, because they sent me some new cymbals whilst I was on tour. And Robert said how much he liked Zildjian cymbals too.”
