Dream Theater

Mike Portnoy, the drummer’s drummer, founder member and driving force behind progressive metal kingpins Dream Theater, has a most unusual way of describing the epic scale of his band’s music. “It’s kind of like the size of a porn star’s penis,” he says, matter-of-factly. “It’s all about the length and the girth. The bigger it is, the more you can put into it!”

Such a comment might seem rather at odds with Dream Theater’s reputation as the thinking man’s metal band. For more than 20 years, this New York-based quintet have been revered as the most serious and accomplished of musicians, with Portnoy and guitarist John Petrucci acclaimed as masters of their art. For many, Dream Theater are the natural successors to Rush, purveyors of highbrow existentialist concept-rock, and men of intellect whose oeuvre includes a 42-minute, eight-part suite entitled ‘Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence’, in which varying forms of mental dysfunction are examined.

However, when Mike Portnoy gets excited – as he is about Dream Theater’s forthcoming appearance at Download – he likes to talk dirty. “It was a bit of a cock-tease,” he says of the band’s previous Download experience in 2007. “It was great to finally play there, but we were on the second stage, in a tent, when everybody was in beautiful sunshine outside on the main stage. So this time will be nice. We’re on the main stage on Sunday with Def Leppard and Whitesnake.

“We love playing festivals,” Portnoy purrs. “We’re the kind of band that can play with anyone. We’ve done shows with Elton John and we’ve done shows with Slayer. We’re kind of like the chameleons of rock. At Download, we could fit in on the Slipknot day or we could fit in on the Def Leppard day. You just write the set-list accordingly. We’re on with Def Leppard, so we’ll be playing our more straightforward songs. I would say we’ll be playing the hits,” he laughs, “but we only have one, and even that wasn’t much of a hit!”

For Dream Theater, having only one hit song, and a minor hit song at that, is something of a badge of honour. The tongue-in-cheek title of the band’s 2007 anthology Greatest Hit (...And 21 Other Pretty Cool Songs) was as accurate as it was self-deprecating. But that one hit – ‘Pull Me Under’, which reached the Top 10 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Tracks chart back in 1992 – was all they really needed, just a little mainstream exposure to get the ball rolling. ‘Pull Me Under’ helped the band establish a fanbase that has remained fiercely loyal ever since. Now, with eight million albums sold, Dream Theater are one of the biggest cult bands on the planet. And their new album Black Clouds & Silver Linings will cement their status as the guvnors of prog metal.

Portnoy especially has dug deep on this album. His lyrics in ‘The Best Of Times’ are a meditation on the death of his father, while ‘The Shattered Fortress’ marks the conclusion of a 12-part song-cycle spanning five albums and inspired by his own battles with alcoholism. The drummer has now been sober for nine years.

“I’ve been writing about the 12 steps to recovery,” he says. “Each song over the five albums has dealt with a couple of specific steps, and ‘The Shattered Fortress’ is the closing chapter to the whole thing, covering steps 10, 11 and 12. Lyrically and musically, it references the previous songs.”

And in keeping with this weighty subject matter, the music on Black Clouds & Silver Linings is some of the heaviest and most complex of the band’s career. Four of the album’s tracks clock in at over 10 minutes, with the closer, ‘The Count Of Tuscany’, coming in at just under 20. “That’s one of the reasons why I think this is such a strong album,” Portnoy says, “because it’s made up of epics – four of them.”

And those songs deliver the classic 70s-style prog-metal that Rush fans have been missing for nigh on 30 years. It’s glorious stuff, completely over the top.

“Oh yeah, absolutely!” Portnoy chuckles. “That’s the big appeal. Anybody can write a five-minute song – although that’s always been a challenge for us. We’re all about being over the top. It’s what we’ve built a 20-year career on!”