Portishead

North Somerset Portesheve [sic] (1086) (DB), Portesheved (1200). ‘Headland by the harbour’. OE port + hēafod.

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For The Record...

Members include Geoff Barrow (born c. 1972), keyboards; Beth Gibbons (born c. 1965), lead vocals; Adrian Utley (born c. 1958), guitar. Band formed in Bristol, England, c. 1991; released first album, Dummy, on London Record's Go! Beat label, 1994; released Portishead, 1997; released Live: Roseland NYC, Island Records, 1998; went on hiatus, 1999-2005; appeared together at a tsunami benefit concert, Bristol, England, 2005; released Third, Island Records, 2008. Awards: Mercury Music Prize, for Dummy, 1995. Addresses: Record company—Island Records Group, 22 St. Peter's Square, London, UK W6 9NW.

Trip-hop group

During the 1990s, the British band Portishead was credited with popularizing an entirely new genre in alternative music: "trip-hop," a dense, narcotic sound that combined hip-hop, reggae-esque dub, and acid jazz with, in Portishead's case, a swank, James Bond-style cinematic mood. Reclusive sound engineer Geoff Barrow and depths-of-gloom crooner Beth Gibbons comprised the nucleus of Portishead. Their 1994 debut, Dummy, produced "an atmosphere of voodoo noir," wrote the Village Voice's Erik Davis. Dummy sold more than a million copies. Summing up the Portishead vibe for Guitar Player, Jason Fine declared that the duo, with the help of some outstanding additional studio talent, "combines densely layered acoustic and electric instrumentation, soulful crooning, and the studio techniques of hip hop into one of the most richly inventive sounds in modern pop."

Portishead's innovative, psychedelic music was certainly unique and caught on with alternative listeners who were yearning for something new. The band acquired an international following and stayed booked on the festival circuit. Portishead released a second album, Portishead, in 1997, then disappeared from sight for a baffling decade-long hiatus. In 2008 Portishead resurfaced, offering long-suffering fans a new album, titled Third. "It's amazing how quickly 10 years can go," the band's guitarist and keyboardist, Adrian Utley, told Jon Pareles of the New York Times. "There was no sense that we would split up or we weren't going to do anything again. We just didn't want to for that time."

Members Met at Unemployment Office
Portishead came together under unusual circumstances. Beth Gibbons and Geoff Barrow met in a program sponsored by the local unemployment office in Bristol, England. The program offered re-training for those between jobs or careers, and Gibbons and Barrow wound up in the "musician" classes. Gibbons was from the English town of Devon, where she had once worked at a clock-making company before moving to London.

In London she sang in a number of bands over the years, including one in which she performed Janis Joplin songs. She ended up in Bristol in the early 1990s. All in all, Gibbons's life was a relatively uneventful one, but one from which some rather bleak and stirring lyrics would later arise. She admitted to being baffled about the source of such misery, but did concede that there was a bit of family dissonance in her youth: "I have divorced parents, which didn't help, but I don't like it when I blame things on my parents," Gibbons told Rolling Stone's Al Weisel. Gibbons later noted that she started singing because she had difficulty communicating.

Barrow was a native of a town not far from Bristol called Portishead. "It looks really pretty and twee, but it's actually quite horrible," Barrow told Weisel. Barrow was a studio whiz at an early age and worked on Neneh Cherry's Homebrew LP while still a teenager. Soul music, hip-hop, and James Bond movie soundtracks were his favorites. When he and Gibbons met, they shared little except their enrollment in the training program. They did find, however, that they both had a strange love for disquieting, under-the-skin strains of music.

Barrow, who found work as a tape operator at a Bristol recording studio, eventually came into contact with two others who would become supporting, yet elemental, members of Portishead—sound engineer Dave McDonald, and a guitarist named Adrian Utley. The veteran musician had played in a number of blues bands as well as with famed electronic virtuoso Jeff Beck. When the quartet began working in the Coach House studio where Barrow was employed, it was a collaborative effort that sometimes utilized odd production techniques. For instance, Barrow would record out-takes from old films and 1970s classics from groups like War and Weather Report and sample them into a new song. Utley's Fender Rhodes was sometimes recorded onto vinyl, or recorded into a dictaphone, then also sampled into a final mix. They also made heavy use of the Theremin, the world's first electronic instrument, which produces a sound best known for its use in the Beach Boys' hit "Good Vibrations"; it was also used in many sci-fi and horror movies of the 1950s and 1960s.

Released Unique-Sounding Dummy
The result of all this electronic experimentation and production-stage tweaking was Dummy, released in England in August of 1994 to critical acclaim. Though its songs were anything but radio-friendly, word-of-mouth about the band and its fresh, unusual sound soon spread through Europe, then North America. Dummy debuted in U.S. record stores two months later, in October. Reviews were laudatory, despite the rather depressing vibe of the whole album, best exemplified by its U.S. single, "Sour Times (Nobody Loves Me)," which charted well and received much alternative radio air play. Rolling Stone described Dummy as "Gothic hip-hop," with sounds that "come across both sad and sexy." Davis likened it to "an invitation to a seance," and noted that Gibbons and her eerie vocal style—almost always the focal point of any review—"seems to teeter at the edge of some narcoleptic void." A later Village Voice assessment of Portishead's sonic allure, written by Sarah Powell, remarked, "there's … something old and English and fairytale-like about Gibbons's voice."

Soon Portishead was being asked to translate its unique sound into the work of other musical acts through studio remixes. During 1995 and 1996, Portis- head revamped singles for bands that included Primal Scream and Depeche Mode. Members also used the windfall from Dummy to fund the construction of their own studio and went to work on a follow-up. The process was more arduous than expected, and the band admitted to being intimidated by their unexpected success from Dummy.

"We kind of got lost for about a year," Utley told Nina Pearlman of Rocket. "A lot of the sounds that we made on Dummy, we [later] heard from other bands and on adverts on television," Utley said. "It kind of made us unhappy with our own sound for awhile." Tensions ran so high that at one point the band almost broke up after it became impossible to actually finish a track at all, a process of creative chaos that went on for almost a year.

Faded from Sight after Sophomore Effort
In the end, Portishead's second album, Portishead, took two years from start to finish and was released in late 1997. It offered more desolate songs, and again, Gibbons's trademark bleak and detached vocals—but once more Barrow, Gibbons, Utley, and the other Portishead collaborators had attempted to force studio technology into bending to their creative will. This time, they discarded the use of bits and pieces from film soundtracks and soul classics, and instead created their own samples by using archaic recording equipment.

Reviews this time were mixed. A Rolling Stone assessment from Elisabeth Vincentelli pointed out that the album lacked a certain diversity of style, noting that after a time, its mood of "morbid fascination turns into ennui." In the end, Vincentelli called it "an exercise in barren claustrophobia," but deemed Barrow "an amazing sonic architect." Powell, writing in the Village Voice, observed a progression in Gibbons's trademark sound. On this second LP, Powell declared, "There's a brattier catch in her singing that wasn't there before. And sighing less is always a good idea." Powell also remarked on the strain of Portishead's relentlessly bleak-sonic architecture spread over an entire album—but conceded that the band's members "do the same song over and over and they do it really, really well."

In 1998 Portishead released Live: Roseland NYC, a live compilation of their famed 1997 concert at New York City's Roseland Ballroom, where they were joined by the 30-piece New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The album—a "best-of" collection of Portishead's previous works—left fans yearning for more, but Portishead fell off the radar for more than ten years, leaving fans to scratch their heads and wonder what had happened. Speaking to USA Today's Edna Gundersen, Utley said band members were exhausted after their 1998 tour and needed time to rest and rejuvenate their creativity. "It wasn't Spice Girls pressure, but we didn't particularly want to work with each other anymore. It would have been a struggle to make a record at that time. We had to repair ourselves."

While Portishead was on hiatus, Utley played music, wrote songs and helped other musicians with production. Barrow moved to Australia, where he cofounded the independent label Invader, which became known for promoting avant-garde jazz and heavy metal. Gibbons released a folksy, jazz-tinged solo album, 2002's Out of Season, produced with Paul Webb, former bassist for the British rock group Talk Talk. Then one day, Barrow decided he was ready to make more music with Portishead. "I never had any fire in my belly to go and do anything or say anything musically until 2003, 2004," Barrow told Pareles.

Regrouped for Third Effort
By the mid-2000s, members were at work on a new album, but the making of the songs progressed at a snail's pace with the group's perfectionism and ideals dragging it down. In an effort to create something new, the group adopted a strict set of conventions for the album. Utley described the process for Pareles: "For instance, we mustn't use instruments that we've used before. Our trademark sound, once we've got it, we want to destroy it and move on to something else. So we have to become something else, we have to re-emerge as something else all the time but still the same. It's hard."

The album, aptly titled Third, was finally released in 2008 and contained some nuanced differences from the group's first two albums. Many songs had faster tempos and were more beat-driven, but just as brooding as ever. The DJ scratching was absent and the reverb was less intense. Yet Portishead retained its uniqueness, forging ahead with freshly minted sounds—a bike horn or cowbell here, a ukulele there. Tracks included the sparse, ukulele-driven "Deep Water," where Gibbons was backed by a doo-wopping pitch-perfect barbershop chorus. "Small" sounded angelic at the beginning, leading off with the cello before dropping into an abyss of psychedelica. The first single off the album was "Machine Gun," complete with electronic, staccato drums.

Gundersen felt that the album "retains the band's signature creepiness and sorrowful vocals while ditching samples and hip-hop elements in favor of edgy, muscular live instrumentation and threads of tension, dread and panic in the psychedelia, experimental rock and cold electronica." Fans were eager for the album. It entered the Billboard album chart at number seven, making it the first Portishead album to crack the Top Ten in the United States. To promote Third, Portishead toured briefly in Europe, then returned to the United States, performing at California's 2008 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival.

This time around, Portishead decided it would not tour extensively to promote the album. "To do a massive tour at the moment would be a folly, I think," Utley told MTV's Chris Harris, noting that if the group went on tour, members would not want to see each other again for a long time. Instead of touring, Utley promised fans that they would not have to wait so long for another Portishead album. "It won't be another 10 years," he said, "I swear."

Selected discography
Dummy, Go! Beat/London Records, 1994.
Portishead, Go! Beat/London Records, 1997.
Live: Roseland NYC, Island Records, 1998.
Third, Island Records, 2008.

Sources
Periodicals
Billboard, October 8, 1994, p. 1.
Guitar Player, May 1995, p. 22.
New York Times, April 13, 2008, p. AR27.
People, October 20, 1997, pp. 29-30.
Rocket, December 3, 1997.
Rolling Stone, February 23, 1995, p. 38; March 9, 1995, p. 66; October 15, 1997.
Time, October 20, 1997, p. 117.
USA Today, July 1, 2008, p. 7D.
Village Voice, December 6, 1994; April 15, 2008.

Online
"Portishead Ready to Unveil Third, Promise Fourth LP Won't Take A Decade To Make," MTV.com, http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1584404/20080328/portishead.jhtml (November 8, 2008).

• Genres: Rock

Biography

Portishead may not have invented trip-hop, but they were among the first to popularize it, particularly in America. Taking their cue from the slow, elastic beats that dominated Massive Attack's Blue Lines and adding elements of cool jazz, acid house, and soundtrack music, Portishead created an atmospheric, alluringly dark sound. The group wasn't as avant-garde as Tricky, nor as tied to dance traditions as Massive Attack; instead, it wrote evocative pseudo-cabaret pop songs that subverted their conventional structures with experimental productions and rhythms of trip-hop. As a result, Portishead appealed to a broad audience -- not just electronic dance and alternative rock fans, but thirtysomethings who found techno, trip-hop, and dance as exotic as worldbeat. Before Portishead released their debut album, Dummy, in 1994, trip-hop's broad appeal wasn't apparent, but the record became an unexpected success in Britain, topping most year-end critics polls and earning the prestigious Mercury Music Prize; in America, it also became an underground hit, selling over 150,000 copies before the group toured the U.S. Following the success of Dummy, legions of imitators appeared over the next two years, but Portishead remained quiet as they worked on their second album.

Named after the West Coast shipping town where Geoff Barrow grew up, Portishead formed in Bristol, England, in 1991. Prior to the group's formation, Barrow had worked as a tape operator at the Coach House studio, where he met Massive Attack. Through that group, he began working with Tricky, producing the rapper's track for a Sickle Cell charity album. Barrow also wrote songs for Neneh Cherry's Homebrew, though only "Somedays" appeared on the record. Around the time of Portishead's formation, he had begun to earn a reputation as a remix producer, working on tracks by Primal Scream, Paul Weller, Gabrielle, and Depeche Mode. Barrow met Beth Gibbons, who had been singing in pubs, in 1991 on a job scheme. Over the next few years, the pair began writing music, often with jazz guitarist Adrian Utley, who had previously played with both Big John Patton and the Jazz Messengers.

Before releasing a recording, Portishead completed the short film To Kill a Dead Man, an homage to '60s spy movies. Barrow and Gibbons acted in the noirish film and provided the soundtrack, which earned the attention of Go! Records. By the fall, Portishead had signed with Go! and their debut album, Dummy, was released shortly afterward. Dummy was recorded with engineer Dave MacDonald, who played drums and drum machines, and guitarist Utley, who rounded out Portishead's lineup.

Both Barrow and Gibbons were media-shy -- the vocalist refused to participate in any interviews -- which meant that the album received little attention outside of the weekly U.K. music press, which praised the album and its two singles, "Numb" and "Sour Times," heavily. Soon, Go! and Portishead had developed a clever marketing strategy based on the group's atmospheric videos that began to attract attention. Melody Maker, Mixmag, and The Face named Dummy as 1994's album of the year, and early in 1995, "Glory Box" debuted at number 13 without any radio play. Around the same time, "Sour Times" entered regular rotation on MTV in America. Within a few weeks, Dummy and "Sour Times" were alternative rock hits in the U.S. Back in the U.K., the album had crossed over into the mainstream, becoming a fixture in the British Top 40. In July, the record won the Mercury Music Prize for Album of the Year, beating highly touted competition from Blur, Suede, Oasis, and Pulp.

Following the Mercury Music Prize award, Barrow retreated to Coach House to begin work on Portishead's second album. The self-titled record finally appeared in September 1997. The live PNYC followed late the next year. The self-titled record finally appeared in September 1997. Portishead went on hiatus starting in 1999, and Barrow, Utley and Gibbons worked on their own projects. In 2001, Barrow formed Invada Records, an experimental label that included Koolism on its roster. Barrow and Utley also recorded a cover of the instrumental rock classic "Apache" as the Jimi Entley Sound that was released as a limited edition 7" single in 2002. The pair also worked as producers, with Barrow working under the moniker Fuzzface on Stephanie McKay's McKay album in 2003, and Barrow and Utley co-produced the Coral's 2005 album The Invisible Invasion. Gibbons collaborated with Rustin' Man, a.k.a. former Talk Talk member Paul Webb on the 2003 album Out of Season (Gibbons had also appeared on a few tracks by Webb's previous project, ORang).

Portishead reconvened in 2005, performing their first live dates in seven years, including an appearance at the Tsunami Benefit Concert in Bristol, and recording material for their next album. Their version of "Un Jour Comme un Autre (Requiem for Anna)" appeared on 2006's Serge Gainsbourg tribute Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisted, and in 2007 the band curated the Nightmare Before Christmas All Tomorrow's Parties festival. In 2008, a decade after their last album, Portishead returned with Third, the trio's most challenging, unpredictable work yet. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi

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