Portishead: Don't Call it a Comeback

December 15, 2007

Eleven days later, Barrow and Utley wait backstage at The Academy in Bristol, a 1600-capacity hanger-like venue located underneath the city’s ice rink. The All Tomorrow’s Parties gig went well, much better than expected, with the band’s new material getting “a better response than the old stuff,” according to Barrow. The mood is buoyant. But tonight is a very different proposition. It’s the band’s hometown and there are many familiar faces present—Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall from Massive Attack, for example. Most of the audience remembers Portishead’s first time around.

Barrow met Gibbons in 1991 on a back-to-work scheme for the longterm unemployed. It was more like a group-therapy session where they sat in a circle and told perfect strangers what they wanted to do with their lives. There was little chemistry between the pair. Barrow was 20 years old, a shy, aspiring electronic producer who still lived at home with his mum. Gibbons was six years older and a regular fixture on the Bristol music scene. They came from different worlds, but each identified the other as a kindred spirit, even if they didn’t have much to say at first.

During a tea break, Gibbons approached Barrow and gave him her number. He sent her a tape of one of his tracks. “It was strange because she sang a proper adult vocal,” Barrow told U.K. dance-music magazine Mixmag in 1997. “Up till then, all I’d got from vocalists was stuff like, ‘Get higher, can you feel the heat?’ or ‘Move to the beat.’ She was singing about Gandhi and stuff like that. It was pretty bizarre.”

A little too bizarre for Barrow. He stuck to his day job, a studio technician helping out on records by Tricky and Massive Attack. But he kept in touch with Gibbons, too. “We were a bit wary of each other, but impressed [at the same time],” Barrow says. With time, the wariness faded. They applied for, and got, a government grant to fund a new band. They named it after the town of Portishead, a seaport 10 miles from Bristol.

Their partnership’s first product was a short film, 1994’s To Kill A Dead Man. Inspired by 1960s spy flicks such as The Third Man, it combined a noir-ish atmosphere and an obtuse, almost nonexistent plot. Independent label Go! Beat signed the pair on the strength of the soundtrack.

Despite the fact that Adrian Utley had worked on To Kill A Dead Man, the record company froze him out (the contract’s language naming only Gibbons and Barrow). That situation has long since changed, but, to this day, it’s not uncommon for interviewers to ignore Utley, not realizing he’s officially in the band. “Of course, it makes me angry,” he says. “But I guess I’m too polite to say anything.” There’s no question that he’s an equal partner, but he admits to lingering “insecurity” about his status.

Dummy was released in 1994. It was that rare thing: a record loved by music critics and the public in equal measure. But it had cultural significance beyond the Mercury Prize win, the #2 U.K. album-chart position and the gold-certified U.S. record sales. The Lalo Schifrin samples, dusty beats and ethereal vocals went well with loft apartments and designer furniture; Portishead was inevitably co-opted as a lifestyle brand. If you attended a hipster dinner party in the mid ’90s, chances are you listened to Dummy in a steady background loop all night long.

“It was annoying,” fumes Barrow. “‘Oh yeah, I love Portishead, it’s so chilled,’” he says, lampooning a certain subset of his band’s fans. “You should listen a bit more because it’s not ‘chilled.’”

Indeed, it’s not. Revisit Dummy today and you’ll find a dark, alienated and, at times, depressing record. Written in the wake of the first Gulf War, Barrow was convinced Armageddon was close at hand. He would sit up watching the news, making himself physically sick in the process. He lived in fear of newsflashes and still does. “SARS,” he says. “I worry about whether I should stock up on [anti-viral drug] Tamiflu. Then I feel guilty for thinking that I’m special and should survive.” You can hear all that existential angst on Dummy.

It’s hard to see how the album became aural wallpaper. Barrow was furious that Portishead’s music had become so trivialized. When Portishead attended the Mercury Prize award ceremony, his intention was to derail proceedings during the acceptance speech. “I wanted to go up there and say ‘it’s all a load of rubbish,’” he says. “But in the end I got too drunk and just ended up saying hello to my mum.”

If Third is a confrontational record, its roots lie in the mainstream success of Dummy. Portishead has been running in the opposite direction ever since. In 1997, the band released its self-titled second album. It was trip-hop, but with none of its predecessor’s warmth and plenty of newfound spikiness. It was a conscious attempt to alienate people. But, in that sense, it was a failure: the album was almost as successful as its predecessor.

The ensuing world tour was not a happy one. Utley remembers a review of a concert they played at the 6,000-capacity Hordern Pavillion in Sydney, Australia. “The journalist said, ‘They look uncomfortable playing to this many people.’ It nailed exactly how we felt. [Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night] is a harsh record. He used to get hell when he played it live. People booed. He said, ‘Hear us out. We’ll play this, then we’ll play some stuff you’ve heard before.’ He got to the end and then he played it all again. Brilliant. That’s what we wanted to be like, not just surface entertainment.”

Barrow chips in: “When you start playing to bigger crowds, there are key points in your set—guitar solos, scratches, vocal parts—when everyone goes, ‘Whoa!’ That sits so uncomfortably with us.” Especially so for Barrow because—as the person manning the turntables and providing the scratches that were an integral part of Dummy—the press frequently described him as a “turntablist.” “I hate scratching with a vengeance,” he says with a grimace. Hence, there is no scratching on Third, although it remains when they play the old songs live.

When the 1997 world tour concluded, Portishead fragmented. So began their lost weekend. Barrow and Utley were both at the soggy end of failed relationships. They hated trip-hop, but couldn’t find a way to move past it. They were drinking too much. Barrow wondered whether he even wanted to make another Portishead album. In 2000, he and Utley decamped to Australia and gave it a half-hearted try, but they “hated everything” they did. They say that there’s an unreleased, half-finished Portishead album lying around somewhere. Material for a future box-set, perhaps. But, as Barrow puts it, “Portishead Mark 1 was over.”