Portishead: Don't Call it a Comeback

Unleashing a new record and refining its musical approach, the British trip-hop outfit that beat out Oasis for the coveted Mercury Prize in 1995 breaks more than a decade of silence, weaving its hypnotic grooves for 21st-century music fans. Looks like the soundtrack to existential dread has hit its sour stride once again.

December 4, 2007

It’s Tuesday afternoon at the Bath Pavilion, a multi-purpose venue in England’s scenic West Country that served as an aircraft-wing factory during the Second World War, and that has since staged concerts by Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and countless other rock luminaries. In three days time, Portishead will play its first concert in 10 years, headlining the All Tomorrow’s Parties weekender at a seaside holiday camp 70 miles down the road on the Somerset coast. Today is the dress rehearsal. Geoff Barrow—the band’s producer and architect—is twitchy. “Is it too early for a pint?” he asks guitarist Adrian Utley. They “um” and “ahh” before deciding it’s time to head to the bar for a Guinness. Just one, to calm the nerves.

If Barrow and Utley are in search of some liquid courage, it’s not without good reason. Portishead fans are flying in from Europe, the U.S. and South America for the ATP gig. The British press will attend in force. Expectations surrounding the band’s third album, called Third, have reached a fevered pitch. Thirteen years after Portishead’s debut Dummy edged out Oasis’ Definitely Maybe to win the 1995 Mercury Music Prize, Barrow and Utley—together with frontwoman Beth Gibbons—return now to a music scene awash in 1990s nostalgia. Britpop-influenced bands such as Kaiser Chiefs and Arctic Monkeys ride high atop the U.K. charts. The Verve has reunited (again) and Oasis took the #1 spot in Q magazine’s recent 50 Best British Albums readers poll (hitherto reserved for Radiohead’s OK Computer). Portishead always represented the flipside of the Britpop coin, with Dummy defining that other ’90s-U.K.-music phenomenon, trip-hop. If there was ever an opportune time to stage a comeback, the moment is now.

“It’s not a comeback,” corrects Barrow, back from the bar. “We never broke up. It just took a long time to make the new record.” He takes his seat alongside Utley. Together they survey a mildly surreal scene: The main hall of the Pavilion still bears the decorations from the previous weekend’s wedding reception—wilting bouquets of lilies atop plasterwork Doric columns, white fabric drapes hanging from the ceiling. The extended Portishead clan has turned out en masse. Grandparents, aunties and uncles catch up on family gossip. A child chases a dog under tables and around chairs. If it weren’t for the monolithic speaker stacks flanking the stage, you could easily mistake it for a family reunion.

Likewise, Barrow and Utley make for a strange pair. Barrow is skinny, with lank shoulder-length hair that recalls Kurt Cobain. He wears battered jeans and a long-loved T-shirt, once black, now a washed-out grey. He’s quick to laugh and talks in a robust West Country accent, elongating his “A”s, dwelling on his “R”s and pronouncing the word “brilliant” as “bree-yant.” By contrast, Utley is beefy and prone to introspective pauses. Before long, Beth Gibbons arrives. She is round-shouldered and sharp-faced, but with a broad, welcoming smile. She says, “Hello,” and extends a hand, apologizing for her late arrival. Then she sees the tape recorder and hurries off. She doesn’t do interviews.

With all members of the band present, Portishead begins its set, starting with new song “Wicca.” Third is a world away from the familiar trip-hop sounds of “Glory Box,” “Sour Times” and “Mysterons.” The first single is called “Machine Gun” for a reason. Built on repetitive bursts of stabbing synth, it’s typical of Portishead’s tougher, newfound electronic direction. “Silence” is jarring and discordant, with rolling drum patterns, jittery guitar chords and a bassline that stalks through sonic shadows. Gibbons’ voice has never been warm, but here it crackles frozen, the lines “Wounded and afraid / Inside my head / Falling through changes / Did you know what I lost?” covering the song like a layer of hoarfrost. The dread is relieved, if only for a moment, by the folksy “Deep Water,” which is just a mandolin and Gibbons sounding eerily like a six-year-old girl. It’s all bleak and deliberately difficult music that doesn’t so much require a reappraisal of the band as ram one down your throat. Thought you knew Portishead? Think again.

After the run through, Barrow and Utley dissect their performance, huddling with the soundman to discuss technical details. The final analysis? Not bad, considering.

“It was a little bit out of control,” says Utley. “But in a good way. It’s been a long time, you know.”

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.”

As far as the Bristol Academy crowd is concerned, the Portishead gig is an unqualified success. Fans don’t just tolerate the new songs, they embrace them, even if “Sour Times” draws the evening’s biggest cheer. Like the other old songs in the set, it sounds surprisingly fresh, scratches and all. If this were a comeback—and let’s face it, that’s what it is—it would be going swimmingly. But Barrow is not happy. He complains that the sound is like “riding a huge blancmange.” The following day, he sacks the PA company.

Portishead is a band of perfectionists. If something’s not right, they won’t do it. For example, when the BBC recently approached them to record a live session, they weren’t interested in the standard studio set up. They were concerned it wouldn’t suit their music and that they wouldn’t have enough control. They insisted on traveling to Berlin so they could perform in a defunct 1930s radio station. For similar reasons, you won’t see Portishead in many festival lineups.

Barrow talks dismissively of bands who play over full backing tracks at large-scale events—double-tracking whole songs, basically—in order to beef up their sound. “Loads of bands do that,” he says. But faking is not an option for Portishead.

For a long time, Barrow and Utley weren’t happy with their songwriting. So they stopped. In late 2000, early 2001, all three members began to pursue other projects. Barrow set up a record label, Invada. Its roster was, and remains, pointedly non-trip-hop, with Bristolian Sabbath-style riff merchants Gonga, Brooklyn psych band Oneida, and Nottingham shoegaze revivalists Amusement Parks On Fire. Producing the self-titled debut by New York singer Stephanie McKay proved less successful for Barrow in terms of stretching himself creatively. However, it did confirm that he never wanted to make “beat-based soul-hip-hop music” again.

Meanwhile, Gibbons recorded an album of jazz and folk (2002’s Out Of Season) with Paul “Rustin’ Man” Webb, and Utley on guitar. It drew high praise from critics. Mojo magazine, not known for hyperbole, was moved to describe it as “among the best albums ever made.” Gibbons could’ve easily carved a post-Portishead career. Why she chose not to, of course, she won’t say.

In the absence of Gibbons herself, it falls to her bandmates to throw some light on her mindset. Not that they do. “I don’t know what Beth thinks,” says Barrow. Does he know why she doesn’t do interviews? “She did interviews in the early days, but she didn’t like it,” he replies. “I think she was embarrassed.” Utley adds, tantalizingly, but not very helpfully: “She would be fantastically interesting to talk to, but you wouldn’t get much out of her in a short space of time. The stock answer that we always give is that her lyrics speak for her.” You have to go back to 1995 and a Dutch magazine called Oor to find Beth speaking for herself. “I am a very sensitive person, very impulsive and emotional,” she said to a reporter in a tellingly brief interview.

In 2005, Barrow and Utley produced The Coral’s fourth album, The Invisible Invasion. Compared to Portishead, the ’60s-inspired Liverpudlian indie rockers worked at breakneck speed, recording a song the moment they finished writing it, then immediately moving on to the next. “They were so prolific,” Barrow says. “We felt really bad about the fact that we’d been at it for five years and had more or less nothing to show for it.” Deflating perhaps, but ultimately it was a cathartic experience that helped free them of their writer’s block. Shortly afterward, Barrow and Utley started working on new Portishead material again.

“The first thing was not to sound like we used to sound,” explains Utley. “But we didn’t know how we did want to sound. It was finding something that fitted into our world.” They were listening to a lot of German synth music, experimental New York synth duo Silver Apples and also John Carpenter soundtracks. Barrow says that they felt a “new sense of freedom” and that “all the worrying about people’s expectations was out the window.” They went to see gigs by bands “with no commercial aspirations.” According to Utley, there have been times when being in Portishead has been “like wearing massive concrete boots, [but] there was no concrete anymore.”

“It’s pretty simple, really,” Barrow says, in summary. “We became excited about music again.”

March 15, 2008

Barrow and Utley are at The High Road House restaurant in Chiswick, West London. It’s only lunchtime on a full day’s worth of press, and they’re already 90 minutes behind schedule. “I’d forgotten how tiring it all is,” says Utley. He and his partner look worn out. Since the Bristol Academy gig, the Portishead machine has reached overdrive. They’ve traveled across Europe doing promotion, and in a fortnight they embark on a seven-week tour, including an appearance at the Coachella festival, where they have the unenviable task of following Kraftwerk.

In large part, it was touring and playing to large audiences that derailed Portishead 10 years ago. You’d have thought they would have reservations about going on the road again. Back in Bristol in December they said it was very unlikely they would be playing any festivals. But it seems that they’ve come around to the idea. “Why are we doing Coachella?” says Barrow. “Because when it works live, it’s great.”

You sense that Barrow and Utley are starting to enjoy themselves, that perhaps they didn’t realize how much they’d missed all this. Maybe they’re even warming up to the idea of lots of people liking their music.

They’re also already talking about what’s next. Barrow is recording a straight hip-hop record. Utley has some ideas that “don’t involve music.” As for Gibbons, who knows? Portishead’s fourth album is already being discussed. There’s no timeframe yet, but Barrow says it “will be quicker this time,” before adding cautiously, “I hope.”

He tucks his hair behind his ears. “The reason this album took so long,” he says, “It was like playing [the video game] Tomb Raider. You get to the end of a level and there are five doors, and they’re all locked. We couldn’t work out how to open any of them. We had to wait until the hinges rusted and they fell off. But now they have fallen off, and I feel like there are lots of different directions we can take. It feels like we could do anything we want.”