Articles

Portishead, as Live As They'll Ever Get

Source: Newsday, April 28,1995, pp B23.

Portishead, as Live As They'll Ever Get

It's easy to find dance music that appeals to happy feet, but gloomy gams have had a harder time of it - until Portishead, that is. The British ambient-dance-cum-lounge-pop band, which headlines the Supper Club Sunday night, has pioneered an electro-torch sound that skirts genres as varied as "spaghetti Western" film scores, '80s new wave and modern hip-hop. On the band's achingly beautiful debut, "Dummy" (London), musical architect Geoff Barrow and singer-lyricist Beth Gibbons beckon listeners into a landscape that's at once surreal and poignant.

"The last thing we wanted to do was just throw together a selection of beats," says Barrow, a drummer who became a producer and has worked with artists as different as Depeche Mode and the hip-hop horrorists Gravediggaz. "What's important about music as an art form is the emotion that can be drawn from it," he ventures. "I think a lot of people working in dance music have sacrificed emotion in favor of technology."

Thanks in large part to Gibbons' downbeat but crystalline vocals, melancholy and regret are the emotions most in evidence on songs like the left-field hit "Sour Times (Nobody Loves Me)" and the "Cabaret"-styled "Wandering Star." Beneath her quavering soprano, Barrow scatters samples like old War albums and the "Mission: Impossible" theme. While not necessarily textbook psychedelia, the whole is sufficiently mood-altering to have earned the label "trip-hop."

Barrow admits the members of Portishead - both confirmed studio rats - don't particularly relish the notion of live performance: "It's not the most creative thing one can do," he says. "In fact, it can be quite deadening, since we're such control freaks that we have to get everything right every time."

Rather than rely on the computers many dance acts employ to insure precise concert consistency, Portishead (the name comes from the blue-collar English coastal town where Barrow spent his youth) tours with a full band. "When I think of the words `live performance,' I take them literally," he says. "We've put together a proper band, no samplers or sequencers . . . I do a bit of scratching on top, but that's as techno as it gets."

In lieu of a traditional opening act, Portishead will set the mood for its performance in appropriately control-freak fashion: A touring disc jockey will spin records, after which the band will screen its self-produced film, "To Kill a Dead Man." Barrow says, "If you're going to offer an evening out, it should be what I call a round one, one that comes together completely. I feel confident we can do that anytime we have control of the situation."

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Portishead, as Live As They'll Ever Get