Articles

Great depression REVIEW

Brixton Academy
The Daily Telegraph November 28, 1997

THEIR debut album, Dummy, won the Mercury Prize a couple of years ago, thanks to its ground-breaking fusion of hip-hop rhythms and ethereal vocals. Before long, dinner parties were being conducted to the sound of Beth Gibbons's anguished wailings and whimperings, against a backdrop of spooky beats, weird noises and what sounded like samples from outer space. Almost overnight, Portishead (named after the Bristol Channel home town of the band's founder and resident clever-clogs, Geoff Barrow) had become deeply trendy.

If there were an award for miserableness, Portishead would walk away with that, too. For all the invention and newness of their music - sometimes they sound like nothing you've ever heard before - they make distinctly uneasy listening. This is especially true live (you can't turn them down or put something more cheerful on) and the London leg of their UK tour was one of the most enervating concerts I can remember.

This is not to suggest that Portishead should have added Happy Talk or The Sun Has Got His Hat On to their repertoire; clearly, their mission here was to explore the darker things in life. With songs such as Over and Undenied, which speak eloquently of anguish and alienation, they did just that.

Nevertheless, after half an hour or so I was yearning for emotional variety - a little warmth, a smidgen of hopefulness.

Not a bit of it. The astringency and sense of isolation evoked by these near-static performers was so relentless that in the end I switched off. On the new album (called simply Portishead ) Gibbons's voice may cover an even greater tonal range than before, but what she actually sings about is more or less the same thing, over and over: obsession, loneliness, self-loathing.

Even so, it was performed here with admirable diligence, economy and restraint, with some particularly snappy drumming, and illuminated by lights and effects which matched the music to perfection. One neat trick involved projecting an oscilloscope reading of Gibbons's voice on to the backdrop.

But instrumental virtuosity and technical trickery could not disguise the awful emptiness at the heart of this show, and after an hour and a half of bleak soundscapes it came as a huge relief when a second encore failed to materialise.

DAVID CHEAL

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Great depression REVIEW