Articles

Portishead - Sweet & Sour

CMJ NEW MUSIC MONTHLY, NOVEMBER 1997

Stranger things than Portishead had happened in the history of pop, but not for a long while. A mysterious group with ties to the Bristol scene that spawned Massive Attack and Tricky came out of nowhere--or, rather, a small town in Southwest England--and saw its debut record go gold. Behind the surface catchiness of "Glory Box" and "Sour Times" some genuinely dark things were going on.

Mixing film noir with funk and dance music is pretty subversive for the pop charts, and Elizabeth Gibbon's lyrics were certainly not of the moon-in-June variety. Most good pop records will wake you up if they come on the radio right at the moment when you're falling asleep. Not so with this band: Portishead's Dummy was a hit record that sounded in places like an invitation to a nightmare.

After all, rarely does something as dark as "Sour Times" stand a chance of going anywhere on the charts - performed live, in its darker and more unrestrained setting, the hook really does consist largely of just Gibbons moaning "Nobody loves me, it's true," over and over again. Something very painful from very deep within is being brought out into the light.

With its second album, simply called Portishead, on the way, the group rolled into New York this summer for a round of interviews and a live video taping. Portishead has only been around for a couple of years, but it already has all the trappings of a full fledged rock 'n' roll legend, including a live orchestra performing with it in concert, a four-figure hotel-bar tab and a reclusive singer who won't do interviews. The ambiance surrounding the Portishead machine was distinctly like that of groups ten times its size. No, we can't mail your passes to you, you have to go to such-and-such an address the day of the show, and maybe there'll be an envelope there with your name on it. No, that laminate isn't good for this door, but it gets you into the secret after-after party at a club across town. It was a lot of fun watching the machine run.

For a group that surrounds itself with such mystique, Portishead's history has already taken on a codified, canonical version. To wit: Main sonic mastermind Geoff Barrow worked in Bristol studios with Massive Attack in the late '80s ("I was a fucking tea boy," Barrow scoffs, swirling his index finger like he's stirring in sugar). Given some studio time and the opportunity to score music for an underground film project, he jumped at the chance, naming his group after a small town outside of Bristol. He auditioned over a dozen singers before he discovered Gibbons singing Janis Joplin cover in a bar band.

The myth that best describes Barrow's story is that of the sorcerer's apprentice who quietly hones his skills in secret until he suddenly rises to overtake his master. Even as he was spooling tape for Massive Attack, answering the phone and making tea, Barrow was watching and listening, absorbing and learning, waiting to make his move. There were no rejected Portishead demos, no years slogging away in clubs. And now that everyone wants a silver of what he does, Barrow seems, on the outside at least, to be relishing the attention. He didn't sell his soul for his success, but a great deal of thought and planning went into it. The guy is thorough, whether he's shaping the sound of a hi-hat cymbal to achieve just the right texture, or putting the pieces of his group together to blend business and music in the right combinations.

But it isn't always easy being an audio alchemist, as Barrow reveals when it's time to talk about Portishead. "It's a weird one for me, it's still really early to comment on it," he shrugs. "I feel like we just sat down and mixed it. To be quite honest, it's like it's a bit of an odd one, because we mixed the last track on a Sunday, we cut the album on a Monday, so in a way it's like I haven't left that cutting room yet, you know what I mean? I'm still kind of like, 'Right, right'" and he leans back like he's listening at a mixing console."You know, still thinking I can muck about with stuff. I've got to understand it's gone. I can't even bring myself to listen to it, you know what I mean?"

Unsurprisingly, Barrow suffered from all the critical and record company pressure for a follow-up. "You get into vibe. I went through a 13-month complete head fuck on this record. I just couldn't do anything. I blocked for 13 months. That's why it took so long to come out."

What happened? "Everything," Barrow murmurs. "A complete and utter panic. I tried to over-analyze. The first record, it was forming for a long, long time. 'You ain't got nothing to prove. You're just doing it for the music, for the joy of being able to do it.' This one, it was literally a case of all the pressure went to me head and it was gone." For emphasis, he makes a fluttering hand gesture to indicate that might be a warbly theremin sample, or an atmospheric bass line exiting his head and floating away.

"We finished, you know, touring and promoting the last album two years ago. From that point until last month, I was in the studio every day, except the weekends. I was convincing myself that everything sounded great, or would eventually come out great, but it never happened. And it was up to the rest of the band to give me a good kicking, and say, 'Let's just forget about all that industry bollocks and let's just write a record. If people like it, good.' I don't know why the first one sold what it did, so why should I worry about this one?"

The new album sounds, well, even more like Portishead than the debut. The early tracks we heard are largely similar to Dummy's soundscapes, but longer, bigger, deeper, less claustrophobic, more vivid. Parts of them sound truly haunted. To reverse the old saw, there's even more there there. "In the beginning, I was influenced by other people, sounds and things that were going on around England," Barrow relates. "I feel kind of conscious about it. I worry a little too much about being a combination of your influences. You know, the grocery list of 'this has got that in in, that, that, and that.' But we always wanted to create something through the middle of that as well as influences. There's a vibe going on, and that's purely what it's about. Me and Ade [Portishead multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Adrian Utley] are able to go into our own studio, and I'll play drums or something and Ade will play bass, or guitar or something. We'd all jam about and we'd get there, and this album is pretty much what we sound like playing tunes, in a room, you know."

Although Utley still remains in the shadows, it seems that he played a larger role in shaping the second Portishead record. Utley was the one who manipulated the theremin that gave "Mysterons" on Dummy its distinctive sci-fi feel, and it was his touch on the Hammond organ that made "Glory Box" shimmer. "A lot of the stuff on the first album, and everything on the new album, was co-written with Ade," Barrow acknowledges. "Basically, we're a band now. We're four pieces of band," he quips. "Beth, me, Dave the engineer, and Ade."

As he lists the group's members, Barrow brings up another significant leap into the future that Portishead helped pioneer: It's one of the first major groups to incorporate its engineer as an equal member, giving him an equal share of the group's earnings. Dave MacDonald also owned the studio where much of the group's debut album was recorded. It's an up-front acknowledgment that how Portishead sounds is just as important as what it is.

"Dave, he's a live engineer, a studio engineer, he can do all that," Barrow relates. "You get into a situation where you haven't even got to nod at people, you just know what's gonna be next. If Dave is there running the vocal through this, that and the other, it's still part of the chain. He's been with me for six, seven years--a massive element within the sound. Ade, you could say the same thing. He's studied jazz guitar for, like, 15 years. He's a serious producer of music in his own right." Like R.E.M., things are so creative around the studios and Portishead's sound is so seamless that it's doubtful whether anyone will really know each of the silent members' roles and exact contributions until one of them leaves to go solo.

Barrow described the arduous process of arriving at a finished track. "You keep chucking away, recording, and chucking away, recording, and you get to the point where it hasn't got any crisp around the edges, and it could be noise, crusty, it could be spinning out in whatever direction, but the basic element of it is something pure, something that you're proud of, yourself. You're trying to get something out that is not just a copy of someone else's material. And as soon as Beth sings on it, then it's another whole element entirely."

So why isn't Beth here right now? The day before the interview, CMJ New Music Monthly had been given a rather cryptic missive from the band's publicists, to the effect that Gibbons would agree to be photographed, but not interviewed, while Barrow would be interviewed but not photographed. What's up with that? Barrow leans back, as if he's been asked that question before. "Because we want her to sing on the next one, right, mate? It's a weird one, that, because me and her, we're the ones who signed on the dotted line with the record company. You know, we're the ones who did the press on the first one. I'll tell you this, you don't want to go there, mate. The industry is a monster, it's a nasty fucking beast... We're in it purely for that bit of vinyl. And what sounds came out of that vinyl. And if people want to talk to us, informing people of what we feel once we wrote that piece of vinyl, well, all right, I'll do it. Anything else outside of that is bollocks. We might have this thing with the photos, like, I don't want to do this photo shoot or whatever, with a $5,000 stylist and a sweater that's not mine and all that. If it means we don't sell 100,000 copies, then we don't sell 100,000 copies. Then we can go away and do some more music. We want her to keep making records, mate."

Portishead's presence in the charts is significant, and not just because it's the flagship trip-hop band. Other bands were earlier (notably Massive Attack) and some, such as Tricky, have equaled or even surpassed its success and visibility in the years since Dummy. But Portishead opened up the door and walked right through; it helped liberate '90s music from the hegemony of the rock guitar, and opened up the charts to new sonic potential. Trip-hop, schmip-hop: Portishead is the sound of what comes after the sampler and turntable become full-fledged musical instruments, the new world where people's record collections become the music that becomes part of someone else's record collection.

Barrow is struck by that idea. After politely revealing a tip on the origins of a particularly murky and atmospheric sample behind a Portishead remix ("I did that for 500 quid, something off a Gong record, I believe"), he warms to the idea of Portishead as more than just a band, but as a powerful sonic force. "Yeah, I'm really starting to see where this should go, what this record should have been," he says. "Not in a bad way, mind you, but it's like I'm still in there mucking about, you know? But after this record, I know where I'm going. I know where it needs to go."

James Lien

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Dummy

Portishead (album)

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Portishead - Sweet & Sour