Portishead

PORTISHEAD

Back from the hinterland of an eleven year hiatus, Portishead gear up to release the aptly titled Third album; just don’t call it trip hop.

The nineties nostalgia capsule may be filled with rollerblades, Vanilla Ice and more about Jennifer Aniston’s hair than anybody ever wanted to know, but it also gave us musical sustenance (and pigeon-holing terminology) with grunge, drum & bass, brit-pop, and trip hop. The latter was one of those sleight of hand moments in music journalism that sought to define a style of emerging music but generally looked upon by the artists unfavourably.

Portishead were the very embodiment of the sound; brooding, abstract rhythms paired with sloppy hip hop beats that was cool enough for beat heads to dig but accessible enough for civilians to get. Their debut album Dummy was a huge success in Europe, broke the US market, notching up over 150,000 sales before they had even toured and earned the group of Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons and Adrian Utley the 1995 Mercury Music Award at home in Britain.
Guitarist and collector of strange instruments, Utley was surprised at their States-side acceptance, considering the musical climate there was all about Guns’n’Roses and r’n’b.
Sitting with Utley in a West London members club talking about those days and the soon to be released album Third, it becomes clear that though the hard lines of touring may be etched on his face, he still holds an indefatigable fervor and love for music. He is talking me through the early days of the group and when we touch upon the cinematic influences of their music he’s off on a rambling discourse of spy soundtracks and sampling.
“I particularly absolutely love watching films and spend a lot of my spare time watching them,” enthuses Adrian. “Geoff has always been into them as well but he actually started sampling them very early on in his music. He would sample something and I would tell him we could actually play it instead. So for that first short film that we made (the ten minute espionage caper that both Utley and Barrow now say is rubbish), we also made all the music for it too; it was purely instrumental film music. For most film composers, if it’s a movie like The Ipcress File, then it would encourage the composer to be much more experimental than if it was a more mainstream movie. So when we make music we approach it from this very experimental film score mentality.”
Utley continues at length on John Barry, the score composer of the Ipcress file who also worked on some Bond films, saying he was much more creative with his scoring on the former film, using a raft of weird and bizarre instruments, something he shares in common with him. His then-wife taped such a program on musical instruments one day which featured the theremin and Utley set about trying to emulate the sound on his synthesizer the very next day, eventually using it on ‘Mysterons’ to such effect many thought it really was a theremin.
Adrian Utley first met Geoff Barrow a year before the release of Dummy. Utley was working at Coach House Studios in Bristol, which had just evolved into a professional studio and had garnered a firm reputation from Massive Attack having recorded Blue Lines there. In there to record with his band he was in at the time, Utley met a young Barrow, who had been working in the studio with Massive Attack on their album.
“You could technically say he was working in the studio but really he was their gopher” corrects Utley. “He was making cups of tea and getting sandwiches for the guys, which is a bit of a shit job. But he had his sampler in there and we got to talking about hip hop, which I was really into since discovering Public Enemy. He’d been into it since he was a kid so we bonded over that.”
Not long after Utley invited Barrow to a studio to work with him on some tracks and that lead to Barrow asking Utley to work on the production of Dummy. Meeting Beth Gibbons at this time, Utley says he discovered they all carried their own influences and vastly different worlds of ideas, which they shared with each other.
“When the three of us came together we all had very different influences and ideas that we had picked up from hearing different music and seeing different films and so that really created the Portishead sound; all of us firing off of each other’s ideas.”
The break out album scored with fans and critics on the back of singles like ‘Sour Times’ and ‘Glory Box’, Gibbons’ voice wrought with despair and bleak emotion but in perfect sync with the maudlin beats and lush arrangements of Barrow and Utley. The band toured extensively and as their popularity grew, so did that of the incongruous new genre trip hop, which was proving more and more frustrating for the band. Scores of bands were imitating their sound, cobbling together spooky synth lines and two-bit beats, but after a Range Rover commercial came out in Britain with a blatant rip off of the Portishead sound, they realized their music was dangerously close to commercial saturation. It caused a minor freak out and had Barrow and Utley imposing ridiculous restrictions on themselves for their second album; no Fader Rhodes piano, no guitar, no strings, no sampling! So although the self titled second album still carries that film score feel to it, this time it was created from scratch.
Utley simply describes the making of the second album as “hell”, though the blood sweat and tears paid off with ongoing success and more tour dates, including a night at New York’s Roseland Ballroom with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra providing a 35 seat backing for the group. Outwardly things were going swimmingly for the band, but on the inside it was a different story.
“We came off our tour from ‘97/’98 after the orchestral thing and headlining these huge festivals when we’d only ever wanted to play small shows,’ confides Utley. “It was furiously difficult to do. Our lives had come unraveled a bit around that time. Both Geoff and I had gotten divorced and our home life had disintegrated into dust. It was just shitty and we came back from this tour as grim as… grimness.”
In need of a long overdue break it was decided by the band that they would concentrate on their own lives for a while, take some time out and wind down from the pressures of drawing out their success.
Geoff went to Australia whilst Adrian threw himself into other work, composing film soundtracks. He joined Geoff for a while helping him out on an album for Sydney based hip hop outfit Katalyst before going back to England to work with Beth on her solo album. Although these years produced no Portishead material and have been seen as their own sour times, the band’s hiatus was over ever meant to be some breathing space until they started work on album number three. The first tracks were toyed with as early as 2001 when Barrow and Utley sketched out a two tracks in a Sydney studio. Geoff had also worked on a couple of things on his own around this time, but it would take another six years before the album would be worked on seriously. Beth’s 2002 solo album, Out of Season, recorded with former Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb received excellent reviews but failed to garner the same sort of attention lavished upon Portishead.
After assisting on her tour, Utley joined Barrow in producing The Invisible Invasion album by folkie-rockers The Coral and it was this studio time and working to deadlines that finally set the wheels in motion for the third Portishead album. “It still took us three fucking years after that to make it though,” quips Utley.
Back together again working on their music, it was like before; each member bringing in a wealth of ideas and discoveries to share with the others.
“We had all been out there finding new things, so we reported back on what we’d found and spent a lot of time playing each other new music. Geoff brought in this fantastic record called Reedy River and we used to play it endlessly and that was a massive inspiration for the song ‘Hunter’, although it doesn’t sound like it. And I had heard that Silver Apples record from the sixties. They were an early electronic band who only used oscillators and they made this totally insane record with the drummer having thousands of toms all tuned and making pitch and then this bloke playing this mad bass-line on two oscillators with telephone switches. It’s really fantastic music, and they were a big influence on another of the new tracks.”
This is Utley in music geek free-flowing stream of consciousness. He talks further on his other musical discoveries and how he used to be solely dedicated to jazz, before realizing he’d never be as good as Coltrane or Davis. He did however play with a number of reputed Blue Note musicians, and regards his discovery of hip hop as the pivotal moment he gave up jazz. It was, he said, “like discovering reggae in the late seventies. It was some of the most futuristic, forward thinking music of it’s time, and still sounds just as relevant today.”
This patchwork of influence sculpted two highly polished albums for Portishead in the late nineties, but with so much time gone by, recording methods changed, and the very nature of the industry ever evolving it is only natural that band have somehow changed from what we knew. Listening to briefly-lent, highly secure copy of the album only twice before this interview, there were understandably many familiar elements present, though I noted that even though the trip hop label may lazily still be associated with the band it couldn’t fairly be placed upon this album. Some songs venture into folk whilst others possess a psychedelic edge; others seem more programmed than any other Portishead material I’ve heard before.
“A lot has changed since we last made a Portishead album. There are new styles of music and many different ways to make it too. We’re much more computer based now of course with how we record everything but when we started out we were using an Atari computer and an S1000 sampler. Pro Tools wasn’t the accomplished program that it is now. We actually recorded on to tape too and then spliced bits of it to resample ourselves.”
This mention of the anachronistic analogue medium sets Utley off again into a wandering ramble about the pleasures of making a real mix-tape and how with the medium all but buried, the art of wooing a girl or impressing a friend just isn’t the same. He also admits he is exactly the sort of person he hates, “I’ll hear a tune on a radio show and go on to iTunes and buy it. I’d hate for people to do that with our album, but fuck it’s just so convenient. I really don’t like downloading for free though. People go on about how it’s power to the people and revolutionary but it’s not. It just means we (musicians) can’t afford to pay our bills.”
Cassettes aren’t much part of the modern music industry lexicon these days and with more and more music heading into the digital realm to be downloaded and digested by the denizens of cyberspace, bands are realizing that the physical market of CD’s and vinyl are fast becoming obsolete themselves. But rather than head off into the realms of self promotion via the internet themselves, Portishead remain under the care of Island records by way of their original label Go! Beat.
Their return will be properly marked by the album release towards the end of April, but it was a show at the end of last year at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival that saw them reunited on stage for the first time in nearly ten years and at the beginning of 2008 they announced a string of European dates. They will also play a headline spot at this year’s Coachella festival, which will coincide with the album release.
“It’s exciting to be getting out there again,” Adrian tells me. “Even though the attention and ultimately success of the drawing big crowds was something we didn’t enjoy so much the last time around, I think we’re at a different point with our music now, and we’re also aware of what it will be like to that extent.”
So you’re not worried about the trip hop label coming out again?
“You know I hated the trip hop label. It was ridiculous because we never really considered ourselves even as sounding that much like the other Bristol bands. So many people tried to copy what they thought was a trip hop sound but they still sounded weak and diluted. The upside about imitation and influence is that it will lead you to the real thing. If there’s someone out there reading this who didn’t get into our music the first time around and then go on to track down bands like Silver Apples or Can or Ohm or Earth or any of the bands that we’re really in to it leads you back to the source. That’s the funny thing about influence though is that it doesn’t always show through your own music so transparently. If I was to list some of the bands we were really into when we first came out or even stuff that we’re listening to today, you’d never be able to pick that by listening to us.”