Sour Time is Now
A new album that nearly never happened. A producer obsessed with armageddon. And a singer who can't stop laughing on stage. Welcome back to Portishead.
Beth Gibbons doesn't do interviews. The voice of Portishead, the band's singer, lyricist and siren won't give anything away. And yet she does. Every star-crossed lyric about love twisting into lonliness is another snapshot of the turmoil that - you reckon - must be raging inside her head. So maybe when she's on stage, when she can't hide from out gaze, maybe then we'll see her break down. When she performs 'Roads' and those strings well up like tears and she sings "I got nobody on my side and surely that ain't right, surely that ain't right," maybe then she'll cry. But she doesn't. When Portishead play New York City's Roseland Ballroom, their first gig for two years, with a mini-orchestra pouring sttings like paraffin onto the band's emotional fire, Beth doesn't cry, she smokes cigarettes and laughs.
It's a strangely intimate gig. There's no stage: artist and audience on the same physical level. Geoff Barrow is walking around, smoking, talking ot the musicians while the DJ plays Kool & The Gang's 'Summer Madness'. It's hard to believe that anything will happen until Beth walks out from backstage, perhaps the most underdressed woman in the building. She holds a cigarette, a cup of fresh water and starts to sing, taking a note perfect route through Portishead's old and new material. But she never cries or breaks down. Not once. And then when Portishead finally peak, when - shazam! - the drums and cellos and strings fuse into a sonic tornado designed to make everyone cry, she just laughs like she's like having hysterics. And I don't know why she's laughing, there's nothing really funny going on. Maybe it's got something to do with revenge.
Pop music can be an act of vengeance, a place where the twisted, broken, fucked-up and washed-up can stake their claim in the world if they can express themselves with enough force to make everyone else listen. The world treated you like shit? All your lovers left you? Well look at me now, beams back the popstar, wasn't I special after all?
And that's what happened with Portishead, two quiet, unstarry unknowns cutting a debut LP, 'Dummy', that eventually shifted about two million copies. And yet the whole shebang was born from a DHSS session in South West England when a handful of the long-term unemployed sat in a circle and one by one told the rest of the group what they wanted out of life.
"I'm a producer," explained Geoff Barrow, an awkward kid just out of his teens, living with his mum, locked into music. He hadn't read a book since he was as eight. "I'm a singer," explained Beth Gibbons, late 20s, singing in bands, pubs, working on demos, never getting anywhere but just getting older.
"She approached me," recalls Barrow, "there was a tea-break and she came over and asked 'what kind of stuff do you do?' She gave me her number. I sent her a tape, a backing track and she sang over that. It was strange because she sang a proper adult vocal, a cover version of a song one of her friends had written. It was pretty bizarre because up till then all I'd got from vocalists was stuff like 'get higher,' 'can you feel the heat?' or 'move to the beat.' And she was singing about Gandhi and stuff like that. It was pretty bizarre." In those days Barrow was a junior engineer and studio tea-boy, working on music at home. He even sold a backing track that was used on Neneh Cherry's 'Homebrew' album. Today he's sitting in the living room of the house he's just bought in Bristol where, recently married, he's just settling down. Barrow's embarrassed about owning it and even apologises because it makes him feel guilty.
Not that it's undeserved. The work he put into Portishead with Beth Gibbons and Adrian Utley resulted in a record that's quite rightly been recognised as one of the landmark albums of the decade. In many ways 'Dummy' achieved what Oasis dream of: to write the great songs of their age, tracks that could last for decades and music that fixes itself deep inside its audience and never lets go. None of this was obvious when they first met.
"We kept in touch," recalls Barrow, "but we were both unsure about each other. I think she wanted to be in this real musician scenario, which was all she'd ever known. So meeting me, this guy with a couple of boxes making funny noises, was pretty strange for her. And to come in and sing songs, her songs that she wrote over the top, I had no control over her ... I think we were both a bit wary of each other but impressed with each other."
But surely some kind of relationship must have developed as the demos became songs and the songs led to a record deal with Go Beat and the first tapes sent out to the radio and media fired an instant and unstoppable process that shot Portishead to the very heart of the music industry?
"Not really," muses Barrow, "I don't think we particularly got on. She was completely different to me. We're still opposites and it was only after 'Dummy' was released when we had a train journey together to do some press and meetings that we actually talked, properly, for the first time."
It's hard to imagine two people working closely together, creating songs like 'Numb' and 'Glory Box' that explore the most fragile and intense emotional states and not talking about stuff.
"But we had nothing particularly in common," insists Barrow, "and we wouldn't really talk. I had mates and they're all really young friends and we all seemed young to her, do you know what I mean? And to us, she seemed... well, hippyish and we kind of didn't know where she was coming from. We were friendly but didn't really know anything about each other. And when we were in the studio it was all purely about the music. We just worked and got on with it. We didn't bring anything into the studio, no drugs, no beer, nothing. Do you know what I mean? It wasn't anything personal. We just talked about music. It sounds a bit cold but it was true."
Whatever secrets burn in Beth Gibbons' heart are going to stay that way: just secrets. No one's going to tell you where she's coming from. Even Geoff doesn't know what she's singing about and, anyway, he doesn't listen to her words, he insists, just the tones and shape of her voice.
There are other mysteries about Beth. Why, for example, in the video for 'Glory Box', a song that always sounded like it was written for a transvestite, does she dress up as a man, flirt with other women dressed as men and re-enact scenes from the 1950s Dirk Bogarde movie The Verdict, the first film ever made in the UK to openly address the homosexual experience? Whose idea was it for her to drag up (and instantly gain a cult lesbian following) in that video?
"I don't know," answers Geoff. "It's not that I'm not telling you. I just don't know."
But in a strange way Geoff and Beth must have been compatible, her intense lyrics somehow fuse perfectly with his heavy-gated, funereal breakbeats and graveside atmospherics. And that's just the slow parts of Portishead. Despite the band's coffee-table reputation ('Dummy', sneer the cynics, was the album without which no dinner party or hairdressing salon was complete during 1994) there's something completely hardcore about Portishead something about just how far Beth pushes her lyrics or the times where she doesn't sing sweetly. Because she doesn't always have the cracked tones of the victim. There are times when she sings with a cruelty and sadism almost unknown in popular music, most famously on the intro to 'Glory Box' where she sounds like a nightmare creature snarling over the static And Geoff responds with treacle- ambience, clanging dissonance and breakbeats dike a cleaver slamming into a butcher's block. So surely hip hop head Barrow must've been dark before he met Beth?
"Yes," he confirms. "I can't stand the light stuff. I can't stand it. I'm not into it. In a sense all the hip hop I liked was very, very dark hip hop. And when I was sampling I was always looking for something that had a strange emotional content to it, something that sparks some kind of emotion or theme or atmosphere. That's always my problem when we're working. I always think it's not enough. It's not dark enough. It's not emotionally hooked enough. But if I can get some emotion musically before Beth begins to write and sing over the tracks then there's something for her to hook into. A thread she can follow. We're looking for something that is quite emotionally powerful. And I don't want to take anyone down when they listen to our music but I just don't think there's an awful lot of music out there that does it to people. And people can handle emotion."
Whatever inspired Beth remains a mystery, although there are hints in the lyrics. Geoff isn't quite so guarded. If he's a dark producer then perhaps it's got something to do with his long-standing conviction that the world is going to end. Up until quite recently he actually believed that a nuclear apocalpyse was imminent and we'd all fry in the blast.
"I used to have loads of dreams about the end of the world. I never died in them, I always used to wake up. I remember watching Threads, this film about what happened if they dropped a 10-megaton missile on Sheffield. We were made to watch it at school for some reason. And that set me off. And also remember, at that time, Frankie Goes to Hollywood were charting with 'Two Tribes' and it was like a weird time, a very weird time. It was very unreal. A lot of my other mates didn't think about it but for some reason it made a dent in my head."
And you really believed that the world would end?
"Absolutely. And I still believe that. I think there's certain kind of process when we've pretty much shagged everything on this planet so maybe something will turn around and say look, you've had your time, it's time to destroy you before you destroy this planet. And I'm not being funny but eight years ago I had this eight year plan based around the idea we wouldn't last much longer. I didn't think we'd survive this long, so I kind of planned all this. I really believed if I actually got a job it would all be over. So I just put all work into making tracks, into the equipment and I just kept on going. I just had to keep on going."
And he'd sit there, at home, locked into his computer with the headphones on, producing up to ten tracks a day, living with his mum, signing on and waiting without knowing it, for Beth Gibbons. And inside his head he must've been as twisted or lost as the states her lyrics explore. "I remember the Gulf War," recalls Geoff, "I had a kind of complete freak out. I was staying up all night watching TV, I had to watch TV. I ended up watching the news all night, waiting for the world to end, working on music, unemployed and basically I kind of just made myself ill. I started getting mad anxiety attacks, my brain was working overtime. In the end I literally had to watch Ceefax all the time, I had to check it before I could even go to sleep."
But success takes the pain away, doesn't it? One million-selling album later, everything should be fine... only it wasn't. The follow-up to 'Dummy', titled 'Portishead' was supposed to be finished by the end of '95; instead it was only completed this Spring, taking over two years to complete instead of the intended few months.
"I never knew why we sold so many records first time round," says Geoff, "I never expected it to happen. And when we went back in the studio to make the second record I didn't know what I was doing. I couldn't find a thing. I had no particular ideas. I had nothing I was happy with. And the other guys were hanging around and getting really pissed off and Beth was getting pissed off So we went off to a residential studio waiting for this big click to happen, thinking it will be alright in a minute, we'll get there. But it didn't happen."
For a while he reckons it felt as if the whole thing was finished. That they'd never complete another record. Game over.
"The others had to kick me up the arse you know. Everyone was desperately unhappy and we sat down and aired our views. And I said I don't know what the hell's going on. And they were saying we've got some good stuff here but I couldn't agree. Maybe it's this thing people say that once you've had a successful record you lose your fight, you lose your hunger, you lose your naivety. You start to think this is an album that people are waiting for."
Somehow they finished 11 new songs and a second LP. Geoff thanks the experience of Portishead's Adrian Utley, an older musician, a veteran of sessions and endless bands who helped him tough it out and turn half finished scraps into finished pieces. Not vastly different from their debut, the new LP offers another set of songs that deal with extreme emotional states. Some songs, like 'Cowboys' and 'Elysium' are Portishead working with white noise, choking pianos, lurching nightmare rhythms and Beth howling like the Wicked Witch of the West Country. 'Undenied' is this album's 'Roads', the tearjerker with soft keyboards to tackle your soul while Beth sings what could be a lullaby for the dying. And 'All Mine' is the closest they get to pop heaven, the stabs from James Bond bleeding into sweet balladry.
"Well, it's not club music," muses Geoff. "Sometimes I see people, this whole club thing and the whole way people live their lives - and I'm not able to judge anyone's lifestyle - but don't they want more? That's why I do the music I do. Perhaps I'm lucky I'm not at the bottom end of life, I don't have a shit job or a shit boss but I listen to the club music and pop music and the big beat music and I can totally understand why all this music exists but don't people want more? I mean there are some questions that need to be asked. It's like Beth's lyrics. I think she's asking a lot of questions she wants answering. A lot of questions she wants to put to people, like why are you like that? Do you know what I mean? Like when you're in your bedsit or whatever don't you want music that's got something? Don't you want more?"
From nothing to more, from a chance meeting of the long-term unemployed at the DHSS to a million-selling career and a historic performance at the Roseland. And as that gig climaxes in a whirlwind of orchestrated emotion, Beth Gibbons stands in the middle of the ballroom, puffing on a fag, sweeping the hair from her face, almost doubled over with laughter. And maybe it is the laughter of revenge because no one can ignore her now. Everyone's staring at her, sucking cigs in sympathy and clearly moved by just how much power she and her band have unleashed. So here they are, the girl who writes songs about love leading to hell and the boy who thought the world was going to end, on top of the world, taking New York and selling millions of records with this incredible sound that's completely their own. Of course she's laughing. What else did you expect?
Gibbons is a Mystery...
Beth, as we know, never speaks to the press. Thoush in the Summer of 1994 she did give a rare interview to Dutch magazine Oov in which she claimed the songs on 'Dummy' stemmed from a personal perspective that had long since changed.
"At that time I was much more into death than now. I thought I knew what death was about, but now I know that it's a mystery and that it will always be a mystery," she admitted, concluding "I'm a very sensitive person, very emotional and impulsive."
She also revealed she was a fan of the Cocteau Twins and Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance.
Ben Thompson was also granted a rare interview with Gibbons for The Independant On Sunday, in December '94.
"People think it's great when everybody loves you all of a sudden, and it is," she said, "but there are other sides to it. I don't feel like this now, but at one stage I was thinking you write songs and you hope you're gonna communicate with people - half the reason you write them is that you're feeling frustrated with life in general. Then it's sort of successful and you realise you haven't communicated with them at all - you've turned the whole thing into a product. So then you're even more lonely than when you started."
She added: "You don't want to make an aura round anyone, becuase it's just not fair on that person. It's unfair and unrealistic and it makes the audience stupid."
One story reveals just how right she was. Pre-gig nerves sometimes give Beth the chronic shits. Just before one American show, while making regular toilet visits , she heard a commotion backstage, and a woman imploring, "Let me through! Let me through! I can heal her!" "Let her through," demanded Beth, thinking relief from her inconsiderately galloping bowels was at hand. What a pity the lady wasn't a doctor. Struck by Ms. Gibbons heartfelt, bleak lyrics, she simply wanted to heal her soul.