Pioneer trip-hop band Portishead survives a long night of the soul
On an oppressively muggy London afternoon, a recording complex below the Thames provides cool relief for the members of Portishead. While the rest of the city boils and burns in a sweaty, suffocating mire, DJ/producer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Geoff Barrow, guitarist Adrian Utely, and engineer Dave McDonald knuckle down comfortably behind a studio console, balancing the tape of a live performance recently recorded at New York's Roseland Ballroom.
As the acid-jazz guitar and wobbly beat of "Glory Box" swell from the monitors, the trio isolates different parts of the song. Barrow pulls down a pair of sliders, leaving only the Isaac Hayes-modeled strings floating eerily through the air. He knows something is wrong, but he can't find the problem. He brings up drums and guitar. "Where's the organ?" he asks no one in particular. "John was fucking tearing." Unable to find keyboardist John Bagott's organ, the tape is rewound to the beginning.
"Keep it going," he demands. "We'll find out where it is." Ignoring this tedious process, singer Beth Gibbons stands near the back of the room, an ever-present fag hanging from her thin lips. Hunched over a countertop strewn with coffee cups and an orange Moog synthesizer, she examines a set of contact prints from the Roseland show, as engrossed in these visuals as her bandmates are in the music. Even without makeup, her large, childlike eyes seem to reveal her thoughts. One minute translucent and beautiful, the next as animated as a mad clown, Gibbons' eyes have a language all their own- which is good, considering her silence toward the press. Her attention is drawn to the music as Barrow suddenly slams the volume. "Glory Box" is nearing its end, but unlike the version on Dummy, the orchestra strings climb to a deafening crescendo that recalls the climax of "A Day in the Life." After a final note and audience applause. Gibbons thanks the crowd, saying, "Sorry it's a bit dodgy." "Let's definitely keep that in," says Barrow, and all laugh.
Portishead's spookily mysterious music may sound like a sci-fi trip-hop crew on the verge of a noir-ish nervous breakdown, but the group is actually quite sane, even jocular, when secluded in the safety of the recording studio. That wasn't always the case: After their 1994 debut, Dummy (Go!Discs/London) earned worldwide acclaim, singlehandedly launched the moniker "trip-hop" and went on to sell two million copies, the band returned to the studio with a severe case of writer's block. Their follow-up album, the newly-released Portishead (Go Beat/London), took two years to complete, during which time the band recorded an entire album, then scrapped it.
"I didn't think I was making music," reflects Barrow, looking out the studio lounge window over the neighboring council flats. "I thought I was making something else. My brain had turned to jelly. Nothing was good enough for the second record. I didn't have a clue what I was doing there. Our music wasn't exciting me one little bit. There wasn't any answer, but I could never quit, cause there is nothing for me."
McDonald concurs. "It was soul-destroying for about 13 months. There were songs floating around with no backing tracks, just pieces. It was going on forever. We couldn't face fucking going to work anymore. Geoff has so much pressure on him and he wanted to do something different; it just closed him down. Finally we broke out and realized we had to get it going and do what we're good at."
Shelving 18 months of work, the band found its groove in February 97 and recording quickly proceeded. As Barrow is obviously a perfectionist, he probably would've spent another two years making the record if public and label demands weren't so great. Is he happy with the finished product?
"No, not really." Barrow is nothing if not honest. "I feel that we've definitely come up with an album that is worth as much as Dummy. It has to be. We started out as the band we are now, but we did some odd things like the film [To Kill a Dead Man, a promotional film never released commercially, so people saw us as very stylish. In England, we were seen as this trendy band. I got the vibe that people thought we were a fad, a thing of 1994."
While Dummy tracks like "Wandering Star," "Glory Box" and "Biscuit" found a band exploring entirely virgin territory, Portishead builds off its predecessor without repeating its course. The same mechanical instruments are there--old Rhodes and Wurlitzer pianos, Leslie speakers, Vox Continental and Hammond organs, Moog and plenty of tape echoes and long-wave radio static--but Portishead has reinvented its sound and its style. "All Mine," for example, is more adventurous than anything on Dummy. Making its entry like a guest spot on an early-'60s Brit variety show via Jamaica, the song sashays with popping horns, overloaded bass and a cracking snaredrum/tambourine beat. Gibbons purrs and preens the verse, belting out the chorus with ear-splitting power. She's Dinah Washington one minute, an offcolor Janis Joplin the next. It's an ethereal Broadway production number that ends in a haze of space blips and bleeps.
The group has grown more extreme and dynamic (as has Gibbons' voice). The strange tracks are truly bizarre ("Half Day Closing," "Over," "Mourning Air"), while the beauty of other tracks (Humming," "Western Eyes") is remarkable. The band's ability to make music that creates a unique, personal story within each listener's mind remains unchallenged.
"People might say we're 'retro,' but I don't care," says Barrow. "It's the music we love making. It's weird when we go into our process of making tunes. Adrian and I and Dave will go into our studio in Bristol and just jam around on an idea one of us has for a track. It'll be sparked from some sonic mad keyboard sound, or some riff, but when you hear that riff with that sound, you know exactly where the track is going. I'll get on the drums and we'll record three minutes of a loop. Then we mix it and treat it through so many different ways. Then I literally put it into the sampler and chop it all up." And the input of Gibbons, who resides away from the band in the countryside of Devon?
"We send her a backing track; she'll write lyrics or a melody. Then we'll have a chat on the phone, along with Adrian and Dave, and we'll decide how to carry on with it. If she's got a really good song, then we'll keep her melody and change the backing track around it."
"You can't fool Beth with anything," says McDonald. "She has this mad way of recording on her home setup; it's extreme,. You notice her vocals are high-pitched and thin? When we get a recording back from Beth, her voice will take your head off. It's recorded at either ridiculously low or high levels. She's a bit of a monster on that."
This long-winded process of assembling tracks is compounded by Barrow's sampling obsession. Along with the rhythm loops that are initially cut to vinyl, then scratched back to tape, Barrow records string and horn players separately, samples and cuts that to vinyl, then records it to the mix. Add tape and space echoes, radio distortion and other sonic secrets, and you have the beginning of the Portishead process. Sometimes, as with "Half Day Closing" (inspired by '60s group the United States of America), the band will actually jam, then cut that into a loop to be sent to Gibbons. Tracks like "Western Eyes" and "Seven Months" were made of old or unused versions of other songs.
Pervading all this is the crackly sound of old vinyl. How to get this seemingly simple sound? "Stand on the record," laughs Barrow. "Leave it out on the street for a couple of days. Actually, I use a heavy needle with some heavy weights on the tone arm. But with Beth, there is so much she actually does that is just her voice. I might distort her vocal sometimes, but it's really the way she sings."
Barrow elaborates: "The main thing for me is that our music holds some emotional content and affects people in some way. That's all I could ever ask for. I don't get much emotion out of the music I'm hearing at the moment. I get emotion out of Radiohead and old music, like Nirvana. ... I'm not saying we're near them, or as groundbreaking or whatever, but that is what it's all about."
Flanked by a 30-piece string section and five horns, Portishead descended on Manhattan's Roseland last July to film a performance of its new album. Even before the audience filled the hall, Barrow was on stage, as innocuous as a delivery boy. Smoking cigarettes and acting bored, he sat complacently on a monitor, trying to calm his nerves. The rest of the band walked on unannounced. As the new songs rolled out--"All Mine," "Seven Months," "Western Eyes"-- Gibbons clutched the microphone like a life raft and never once looked at the audience. As strings swirled and hems blared over the angst-ridden songs, Gibbons' eyes remained tightly shut as her voice reveled in a cast of miserable characters. Except for drummer Clive Deamer, Portishead seemed stressed under the weight of its ambitious production. Playing two encores to an enthralled crowd, Portishead left the stage with its cred intact and its personalities still hidden.
"Acting the star is the last thing I want," says Barrow. Talkative and with a quick smile, he doesn't seem the nervous-wreck type. "I like being on stage beforehand, so it's not like walking on. I do that to get over my nerves. Even Beth and Adrian were going to come on earlier; they don't like to make a grand entrance, either. We're no better than you. Beth absolutely hates being the focal point. She is totally uncomfortable with the whole thing. She held back at Roseland; she didn't go for it. It's the nerves. I missed loads, too, because I was so tense. Beth gives a hell of a lot. She's really nervous about press. She questions who she is sometimes."
Even with its John Barry-ish strings, unearthly space echoes, Goldfinger guitar and coarse turntable scratching, the weird world of Portishead looms around the haunting figure of Beth Gibbons. The distraught character she played in the band's groundbreaking video, To Kill a Dead Man, seemed strangely close to the person who inhabited her forlorn lyrics. Singing of "the blackness, the darkness, forever" ("Wandering Star") and "Nobody loves me, it's true" ("Sour Times"), Gibbons' chameleon-like voice is one of the most distressingly captivating sounds to come from England since Churchill's gruff bark filled radios during WWII. Well, she's no Spice Girl.
With Portishead, the group has focused its efforts, with Gibbons' spectral voice front and center. Still filtering the music through Barrow for final approval, Utley and Mcdonald have helped Portishead to flesh out the uncanny sounds that debuted on Dummy. By contrast, Portishead is, entirely, a more extreme affair. Odd chords clash dissonantly and Barrow's turntables gurgle and spit, while the bass often distorts, throbbing like an ugly pack of hell-bent killer bees. The high end of the recording is often shrill and taut, filled by ghostly static, vinyl distortion and Gibbons' howling vocals. Portishead is a sonically astounding record, proving that Dummy was no fluke. More than ever, Portishead delivers its eerie, lost laments seemingly filtered through a radio blasting from a cold Martian surface. "We have become so anal about what we do," laughs Barrow. "When I finished doing the album, I honestly thought it was just a pure pop record. Then I realized there are some darker things on there. But we're so normalized by it all, we don't see it as weird or dark. Those discordant sounds? I don't notice them."
Influenced by hip-hop, dub,'60s soundtracks and classic 7-inch soul singles, Barrow takes a blender approach when producing Portishead. That includes burning the edges when the muse hits him. "When I'm in the studio mixing the tracks, I have the speakers cranked up so they really fizz and distort. But when we turn it down, the excitement of the track almost disappears. So we distorted all the tracks. The production can be clean but still filthy as hell. The notes are one thing, but the sonics are as valuable as the notes. It's that idea of creating little pieces that are completely different from each other."
Each track on Portishead has its own signature sound, from instrumentation and samples to the very audible differences in production. "All Mine" replicates a storming big-band number with Shirley Bassey circa 1963; "Half Day Closing" churns nauseously like a bad acid freakout; "Over" couples brazen scratching with a scabrous guitar riff (similar to Blue Oyster Cult's "She's as Beautiful as a Foot"); "Humming" is an epic sci-fi symphony complete with billowing theremin, macabre strings and a loping hip-hop beat. With Gibbons' fragile vocals, the track is stunningly surreal.
'That's inspired by an old sci-fi film, The Day the Earth Stood Still," explains Barrow. "It's that whole Twilight Zone thing. You can always insert some B-movie soundtrack. If you actually take out the visuals, that's what vibe we're about. Say you have The Brady Bunch: Take away the visuals, and leave the incidental music that went with a sad episode where Marsha accidentally cut off her pigtails: If you listen only to the incidental music, it could be really heavy. That's the same as the B-movie stuff: You listen to it and it creates that emotion-- but it still comes from [a B-movie]."
Portishead was so long in coming partly due to Barrow's conviction to sample exclusively from self-generated sources. Outside of a Pink Panther brass sample and a snippet of the Pharcyde in "Only You," this is pure Portishead. Barrow, Utley and McDonald spent months painstakingly creating rhythm loops and recording horn and string players to resample back to vinyl. Barrow's pure sampling logic is a lesson in Vinyl Archeology 101.
"The samples had to sound like they were from recordings covering the 50s to the mid-70s. That's the area of time we work in. There are three string sounds that are absolutely brilliant for us. There's the 50s and '60s pop recordings of soul tunes or soundtracks, and they're all quite distorted and scrunched up--they sound really good. But because of how loud they actually cut them into the vinyl, they always sounded distorted. You won't hear it on CD, but on the actual singles you'll hear another world entirely. All those singles-- like Stevie Wonder, James Brown--were cut very hot, with the meters running into the red. When they put those singles on the jukebox, they were really loud, which was better for the artist.
"Then there's the orchestral stuff, and the jazz recordings, like [from labels such as] Impulse! and Blue Note, and Bob James, that massively influenced us. And since we heard these strings originally on scratchy records, that's how we want it to sound. It's not 'cause we want to be cool or trendy; it's literally the sound we all love."
Engineer Dave McDonald, who along with Utley acts as sounding board for Barrow, agrees with the unorthodox sound values of Portishead. "We didn't think some of the tracks were heavy enough," he says, wearing a "Hoboken Exterminating" T-shirt. "So we mastered it to half-inch tape so we could burn the hell out of it, really push the meters right off the scales. Why distort the bass so heavily? It's just the vibe of it. If it sounds good breaking up, then it's good. The slower the track, the heavier it becomes. The rest of the world is getting faster but why should we? Who made the rules? Show me the man."
To understand Portishead, you must trace the history of Bristol, which, having contributed Tricky, Massive Attack and Roni Size, has proven to be one of the world's most fruitful scenes. Bristol, like Liverpool, is a coastal town which during slavery was a major port between Africa and America. After slavery was abolished in the early 1800s and as late as post-World War II, Bristol's streets were crowded with Caribbean and Jamaican immigrants who had followed the slave routes back for jobs in England. This community soon developed its own vibrant culture and music, centering in the 1980s on the area known as St. Paul's. Blues, reggae, and church music established a sound quite unlike what was happening in the rest of England. Much of this came to fruition with the Wild Bunch, which included members of Massive Attack. When hip-hop took off in the early 80s, the music was happily received at the Dug Out, a Bristol mixing spot for punks, gays, blues, jazz and soul musicians who ignored barriers.
Portishead, a commuter suburb of Bristol, is seemingly years away from Bristol's roughhouse lads. But as a teenager, Geoff Barrow grew up listening to tapes of the Wild Bunch, the Wise Guys and 3PM at the Dug Out, and was already making his own tapes in his bedroom.
"I figured out that if I sped up a record and sampled it as a loop, then slowed down the sample on the sampler, I could get a two-bar loop going," recalls Barrow. "I sampled Bob James, Junior Mance, James Brown, Marvel Whitney, made lots of stuff that sounds really primitive now."
Making tea and sandwiches for Massive Attack while it was recording Blue Lines at Coach House Studios, the group was impressed enough with young Barrow's demos that it played them for Neneh Cherry's manager, Cameron McVey, who not only invested in Barrow but appropriated his song "Sundays" for Cherry's second album, Homebrew. Thus began a period of intense songwriting.
"I met Beth at Enterprise Allowance Day," recalls Barrow. "I was offering my production services, about to have my dole cut off, when Beth came up and said she wanted to be a professional singer. After we got together, I knew she was really good, but she came from a very guitar-oriented, indie Brit music scene. Then it clicked. She was singing 'It Can Be Sweet.' All of a sudden, it really clicked, it just happened."
Adding Dave McDonald, a popular Bristol engineer, and Utley, a locally renowned jazz guitarist, everything jelled, from Barrow's hip-hop to Utley's jazz to McDonald's sonic shenanigans. With the release of Dummy and the video To Kill a Dead Man, Portishead seemed a perfect amalgam of 30 years of Brit soundcraft. Sci-fi epics (Day of the Triffids), spy flicks (James Bond, The Prisoner), gorgeous soundtracks (John Barry) and all that Bristol soul were given life and limbs by Gibbons' expressive, ravaged voice, which could both soothe and scare, like Jekyll and Hyde on Prozac. Gibbons, from a family of five sisters, was quickly repelled by the all the press attention, refusing to be interviewed after the group's first trip to the U.S. Whether her fragile, neurotic persona is a reality remains a guarded secret.
"I think Beth is a little more stable now," remarks Barrow. "Not stable; that makes her sound mad. She's a little more sorted with the business we're in. She knows she can control her own destiny. It really wouldn't surprise me if she got out of the business, simple as that. Beth believes in people being completely real. All the bullshit and the way things get twisted and how every thing is based on style bothers her. If she had her own way, it would just be a job. But she's not this mysterious woman. She's not depressed; she is very sweet."
"Beth's in touch with the same things that all of us are," explains Utley. "She's in touch with depression, but aren't we all, really? True emotions influence her lyrics. We'll be talking or eating and she'll blurt out, 'That's what I was talking about in "Glory Box" or in "Wandering Star." Her lyrics are connected with the problems we all have in life."
And if Gibbons is seen as the band's frail spiritualist, Barrow, too, has his own demons to exorcise, which in turn feeds his music. "When I was unemployed during the Gulf War, I was sick every night. I thought the world was going to end. I constantly had apocalyptic dreams. I worked up an eight-year plan for the end of the world based loosely around Nostradamus, and we've just gone past it. So I am a bit more optimistic. But look at the weather and all the serious problems every-where. No one is telling us the truth about anything. We all work and obey and we feel that within our little rat run, we're in control. But outside that rat run, we have no power at all. It's too late."
Why music of such darkness and introspection has resonated with so many people is a puzzle. Perhaps, as with soul music ˆ la Erykah Badu and Maxwell--a style experiencing a resurgence since Portishead's debut --people are acknowledging a need for music that touches the fuzzy analog heart in this cold digital age.
"It may sound bizarre, but many of our sounds are what everyone has grown up on." reflects McDonald. "You didn't grow up hearing digital sounds; you heard natural instruments. You lock these little sounds in your head, and people identify with it. They may not recognize it in its new form, but instinctively they recognize it."
"I think it's the songs and the lyrics and Beth's voice, apart from all the weirdness," muses Utley. "There wasn't that much around sounding like we did with Dummy. It's that combination. People definitely connect with Beth and her lyrics. You can see it at gigs. Mostly women singing the lyrics, but men as well."
And what if Portishead is seen as depressing, dark and dangerous? Bollocks. "They can have their Kiss any day," laughs Barrow. "People who say we're too dark and depressing, you have to have two sides of music. There has to be a balance, and in England at the moment there isn't a balance. If people think we're too depressing, they can fuck off and watch the Spice Girls."
The Architecture of a Track: "Western Eyes"
Geoff Barrow creates the music of Portishead like the ultimate studio reanimator, using the chop-and-block capabilities of the sampler and vinyl platter as his primary tools. Even the very organic-sounding "Western Eyes" was assembled from many sessions, cut to vinyl, then scratched back to the mix.
With a rare, untreated vocal from Gibbons, the song recalls a dream with its spartan orchestral arrangement, toy piano and dusky jazz guitar. The track closes with '40s-style crooning (from Shawn Atkins of London group Whores of Babylon) answering Gibbons' bleak lyrics with a few words on "hookers and gin."
Barrow elaborates: "It began with one piano chord that Adrian and I just repeated. I had a drum set beat from a session I did six months before at another studio with Clive Beamer. I sampled that beat and added it to the tape. Then I listened back over some strings I had recorded from Dummy and found this two-note bit, so I looped that and added it over the top as a demo with the beat. Then I played another part on the piano as a drop-in, and we sent it off to Beth. She had already written her vocal melody and the lyrics for another track; she sang her song over our backing track.
"For the actual recording, Adrian played the piano part on a proper grand piano. We did a string session about three months later, got the orchestra to actually play that initial bit, then took that as a sample. Then we added the real piano back as a sample, added the bass and a hi-hat and arranged it. Finally, Beth came in and put down the main vocal at the studio in Ridge Farm near Brighten.
"For the closing male vocal, Shawn came up from Bristol. We had a laugh and couple of drinks and came up with some ideas. I really wanted to do something with a vocal in it, but I didn't want it to be stupid, 'cause it could sound that way. We wanted to capture a certain vibe. Shawn sang over a piano line and then I put it on vinyl, without the piano. Adrian worked out some jazz guitar chords and the tinkling piano around Shawn's vocal. By that time, a full drum-set beat had been cut to vinyl, so I sampled it back off vinyl and replaced the original samples.
"We mixed it as a whole thing, put it down to quarter-inch tape, then cut that end-part back to vinyl. Then I scratched the vinyl in with the piano, strings, guitar and the vocal."
Ken Micallef is a freelance writer living in New York. He is working on a book about electronica dance music.