The Arts: The band who never meant to be famous Portishead's long-awaited
second album makes no concession to success, as Geoff Barrow tells Caspar
Llewellyn Smith
WHEN Portishead carried off the Mercury Music prize two years ago Geoff Barrow felt overwhelmed, though more by drink than by the occasion at the swanky Savoy Hotel in London. While accepting the winner's cheque for pounds 25,000 he attacked the very notion of such Booker- ish awards. Then he faced the ranks of press.
"It was my first time at something like that," he says, "and I wasn' t really sure what I was doing. Someone shouted, `So, Geoff, what kind of car are you going to buy with the money?' And all I could manage was, `A bloody big one!' "
It was all very rock and roll, the kind of behaviour you might expect from a 23-year-old whose band had sold close to two million copies of its debut album, Dummy, outstripping the success of Oasis in America. But it wasn't typical of Portishead: this a group that wouldn't throw a TV listings guide through a hotel window, never mind the television - not least because no one ever expected their dark, brooding "trip hop" to shift any product-units.
They were never meant to be famous. Singer Beth Gibbons, now 31, took the JD Salinger approach to publicity: she has only ever given one interview, and that when Barrow failed to show, which scarcely helped their image. But despite themselves Portishead became the acceptable "alternative" group, often imitated but never bettered (Dummy played constantly in the twentysomethings' flat of BBC2's This Life).
"Just because our music sounds quite mellow at first," says Barrow, sitting in the bar of a polished London hotel, smoking Silk Cut and drinking sugary tea, "people seem to think, `Ah, we'll play that when we're having friends round for a fondue night.' "
The group's long-awaited new album, due at the end of the month, preceded by next week's single, All Mine(Go!Beat), makes no concessions to this new-found popularity. The self-titled second album is unmistakeably Portishead, but this time round they're bleak and blue (which means they're sounding like the world has just ended). "Beth sounds really angry at times," says Barrow. "Which is good."
As soon as they had finished touring with Dummy at the end of 1995, the group headed back into the studio. "It's not as if we went messing about and spending our new money," says Barrow, though he did sneak off on honeymoon to Antigua with his new wife, Jo. "I don't have to worry about the gas bill now and I live in a nice house. I'm not pretending I live in a bedsit. But given the choice of going to a party with lots of celebrities or staying in the studio - it's not even a question."
Did success change Beth? "She doesn't want to know about fame, she wants to live an absolutely normal life. And she worries about people seeing her as some kind of pop star."
Beyond the fact that they met on a job training scheme in 1991, and that he liked hip hop, she Janis Joplin, not much is known about their relationship. Which isn't that surprising because Barrow says that he hardly knows Gibbons himself. "We never really talked all the way through Dummy, not sociably. She'd come in, do her vocal and that was just about that."
But she writes the lyrics herself and they're not the usual pop fripperies. Didn't Barrow wonder where she got the stuff from? "No, I didn't really think about it. I was just locked into the music, and she sounded good. I still don't know what all her songs mean."
It seems as though Gibbons cultivates this side of her character: her image is simply that she doesn't have an image, which could be the most brilliant of Spinal Tap strategies. The band, it's true, have traded on a sense of mysterious cool, in part because their product is smartly packaged, a job they took on themselves.
Other groups would have launched themselves with a cheap-and-cheerful video, but Portishead commissioned a 30-minute film to which they wrote the soundtrack. Their new single is accompanied by a stunning video (think David Lynch but weird) which Barrow made with three old school friends.
All this, he insists, is less a pose and more a happy accident. "We' re not trying to be mysterious, we just work in odd ways. It all looks really stylish, but as people we're not." He says this dressed in baggy jeans, grey sweatshirt and looking like Ricky Butcher in EastEnders.
Gibbons, contrary to popular belief, isn't a recluse. "She could out- drink, out-smoke and beat all us lot up in a single afternoon if she wanted to." Mind you, she does have a difficult side. "She can be frighteningly truthful. Some of the truths she comes up with can be really hurtful. Still we don't row as much as we used to. It has got better."
Nevertheless, the recording of the new Portishead was a difficult process, with Barrow, the producer and chief ideas man, growing ever desperate over 18 months. "I'd flaked right out," he says, "but didn't tell anyone. Everything I'd ever wanted to do I'd done with Dummy, so the big question was where do I go from here?" Second-album syndrome, the tennis elbow of pop, had struck.
In the end, Barrow admitted to the group's two other core members, guitarist Adrian Utley and sound engineer Dave MacDonald, that he didn't know what he was doing. "The turning point came when Adrian said, `Let's actually finish a track! Let's actually see what it sounds like and then decide whether it's any good."
As it is, the new record sounds much like the old one. "But we are what we are on Portishead. That's what we sound like. I've had people say, `So, Geoff, trip hop is dead and I was very disappointed that there was no drum and bass on this album.' But we can't do that - we'd be fakes. If people don't think we're trendy any more, fair enough. There's nothing I can do about it." But he has always had this attitude - and the last album sold millions.
Perhaps he doesn't need to pose and pout and act like a star. "If other groups are `mad for it' then that's what the public want to see. They don't want to see a group that is crap at it. Which is what we'd be."
What if Beth were to walk off with Liam Gallagher tomorrow? "As long as we could still get on with her, cool. That's her personal life. But it would be worrying."