POP MUSIC / Mine's a double
A grim lot, Portishead. Small-town miserablists with a downer on happiness and a BA in alienation. They have a sound straight out of the arthouse and a mood as bleak and ghostly as a seaside resort in winter. They make music for insomniacs adrift in thesmall hours with an inch of gin left in the bottom of the bottle.
When their first album, Dummy, slipped inauspiciously on to the stands a few months ago, the critics raided Roget's for adjectives to describe the band's spaghetti junction of influences, and musical encyclopedias to find models for singer BethGibbons's trancey Temazepam soul. Names like Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell, Edith Piaf peppered the reviews. The band's apparent reluctance to perform live and the recalcitrance of Gibbons towards journalists merely upped their enigmatic ante. Now theword about Portishead is that they are the biggest home-grown thing since Soul II Soul.
For once though, the superlatives were not misplaced. Portishead sample, they scratch, they have the courage to distort Gibbons's sepia tones and make them sound like a bad radio signal (Can you hear me Major Tom?). They lift from Sixties TV themetunes, from hip-hop and dub and Twin Peaks-style ambient. They probably read Julia Kristeva and shuffle around in black overcoats a few sizes too big, but turn up the volume, lie back and you're in blissed-out sensurround, remote, disaffected anddeliciously melancholic.
So it was appropriate that they chose 11.45 on a cold November night to address their public for the first time. The tiny Eve Club in Regent Street was packed with awestruck fans, necks craned to glimpse the stage on to which Gibbons and co stepped -unannounced, of course - and slid into the eerie, looping number, ''Mysterons'', with its militaristic backbeat.<> Gibbons hunched over her microphone like Nico on junk, clutching it with both hands, cigarette burning, dragging deeply at each pause for breath and relighting at the end of each song. ''All for nothing'', she sang in her controlled, dispassionatevoice, as clear and strong as on disc. We knew then how little tweaking had gone into producing that extraordinary sound. Gibbons has a voice to kindle a million bedsit fantasies, moving effortlessly from ironic sweetness - ''Nobody loves me / It'strue'' - on the single ''Sour Times'' to catlike mewing on the hymn to solipsism ''Numb''. When it came to the sublime ''Glory Box'', she proved that she can do blues, too. ''Give me a reason / To love you'', she yearned, her voice swelling like a bigblue bruise.
Thirty minutes and five fags later and suddenly it was all over. No bows, no encores. As we walked out into the November night we felt ever so slightly cheated. But somehow even that seemed appropriate. Pass the gin.
By HELEN BIRCH