Tangled Up In Blue
- Issue #178 (Dec 98) | Published 18/04/07
- By: Rob Young | Featuring: Portishead
After three albums and a world tour which nearly put paid to them, the members of Portishead are resting up. In Bristol, Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley discuss the workings of the decade's most unlikely global pop phenomenon with Rob Young
Portishead is a quiet village. A location in my memory that demands a special return: boating ponds for Saturday afternoon self-propulsion. Voyages to the island of sleepy birds. Rough winds of an English spring. Booths for hot dogs and ice cream. Daytrips free of incident, apart from that bloke walking a sheep on a lead. Satellite town requiring healthy fantasy life. The park: unmonitored wilderness suitable &emdash; in retrospect &emdash; for agents, double agents, ministers, crime bosses and hitmen to meet, cut deals, double and triple cross. On the other side of the dyke: the Bristol Channel, for a seaborne getaway.
Portishead is a satellite. A little rock orbiting the city of Bristol, in whose streets a taxi's radio is at this moment flooding the driver's thoughts with youthful memories, courtesy of a rock 'n' roll medley on Classic Gold. I'm dropped in the rain outside a small terraced house in the city's Redland area. Round the corner is the house where I spent the first seven years of my life. Me and the taxi driver - shuttling back towards the railway station, Shirley Bassey blaring - abandon each other to our respective timeloops.
Portishead is a group. Represented this time by two people, Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley. No Beth, not today. She's just the singer, the final stage in the process, and finds interviews' demands for revelation "too painful". We're not here to hurt anybody. In fact, we don't need to talk to Beth Gibbons. When it comes to getting a grip on Portishead, she's a giant red herring. Because she's ostensibly the group's 'front', interviewers naturally demand her presence; look to her to articulate the group's motivations, then sit helpless as their Walkmans grind to a halt. She's one of those Great Voices - swooping from wheel-broken butterfly to mewing Billie Holiday - which find it impossible to reduce to a soundbite the hurricane of passion blowing through them. Nick Drake, Mark Hollis, Janis Joplin, Sandy Denny - all lousy interviewees; their personal heavens and hells etched in the grain of the voice, not the thrust and parry of argument. The originators, powerhouse and engine room of the group's sound, are the two men sitting opposite me at this kitchen table in Bristol.
The files: Geoff Barrow, 27, tired, been-in-the-wars demeanour. Programmer, turntablist, knocks it about on drums occasionally. Slipped into Bristol's underground HipHop scene in the late 80s, made one track with Tricky, worked on Neneh Cherry's Homebrew with various mates ("We've got the boys from Portishead in," her manager Cameron McVey used to say during those sessions, and the name stuck). Produced Carleen Anderson and fellow Bristolian HipHopper Earthling; remixed Depeche Mode, Primal Scream, Gravediggaz. Portishead photos usually get cropped down to his and Beth's faces alone. Gets depressed that the group is perceived as depressive.
Adrian Utley, older, confident speaker flashing occasional streaks of bitterness. Plays guitar, bass, organ, theremin. Previously worked in local jazz organ trios; once accompanied Big John Patton on tour. Cheesed it for a holiday camp season, where boredom made necessity the mother of minimal invention: "I always perversely liked it, even though we had to play absolute crap, I loved thefact that you had to play some big heavy tune, and you only had an organ and bass pedals, and guitar and drums. You didn't have horns, you didn't have a bass player - and it made this other sound." Fascinated with musique concrète, electronic rock à la United States Of America. Plans to unscrew his Minimoog's wooden scratchplate and take it across the Atlantic for Bob Moog to autograph.
Portishead have just reached the ragged end of one particular loop in their lives, and they're going to have to get tattoos done. "They mark the end of a phase in your life," says Geoff, "for when you want to say goodbye to that part, and move on." They're counting the emotional cost following a world tour of nearly 90 dates, the close of a cycle that started back in 1995, when their first album Dummy attained the dubious honour of a Mercury Music Prize, and sold more than a million copies worldwide. To mark the end of this "ten months of cabin fever", they've released a live album, PNYC, recorded mostly on one night in July 1998 at New York's Roseland Ballroom. This specially arranged in-the-round recording and video shoot with a 28 piece string orchestra is one of the more successful attempts to marry pop group and orchestra. Indeed, it breaks a duck going back 40 years, when the complex hornweb of Miles Davis and Gil Evans's big band - Miles Ahead-era - was deconstructed by the weaving CBS TV cameras on The Robert Herridge Theatre.
Portishead is a satellite. A little rock orbiting the city of Bristol, in whose streets a taxi's radio is at this moment flooding the driver's thoughts with youthful memories, courtesy of a rock 'n' roll medley on Classic Gold. I'm dropped in the rain outside a small terraced house in the city's Redland area. Round the corner is the house where I spent the first seven years of my life. Me and the taxi driver - shuttling back towards the railway station, Shirley Bassey blaring - abandon each other to our respective timeloops.
Portishead is a group. Represented this time by two people, Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley. No Beth, not today. She's just the singer, the final stage in the process, and finds interviews' demands for revelation "too painful". We're not here to hurt anybody. In fact, we don't need to talk to Beth Gibbons. When it comes to getting a grip on Portishead, she's a giant red herring. Because she's ostensibly the group's 'front', interviewers naturally demand her presence; look to her to articulate the group's motivations, then sit helpless as their Walkmans grind to a halt. She's one of those Great Voices - swooping from wheel-broken butterfly to mewing Billie Holiday - which find it impossible to reduce to a soundbite the hurricane of passion blowing through them. Nick Drake, Mark Hollis, Janis Joplin, Sandy Denny - all lousy interviewees; their personal heavens and hells etched in the grain of the voice, not the thrust and parry of argument. The originators, powerhouse and engine room of the group's sound, are the two men sitting opposite me at this kitchen table in Bristol.
The files: Geoff Barrow, 27, tired, been-in-the-wars demeanour. Programmer, turntablist, knocks it about on drums occasionally. Slipped into Bristol's underground HipHop scene in the late 80s, made one track with Tricky, worked on Neneh Cherry's Homebrew with various mates ("We've got the boys from Portishead in," her manager Cameron McVey used to say during those sessions, and the name stuck). Produced Carleen Anderson and fellow Bristolian HipHopper Earthling; remixed Depeche Mode, Primal Scream, Gravediggaz. Portishead photos usually get cropped down to his and Beth's faces alone. Gets depressed that the group is perceived as depressive.
Adrian Utley, older, confident speaker flashing occasional streaks of bitterness. Plays guitar, bass, organ, theremin. Previously worked in local jazz organ trios; once accompanied Big John Patton on tour. Cheesed it for a holiday camp season, where boredom made necessity the mother of minimal invention: "I always perversely liked it, even though we had to play absolute crap, I loved thefact that you had to play some big heavy tune, and you only had an organ and bass pedals, and guitar and drums. You didn't have horns, you didn't have a bass player - and it made this other sound." Fascinated with musique concrète, electronic rock à la United States Of America. Plans to unscrew his Minimoog's wooden scratchplate and take it across the Atlantic for Bob Moog to autograph.
Portishead have just reached the ragged end of one particular loop in their lives, and they're going to have to get tattoos done. "They mark the end of a phase in your life," says Geoff, "for when you want to say goodbye to that part, and move on." They're counting the emotional cost following a world tour of nearly 90 dates, the close of a cycle that started back in 1995, when their first album Dummy attained the dubious honour of a Mercury Music Prize, and sold more than a million copies worldwide. To mark the end of this "ten months of cabin fever", they've released a live album, PNYC, recorded mostly on one night in July 1998 at New York's Roseland Ballroom. This specially arranged in-the-round recording and video shoot with a 28 piece string orchestra is one of the more successful attempts to marry pop group and orchestra. Indeed, it breaks a duck going back 40 years, when the complex hornweb of Miles Davis and Gil Evans's big band - Miles Ahead-era - was deconstructed by the weaving CBS TV cameras on The Robert Herridge Theatre.