Thursday, October 2, 1997

Band's new album an eagerly
anticipated follow-up to 1994 hit
Dummy

Portishead flush with success

By JANE STEVENSON
Toronto Sun

Portishead. Remember them?

The ultra-cool, cinema-friendly British band with
the unusual name -- it comes from the small town
outside Bristol where group braintrust Geoff
Barrow grew up -- returned to the music world this
week with one of the most anticipated albums of
the year.

Anticipated because of the critical acclaim that
greeted Dummy, Portishead's 1994 debut that
spawned the scratchy, sample-ridden, so-called
"trip-hop" hits Sour Times and Glory Box, sung by
the beautifully-voiced, if overtly melancholy Beth
Gibbons.

Let's put it this way, Portishead makes Joy Division
sound like Aqua.

"People can really get the wrong idea of the type of
band that we are," says Barrow, on the phone from
New York recently.

"People think we walk around looking very moody,
dressed in black with inverted crosses around our
necks. It's not true. And also people think that
we're incredibly film-ic and call us noir. To be quite
honest, it's not really like that. We're into films in a
big way, but I would most probably watch Men In
Black over some kind of imported Dutch art-house
film."

Still, Dummy picked up the much-coveted Mercury
Prize in England, sold two million copies worldwide
and had every hip movie using a Portishead song
for awhile.

"At the end of the day we won't really lay one track
down to a film anymore," says Barrow. "Because
it's just one massive marketing exercise for
Hollywood. In some films, it worked. In most of
the films, it just absolutely didn't work. It was just
because they were saying, 'Oh, there's a trendy
name, let's do it. Let's get Beck. Let's get
Portishead. Let's get Massive Attack. Let's get
whoever.' It was more to do with selling albums
than anything visually. So I'm kind of like skeptical
about the whole thing."

Additional fall-out from Dummy was that
Portishead -- who will likely play a Toronto date in
the new year -- really struggled with their self-titled,
follow-up record, which took two years to make.

"We had a very, very weird time for about 14
months," says Barrow. "We were unsure about the
way we wanted to write music -- quite depressed
and frustrated at times about the way it was turning
out, very frustrated about the music we were
hearing on the radio. It was very uninspiring."

One huge decision for Portishead -- rounded out
by co-producer-guitarist-bassist Adrian Utley and
engineer Dave McDonald -- was not to sample
other people's records anymore.

Still, two borrowed samples did end up on the new
album. "The rest of the stuff we wrote ourselves
and then sampled," says Barrow, who's currently
enjoying the music of Radiohead, A Tribe Called
Quest and Foo Fighters.

"Basically in Europe the whole sample thing was
getting ridiculous. There were CDs that were
coming out with 5,000 funky breaks on them so
people didn't even go out and find records
anymore. They'd just kind of get the CD, put it in
and have a choice of 5,000 breaks. Even the rarer
stuff to sample from, you would sample it, and in
two days' time, it would come out on a bootleg
from Europe. I've got nothing against people who
sample from other records as long as they're
creative. Most of the time they're not."

As for expectations about how the new Portishead
album will do, Barrow is realistic.

"We were incredibly surprised Dummy sold, but
we wouldn't expect that on the second one -- it's a
harder record to get into," he says. "I think it's less
accessible than the first. I don't think there's the
kind of singles that were on the first one."