Dotmusic
Mon 18 Aug 1997
PORTISHEAD - FACING DILEMMAS IN FOLLOWING 'DUMMY'

Once the champagne supernova celebrations of a double-platinum debut album and the subsequent promotion has died down, the daunting thought of emulating that heady success must haunt many a musician. Just ask Geoff Barrow, the creative lynchpin of Portishead, whose 1.9m-selling debut album Dummy was the surprise hit of 1994 and won the following year's Mercury Prize. Barrow admits that a creative crisis had threatened to capsize the band while they were in the process of recording their second album, simply called Portishead. "I definitely lost it for about 13 months," he admitted at a recent press conference, held the day after the band played a triumphant show at New York's Roseland Ballroom with a 30-piece orchestra.

"When I started the album, I massively over-analysed what I was trying to do. We set up all these rules that were ridiculous. It was difficult because of the way Dummy happened and it was just a weird experience." Those rules included changing the creative processes that shaped Dummy, from the use of samples to using distinctive instruments like the theramin. "Total originality and perfection," was Barrow's stated, but impossible, goal. That led him to abandon his early demos and take his bandmates, vocalist Beth Gibbons, guitarist Adrian Utley and studio engineer Dave McDonald, from their new home studio into an expensive residential version, where his frustrations boiled over again. Portishead manager Caroline Killoury, at Fruit Management, admits Barrow's methods caused an impasse but that regular music press reports that the band nearly split up were exaggerated.

"The band were working on their separate parts and, as can happen, they weren't all pulling together," she says. "Geoff admitted he needed a kick up the arse, which he duly got from the other members, and then suddenly it clicked and everything started." With the band sharing songwriting input and the belated inclusion of some judiciously chosen samples, the album was eventually finished after 10 months, four times over budget. Instead of heralding a new creative direction, the band have essentially concentrated the groundbreaking Portishead sound. Some may feel disappointed; others, like Go Beat label boss Ferdy Unger-Hamilton, sees it as simply more refined magnificence.

"To me, they've managed to get better and still stay the same," Unger-Hamilton raves. "The album's heavier, it has more movement and you can turn it up louder, which I didn't think you could really do with Dummy. It's further down the road they were taking in the first place." The road in question helped create and define the term trip hop, alongside fellow Bristolians Massive Attack and Tricky. Since Dummy debuted in 1994, that road has been travelled by many a combo, among them Morcheeba, Moloko and recent chart-toppers Olive, so might find the going a lot tougher this time around? Unger-Hamilton snorts at the idea. "Great records and great artists defy generic terms and that's what Portishead do," he says. "When I think 'trip hop', I think of bad versions of what Portishead do."

Killoury's view is more pragmatic. "All the trip hop bands that have come through might come from a similar mould, but they all do it in their own way," she says. "Portishead are exceptionally good and there's room for bands that stand out in any period of time." The first evidence of the new album came in July when the opening track Cowboys was released as a 12-inch, limited to 7,500 copies. "The band didn't want to come back in a big, horrible, Hollywood way," Unger-Hamilton says. "They just wanted to put a tune out, one that would be bought by the kind of heads who frequent record shops. Dropping tunes was the original idea behind Portishead and they didn't want to stray far from that." That said, the move only served to intensify interest in the band, although Unger-Hamilton counters accusations of elitism by announcing that Cowboys will be the B-side of the next single, All Mine, released on September 8.

Portishead launched the new album with the New York show, watched by a crowd that included international media and PolyGram executives. "We thought, 'If we have to do media, wouldn't it be a great idea to do a big show in New York?'. Suddenly it's happening and we're crapping ourselves," says Barrow. "It's the last thing we could want - the glare of publicity, being filmed live doing material for the first time. Just saying it makes me think we were totally mad!"

Unger-Hamilton adds, "It was the clever, shy person's way of doing things. This way, they were able to kill hundreds of birds with one stone. We recorded the show for a long-form video and possible live album, but playing that show was a great way to get the band across to everyone in a way that stays true to what Portishead do, which is a controlled environment. And it was a sublime show, just perfect Portishead." Creative crises or not, bands could do a lot worse than copy Portishead's art of controlled perfection.

Sarah Davis