Sunday November 15th, 1998

Portishead seeks downtime

By ADRIAN BROMLEY -- Jam! Music

Bristol, England trip hop jazz ensemble Portishead
are in need of some time off. Lots of it.

"We are now going to seriously have a break,"
says guitars Adrian Utley over the phone from
Bristol. "We want to stop for six months or more
and not do anything. I mean, we will still be doing
things but just aim to keep away from what we do
with the band. We need to reacess what we are
going to do with Portishead."

It has been a busy few years for the band, right?
"Yeah," laughs Utley, "We have just been going
strong and hardly stopped doing this. We (the band
is rounded out by singer/lyricist Beth Gibbons,
sampler Geoff Barrow and Dave McDonald) went
straight from touring with the first record, the
critically acclaimed 1994 effort 'Dummy,' onto the
second record (the self-tiled 'Porishead") and we
never full recovered from that long process of
assembling our sophomore album. Then we went
right into the Roseland Ballroom show promoting
the record, which led to the new Live disc
'Roseland NYC LIve', and from there went into a
10-month world tour. This is a much deserved
break and musically it allows us to put our brains
back in order."

Phew! That's a long time of non-stop work.

"Yeah...I know. It's going to just be great to get
our lives back in order," states Utley with
confidence. "Our lives have been rutted quite a bit.
I think we'll just take time off and maybe do a few
things, maybe together. Who knows? We've met
Radiohead recently and they have just come off six
months rest and are eager to get back intot he
studio now. We need to have that kind of time off
and from that point on we 'll see where it takes us."

As for new material and the direction of the band,
Utley answers, "I think what we work on next will
be much different. I think we all feel that. I think
we'll take all of our influences that we got and move
ourselves into an area that is just us, I mean we can
only be Portishead, but the new material will be
unlike what we were like before."

He adds, "It's hard to really figure out where we
will go. There are a lot of people that look up to us
and say great things about us, and that is a great
thing, but we have to live up to that. Before anyone
knew who we were, we were working hard to get
far with this band. Now that people know who us,
they expect us to do so much, and that is hard to
deal with sometimes. It's very difficult to face, but
it's like your learning in public."

As for the 11-song live recording 'Roseland NYC
LIve' and the use of the 30-string orchestra. Utley
comments: "We never really planned for this live
show at the Roseland to become our live record.
We were doing this to promote our second album
and have a video. It was basically a launch for our
second record so that we could have video footage
to play in different territories or countries."

"When we were on tour, we decided we liked it
and wanted to document that period of time for the
band. We used the material from that show as well
as a live track from San Francisco and in Norway.
This live record came into existance much later
after we had recorded the show. I think we were
happy with the recording now, and happy with it
now, but if we were to do it again, we 'd definitely
do it much differently. This live recording is a
combination of a lot of hard work to pull it off and
lots of ideas, both visionally and soniclally. It was a
very importnat moment in our lives."

In closing, I ask Utley about the downside to the
live show with the orchestra. He reveals, "To be
able to get the music sounding right live, we had to
play much more quieter than the string sections of
the orchestra. The brass and percussion stuff was
quite the feat to work with. We generally got along
real well with the orchestra. It wasn't just one of
those things where the band comes in and they play
their part and that's it. We had to build this up. It
took like two months of practice and getting the
ideas down and working and then two days
rehearsal in New York with the orchestra. Through
all that though, it was worth the experience."