Source: Request magazine, October 1997
By: Julie Taraska

Sweet & Sour Times:
Does Portishead still make music that matters?

IT'S BEEN THREE YEARS since Portishead's Dummy infused electronica with emotion, smearing smoldering soul over
old-school breaks, and three years of waiting through postponed release dates and rumors of the band's demise for its
follow-up. but now that the band's second album, Portishead, is finally ready, its release is a bona fide event. Press from
around the world have been flown to New York City to preview the album, which is being presented live at the Roseland
ballroom on this late-July evening. A 30-piece orchestra, complete with string section and horn ensemble, has been brought in
to back the band. The performance will be Web-cast live and taped for later screening on Britain's Channel Four. You could
say all angles are covered, media-wise.

Avoiding the melee around him is Geoff Barrow, Portishead's 25-year-old mastermind. He's crouched next to one of the
violinists, discussing last-minute changes. Bassist/keyboardist Adrian Utley is standing off to the side, quietly tuning a guitar.
Dave McDonald, the band's soundman, is kneeling by the board, checking a cable.

It's only when the stage lights are turned up and the audience is hushed that Beth Gibbons, Portishead's lyricist and vocalist,
enters. Dressed in a black sweater and blue Levis, she takes her place in front of the musicians, squinting in the brightness,
cigarette in hand. The song "Humming" from Portishead commences with violinists fluttering through the lengthy intro. Gibbons
slouches over the microphone stand, wrapping her hands around it. Waiting, she exhales a plume of smoke, closes her eyes,
then finally whispers, "Clo-ser/No hes-i-ta-tion," then, more strongly, "Give me/All that you have." She takes a deep breath.
"And it's been/Sooo long," her voice drops, "That I can't/Ex-plain," then rises again, "And it's been/Sooo wrong." She adds a
plaintive edge, "Sooo long/Sooo wrong."

As the song's hip-hop beat comes in, her shoulders relax, her relief almost palpable. And as she and the band continue,
performing 10 of the 11 tracks on Portishead, reactions in the crowd vary. Some listeners are transfixed, hanging on each
syllable; others seem less mitten, perhaps annoyed that the songs aren't as accessible as their predecessors. And still others,
remembering that the secret to Portishead lies in nuance, in the twists and turns of the plot, slowly warm to the songs.

There's no denying it: Dummy was an indelible moment, and Portishead has been away a long time. The landscape has
changed. Now Moloko, Sneaker Pimps, and Morcheeba pair soul vocals with sampled backbeats; Beth Orton, Lamb, and
Everything but the Girl fuse a singer/songwriter's sensibility with electronic tracks; Death in Vegas, Lionrock, and 'O'rang mix
live and studio instrumentation. Portishead may have introduced these techniques to electronic pop, but in the selective memory
of the music industry, that doesn't count for much. So, history aside, does Portishead still make music that matters?

RELEASED IN ENGLAND in August 1994, Dummy came quietly into the pop arena, an album with many references but
few precursors. Arriving six months later in America, it jostled with the tail end of grunge, selling 468,000 copies in the United
States with the help of MTV, which made "Sour Times" a Buzz Bin video. As Dummy garnered accolades in the U.K.--a Brit
Award, the Mercury Music Prize, and praise from music weeklies and style mags--its creators lost their cool. Barrow was ill
with worry most of the time, nursing a stomach ailment; 32-year-old Gibbons, preferring a private life, adopted a defensive
interview strategy: Journalist arrives, she leaves. By mid-'95, when Portishead commenced work on its sophomore album, the
pressure had taken its toll. Barrow suffered a 13-month writer's block, his brain turned to "jelly" from "overanalyzing what I
was trying to do [and] trying to work out why [the band] sold so many records," he says.

"I never thought there was anything good enough for the second record. My brain wouldn't let me do it. It just closed down, in
the sense of ideas. I wasn't being inspired by any music I was hearing, and I was kind of depressed about the whole musical
thing. I saw things being really rated that I thought was rubbish."

The idea for Portishead came from Barrow, a former tape operator at Bristol, England's Coach House recording studio.
Assisting on Massive Attack's Blue Lines and writing demos for Neneh Cherry's Homebrew, he became steeped in Bristol's
downbeat jazz and dubby breaks, adding them to his passion for hip hop. ("I did graffiti, I was awful at it," he says. "I was
awful at breaking as well. The only thing I was good at was sort of putting records together.") After being approached by
Gibbons, a Janis Joplin-cover singer, in the local unemployment office, Barrow roped in jazzman Utley and programmer
McDonald to help draft what he calls "pop songs with alternative backings." Utilizing a visionary production technique whereby
everything was recorded to acetate and then sampled so that the finished tracks had the gentle hiss of an old soul record, the
three paired the results with Gibbons' frayed wail, her haunting voice sketching oblique scenarios of troubled love, tales
encoded with a private language of inflections and sighs.

"I didn't want to record another Dummy--what would be the point?" Barrow says. "Because I know what it's like: You get a
band's album, and it sound OK, then you get their next album, and they haven't changed enough. The music has changed
around them, they bring out their record, and it's over. If that happens to us this time"--he laughs self-consciously--"I don't
know."

"I STILL HAVEN'T got a clue at how [Portishead] will do," Barrow says three days before the band's Roseland concert. He's
drinking tea at the venue's back bar while the orchestra's horn section rehearses; trombone honks and trumpet blasts punctuate
the conversation. Anxious about the musicians' progress, Barrow apologizes for the backdrop of noise. It's just that he would
prefer to be within earshot of Nick Ingman, the conductor, needs me.

Dressed in blue T-shirt, tan cords, and white shell-tops, Barrow looks to ordinary to be a proponent of this chaos. "I'm too
close to [Portishead]. I couldn't even go anywhere near what I think of it," he says, turning his attention from the horn section to
the interview at hand. "I couldn't tell you anything about Dummy either. No, I could tell you the tracks I can't hear anymore:
[singles] 'Sour Times' and 'Glory Box.' The ones I can hear are the most people skip on the CD."

Measured against its predecessor, Portishead pales. Yet the album is an evolution. It's strikingly less controlled and less tightly
structured. Looped hip-hop breaks still form the basis of many of the tracks, but mingled among them are songs that rely on
bass or guitar or even a bit of drumming by Barrow. Instead of snippets from '60s soundtracks, which have flooded the market
in the past two years, a 40-piece orchestra adds texture.

Portishead's intent on the album was to work with live sounds in lieu of pre-fab ones. "It's the opposite of what [an electronic
act] is supposed to be doing," Barrow says as a trumpet bleats in the background. If Portishead used samplers, its music would
be so much easier to make: Push "go" and sit back. "But we do it [our way] purely because we enjoy it," he continues. "I don't
find any joy in sampling or scratching."

Gibbons' vocals also have shifted. No longer just a warm coating over the songs, they've become an instrument in the mix, still
audible but less pronounced. Sometimes her voice is drenched with distortion, other times she skirts to its extremes: Eartha
Kitt's snarling rasp and Judy Collins' plaintive cry. And even other times she abandons her lower register completely, stretching
for, but only wobbly reaching the higher notes.

Unlike Barrow, Utley, and McDonald, who work together in the studio, Gibbons works alone in the privacy of her home.
When the boys get a rough track together, they send it to her; she writes and records a lyric, usually within two or three days,
then sends it back. From there, both sides discuss changes they feel need to be made. The unique arrangement may be one
reason why Gibbons' vocals have taken such a turn. "She's got a setup at home," Barrow explains, "and she's got all the bottom
out of her system and as much treble as possible. She listens to the music with headphones, blaring away. She loves it that way,
with vocals really tearing your head off."

As the conversation moves to Barrow's recent marriage ("I've had to clean my act up--you've got to be careful") and then hip
hop, he glances toward the stage, where the rest of the band has assembled. As he launches into the subject of hip hop's
underfunded status in Europe, slightly disjointed organ phrases repeatedly start, then abruptly stop. Then a few drum beats
sound, resonating a little too loudly for the room. Then, as Barrow mentions how he's a massive fan of Wu-Tang Clan's RZA, a
bass line begins. And then Gibbons' voice wafts in: "'Cause nobody loves me/It's true/Not like you do."

Barrow's sentence grinds to a halt. The song is "Sour Times." Cupping his head in his hands, he looks up, grins impishly, then
pretends to drive a stake into his forehead. The joke goes flat when he sees that I'm taking notes. "No, no, that's bad," he says,
suddenly serious. "Don't write that down."

AS PORTISHEAD'S quality-control officer, Barrow, out of both desire and default, is the band's mouthpiece. "We're really
uncomfortable doing press," he reiterates continually. Yet at the Roseland rehearsal, he seems just the opposite, greeting me
with a smile and proffered hand. The rest of the band is seated near him--Gibbons is perched on a green marble-top table
surrounded by Utley, McDonald, the drummer Clive Deamer--but no one attempts any other introductions as Portishead's
manager whisks us off to the back bar. Gibbons throws me a look--a tight-lipped grimace? sheepish smirk? nervous
smile?--then returns to her conversation.

"Beth doesn't do interviews--at all," Barrow says by way of explanation. "She won't be able to do anything right. [They] make
her a nervous wreck." When he and I met in 1995, she was present. During that interview, he did most of the talking, but she
added the occasional word. She kept offering peeks at some other side of her. What was behind her dirty chuckle when
Barrow referred to "fiddling around in his bedroom," or her reputation as a terror when behind the wheel of her Triumph
convertible, or her handshake, which was far firmer than I had expected? "[Interviews] do affect her," he reiterates, clearly
having gone through this before.

"The thing is," he continues, "for [Beth to] not do interviews, it creates this nonsense mystery-woman thing. We don't go along
with that. Literally, if she's unhappy with something--because we've got more power now, because of the records we sold--if
she doesn't want to do it, that's cool. I don't want to do photographs. Not because I am a prima donna, but because I cannot
abide being in a photo studio for five hours. That's not what I am in the industry for; that's not why I make music. I hate it that
much that I don't do it."

He takes a drag on his cigarette. "There is this huge gap between rock 'n' roll bands and the general public. It's great for people
like Oasis; they're brilliant, they know how to play the game, and you need that in rock 'n' roll. But we, literally, can't deal that
way. Even if it prevents us from selling records--and it does--sometimes we get really unhappy doing TV things and stuff like
that. We're not into lip-synching and all that crap."

After a pause, he adds, "I think if [the press] really bothers Beth, she should stop singing and get out of the business altogether.
Then there would be nothing to write about anyway." They could write about him."That's right," he says, with a slight edge in his
voice. "That's why I do the interviews and she does photographs. Whic his completely useless to a magazine, because you have
a picture of one person and the other person's talking."

IT'S 8:45 A.M. the next day, and Barrow and I have met for breakfast at his suggestion, after the Roseland interview had been
cut short. He's wired from jet lag and announces he's been on a diet. "We shot this video of our rehearsal to see how we were
playing," he says on the way to the hotel dining room. "And in it, I look like a pregnant 15-year-old girl! Little breasts, little
belly." He glances at his chest--which looks pretty flat to me--and shudders.

So, over tea, toast, and only a little bit of jam, he lays out Portishead's plans. There will be a short U.S. tour in December and
possibly a remix EP--done by the band members themselves--in the new year. He and some mates who call themselves
Invisible Inc. have finished the video for the first single, "All Mine," due out in late September. "Beth's not in it, none of us are in
it," Barrow reports. "It's based on a 1968 Italian talent show and The Outer Limits. That's kind of a British Twilight Zone."I
used to watch it on TV," he says, crunching through a piece of bread. "I really, really loved it. I actually saw Sam & Dave on it
the other day; they sang five tunes and were blinding. There's [the host] Little Tony--he's got sideburns" Barrow takes a sip of
tea. "I think it's supposed to be like The Ed Sullivan Show, but a little rougher around the edges."

The video starkly contrasts with To Kill a Dead Man, the stylized black-and-white film photographer/director Alex Hemming
shot for Portishead in 1994. An espionage takeoff, the 10-minute short starred the band members and featured their
soundtrack. The video for "Sour Times" was culled from the film's footage.

Barrow cringes at the movie's mention. "When I look at To Kill a Dead Man, I can't stand it," he says. "I think it was a
dreadful piece of film. Basically, it was done so that we could write some film music. Not to put down anyone involved with the
film, but we should have done it with pure images, rather than having us in it. It was misunderstood, what we wanted to get out
of it. It created an image, and the whole idea was for it not to."

He pushes a lock of hair off his face. "We are completely anti-image," he says. "The whole vibe to us is purely that it doesn't
matter which trousers you wear, it doesn't matter how you look, it doesn't matter what you speak like. Someone might
interview me, and I might be a complete and utter dork, twat, whatever. Whereas the important thing is that little bit of vinyl."
He draws a circle in the air. "That's the important thing. If people get off on that, that's brilliant."