Source: Alternative Press, May, 1995
By: Julie Tarkasa

Portishead's potent cocktail of smeared blues, '60s spy-movie themes, and hip-hop dub has successfully infiltrated America.
Special agent Julie Tarkasa goes on a mission to discover their secret formula.

It takes a 5,000-mile plane ride to reach the rendezvous point: A Hilton Hotel in Bristol, England. It's lounge, mind you, sports
the same patterened carpet and square wooden tables decorating every American Hilton. In one corner, a mirrored bar
sparkles like cubic zirconium. In another, a woman plays "As Time Goes By" on a synthesizer. Like a scene from a David
Lynch film, the setting in simultaneously familiar and surreal, a fitting location to meet Portishead.

Geoff Barrow, the band's 23-year-old mastermind, is seated in the captain's chair. His cautious eyes, tangled hair, and a few
days' worth of stubble give him a rough appearance. Looks can deceive, though, because he's both gregarious and
unpresumptuous. A man who carefully considers his words, he even admits to tidying up after his girlfriend, Jo.

He nods toward his cohort Beth Gibbons, crumpled in the chair next to him. "The first time I met Beth, she had come to my
house to audition. The singers that I had been working with, I would have to say to them, 'Come on, sing and they would be all
quiet. But Beth, she was like, 'Waaaaaah!" He emphasizes the word as if it were coming from the bottom of his lungs.

Gibbons begins to proffer an explanation, but falls into nervous giggles. She flicks her hair over her face and looks away toward
some object on the other side of the room.

"Beth sings with so much power," Geoff explains. "I never met any person that was like her."

Nor have most people met anything like Portishead. When the group released Dummy last fall, critics sputtered superlatives.
Barrow's smeared blues, '60s spy-movie samples and hip-hop dub simmered beneath Gibbons' quivering voice. Loneliness and
spent relationships - "You abandoned me/Lost forever/ Ridicule/Breathes a sigh" - haunted her tales. From the otherworldly
hum of "Mysterons" to the rattling chains and unrequited obsession of "Sour Times," the songs evoked images and atmospheres
like Morricone soundtracks. Gibbons' Iyrics unravelled through this musical ether; her passion, though bruised, smoldered over
the noir grooves.

Gibbons' shyness also stoked the fire. Despite Dummy's success, the wide-eyed siren avoided interviews, claiming that she had
put so much of herself into the Iyrics that she had nothing left to say. Journalists and their psychoanalytical queries made her
uncomfortable. She preferred to leave them all guessing at her motivations as she sped away in her convertible. Today,
fortunately, she has consented to stay a while.

"The only reason I sing," she says, fidgeting with the cuff of her baggy green sweater, "is because I love emotion. I am totally
obsessed with how people feel." She plants her elbows upon the table and leans forward, face flush. "Like, I meet you, and see
how you are. I am much more interested in what you are thinking, what you are feeling. But I know I can never get to that. So
that's why I sing, because I am always trying to find a new feeling and figure out why I didn't feel something and am I just a
computer and don't feel anything?"

She collapses into her armchair. "That's why the whole album is 'Waaaaaah!"

Before Portishead the group came Portishead the place, a seaside town near Bristol where, as one visitor remarked, "people
go to die." Geoff spent his childhood there, DJing in his bedroom before he graduated to "tea boy" (the British equivalent to a
"gofer") at a recording studio. There he met local musicians Massive Attack, who were then recording Blue Lines. Massive's
manager, Cameron McVey, was impressed by Geoff's work and got him a job writing demos for Neneh Cherry's Homebrew
album. After that, Geoff left the studio to concentrate on Portishead, subsidizing his income by remixing songs for Primal
Scream, Gravediggaz and Jeff Beck, among others.

Aside from working in the studio, living in Bristol has also affected Geoff's ideas about music. Bristol's ethnic diversity -
including its substantial West Indian community - has made the city a cauldron of black and white music styles. An active
network of reggae sound systems runs in the area, thumping out bass-heavy reggae and other traditional Caribbean musics at
outdoor events. Geoff, a fan of reggae, claims that the genre has taught him about "beat lines, breaks, effects and mad sounds,"
the elements which form Portishead's music.

"When I was younger, I looked to the people who were DJs, [to] the cool people who were making records. When I was in
my bedroom fiddling around..."

Beth chuckles slyly, catching him off guard. He throws her a quizzical look and then grins sheepishly.

"I'd better reword that. When I was in my bedroom coming up with demos, the last thing I wanted to do was sound like the
Wild Bunch or Smith And Mighty," he says, referring, respectively, to the precursor to Massive Attack and to the Bristol band
credited with inventing the breakbeat. I rated [liked] them when I was younger and into hip-hop. I suppose that if you live
anywhere, you admire the local people that are doing really, really good music."

Beth, who has a habit of letting her cigarette ash burn precariously long, feels that Geoff, rather than geography, has most
influenced her.

"I think what would have affected me is if I were working with someone else, " she says. "With Geoff, it's more like trying to get
the message across what I'm trying to..."

"Do?" he asks.

"Yes," she answers, laughing, "because you are quite good at knowing what I'm after, even though we don't see eye-to-eye on
all things."

Portishead's songwriting method is unique. First, Geoff - along with the band's guitarist/so-producer Adrian Utley and sound
engineer Dave MacDonald - work up a backing track in the studio. The three then give it to Beth, who goes off on her own for
a few days to write and arrange the vocals. Then she calls Geoff and either plays or sings the results over the phone. Once
they're both satisfied, they record the finished piece in the studio.

Geoff believes that technology has supplanted emotion in music. To make Portishead's beats sound "warm" and "organic," he
and the band create their own samples. They also use real instruments, a rarity in such studio-created music.

"I cannot stand people who can't be asked to plug in an old amp because they would rather use some little box that's easier to
carry," says Geoff, disgustedly. "I cannot stand producers that tell you that you should buy this Hammond organ because 'it's
the best piano known to man.' For the same amount of money, you could book into a studio and play a real piano. The
Hammond organ they give you sounds all digital and nasty. It makes this one sound that this bloke who sat in this music lab at
Korg or Casio came up with. The music isn't personally yours."

His solution is to use technology to complement - rather than contradict - nature. "When it comes down to sound, we're very
obsessive about it. We sample everything and turn it inside out. We use modern technology up to a point, then use the old stuff,
then mishmash it around."

Beth's weathered wail is Portishead's most soulful element. Her voice flaunts a poet's timing, and begs comparisons to Billie
Holiday and cabaret singer Edith Piaf. Beth, however, denies any conscious parallels. She claims her inspiration is Janis Joplin,
whose songs she used to cover in Bristol pubs. That explains her cathartic vocal style. It also accounts for the reports that
during Portishead's three live shows, Beth, eyes closed, clung to the microphone "as if the floor were being pulled out from
beneath her" while letting loose screams that "singed eyebrows."

Beth, of course, declines to comment upon these descriptions. But she admits that when she's trying to decide how to deliver a
song's lyrics, she's "disciplined" and "obsessive," often singing each syllable over and over for days.

"I think I have tried every style I can think of," she says flatly. "I'm trying to do something that I want to hear because I'm never
hearing what I want to. I'm trying to come up with a new sound, but I feel that I always fail. "

Geoff sees it another way. "As long as you can establish why you're doing something, I think it's all right," he says, "because
then you can analyze it. That helps the take." He pauses to take a sip of beer as Beth watches him. "Thing is, I'll give Beth a
backing track, and her style will change from track to track, like a chameleon of voices."

"It's a mood thing," she says.

"Like you'll sing 'Roads,"' he continues, "and you'll be very breathy. Then you'll sing 'Glory Box,' with the lyrics 'I'm so tired of
being a temptress' and it's the mood - you sing around a sound."

She nods. "It's definitely to fit the backing track." A pause, a puff of smoke, and she pushes the topic away.

She then begins anew. "Because Geoff writes like he does, [in his skeletal, atmospheric fashion], it is quite odd singing, because
there was probably less on each track when he gave it to me than there is now. It was hard to write. But that's the fun for me,
trying to write over a backing track that you're normally not supposed to sing over."

"I keep trying to give her more and more backing tracks that she won't be able to sing over," says Geoff, "and she comes back
with a better song on each one."

He turns to Beth. "If I give you something too simple, we both look at each other and go..."

He scrunches up his face and shakes his head. She smiles.

"Nah."

Instead of making a video for Dummy's first single, "Sour Times," the band first made a short film, To Kill A Dead Man. Geoff
claims that this pastiche strings together "cliches from every spy movie known to man." Scenes from the film eventually became
the video for "Sour Times."

To make full sense of the video, it's important to understand the film's plot. A shifty-looking loner in a trench coat (Barrow) is
hired to assassinate a dignitary while the dignitary's wife (Gibbons) looks on. A shot is fired, the dignitary goes down, and the
wife becomes hysterical. Carted off to an asylum, she is sedated and forced to watch replays of the assassination. After her
discharge, she engages in a symbolic game of chess. She then hires the same assassin to kill the dignitary, since the dignitary
faked his death hoping to drive his wife insane. For the film's classic denouement, the wife's car pulls up to the dignitary's
Mercedes. He glances over at her and then puts his hand over his face, realizing that the man he just let into his car is going to
kill him. She closes her window and drives away, avenged.

To Kill A Dead Man was entered in European film festivals, distributed to the film societies at American and British colleges,
and screened around London as a preview to the thriller Shallow Grave. Portishead opted for the film because they wanted to
avoid having the band assume some sort of image.

Geoff elucidates. "We're not into having a load of dancing girls behind Beth, and me on the decks, lip-synch ing. We're not film
buffs by any means, but we are into soundtracks, not the image thing."

Yet the film, shot in a French avant-garde style, is very image-conscious. Objets d'art are littered around the set, while the
attention to detail - the cars and clothes in particular - is exacting.

Geoff says that he would have preferred a grittier-lookiny film. "Every video we've done, we've used [director and
photographer] Alex Hemming. I am never unhappy with anything he does, [but] if I had my own way, I would have wanted the
movie to be a lot crustier. To me, it was too stylish, because as people, we're not stylish." He glances down and shrugs. "It
kinda gives a false impression."

Still, Geoff's happy Portishead made the film, since it was, after all, a practical decision. "We made a tenminute film, wrote a
soundtrack to it, got all the artwork for the album and used it as a big promotional video all for the cost of making a
mediumpriced video... And all without having to wear any trendy clothes."

In Britain, where Dummy has sold over 200,000 copies, the band has won accolades from style bibles, music papers, DJ
monthlies and critical journals. In America, where the album has sold nearly double that, a similar response has been building.
Why has this album - which is neither agit-punk rock nor overtly danceable - been so successful?

Probably because it's one of the first non-rap albums to merge electronica with a sense of emotion. Technology may be the
future, but so much of technology-based music is faceless. Consider house and techno's empty repetitions, or ambient's
anonymous atmospheres. Portishead infuse real feeling into their beats, wandering through universal subjects like desolation and
heartbreak. Beth delivers her well-thought-out lyrics with grit and blood intact, her display of emotion on par with the likes of
PJ Harvey. People who crave something real, something to feel, are captivated as Portishead's music satisfies their desires.

Aiming to fulfill their own desires, Portishead are currently ensconced in the studio working on Dummy's successor. Geoff and
Beth believe the album will sound much like its predecessor, not because they intend it to, but because their success hasn't
changed them.

"I'll do what I do because I am the same person, but hopefully progressed a bit. We don't want to do the same thing, [but] it
ain't going to be like we turn into Elton John."

Before the album is released, however, Portishead will briefly tour the U.S. Their show will be fully live and devoid of all
sampling, a feat for a band so studio-based. But Geoff is confident he'll be satisfied with the results.

"Instead of just plugging in and playing, we're going to use a lot of techniques to make the songs sound like those on the album.
There's a gap between each song, and that little gap will allow us to change our sound. Instead of just playing the songs all in
one sound, we're physically going to change the organs, double bass and drums so they sound different from the last song."

The band looks forward to the trip to the States, a welcome break from the mounting pressure and expectations of the second
album.

"In America," Geoff says, "I find that if you have a hit, people say, 'Well done. I'm really pleased for you.' In England, it's like,
'You've sold out. You're not cool anymore.'

"I never did my music to be cool. I did my music so people I rate would turn around and say my music was really good."