Tuesday November 3, 1998

Under the influence of Portishead: Why are
musicians all raving about Britain's Portishead?

By DAVE VEITCH
Calgary Sun

Portishead hadn't even completed the painfully
protracted recording sessions for its second album
when the band hatched a new idea.

The influential British trip-hop quartet wanted to
premiere the yet-incomplete album with a
large-scale show. In New York City. Backed by a
30-piece orchestra. And videotaped for posterity.

Already under tremendous pressure to followup its
acclaimed 1994 debut Dummy, the members of
Portishead pursued their concert concept and
pushed themselves to the limit.

"It felt like that at times," recalls guitarist-bassist
Adrian Utley in an overseas phone chat.

"But it was exciting, too. I was getting up at

five in the morning to get working on the string
arrangements and stuff."

All turned out well. The group's haunting self-titled
second CD topped many best-of-1997 lists and
the New York concert was a smashing success, as
you can hear when a live album from the show,
PNYC, hits stores on Nov. 10. A video of the
performance is expected in shops this week.

"The concert was extremely expensive and we
could never really do it again with an orchestra.
Even rehearsals for it cost us a fortune. But it was
definitely worth it," Utley says.

Indeed, Portishead's noirish mix of languid hip-hop
beats, scratchy self-made samples, cinematic string
arrangements and Beth Gibbons' jazzy, anguished
vocals took on even more drama and majesty
onstage.

The group's unmistakable sound has been hugely
influential. Singer Roberta Carter Harrison says
Dummy prompted her group, Canada's Wild
Strawberries, to ditch its guitar-pop direction for
moodier soundscapes, while American
singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones told me this
year that Portishead's music had a huge effect on
her own trip-hop disc, Ghostyhead.

"That's brilliant," Utley says excitedly.

"I respect Rickie Lee Jones massively. I always
loved her (1979 song) Last Chance Texaco.

"I'm very glad if I hear people have been
influenced by us and yet they don't sound like us.
It's like taking a spirit. That's what we're doing.

"We're influenced by people, obviously. But it's
convoluting them and letting them influence your
brain without you wanting to sound just like them.

"That's what it's about."

Many of today's hitmakers are liberally
appropriating sounds and ideas (particularly
involving tape loops) from Portishead and its
hometown peers Massive Attack and Tricky, all of
whom have turned Bristol, England, into the
epicentre of the 1990s trip-hop movement.

Did Utley sense he and his fellow Bristol musicians
were rewriting the pop music vocabulary?

"I only had one sense of that and that's when we
first did (Later With) Jools Holland," Utley says,
referring to a British TV music show hosted by the
onetime Squeeze keyboardist.

"We had just released Dummy. I remember INXS
were on, an old soul singer and Edwyn Collins....
The crew there were not interested in what we
were doing because we were quiet, slow and didn't
want flashing lights around us, like a lot of other
bands did.

"For the first time in my life, I felt that something
was happening."