Beth
goes solo!
Beth Gibbons | Vocals, melodies,
lyrics, backing tracks.
Musical
influences: Billie Holiday, Edith
Piaf, Cocteau Twins, Nina Simone, Otis
Redding, Janis Ian, Jimmy Cliff.
General info:
Beth Gibbons was born January 4th, 1965, in
Exeter, UK, and raised on a small farm twenty
miles outside of town with three sisters.
"We all had an enormous amount of work
to do on the farm," recalls Beth in one
of her early interviews. "Everyone had
to roll up their sleeves; it wasn't really
the time for moods."
You could say Beth was a quiet child,
forgoing the night life in the city nearby
and preferring to stay home with her mother
and listen to records. Finally, at the age of
22, Beth, who had decided to forgo any sort
of university experience, made up her mind to
move to Bristol and take her chances as a
singer. After a rather unsuccesful career as
a bar chanteuse, she came across Geoff Barrow
and the rest was history.
For Beth and Geoff, the media pressure grew
too strong to handle after the taste of
success 'Dummy' brought along. They decided
Geoff would do all the interviews if Beth
would do all the photo shoots. As a result,
Beth hasn't given an interview since the
early press junket to promote Dummy. That has
nothing to do with her supposed shyness nor
that she'd want to conceal her not so
glamorous pub-rock past. It's just that her
songs are about things that are very personal
to her - she doesn't want to have to talk to
the press and reveal stuff that's private.
Also, Beth's afraid
that if she did interviews, it would affect
the way she thinks about writing songs. Beth
feels that she can't express herself in a
half-hour telephone interview, and she's
afraid to be wrongly represented by false
quotations. She also thinks she has already
said everything she wanted to say in her
lyrics.
Nowadays Beth has her
own little studio in the countryside in which
she writes music for Portishead. She records
the songs and sends them to the other band
members in Bristol where they do their part
and send it back to Beth and so on. This is
the recording process Portishead have used on
their last albums.
In October 2002 Beth
released her debut solo album 'Out Of Season'
with help from Paul Webb of Talk Talk. More
information on her solo career can be found here.
Adrian Utley on
Beth: "I think she is one of
the most honest and intense singers. And I do
mean that sincerely. It's a pleasure to be
able to work with someone that special."
Geoff Barrow on
Beth: "I thought she had a
major voice, but I just didn't think we'd do
anything together. At that point her voice
was so way out for what we wanted. From what
we were doing. And her voice sounded a little
bit different from where she is now. We've
kind of, like, changed together. Since we've
been working together, we've changed so we've
adapted to each other."
"She's got her own
little studio that she works in when she
writes the songs. She likes recording her own
tracks really badly. Like playing drums or
playing guitar or whatever, making a racket.
I don't know. I think she likes people like
Otis Redding, I suppose, or Janis Joplin. But
she's not a big music person. She wouldn't
really go out and buy a record. Since I've
known her, I've never known her to actually
say she's gone out and bought an album and
liked it. I don't even think she really
listens to music either really."
"I know for a
fact, I know really, if Beth isn't happy with
what's going on in the music industry, she'll
quit. Stop. She'd stop tomorrow. I just know
that. I haven't got to be running around
making her happy, because it won't be one of
those things that'll make her unhappy. It'll
be a personal feeling. Because she's real
level-headed. It'll be one of those things
that she'll turn around and say, "look
I'm not enjoying this." And if I said,
"Can I sort this out," and she
says, "No, I'm going to give up."
There's nothing I can do."
"Within
Portishead, there's really only one important
thing and that's making music. So if her
doing interviews affects her doing music and
she's uncomfortable with it, then she doesn't
have to do it. If she wants to at some point,
yeah. It's totally up to her. It's not some
kind of ploy to make her this mysterious
woman. She doesn't like doing them -- full
stop."
"I think the idea
that she gives so much of her personal
feeling into those things, for someone to
judge her within half an hour is kind of
really unfair. Because if I were a
journalist, heard the record and I spoke to
her about personal things, you would actually
think that she must be a massively depressed,
kind of troubled person when in reality she's
not at all."
Quotes:
"I was raised far away from it all, on a
farm. My parents divorced when I was really
young, so there was never a man of the house.
We had always lived with just us girls - with
my mum and my three sisters, Anna, Kathreen
et Lydia. At 61 years old, my mother, has to
manage alone with her livestock, about twenty
heads of cattle. She's incredibly
courageous… the closest town, Exeter, is
about twenty miles from our house. At the
most, we would visit there about once a
month. Yet, I was rather happy with this: we
all had an enormous amount of work to do on
the farm, everyone had to roll up there
sleeves - it wasn't really the time for
moods. At seventeen years old, I had several
friends leave to go to the town. But me, I
prefered to stay at the farm and help my mum.
Being way too lazy, I never had the desire to
go to university… I left the farm
briefly for the first time to be with a boy,
but a couple of months later, I was back at
my mum's house. I ended up staying there
until my twenty-second birthday."
"My voice adapts
itself to the music. I can do a lot more than
you hear in Portishead. Or rather: more than
Portishead needs. Bono has a big voice, yes,
but let him sing over a Portishead-track and
there's nothing left of it. With Geoff's
music you have to restrain yourself otherwise
you'll ruin everything."
"I don't actually
think the songs are that desperate. I do have
an emptiness but, then again, everyone has to
a lesser or greater degree. I tend to dwell
on mine more than other people do which I'm
sure manifests itself in my lyrics. Suffering
for your art is most definitely overrated but
I do get a certain, I don't know,
satisfaction from being able to deal with my
paranoia and insecurity. I wake up sometimes
and think, 'no way am I going to be able to
get through the day', but you do and at the
end of it you feel a tiny bit stronger. When
I'm that 'up', I'm too busy enjoying myself
to write about it. I'm naturally pessimistic
but what motivates me isn't so much
depression as a sense of helplessness. I keep
thinking there must be more to life but I
don't know what it is. In that respect, I
find life both scary and slightly
unfulfilling."
"No, I'm not
trying to save on psychiatrist's bills. It's
more me asking, 'does anyone else feel this
way?' And if it does reach the point where it
gets uncomfortably personal, I tend to
disguise what I'm saying in the
phrasing."
"The thing that
I'm into is the philosophy of the music. I
love the surprise of things, the accidents…just
the sound of a word, to try to express them
in the best way, so that the emotion is
totally revealed.”
