is the moment the world at large first discovered Barrow and Gibbons’ singular, slightly scary chemistry.
“We should go over to Portishead,” a mullet-and-leather-jacket sporting Jools Holland declared, welcoming
the band to his Later... studio on 12 November 1994. “The singer and the DJ met on an enterprise allowance
scheme.” It was a strange introduction to what was, by the standard of mid-Nineties British pop, a strange
band. “We played ‘Glory Box’ and ‘Wandering Star’ and the interest went crazy,” Barrow would later tell
me of that performance.
He spoke as if Jools Holland had happened only yesterday. That it would be seared so powerfully into his
memory is no surprise. The rendition of “Glory Box”, in particular, was an unforgettable avalanche of late
hours catharsis. Amid scratching vinyl and grooving guitars, the haunting sample of Isaac Hayes ”Ike’s Rap
II” sweeps in. Gibbons stands with her eyes closed, mouth shaped into a snarl. Even before she sings, you
know something special is happening.
“With only three albums, Portishead brought an amazing story to British music,” says Melissa Chemam,
author of Massive Attack: A Bristol Story, one of the definitive chroniclings of the city’s music scene through
the Nineties.“They’re absolutely revered in the rest of Europe. Their sound is more related to jazz than hip-
hop... They cultivated their own identity, at a time of massive trends like Britpop. They never fit into a
commercial model.”
Their sound on single ‘Glory Box’ was a mash-up of hissing vinyl, slowed-down James Bond guitars and
‘Doctor Who’-style scary effects
Portishead, as Chemam suggests, are part of the secret history of British music in the Nineties. It is a
narrative that has come to be thoroughly obscured by Britpop. Dummy was released the same year as Oasis’s
Definitely Maybe and Blur’s Parklife. At the time, and certainly within the critical community, it was
accorded equal prominence.
Dummy would go on to shift an estimated 3.6 million units. In an era of blockbuster records it was right up
there. And of course it won the 1995 Mercury Music Prize, seeing off Oasis, PJ Harvey, Leftfield and fellow
West Country boundary-breaker Tricky. It has also weathered the decades better than many of the albums
with which it jostled for attention. The average Britpop LP of the period nowadays sounds as creaky and
quaint as a Pathé newsreel. Because Portishead never fitted in to begin with Dummy remains its own
mysterious thing: timeless and unknowable.
That’s even more remarkable considering little about either the group or their approach to music was
particularly enigmatic. Dummy took hip-hop and its DIY sampling culture in a mildly left-of-centre
direction. The primary ingredients were guitarist Adrian Utley’s jazz-inflected licks, Barrow’s passion for
Sixties and Seventies soundtracks and Gibbons’ supernatural coo. And they spent an age labouring over
their soundscapes. There was no secret formula.
“The album was a game changer in Bristol’s music history,” says Chemam. Portishead were, she points out,
operating in the shadow of Massive Attack, pioneers of the swampy, rumbling sound that would – to the
horror of everyone involved – quickly be dubbed “trip-hop”. Yet if the story of Dummy has to be told in the
context of Massive Attack and of their sometime collaborator Tricky, it’s equally obvious that Portishead
were their own thing, out there in the lonely margins.
“Dummy came out only a few weeks before Massive Attack’s second album, Protection,” says Chemam.
“Portishead had some dark imagery and some hip-hop influences. [But] they were not creating the same
kind of music and were not at all the same kind of band. Massive Attack came out of eight years of work in