sound systems, and had a strong Caribbean identity.”
“Nobody in Bristol apart from team at the Coach House Studios expected Dummy,” adds Richard Jones,
author of Bristol Music: Seven Decades of Sound. “Like Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, it was completely
unanticipated. The broken beats, the plaintive guitar, the devastating sadness of the vocals were truly
groundbreaking.
Geoff Barrow fell in love with hip-hop and
sampling while attending youth club funk nights
in rural Somerset (Rex)“For decades, Bristol music had barely troubled daytime radio or the charts. The city had refused to dance
to the London beat and so had developed a musical style in isolation drawing, perhaps subconsciously, on
the city’s traditions of jazz, folk, reggae and hip-hop and adopting an international perspective that surely
had something to do with Womad [the international arts festival] being based in the city. Perhaps this helps
appreciate where Dummy came from, but there’s no explaining genius.”
Dummy was a spectacular record made by unassuming and in some ways ordinary people. Barrow, the
group’s founder and driving force, had started out as a tape operator and general runabout at Coach House
Studios, situated then, as now, close to Bristol city centre. Coach House was a gathering point for faces on
the local trip-hop scene, among them the members of Massive Attack. Twenty-year old Barrow was on
hand, brewing up a cuppa and delivering the post, as the group assembled their 1991 debut Blue Lines.
He later worked on Neneh Cherry’s Homebrew alongside her producer husband Cameron McVey (who had
overseen Blue Lines). The lesson he took from these experiences was that by the early Nineties musicians
were no longer hidebound by convention. They were at liberty to make up their own rules. One of the most
revolutionary aspects of Massive Attack, after all, was that they weren’t a band in the traditional sense. They
were a collective, with a free-floating family of members and influences that encompassed graffiti and
vintage scores as much as hip-hop or pop.
What Barrow lacked was Massive Attack’s encyclopaedic grasp of pop history. A shy lad from the sticks, he
wasn’t much of a crate digger. One of his early demos sampled his sister’s copy of the Grease soundtrack.
That was all there was to hand. Everything changed when he struck up a friendship with DJ and musician
Adrian Utley, the very disc-spinner whose youth club gigs he’d attended as a teenager.
“We kind of hooked up, with our knowledge of old school hip-hop and current hip-hop at the time, and
breaks and stuff,” Utley told Medium in 2014. “I’d kind of play him old breaks that he’d never heard before
to work on tracks.” All Barrow needed now was a vocalist. He held a mini X-Factor competition in his
mum’s kitchen in Portishead. A gaggle of hopefuls got the bus down from Bristol to audition. None chimed
with his distinctive vision.
As with all the best pop stories, Portishead’s features a heavy dose of serendipity – never more so than when
Barrow bumped into vocalist Beth Gibbons at that fateful enterprise scheme induction day. They got to