talking and realised they had a mutual acquaintance in Utley. Portishead was progressing from pipe dream
to flesh-and-blood pop group.
In the summer of Oasis, Blur, Pulp and the rest, ‘Dummy’ was a dark and unfathomable record
Still, they in many ways remained at the baby steps phase. There was no record label interest. They didn’t
play live. And didn’t have anywhere to rehearse. But Barrow was still working at Coach House and had use
of the studio during downtime. He took full advantage. Painstakingly over the course of 18 months, the
record that would become Portishead’s debut came together.
Dummy, it’s worth remembering, was not a slow burner nor an underground hit. It was as an immediate
sensation. In 1994 rave reviews could still make a difference and the music press was head over heels for
Dummy. In a summer dominated by Oasis, Blur, Pulp and the rest, it was dark and unfathomable. And in
Gibbons it offered a bleak, twisted and completely novel vision of what a blues singer could be.
Success thus arrived more or less overnight. Portishead’s response was to recoil in horror. Gibbons sang
because she felt isolated from and unmoored by the world and wanted to communicate with others with
similar experiences. Now she found herself the poster child for upwardly mobile angst. The breaking point
was when Portishead were repurposed as aural wallpaper for the BBC’s aspirational Gen X drama This Life
(thanks to the show’s music supervisor, Ricky Gervais).
“Half the reason you write... is that you’re feeling misunderstood and frustrated with life in general,”
Gibbons protested. “Then it’s sort of successful and you think you’ve communicated with people, but then
you realise you haven’t communicated with them at all – you’ve turned the whole thing into a product, so
then you’re even more lonely than when you started.”
If a low profile was what they wanted, difficult times lay ahead. Their debut London performance, at the
Eve Club on 28 November 1994, was a glittering event, with a huge media coverage and a guest list that
included INXS’s Michael Hutchence. A mild backlash ensued. Dummy was ridiculed in some circles as
manicured misery for the dinner-party set. This hurt. And when Portishead were nominated for the
Mercury, they were more or less appalled at all the exposure.
The lesson they took away was that the less people saw of them the better for Portishead. An eponymous
second album followed in 1997. A full 11 years would then elapse until its follow-up, Third. In the interim,
they’ve maintained a cautious silence. Portishead’s success would, it was clear, be on their terms. They’ve
kept a tight grip on that narrative ever since.
“We never went to parties or award ceremonies,” Barrow told me. “We never actively sought to be famous.
We won the Mercury, which was bloody uncomfortable. It proved a point to us. We weren’t those kind of
people.”