12
The Observer
25.08.19 MusicRIGHT
Geoff Barrow
and Beth
Gibbons in the
early 90s and,
below, the cover
of Portishead’s
1994 debut
album,
Dummy.
Mark McNulty/
RetnaUKOn the 25th anniversary of their classic
debut, Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Adrian
Utley talk to Jude Rogers about how they
made it, how the music business disregards
mental health – and why gentrifi cation
hasn’t helped their home city of Bristol
T
wenty-fi ve years ago ,
during the summer
of Blur’s Parklife and
Oasis’s Defi nitely
Maybe, a darker,
stranger record was
released. Its title and mood was
inspired by a 1970s TV drama of
the same name, about a young deaf
woman in Yorkshire who becomes
a prostitute. The lyrics spoke of
emotional extremes, sung in a
rural-tinged, English blues by the
Devon-born Beth Gibbons , of “the
blackness, the darkness, forever”
in Wandering Star, or of the feeling
that “nobody loves me, it’s true, not
like you do” in Sour Times.
Its sound, woven together by Geoff
Barrow a nd Adrian Utley , helped
defi ne what is known today in
music as hauntology, the sampling
of older, spectral sounds to evoke
deeper cultural memories (Boards of
Canada’s TV-sampling electronica,
Burial’s dubstep, and the Ghost Box
label’s folk horror soundworlds
would follow their lead). But despite
its starkness, Dummy became a
triple-platinum seller and a Mercury
prizewinner, perhaps because it
struck a nerve in what Barrow calls
our “sonic unconscious... when
sounds can merge with other sounds‘Dummy wasn’t a
chillout album.
We had more i n
common with Nirvana’
from somewhere else, and ultimately
create emotion”.
It’s a muggy, windy afternoon
in a canalside corner of Bristol, the
city where Portishead have been
making music on and off since 1991.
Barrow and Utley are in the studio
of Barrow’s record label, Invada,
scuttling around drinking coffee
and fi ddling with a new synthesiser.
Despite there being 15 years between
them, they have a funny, sweary,
fraternal camaraderie. Beth Gibbons
is not here, as usual, despite requests:
only two short interviews in the mid-
1990s revealed the chattier person
behind her mysterious persona. (She
didn’t do interviews either for her
racked, bruising interpretation of
Górecki’s Third Symphony with the
Polish National Radio Symphony
Orchestra , released earlier this year.)
With no reissue to support
Dummy’s silver anniversary (a
remaster was released in 2014), one
wonders initially why we’re here.
The trio haven’t released an album
since 2008 ( the abrasive, career-
high Third ) or played live since 2015;
their last outing, in 2016, was a
startling, bleak cover of Abba’s SOS
for the fi lm High Rise. But as the two
hours unfurl, it’s obvious that this
is Portishead’s opportunity to settle