Portishead

The Bristol trio of Beth Gibbons, Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley, whose Mercury-winning debut Dummy popularised trip hop, a label they disliked, and whose Third transformed them fourteen years later.

Origin
Bristol, England
Years active
1991-present
Genres
trip hop, alternative rock, electronica, experimental rock
Labels
Go! Discs, Go! Beat, London, Island, Mercury

Bristol

Geoff Barrow moved to Portishead, a town about eight miles west of Bristol, at eleven, and later called it his dreary home town. From 1989 he worked as a tape operator at Coach House Studios in Bristol, where he picked up spare studio time while Massive Attack were making Blue Lines. In 1991 he met Beth Gibbons, a singer from Devon who had come to Bristol to sing, on the government's Enterprise Allowance scheme. At a training day in a Clifton hotel she told him she wanted to sing full time. Their first ideas were recorded in Neneh Cherry's London kitchen while Barrow worked on her album Homebrew, and the name stuck after their A&R man read a Music Week item about Cherry working with the guys from Portishead.

Adrian Utley, a jazz guitarist who had played with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, was drawn in after hearing It Could Be Sweet, their first finished song, at Coach House. Barrow taught him sampling, and Utley brought cimbalom and theremin. With the engineer Dave McDonald, sometimes called the fourth member, they borrowed a method from New York hip-hop: they pressed their own playing to vinyl, scuffed the records by walking on them, recorded through a broken amp and stacked samples even when the keys did not match.

Dummy

Dummy came out on Go! Beat on 22 August 1994, its cover taken from stills of the band's short film To Kill a Dead Man. Numb, Sour Times and Glory Box were the singles. Melody Maker made it album of the year and heard it as noir music for a film not yet made. It reached number two in Britain, won the 1995 Mercury Music Prize and had sold 3.6 million copies worldwide by 2008. It is widely credited with popularising trip hop, a tag the band disliked. Wandering Star, with Barrow's scratched solo, became a fixture of their sets. After Dummy, Gibbons largely stopped giving interviews, and the band's story has mostly been told by Barrow and Utley.

Portishead (1997), co-produced with McDonald, went to number two in Britain and number one in New Zealand. On 24 July 1997 they played the Roseland Ballroom in New York with an orchestra conducted by Nick Ingman, released the next year as Roseland NYC Live. The tour ran for more than a year and left them exhausted, and Barrow put the band on hold and moved to Australia.

Third

Barrow founded the Invada label there in 2001, and he and Utley began Portishead tracks in a small Australian studio, then scrapped every one. Gibbons made Out of Season with Rustin Man in 2002, and Utley played on Goldfrapp's records. Producing the Coral's The Invisible Invasion in 2005 brought Barrow and Utley's creativity back, and that year the band played a tsunami benefit in Bristol, their first show in seven years.

Third was made from 2005 to 2008 across three Bristol studios, though Barrow said most of it was written in a burst at the end of 2007. They avoided instruments they had used before and swapped roles, with Barrow on bass and Gibbons on guitar. Barrow wanted it to sound as if it had struggled. Released at the end of April 2008, after a Last.fm stream drew 327,000 listeners in under a day, it reached seven in the United States, their best American debut, and Pitchfork called it a staggering transformation. It closes with Threads.

Since

They curated All Tomorrow's Parties events in 2007 and 2011, headlined Coachella in 2008 and the Other Stage at Glastonbury in 2013. In 2014 Utley said writing had begun on a fourth album, which has not appeared. Their last full set to date was at Benicàssim on 19 July 2015. They produced a cover of ABBA's SOS for Ben Wheatley's High-Rise and in 2016 received the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. In May 2022 they played five songs at O2 Academy Bristol for War Child, their first show in seven years.

Barrow leads Beak> and scores films with Ben Salisbury, among them Ex Machina, Annihilation and Civil War. Gibbons recorded Górecki's Symphony No. 3 with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, sang on Kendrick Lamar's Mother I Sober, and in 2024 released her first solo album, Lives Outgrown, which was nominated for the Mercury Prize. In 2025 Barrow said there would be no new Portishead music in the near future, but that the band had never broken up.

Members

Records

Songs

Massive Attack, Tricky, Goldfrapp, Beak>, Beth Gibbons

Where to go next

Official

Reference

Discography and data

  • Discogs Every release, with sleeve credits for the samples.
  • WhoSampled The samples they used, the records that sampled them, and covers.

Writing and criticism

Interviews

Live performance archives

Film and video

  • PortisheadVEVO The official videos, including Glory Box and Wandering Star.

Sources

  1. Portishead (band), Wikipedia
  2. Dummy (album), Wikipedia
  3. Third (Portishead album), Wikipedia
  4. Geoff Barrow, Wikipedia
  5. Beth Gibbons, Wikipedia
  6. Portishead's Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley break down Dummy 25 years later, KEXP (2019-08-22)
  7. Portishead: Do Not Disturb, XLR8R (2008-05)