You Only Live Twice
The inspired with Dummy. And nearly expired making its successor. As Portishead finally deliver their eagerly awaited second album, Paul Trynka uncovers the turmois behind their enigmatic facade.
Geoff Barrow is way beyond the sweating stage. Portishead's creative mainstay is beginning to lose it completely.
It is summer 1996, two years after the release of his band's astounding debut album Dummy, and over a year into sessions for its eagerly-awaited follow-up. Once Portishead could rely on Barrow to steer a path through the thousands of decisions involved in their painstakingly-constructed mini psycho-dramas. But now he posts backing tracks to singer Beth Gibbons so that she can work out a vocal, then phones her and tells her it's probably not worth the bother.
The man who'd established a rigorous creative manifesto for the band's debut now spends most of his time laying down rules that prevent recording ever escaping Square One. Rethinking decisions he'd made instinctively the first time round makes every route seem like a potential minefield. Two-second rhythm loops become the subject of days of debate. The question of whether to ban samples from other records, like the Isaac Hayes string part that underpinned Glory Box, imposes new restrictions. Most crucially, how much of the distinctive palette of sounds that had coloured Dummy can they retain? Close friends trade rumours of what amounts to a total split, with guitarist and MD Adrian Utley, sonic adviser Dave McDonald and even Beth Gibbons left in limbo while their leader undergoes the mother of all creative crises.
The solution only arrives when the band are finally united at Surrey's Ridge Farm studios, with the studio clock ticking expensively away. One track, Humming, finally seems to be coming together, and Adrian Utley envisions an intro on the Theremin, the spooky primitive synth featured on countless '50s sci-fi soundtracks. But they'd already used the Theremin's eerie moan, with decisive effect on Dummy's opening song Mysterons. Would they be accused of repeating themselves?
"There was a moment," remembers Adrian Utley, "when we questioned if we could use that sound. And the decision was ultimately up to Geoff - if he'd said, 'No we can't,' we would have dropped it. Then we thought, So, we shouldn't use it 'cos it was on the first album? Does that mean we shouldn't have Beth singing 'cos she was singing on the first album? Or guitar, 'cos we had guitar on the first album? The Theremin is a sound I love, and I got really pissed off with people going, 'Oh, everybody's using Theremins.' It's a voice we have. And we all finally decided, fuck it, this is one of our sounds, and we are going to use it. Yes, fuck it."
Hence the biggest crisis in the short history of Portishead was resolved with a communal atmosphere, a Theremin and a new mission statement: Fuck it.
Much of the furore surrounding the release of Portishead's debut album. Dummy, in September 1994, was probably down to the tact that it was one of the first albums to match the pulsing, organic texture and emotion of '60s soul with the two-turntables-and-a-microphone magpie sampling of '90s De La Soul or Public Enemy. Throw in the exoticism of '60s spy noir, sci-fi spookiness, and the formidable vocal presence of Beth Gibbons, and you had the perfect record for the sophisticated mid-'90s record buyer. But this was no scrapbook assemblage marrying fashionable themes, for Dummy boasted perhaps the most radical architecture of any '90s album, every room featuring doors to new places, the whole effect rendered deceptive simple by the unifying emotion of Beth Gibbons's heartfelt vocals.
Geoff Barrow was 22 when he constructed this manifesto. Four years later, sitting in his airy, unostentatious, Victorian house, with MTV providing the ubiquitous rock-star backdrop, he's a wiry bundle of almost manic energy, standing up, sitting down, moving to the windowsill and back, playing with Roxy ('The Wondercat', according to her Dummy credit) chain-smoking, laughing. And almost morbidly fearful of categorisation. For instance, the story of how he got into the emerging electro scene comes with the qualification that "I mean I'm not an expert, I would never make out to be living the hip hop lifestyle, ha ha, you know what I mean, that's the main thing for me. I would never pretend to be something I ain't..." If his musical partner Beth Gibbons regards interviews as psychically ruinous, Geoff Barrow seem to see them as necessary but problematic encounters in which there's little to gain, and much to lose.
Born in the little Avon town of Walton-In-Gordano Geoff Barrow took drum lessons at school from "Mr Gittins - he was the little drummer boy in the film Charge Of The Light Brigade", and acquired his first beaten-up old drum kit just before he moved to the nearby town of Portishead with his mother after his parents divorced. After playing in "Ridiculous, awful rock bands" with various schoolmates, Barrow was urged to check out the new generation of 'electro' artists by Andy Smith, now Portishead's DJ, around 1986. Before long he'd joined the ranks of the UK's new generation of bedroom musicians, pressing into service a couple of second-hand decks, making tape loops on cassette, borrowing echo units, and experimenting with his first sampler: "One of those little ones, with two seconds sampling time, and a barking dog sample on it." After leaving school, a short-term enrolment in a graphic design college course was hampered by the fact he was "dyslexic and colour blind, so that was out of the window". After a brief stint in a hotel kitchen, Barrow took his fate into his hands and started phoning around Bristol studios for work as a tape op: "It was the typical story, 'Oh no, sorry, we're completely overmanned and underpaid,' until I called Andy Allan, who was setting up his studio and he said, basically, if you help me build the studio, you can have a YTS placement. " Barrow's tenure at what would become Bristol's Coach House studios took place at a fateful time; The Wild Bunch, who had formed out of a gang of Dug Out clubgoers, were at that point evolving into Massive Attack, while another Wild Bunch founder, Nellee Hooper defected to the Soul II Soul organisation to help make one of Britain's most successful dance albums to date. Neneh Cherry (who'd become involved in the Bristol music scene via Rip Rig And Panic) and husband Cameron McVey, had enlisted Massive Attack's help for her stunning 1989 debut, Raw Like Sushi. Under McVey's management, the Massive Attack triumvirate of Robert Del Naja (3D), Grant Marshall (Daddy G) and Andrew Vowles (Mushroom) began recording what would become the hugely-influential Blue Lines at the Coach House. Shara Nelson and Horace Andy were assisting with vocals, Tricky Kid was rapping, Johnny Dollar was producing and arranging. And Geoff Barrow was "making.. the tea and getting the sandwiches. I started getting on with G; they were all really friendly, and Johnny Dollar was a really nice bloke. But I was a terrible tape-op - I couldn't clean the heads of the tape machine, I couldn't set anything up or plug anything in. The only thing I was really good at was constantly making tea. . . "
Even so, Barrow's experimental demos, splicing together drum breaks and soundtrack samples, attracted the attention of G and Cameron McVey, who bought Barrow an Akai sampler and recording time at the Coach House. The immediate result was Somedays, one of the better songs on Neneh Cherry's disappointingly lacklustre Homebrew album. A slow, minor key lament with a piano sequence borrowed from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, Somedays' sombre mood, was a harbinger of things to come, even if the sound of the Barrow produced recording was comparatively clean and sparkly. Geoff's other early composition was even more distinguished, a claustrophobic collaboration with Tricky, Nothing's Clear, released on a Bristol charity compilation, which sampled the mournful repetitive piano riff from Gabriel Yared's Betty Blue soundtrack.
Over the period he worked on demos for McVey, Barrow tried out dozens of vocalists - "there were these soul singers from Birmingham I did a track with them and that was pretty cool. And then there was a singer from Australia, and that was absolutely dreadful. " And then there was Beth Gibbons, whom Barrow met during the coffee break at a Enterprise Allowance course in February 1991.
Beth Gibbons is now immortalised as the Greta Garbo of the Bristol music scene, notorious for speeding off in her vintage Triumph convertible the moment she espies an inquisitive journalist. Turning up for a MOJO photo shoot she's friendly, straightforward and talkative, but her smiling reference to the session as "my penance" is a subtle reminder that brushes with the press are to be endured, not enjoyed Barrow has commented that Gibbons's affection for Janis Joplin made for a stimulating culture clash, but Beth's love for Talk Talk (she' worked with drummer Lee Harris) is just as significant. Listen to the blasted soundscapes of Talk Talk's Spirit Of Eden and you have the perfect precedent for Portishead's sonic audacity.
Geoff and Beth's first completed collaboration was It Could Be Sweet, the oldest track on Dummy by nearly three years. Out of the album's context, the song's complex drum machine pattern and grainy piano backing boasted obvious Massive Attack references, although Gibbons's fragile fag-worn, lovelorn vocals add a wholly unique slant. Geoff Barrow reserves his affection for other Dummy songs, but one musician who did occasional production work at the Coach House was profoundly impressed.
"It Could Be Sweet was totally done when Geoff played it to me," remembers Adrian Utley. "I was absolutely blown away. People don't mention that song when they talk about Dummy, but I thought it was totally excellent. And still do."
By this point Barrow had already recruited engineer Dave McDonald into his unconventional set-up, now managed by Fruit, a management company set up by Caroline Killoury, previously with Cameron McVey's Cherry Bear organisation. In a band where sonic texture was as paramount, McDonald was responsible for ageing and manipulating the samples and instrument sounds ("I had to unlearn everything I'd learned about getting nice clean sounds," he laughs. "If I had to get another studio job now I'd be spannered").
Now Utley, an experienced guitarist who'd made a living playing jazz with the likes of slave-driving neo-bopper Tommy Chase - no mean achievement - was recruited, too. "It was a light bulb coming on at that point," says Barrow. "Ade's not anti-sampeling it was just at that point we relaised that we could get our own samples, those sounds won't turn up on other records. It was a new stage I totally wanted to get into... There was this little crack in the door and I could see the light and knew we could go in there and have a look."
Adrian Utley lives in what is undoubtedly a Rock Star House: rambling Georgian-style, bleached wood floors, with funky vintage guitars and classic Arne Jacobsen chairs dotted around. An immaculate setting that in London would have been assembled at an immense cost by an interior designer, this clean, apparently modern environment is the product of untold weeks spent exploring Bristol junk shops and boot fairs. It's a typical embodiment of the Portishead dog-eared modern asethetic, one which takes a definatively American art-form like hip hop and translates it to an environment of Bakelite, Joe Meek, Lev Theremin and gadget-laden Aston Martins.
Utley, 10 years older than Barrow, is thicker-set and more laid-back than his colleague, though not without a certain gimlet glare. The one-time jazzer takes the primary responsibility for Portishead's cultural leap, as the man who encouraged Barrow to switch his sampling focus from the US blaxploitation world of Isaac Hayes and War to a unique English environment of Shirley Bassey and leather jumpsuits. Like the set of The Prisoner, this new world was an artificial creation, conjured up by Utley and carefully aged by McDonald.
While the 10 songs assembled for Dummy boasted only half a dozen 'official' samples, including Glory Box's Isaac Hayes string phrase, and our Times' borrowing of Lalo Schifrin's More Mission Impossible, countless more sounds apparently sourced from vintage vinyl were manufactured by the group, then carefully distressed by McDonald and pressed onto vinyl for Barrow to spin, so that the whole backing track shared a common perspective. It's a working method that, although now commonplace in the wake of Beck's Odelay, was unique at the time, and inevitably problematic, as Utley recalls: "we're not a two guitars and drums rock band, and we're not doing a straight hip hop thing. We're stuck in between a lot of things, and that does make things difficult. It's uncharted territory. It's great rehearsing for live work now because we have have this band and we can actually say, Let's change that chord, and it happens. On record we'd have to go back and recreate the sample. "
The first result of Utley's involvement in the group was Sour Times which, as part of a three-song demo, helped attract the interest of Go! Beat's young A&R-head Ferdy Unger-Hamilton. With Barrow and Gibbons signed to the label, and Dave and Adrian hired as freelancers, recording proper commenced. It was a painstakingly involved process, with Barrow the man responsible for imposing order on the profusion of backing tracks and vinyl, like the Enigma code-breaking computer pioneer Alan Turing who held a vision of what his backroom boffins in Bletchley Park were working towards. Barrow himself names Gibbons as the prime reason for Dummy's success, but as McDonald puts it, "It was Geoff who pulled everyone through with his complete vision. And his complete belief. Working the way we do, it seems totally impossible to keep a sense of perspective. Each segment is part of a greater whole, and if that little segment's not right, the whole track's not right. You have to be very obsessive about every little element. So you need an incredible sense of focus to pull through, and that's what Geoff did. "
By now, the band was bringing in Utley's musician acquaintances, including drummer Clive Deemer and organist Gary Baldwin, to construct their material. For Barrow, this was a key move. "The first song where I got kind of close to what I wanted was Numb, by which time we were into recording the album proper. Personally, I think if you get exactly what you want you might as well give up, but on that song I really got the beats I wanted, the sounds I wanted. When Beth sang that song over it, suddenly I thought, Right. "
When Dummy was released in September 1994, most of the public who heard it, many of them after reading ecstatic reviews, thought so too. Its total sales of nearly two million surpassed Massive Attack's Blue Lines, while the band's near- pathological reticence added to their aloof attraction. As Dummy's sales rose, Gibbons, author of those enigmatic Iyrics, refused to speak to any British journalists. Until the day when MOJO writer Ben Thompson was sent to interview Geoff Barrow for The Independent. The Portishead mainman was temporarily hospitalised with a stomach ulcer; Thompson arrived to find Beth Gibbons preparing a pot of tea.
"It's strange that with Beth it's got to this level of mystique," Thompson points out. "I think that happened because Dummy happened slowly `without her doing any press, then they got to the point where they could call the shots, and she could continue that way. She was, as interviews go, really nice, not only not starry, but not at all extrovert. But hardly phobic. I won't say the fact that she's not done any other interviews since she spoke to me haunts me, but..."
Interviewed for a couple of overseas magazines in the early days, Beth was most notable for her refusal to make up the stories that go so conveniently with a press campaign: "I feel guilt sometimes, because when I think of people like Billie Holiday and Edith Piat, who are heroes of mine, I wasn't a victim of child abuse," she told Ireland's Hot Press. "I didn't have a dysfunctional family, and apart Łor one thing which, sorry, I'm not going to tell you about, my worst teenage trauma was trying to get my homework done on time." Inevitably, of course, there comes a point where not making a statement becomes a statement. The Clash refused to play Top Of The Pops because it represented selling out. Portishead refused to ply Top Of The Pops because it was not very good. "We didn't want to do it, not because of the people there, not for any we're-too-cool reasons or anything like that," says Barrow. "We hadn't even played live at that point, and I just thought, I don't like that show personally, and if there is a chance for me to say no I will. The same with not playing The Brits. And Go! Beat supported us through that stuff."
In the event, the band's decision proved typically prescient. Deciding to rework their material for live dates, and eschewing the use of samples or sequenced backing tracks, they brought in Clive Deemer, bassist Jim Barr and John Baggott on a battery of ancient electric pianos and string machines for their first live performances. The moment that marked their ascension to Premiership status was the final date of their European tour: Glastonbury 1995. The attempt to make a low-key impression by playing the 2,000 capacity Acoustic Tent backfired. The surrounding fields were crushed with thousands of would-be entrants, while the scene inside was of equal mayhem, particularly when Evan Dando, who'd been partying in the beer tent instead of showing up for his afternoon performance, was rescheduled moments before Portishead's allotted slot. He played one song, then attempted to win over the audience by addressing them as "a bunch of limey hippies".
The curtain that dropped halfway through Dando's second song was a merciful release, but was succeeded by another interminable delay: "There was all kinds of madness going on, says Barrow "We were told we were put back an hour but no-one announced it; it was a complete fiasco. We're on-stage setting up all our gear, with everything going down, leads going missing, Dave's over by the mixing desk trying to punch someone who's causing all kinds of grief. . . Finally we had to find someone who was in charge and say, Stop, we're on now."
The band took the stage to a sudden hush, silhouetted against a backdrop that simulated twinkling stars against a midnight sky. Within seconds the effects box that processed their drum sound gave up the ghost, as did their complex digital mixing set-up. Then Beth started singing, and a soft sigh rippled through the packed audience. As her voice modulated into the Billie Holiday croak of Glory Box's second verse, everyone spontaneously hollered like a gospel congregation, gleefully boarding the emotional rollercoaster. With half their gear down, the band were forced to improvise, with Barrow juggling his vinyl, sometimes using it as a mere percussive noise source. In the packed tent, with the band only occasionally visible, it was impossible to tell from where some of the noises were being conjured. The supposedly shy, psychically frail Beth Gibbons was a masterful, hypnotic presence, spearheading the band's brutal emotional assault which culminated in a crazed, extended attack on Glory Box for the encore.
It was the most exciting, draining moment of a Glastonbury year which boasted breakthrough performance from Oasis and Pulp. Yet the Portishead set was hardly mentioned, quite simply because the journalists who turned up 30 minutes before the performance hadn't been able to get within half a mile of the tent. "There was not an awful lot said, 'cos I don't think a lot of press got there," says Barrow. "A lot of things weren't great about that night, mainly because of how dangerous it got. . . But of everything I've ever done in my life, which is not a great deal, that was definitely the one. The most amazing experience I've ever had."
Although the Mercury music prize awarded to Dummy that November might have sealed the album's commercial success, for the band it was an anticlimax. Adrian Utley left the ceremony halfway through, intending to watch it on TV Luckily his girlfriend persuaded him to return, just in time to find his band had been declared the makers of the year's finest album.
"People used to say to me 'God it must be really hard coming up with a follow-up to Dummy,'" laughs Barrow, lighting up another cigarette. "The main point is, I don't know why Dummy was so successful, although I know Beth's vocal is 80, 90 or 100 per cent of it. I just made that record the way I thought it should be; I don't know how to make something that's going to be a success...
"And even though it's been three years since Dummy, we've pretty much worked every week in the studio, trying to get stuff together. I had a holiday in mid '95 and have been in there ever since. And even through all this time when nothing worked, a year or whatever, I was still going in the studio every day and working. And it was hell. OK, people have to lay Tarmac for a living or whatever, but for me personally, mentally, it was hell."
Dummy's success had become a straitjacket. The commercial pressure was the easy part; a more fundamental problem was that, with dozens of post-Dummy bands using a female torch vocal over a lo-fi drum machine-driven backing, many of Dummy's novelties had become merely mundane. "We were hearing a lot of those kind of sounds that we had made and we needed to move on," says Utley, wistfully "But there's obvious reference points that we have as a band: an identity, a sound, and we couldn't totally change everything just for the sake of not doing what we did last time. It was intensely difficult at times. We'd decided to use all our own samples, and that was difficult too, because we did actually get bored of the sounds we were making. And it's really unwieldy the way we make records. like walking with one Wellington boot full of concrete a lot of the time."
On the first album, Barrow's vision had solved every artistic quandary they faced. Now, convinced he had to grapple with his creative crisis in private, he came close to losing everything.
"I'd been a control freak, basically. But at this point I thought, I've lost it. And because I always took that controlling role I never told the rest of the band what I was going through, so that they were going, 'What's the hell's going on here?' I never realised that I was personally putting other people through hell, too. My head just bombed right out, completely and totally; I over-analysed everything, nothing was good enough for the second record... I couldn't face sitting at my computer and the sampler. The only thing I enjoyed was when Ade turned up his guitar and I got on the drums and basically we just smashed the hell out of everything.
"When we got to Ridge Farm things came to a head in a lot of ways. That's when we realised we were in this band and we all relied on each other and that each role is equally important." As the studio bills mounted to frightening proportions, Utley in particular took on a crucial new role, "I basically needed kicking up the arse," says Barrow, "and to he told, We can make a Portishead record. And we can enjoy this."
Bizarrely enough, with the band's one-year hiatus behind them, that's exactly what they proceeded to do. Although on first acquaintance the results share the same tonal range as Dummy closer examination reveals that the sonic audacity which characterised the debut is still gloriously unrestrained. Half Day Closing, one of the first songs to be completed was initially given the working title Leslie, after the ancient rotary speaker through which Beth's voice was processed: "Right at the end Beth starts singing a high note, and it goes right off the scale," remembers Dave McDonald, laughing maniacally. "It was the most amazing sound I've ever heard; it went past distortion, to somewhere else I haven't got a name for." The song starts off in the Twilight Zone, with a doom-laden Joy Division-style bass figure, and then goes somewhere even weirder, as radically panned tin-can drums, and wiggly sci-fi Moog make their entrance; Beth's simple, plaintive vocal, bristling with distortion, is the only fixed point the listener can latch onto. Humming, Utley's Theremin tour de force takes the listener into sci-fi territory again, with its evocation of Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack for The Day The Earth Stood Still. The Herrmann reference is typical of the enigmatic Bristolians' mix of highbrow and lowbrow simultaneously evoking groundbreaking electronica and the ludicrous spectacle of a silver rubber-suited Gort. The only shame here is that Utley cheated by using a Theremin patch on his ancient MiniMoog the mental image e of him wiggling his hands Clara Rockwell-style over the glowing valves of the real thing is captivating.
There are countless more reality shifts: Humming's grandiose pizzicato strings, recorded at great expense with a full orchestra at London's Air studios, then copied onto a cheap cassette to render them 'used' end lo-fi, or the drum track on Elysium, deliberately recorded cockeyed, with an asymmetric lilt that prevents its sounding too at-home. That 'found sound' aesthetic is carried to its extreme on Western Eyes, in which Bristol singer Sean Atkins was recorded with a cocktail band, then slowed down in what sounds like a slight return to the Johnnie Ray I'll Never Fall In Love Again sample used on Biscuit. It's an in-joke too far, perhaps, missing the spontaneity of a genuine sample that's become subverted in its new setting. But at least it's an in-joke that reflects the fact that Barrow and band can actually enjoy making records again.
"I don't honestly know how this album is going to be perceived," Barrow concludes. "I don't know whether it's got singles on it; whatever, it's a weird one. But I think the main thing is that we did do the album, and then it's on to the next one. Like the press launch in New York, it's a balance between enjoying yourself and totally bricking it. From now on we're going to get the balance right."
A few days later, the band convene for a nervous but intermittently inspiring performance in New York to launch their album. Accompanied by a huge orchestra, under the white glare of the cameras, Beth Gibbons walks the Portishead tightrope between triumph and terror. As the massed cellos and violas reach a crescendo on Mourning Air, Gibbons's hypnotic persona fills the Roseland Theatre and leaves the audience open-mouthed and misty-eyed. And there are other moments where Beth, silhouetted by the TV cameras like a rabbit in a truck's headlamps, flounders for the right note as nerves paralyse her larynx.
Their moving performance completed, the band return to the stage to ecstatic applause, the orchestra rise to their feet to take a bow. Gibbons claps, and shouts "brilliant".
The next week, the press reports seize upon this rare Gibbons utterance. But there was more. For as Beth uttered her uncharacteristic comment she was looking at the orchestra. The next moment, she pointed at herself and mouthed: "We were crap. . ." Ah, self-deprecation. As curiously British as John Steed's sword-stick brolly. And as typically Portishead.