Portishead - Trip-hop's dark landing

Bristol, two hours by train from London. Cold, damp land of Albion beneath which, however, the flame of creativity burns.

In the beginning there was Mark Stewart's Pop Group, an outpost of every contamination between white music par excellence (punk) and black scents (funk, reggae, dub, free-jazz).

And in the mid-Eighties "The Wild Bunch" also took shape. A melting pot of rappers, djs, dancers, writers and producers who came together to play in the basements of the city's suburbs.

Then, some of them took flight. Like the trio of Massive Attack, who in 1990 gave birth to an "open" collective, releasing their debut album "Blue Lines" a year later. It contained a bit of everything, from hip-hop to soul, but also funk, reggae, electronics, soundtrack music, acid-jazz.

They would call it Bristol sound, or more simply trip-hop. A sort of "equal and opposite" reaction to the techno frenzy sweeping through those years. Atmospheric music, music for a journey (the "trip"), that slows down hip-hop and house pulses to achieve a more relaxed, dreamlike effect. Cerebral music, yet deeply physical, with those dub basslines that hit you in the gut.

These were exhilarating months for Bristol, which quickly became England's most fertile musical laboratory. There was no shortage of knockout alchemy - from Maxinquaye by Tricky to the Massive Attack triptych "Blue Lines"-"Protection"-"Mezzanine" - but one record in particular would definitively fix the genre's "essence" and, above all, broaden its audience and boundaries. Ironically enough, Bristol's prophets would become the "cousins" of a tiny neighbouring hamlet overlooking the ocean. A place that, from an obscure cross on the map of England, would become synonymous with the worldwide saga of trip-hop.

A spy-story in slow motion

Portishead is, in fact, the name of the town where Geoff Barrow spent his youth, a promising young multi-instrumentalist who had, however, already made a few trips to Bristol, if only to work with Massive Attack at the Coach House studio and to produce Tricky's contribution to the charity compilation "Sickle Cell".

Barrow was writing hip-hop beats and had a deep love for the film scores of John Barry (the composer famous for the 007 saga and for cult theme tunes, such as the one for "The Persuaders") and Bernard Herrmann (the man behind the music for many Alfred Hitchcock films), but also for Moroder's disco, the beat-jazz of A Tribe Called Quest and the hammond-soul of Isaac Hayes. After entrusting one of his tracks ("Somedays") to the graces of Neneh Cherry, Barrow built up a reputation as a remix producer, working with Primal Scream, Paul Weller, Gabrielle and Depeche Mode. And it was in a recording studio that he met Beth Gibbons, a "pub singer", slight and painfully shy, but with soul fire in her veins and a burning passion for the likes of Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Elizabeth Fraser and Astrud Gilberto.

This is how Portishead were born. More than just a band, a genuine artistic project, meticulously curated down to the smallest detail: from the minimal graphic design to the production of the videos, from the imagery it conjured up to its reticent approach to the outside world.

Before putting themselves to the test in the studio, the duo put their cinematic taste to use in the black-and-white short film "To Kill A Dead Man" (1994), a tribute to 1960s spy movies. Barrow and Gibbons appear in the film and compose its score, which caught the attention of Go! Beat. Their debut album duly came out that autumn, recorded with sound engineer Dave MacDonald (who also handled drums and drum machine) and jazz guitarist Adrian Utley.

Branded on the cover with the giant "P" that would come to define all of the band's output, Dummy (1994) is a kind of "modern classic". A timeless record, perhaps precisely because it's forever balanced between past and future. Like a black-and-white film, shot however with the most advanced techniques of the late millennium.

Perhaps never more than in this case does the term "cinematic" fit so well in describing a sound that makes the ideal marriage of sound and image its cornerstone. It can serve as the backdrop to a night-time journey or to a romantic encounter. It can animate the scenes of a spy story or of a David Lynch thriller. But it could just as easily be the soundtrack to a post-nuclear science-fiction film, given the bleak, decadent spirit that pervades it.

The core idea of Barrow and co. is the reworking of old noir and spy-film themes, blended with jazzy-lounge touches and slowed-down hip-hop rhythms, all steeped in smoky, desolately romantic retro atmospheres. For the rest, the framework is the one typical of so much trip-hop to come: a heavy reliance on samples and scratching (the sounds obtained by rubbing the needle across the vinyl of old 33rpm records or mix discs), guitar riffs borrowed from 1960s spaghetti westerns, broad string sections, dark basslines, Moog synthesizers and a Hammond organ adding a further vintage touch.

But what elevates this blend of sounds is Beth Gibbons' aching, spectral singing, boldly dubbed "Billie Holiday from outer space". Her voice is capable of sudden shifts in register: it can be tense, metallic, harrowing; but also warm and sensual, as on the slow "Glory Box", a mournful meditation on women's struggles, or on the opening "Mysterons", which starts with a bolero-like swagger and ends up wrapped in the coils of ever more seductive sonorities, amid the moan of the theremin, martial beats and soft cushions of keyboards.

The emotional climax of the whole collection, however, is the single "Sour Times", a postmodern torch-song driven by a Lalo Schifrin sample. Utley's guitars and Barrow's fine touches on scratches and keyboards set up a spectral atmosphere, over which a sumptuous melody takes flight, with a forlorn Gibbons crying to the wind “Cause nobody loves me/ It’s true/ Not like you do…”. A memorable track, one that would be even further improved in the harrowing live rendition from the New York concert.

The jazz imprint, brought to the table by the eclectic Utley, is more evident on tracks like "Strangers" and "Pedestal"; the former, in particular, also reveals the painstaking work carried out in the studio, with its succession of refined sonic digressions - from soul to bossa nova - and shifts in rhythm (complete with stop-and-go moments synchronized with Gibbons' vocals). "Roads" pairs the moaning of the guitars with a retro orchestration, propelled by solemn strings: the effect is deeply evocative, as if introducing the plot twist in an imaginary film.

The band's tenderer side is distilled in the melancholic "It Could Be Sweet", where Gibbons' soprano manages to swell with emotion almost every syllable of the line "Try a little harder...". Propelled by obsessive rhythms - including the use of an African drum - "Numb" is another masterclass from the vocalist, who skilfully floats between the notes with vocalizations à la Sade. It is instead a refined cabaret chanteuse who inhabits the relentless lied of "Wandering Star", wrapped in a blanket of electronic hisses and scratches, with the usual dub bassline holding everything together.

"Pedestal" and "Biscuit" give voice to the ghosts of that latent anxiety which is another hallmark of the Portishead brand. "Biscuit", in particular, picks up the pace, unleashing a storm of syncopated beats and hip-hop pulses, with icy gusts of keyboards in the background. Perhaps only "It's A Fire", with Gibbons mewling a touch too much over an organ accompaniment, momentarily lowers the quality of an otherwise near-perfect record.

Dummy is indeed the definitive manifesto of the trip-hop revolution, but it is also, more than any other record, the work that transcends the boundaries of that genre, landing on the new frontier of a music that is as retro in spirit as it is modern in approach.

Portishead's work is rooted in the sorrow of the blues and the open-hearted confessions of soul; it absorbs the anguish and sullen temperament of dark-wave, the rage of hip-hop, the obsessiveness of techno. And it manages to clothe them in ballads of icy elegance, thanks in no small part to an orchestral taste that is never overdone.

The album sweeps every year-end poll run by the British critics, and goes on to win the Mercury Music Prize too. But it's its American success – 150,000 copies sold before the tour had even started – that gives trip-hop a new, and in some ways unexpected, worldwide dimension.

A period of hiatus follows, however, during which rumours even spread of a possible break-up of the band.

The dark side of the moog

Three years pass before the difficult second album arrives. Portishead have become a global phenomenon, thanks to an original and unmistakable style. But that's precisely why they're now faced with a daunting task: relaunching that sound without falling into a sterile rehash of stylistic tropes that have, by now, been widely absorbed – not least because of the flood of trip-hop releases that followed in the wake of Dummy's boom.

This is also why the band tries to shake off every label. “For us, trip-hop is a definition invented by the papers – Barrow states – We want people to appreciate our music without thinking it's a trend. We move in territory without borders”. Which only confirms their introverted, reclusive nature.

In the video for the new single “All Mine”, Portishead cede the spotlight to an unsettling, glassy-eyed little girl, who sings against a 1970s “Zecchino d'oro”-style backdrop. In the background, amid bare and stark settings, looms the band's signature giant “P”, recalling the one used for “parking” signs, once again serving as their trademark.

What Portishead (1997) loses in originality and impact, it gains in refinement and variety. With Utley now a permanent member, the band makes a fundamental conceptual shift: instead of gathering disparate sounds to adorn their subdued sonics, they record original music, pressing it onto vinyl and crafting their own samples. There's a more frequent use of real instruments and a stronger hip-hop leaning compared to the debut. The underlying blueprint remains: woozy guitars, string sections, dub basslines, moog. But everything becomes even more narcotic, tortuous and hermetic.

Less melodically intense than the debut, the songs remain evocative and at times even more surprising, with constant variations on the theme. As in the opening “Cowboys”, where an electro-lounge intro riddled with scratches is punctuated by dark guitar twangs, over which Gibbons' anguished voice rises. Or as in the single “All Mine”, which oscillates between jazzy touches (insistent horns) and Hitchcockian noir climaxes. But it's “Humming” above all that stands as the pinnacle of this new phase for the band, expanding the darkest soul of their sound. Cinema is once again the backdrop, but this time it's that of pioneering 1950s science fiction, all aliens and ghosts. The theremin's chilling wail evokes spectral scenarios, over which Gibbons' soprano raises its anguished requiem, syncopated by the beats.

The singer's vocal trills, often electronically treated and filtered, remain the extra ingredient. From the touching falsetto of “Undenied”, over a soft bed of piano, with scratches simulating rain falling on window panes, to the 1930s jazz-cabaret number of “Mourning Air”, from the piercing invective of “Seven Months”, which cuts through spaghetti western guitars and thrilling effects, to the catatonic litanies of “Over” – with its bluesy guitar embroidery – and “Only You”, set against sampled hip-hop beats.

But it's also the most introverted and darkest episodes that give the album its strength. Like “Elysium”, a new labyrinth of desolation, where the forlorn vocal is accompanied by layers of sounds and noises of every kind. Or like the dreamlike trip of “Half Day Closing”, which even brushes against psychedelic paradises, with its percussive patterns and the distorted voice turning glassy and acrid. “Western Eyes”, finally, closes the album with warmer soul tones, almost as if wanting to leave a ray of hope amid so much icy resignation.

Less explosive and less immediately captivating, Portishead's second album won't repeat the success of Dummy, but over time it will earn its rightful reputation: that of the ideal soundtrack for a desolate, metropolitan fin de siècle.

Ever more ambitious, Portishead land in America for a lavish tour. On July 24, 1997, they face one of the most demanding music audiences on the planet, in New York, at the Roseland Ballroom. The result is a memorable show, with a 33-piece orchestra and a horn section backing the band, as they rework their signature tracks with heightened dramatic flair (starting with a searing rendition of “Sour Times“). Gibbons' live performances, meanwhile, are a sight to behold: eyes perpetually shut, cigarette in hand, curled in on herself, as if she could barely withstand the weight of facing the stage.

Roseland NYC Live (1998) will document this epic feat on record.

At the peak of their popularity, however, Portishead seal the doors of their workshop and withdraw into a mysterious silence, one that will last a decade.

Delights Out of Season

Only Beth Gibbons will show any sign of life, releasing, alongside Rustin Man (aka Paul Webb, former bassist of Talk Talk), the splendid Out Of Season (2002).

Having met during auditions where the bassist was looking for a voice for his new project O'Rang, the two would go on to make a stirring record together years later. Gibbons's voice ranges across love, desire, the joy of living, fragility. And its evocative power is matched by music that is measured in every single component.

The opening "Mysteries" is sung in a voice like a nightingale's, a slow ballad backed by gospel choirs. Other gems follow shortly after, moving through jazz and soul, with the far-from-intrusive ghost of Nick Drake making an appearance, right up to the delicate song dedicated to him. The presence of another Portishead member, Adrian Utley on guitar, makes you wonder what the Bristol band would have sounded like in an earlier musical era, before the arrival of samplers and rhythm patterns built on pre-recorded loops.

The second track, "Tom The Model", echoes the atmospheres of 1960s Shirley Bassey, but the album saves its best for the central tracks: the aching piano ballad "Show", where Gibbons picks up the legacy of one of her great muses, Billie Holiday, to deliver a spine-tingling vocal performance; the shift in register of "Romance", which lives up to its title with an exquisite Fifties-style orchestral arrangement; the exotic atmospheres of "Sand River"; right up to the seductive crescendos of "Spider Monkey", where Gibbons seems almost to be singing of a cruel fate - that of having a voice powerful enough to pierce even the most reluctant heart, while at the same time being destined never to satisfy her own longing for love.

Out Of Season is an autumnal, melancholy record. Anyone who doesn't love it has never had a heartbreak in their photo album...

The Third Seal

Almost unhoped-for, the return of Portishead comes with Third (2008), which breaks a ten-year silence.

What preserves the identity of the Bristol trio is the suppleness of Gibbons's vocal lines and the care lavished on the compositions; what turns jagged is the instrumentation, which is not afraid to draw even from the misty pools of industrial dark. There are more sinister auras here in place of the chiaroscuro hazes of the band's former atmosphere, following that route toward darkness which had already shown its first signs on the self-titled 1997 album.

Forget, if anything, the stylish flourishes that adorned the downtempo of Dummy, and for the most part the ethereal ballads of Gibbons's Out Of Season, traces of which can nonetheless be sniffed out in "Hunter" - though it's led elsewhere by the unusual interludes that disrupt it: it feels like a game of cross-references with early Goldfrapp. Where the guitar was once ornamentation, it's now a co-starring actor, even taking on menacing shapes on the opening "Silence", when it chases after a snare drum running at double the speed we're used to, or when it outlines the anguished scenarios of the closing "Threads".

Portishead move through open territory, shifting mood abruptly even within the same songs. So "The Rip" turns into an instrumental crescendo for vintage keyboards after the vocal melody lingers on canons close to Enya, and "Small" wanders off with progressive flourishes from its main theme, which, by contrast, sounds like a personalized reworking of Roxy Music's "Sea Breezes".

The percussive element, angular and dry, is the real novelty alongside the guitars, but it's hard to ignore signals pointing in other directions, like the all-out folk digression of "Deep Water", or the echoes of Tarwater's electronic loops found in "Nylon Smile". "Machine Gun" machine-guns its pure industrial sound at a defenseless voice, and this game of contrast becomes the album's creative peak, while the relentless "We Carry On" moves between Teutonic experimentalism and the dazed repetitions of Clinic, sealing an emotional Babel that only the clearest talent can bring to a common denominator.

In 2024, Portishead broke their silence by releasing a remastered and expanded version of their historic live album, to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary, titled Roseland NYC Live 25 (Remastered 2023).

Remastered and expanded, the new version of the live album now includes "Undenied" and "Numb" (in a gorgeous version full of keyboard flourishes and wah-wah), which originally appeared only in the concert-film video, as well as the full performance of "Western Eyes", which had partly appeared in the film's closing credits. "Sour Times" and "Roads" are also now present in their original Roseland versions, whereas the 1998 album had used recordings taken from other shows.

Just a few months after the reissue of that seminal live album, Beth Gibbons returns to the scene with her first true solo debut.

The hugely anticipated Lives Outgrown finds the talented English singer-songwriter grappling with a deep meditation on the relentlessness of time. Approaching the threshold of sixty, Beth draws a rather severe portrait of the stages that led her to become the woman and the artist she is now.

A ten-year gestation, in which the lyrics and music written by the British artist found perfect alignment with Midas-touch James Ford and Bridget Samuels (production, arrangements and much more), as well as with Lee Harris (also co-writer of four tracks), the extraordinary former Talk Talk drummer - a band whose influence is invoked here, at this point, no longer by chance.

The instrumental attire given to these profound themes could only possess the same awareness, in no way sparing of complex harmonic structures. The hazy trip-hop of Portishead is light years away, as are the jazzy fragrances of the already-mentioned “Out Of Season”.

“Lives Outgrown” thrives on a minimal grandeur, one that draws its primordial essence from the darkest, most elaborate folk, and within this habitat it sets symphonic alchemies, at times psychedelic and progressive, sealed by the presence of strings and horns and refined by some decidedly unconventional instrumentation, such as jute and psaltery, and above all crossed by Lee Harris's extraordinary percussion, which shifts gradually between tribal textures and odd rhythms obtained by caressing drums of various origins, as well as improbable household objects such as Tupperware containers, plastic bottles and cans.

The programme's undisputed lead is Gibbons's celestial voice, which shows no sign of wear from the passing years. Her timbre cuts through the wounds inflicted by her own words with vibrant, sinuous character, at times almost seeking to soothe certain statements, but far more often intent on sealing airtight a sincere and inescapable thought that, in this interpretation, allows for no alternative outcome.

This effective solo debut from Beth Gibbons is a manifesto aimed at telling the world that the only constant in everything that involves and surrounds us is change. Year after year, the banalities of everyday life sink into the bone, but the lethal arrow of passing time allows no possibility of rewinding the tape and starting anew. The only secret is to face what lies ahead and to treasure what has happened within one's own personal sphere.

Lives Outgrown is an exemplary gift for anyone who wants something more from music than mere entertainment. Surrendering to these layered atmospheres while meditating with the right focus on the content on display will leave ample room for reflection.

Contributions by Paolo Sforza (“Out Of Season”), Marco Bercella (“Third”), Cristiano Orlando (“Lives Outgrown”).

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google