Portishead's Dummy (33⅓ Series)

8/18/2019 Portishead's Dummy (33⅓ Series)

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DUMMY Praise for the series:

It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realizedthat there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in

the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling andeclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic

personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review

Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone

One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut

These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate

fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make yourhouse look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album

and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice

A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK)

Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon

Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype

[A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK)


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We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your onlysource for reading about music (but if we had our way …

watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything

there is to know about an album, you’d do well to checkout Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork

For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our website at www.continuumbooks.com

and 33third.blogspot.com

For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book


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Dummy

R. J. Wheaton


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The Continuum International Publishing Group80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

www.continuumbooks.com

© 2011 by R. J. Wheaton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, storedin a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the written permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of

Congress

ISBN: 978-1-4411-8557-0

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions,

Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN


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• v •

Contents

A Note on Sources vii

Dramatis Personæ ix

From the Ether 1

Memory 19

Shock 49

Intimacy 66

Solitude 86Narcotic 105

Alienation 123

Solace 141

Resonance 161

Loss 180

Siren 202Works Cited 225

Acknowledgements 233


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• vii •

A Note on Sources

Research for this book involved interviews with anumber of sources, including discussions with Dummy and Portishead sound engineer Dave McDonald, andPortishead friend and collaborator Tim Saul. Quotationsfrom Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons, and Adrian Utley

were gathered from an extensive range of interviews andarticles written throughout the band’s history, particu-

larly from the period between the release of Dummy in 1994 and Portishead in 1997. All of these sources areannotated throughout and are listed at the end of thebook.


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• ix •

Dramatis Personæ

Por t i sh ead

✒ Geoff Barrow — producer, turntables, drums✒ Beth Gibbons — vocals, lyrics✒ Adrian Utley — guitar, co-producer✒ Dave McDonald — sound engineer

Cont r i bu t o r s and c o l l a b o ra t o r s

✒ Andy Smith — crate-digging✒ Clive Deamer — drums✒ Gary Baldwin — Hammond✒ Neil Solman — Fender Rhodes

✒ Richard Newell — drum programming✒ Andy Hague — trumpet ✒ Tim Saul — friend and collaborator; involved inpre-production sessions; part of Earthling✒ Miles Showell — mastering engineer✒ Alexander Hemming — director of short film To Killa Dead Man and the first Portishead music videos


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✒ Marc Bessant — friend and collaborator; visualmaterials✒

Ferdy Unger-Hamilton — A&R at Go! Beat Records✒ Tony Crean — Marketing at Go! Beat Records

B r i s t o l

✒ The Wild Bunch: Miles Johnson (D.J. Milo), Grant Marshall (Daddy G), Nellee Hooper; Claude

Williams, Robert Del Naja, Andrew Vowles✒ Massive Attack: Marshall, Del Naja, Vowles✒ Rob Smith and Ray Mighty ✒ Neneh Cherry ✒ Cameron McVey — Massive Attack producer;Portishead’s first manager; husband of Neneh Cherry ✒ Jonny Dollar (Jonathan Sharp) — Massive Attackproducer✒ Tricky


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• 1 •

From the Ether

A storm at sea — One continent talking to another —Childhood experimentation — The voices of the

dead — “Mysterons” — Animated dummies — A premonition of

misinterpretation — Verbal abuse as a characteristically English

means to express admiration — A dog barking — Midsummer

night — Nocturnal projections — The paranormal — Acclaim! —

An anatomy — Espionage

On December 21, 1927, the White Star ocean liner Majestic arrived in New York City. It had been delayed“through buffeting strong westerly gales and high headseas.” It contained 17,661 sacks of mail, “the biggestforeign mail on record.” The New York Times reported onthe prominent passengers, among them Polish pianist-

statesman Ignace Jan Paderewski and American financier William Averell Harriman. A cold wave had seized thecity, filling the city’s shelters two days before. Duringthe course of the day a broken air line disrupted at least20,000 travelers on the city’s subway system, forcingpassengers onto the tracks. A fire at 8th Avenue turned


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D U M M Y

• 2 •

20 families from their homes. The Beethoven SymphonyOrchestra performed at Carnegie Hall.1

On board the Majestic was Lev Sergeyevich Termen,aged 31. His name now was Theremin. He had inventedhimself from thin air. He was born in St. Petersburg in 1896. A childhood ofmechanical discovery: pendulums and the dismantling of

watches; astronomy, the discovery of a star. Experiments with electricity, charged wires suspended above the headsof his classmates and glass cylinders luminous in their

hands. At war: enlisted to the Reserve ElectrotechnicalBattalion, erecting radio towers across the collapsing faceof Tsarist Russia.2

The instrument that bears his name came from exper-iments conducted at the Physico-Technical Instituteon the outskirts of Petrograd. Experiments into thenatural capacitance of the human body: how the relative

proximity of the body to an oscillating circuit canproduce variations in its frequency. A performer standsin front of the instrument and moves her hands near twoantennae, one of which controls the volume of resultingsound and the other the pitch. The sound appeared to emanate from nowhere. It hada character that was unearthly and unsettling — bothelectric and, in its lissome variation between tone and

1 New York Times December 20, 1927a, 20 December, 1927b,December 22, 1927a, December 22, 1927b, December 22, 1927c,December 22, 1927d, December 22, 1927e, December 22, 1927f,December 22, 1927g.2 Glinsky 2000, pp. 11–12.


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R . J . W H E A T O N

• 3 •

volume, somehow possessing the qualities of a human voice.

Newspapers described “probably the most amazingmusic ever heard”; “a strange penetrating sound of aquality human ears never before had heard.”3 Einstein,attending a performance in Berlin, called it “an experienceas significant as that when primitive man for the firsttime produced sound from a bowstring.”4

* * *

The sound of a Theremin is the fifth sound you hear onPortishead’s 1994 album Dummy. It enters 12 secondsinto “Mysterons,” and signals the album’s wide range,gliding several octaves above the song’s subatomic bass,leaving Beth Gibbons’ vocal embayed in the song’smidrange.

* * *

The instrument’s sound was said to come from theether, a formless medium believed to accommodate thepassage of radio waves, X-rays, and other elements of theelectro-magnetic spectrum. Some believed the ether toaccommodate the souls of the departed and that it wouldallow an audience with the marooned voices of the dead. In Paris, according to the Montreal Gazette, “Police

were called to keep order among crowds”; that “For the

3 Jones 1927.4 New York Times December 22, 1927e.


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• 4 •

first time in the history of the Opera standing room wassold in boxes.”5

What Theremin promised, he promised to the crowd. The ability to create music from thin air; to create music without classical training; that “the power of producingbeautiful harmony, until now denied all but a few,may soon be within the reach of thousands.”6 A soundbeaconed by the technology of the future; that freighted

with it the strangeness of existence and the wake of thepast.

* * *

Things you may not notice about “Mysterons” on firstlisten:

✒ At 0:12, 0:17, 0:23, and elsewhere, there is a vocalsample scratched onto the surface of the song. Itunderscores the song’s great rhythmic keel, the kickdrum that thumps through the song with a pulse-like rhythm; the militant snare riff that impresseseverything around it. With the vinyl sounds — thepop and crackle that open the song — the scratchingsignals the album’s hip-hop aesthetic: that this will bemusic constructed of other music. A deep, resonant

male voice intones “Portishead”; yet it is slowed and weathered and manipulated to the point that it isalmost unintelligible, almost abstract noise: “Porter’s… Head.”

5 Montreal Gazette December 9, 1927.6 Montreal Gazette December 9, 1927.


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✒ The subtlety of Beth Gibbons’ vocal delivery:“somewhere where they can forget” — the second

syllable of “somewhere” cast away, speculative,unknown. The end of “forget” delivered as if the word itself is barely remembered. In the next verse,“holding on” is dragged into the lilting swells of“ocean.”✒ The fretnoise on the opening guitar arpeggios — anartisinal, workmanlike punctuation amid the other-

worldly sustain that sounds the depths of the song.

At 1:28, and at 2:49.✒ At 0:47: the watery sound that swells into the song,followed by three descending, drop-like notes,impossibly delicate against the brittle twang of theguitar and martial indifference of the drums.✒ The chorus itself: the point and charge of the drums;a question narrowed to the force of a statement.

“Did you really want.” The verb containing derision,disbelief, accusation.✒ At 4:07: the rattling echo of the snare sounds; then,as the music becalms itself into a synthetic, abstractconclusion, the crystalline sustain of a RolandSH-101 synthesizer flattens the surface of the song.

It is a song so diverse in its influences, its range ofsounds, its intensity, the mystery of its meaning. “Thisocean will not be grasped.”

* * *

The song’s title comes from Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons , a ’60s children’s science-fiction television


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series, featuring animated mannequins — dummies — ina technique named “Supermarionation” by series creator

Gerry Anderson. The villains — the Mysterons — weredisembodied aliens whose voices, like the vocal samplescratched into the beginning of the song, boomed at thelower frequencies as if intoned through a megaphone.

The soundtrack music, by Barry Gray, has the swingand campness of the English ’60s. But it also featuresexperimentation with electronic sound, including theuse of another early electronic instrument, the ondes

Martenot, which sounds in its eerie oscillation very muchlike a theremin.

* * *

In 1994 Miles Showell was working in west London as amastering engineer at a facility then called Copymasters.

He had established a solid working relationship withFerdy Unger-Hamilton, the A&R director of Go! BeatRecords. Unger-Hamilton and guitarist Adrian Utleybrought him tracks for “Sour Times,” the second songon Dummy, on quarter-inch tape, for a promotional 12”.Showell recalls “I remember remarking to Adrian howhaunting and otherworldly the track was, especially Beth[Gibbons]s’ vocal.” A few weeks later Portishead producerGeoff Barrow and sound engineer Dave McDonald werealso present for sessions to master the entire album.Showell remembers:

I was looking forward to the session as “Sour Times” hadmade such an impression on me but to be honest I did


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• 7 •

not expect the rest of the album to be as good as that. Inreality, of course, it proved to be a fabulous album. I can

distinctly remember thinking to myself, “This stuff isfantastic, but it is such a shame that no one else is goingto get it.”

* * *

Dummy was released in the U.K. in August 1994. AnOctober release followed in the U.S., with the following

tracklisting:

✒ “Mysterons”✒ “Sour Times”✒ “Strangers”✒ “It Could be Sweet”✒ “Wandering Star”✒ “It’s a Fire”✒ “Numb”✒ “Roads”✒ “Pedestal”✒ “Biscuit”✒ “Glory Box”

“It’s a Fire” had not been part of the original U.K.

release. A later Canadian release added “Sour Sour Times,” a starker, leaner remix of “Sour Times,” to theend of the album. Dummy spun off three singles: “Numb,” released

June 6, 1994; “Sour Times,” released July 25 (and


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• 8 •

re-released in April of the following year); and “GloryBox,” January 2, 1995.

* * *

People remember, clearly, when they first heard Dummy. Tim Saul, long-time collaborator of Portisheadproducer Geoff Barrow, and contributor to Dummy’spre-production sessions:

I can always remember the first time that Geoff playedme “Sour Times.” I was pretty bowled over and I thinkI abused him fairly, for about half an hour. I was reallyenvious. He continues to do this: he has an ability to pullsomething out of the bag when you think that you know

what he’s going to do, and you kind of think you’ve gota good gauge of maybe what he’s going to come up with

next. And yet he kind of throws you.

* * *

Ferdy Unger-Hamilton, who signed Portishead to Go!Beat Records in 1993:

“Glory Box” was mind-blowing. I played it to the salesteam and they were like, ‘It sounds like a dog barking!’Some people thought it was mad and others just got it. Idon’t know if I’ve ever felt like that since.7

* * *

7 Quoted in Simpson 2008.


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• 9 •

Andy Wright, a record producer who had just finished working on Massive Attack’s Protection:

The first time I heard it was in a hotel room in Manchester.Somebody had it on their Walkman, which they’d gotconnected to some little speakers. And I thought, wow,

what the hell is that. I thought it sounded amazing.

* * *

Mark Oliver Everett, later to found indie rock band Eels:

Then one day during this bleak period in my life, I wasdriving down the road and heard the English groupPortishead on the radio for the first time and it stoppedme cold. I had to pull the truck over to the side of theroad so I could really listen.8

* * *

Jay-Jay Johanson, Sweden, 1994:

I played it on my ghetto blaster to all my friends onmidsummer night around a campfire in the woods.

The effect was enormous. Some felt scared, some cried,some became totally depressed. And I just adored it onehundred percent.

* * *

8 Everett 2009, pp. 105–106.


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Tony Crean, handling marketing of the album for Go! Beat,later told writer Phil Johnson that Portishead were “a studio

band making esoteric music who initially didn’t want to playlive and whose singer didn’t want to do interviews.”9

Blue-painted mannequins were placed at visiblelocations around London, marked only with the letter“P,” drawing attention from national media and theanti-terrorist squad who, it was said, suspected thepresence of explosive devices. Mysterious memorabilia

was distributed around London’s club scene.

Under cover of darkness a giant “P” was projectedonto the massive building belonging to MI6 — Britain’sequivalent of the CIA — that sits in an impenetrable artdeco facade on the bank of the River Thames.

Dave McDonald recalls Crean’s energy:

He was brilliant — he was crazy. We were trying to calmhim down … He was doing things that I’d never seenbefore like going around clubs and pubs and stuff justleaving a box of matches with “P” written on them …

you keep showing something but not telling people whatit is, they think, what is this about?

* * *

The band made a 10-minute film, To Kill a Dead Man,starring core members — producer Geoff Barrow,singer Beth Gibbons, guitarist and co-producer AdrianUtley, and sound engineer Dave McDonald — as well as

9 Johnson 1996, pp. 164–165.


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• 11 •

supporting musicians and collaborators including RichardNewell and Tim Saul. The film, a short noir -inspired tale

of deception and revenge, was intended to allow the banda chance to write a soundtrack, and to provide materialsfor a music video — for “Sour Times” — and stills foruse in promotional art, including the cover of the album.

* * *

Dummy quickly became associated with the unusual. On

December 17, 1994, the B.B.C. aired “Weird Night,”more than 3 hours of programming related to theparanormal. Content included documentaries on urbanmyths; a film called “The Last American Freak Show”;testimonials of bizarre and unnerving coincidences; and,inevitably, an episode of The X-Files . The introductorypreview featured a passage from “Mysterons” and a

slowed, pitch-shifted excerpt from “Biscuit.”

* * *

What to make of this music. Critics said it “sounded likenothing else on earth”;10 it “seemed to come from thepast and the future at the same time.”11 The band created“an invitation to a nightmare”;12 “a world so ghostly youmay think the C.D. player has channeled the musicalnetherworld.”13

10 Mixmag 1999.11 Lucas 1997.12 Lien 1997.13 People 1995.


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Dummy was named “album of the year” by U.K.music scene periodicals such as Melody Maker , Mixmag ,

The Wire, The Face, ID, and even daily newspapers likethe conservative Daily Telegraph.14 The following yearDummy was awarded the fourth Mercury Music Prize,the U.K.’s most prestigious musical accolade. By the beginning of summer 1995, after Portisheadhad completed a U.S. tour, the album had sold 850,000copies worldwide.15 By the release of their second album,Portishead , in September 1997, it had sold almost 2

million, and was double-platinum by January of thefollowing year.16 The band’s Third album was released in

April 2008; by then Dummy had sold 3.6 million copies.17

* * *

Somehow it became ubiquitous in public venues. Vancouver

writer Sean Cranbury, at the time bartending in the Ontariorustbelt town of Hamilton – “The Hammer” – recalls:

it seemed to have its own kind of swagger, and its ownsensibility, and it was dark … dark and jagged and weird.

And Beth Gibbons’ voice was ghostly and incredible. And yet it somehow, against all possible odds, it was capableof getting some sort of mainstream airplay. “Sour Times”— it still amazes me when I hear that song, to think thatpeople played that in cafés or played that in nightclubs or

14 B.B.C. 2010.15 Miller 1995.16 Marcus 1997.17 McLean 2008.


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• 13 •

in bars on a Friday or Saturday night. That was fuckingshocking.

* * *

Consider the qualities abundant in popular music thatare disconcertingly absent from Dummy:

✒ uncomplicated tenderness✒ unconditional love

✒ actually, even the words “I love you”✒ assertions of knowledge about infidelity, often bymeans of hearsay ✒ statements of political philosophy — often out offocus — mostly concerning working-class Americans✒ sexual desire uncomplicated by things that includereality ✒ moments that lend themselves to dancing✒ moments that lend themselves to candlelight. Upona significant increase in volume, the quantities ofair mobilized by “Strangers” will actually extinguish

your candlelight ✒ reassurance that things will, actually, be okay.

* * *

And yet Dummy entered into popular consciousness with astonishing speed. In October 1996, British musicmagazine Mojo challenged readers to select their bestsongs of the ’90s. From over a thousand reader entries,four songs from Dummy made the final hundred — an


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achievement matched only by R.E.M.’s Automatic for thePeople and Oasis’ Definitely Maybe.18

In February 1998, Q magazine published its readers’poll of “100 greatest albums ever,” in which Dummy was placed at number 16. Reader C. M. Dodd asked aquestion that seemed to exemplify the album’s mystiqueand its appeal:

Where did this come from? It tears out your heartstrings.19

* * *

An anatomy of Dummy. Beth Gibbons’ vocals, closely recorded, intimate;always distinct; never crowded. Breathy, intense, coy,ironic, caressing, commanding, challenging. Her lyricsare shards of imagery; non-narrative; fragments of self-

reflection. Closely observed emotional pain, isolation,loneliness, exile, alienation. Desire, seduction; distance,loss. Her voice is taut across the music’s surface; sometimescarred, calloused, supple, fresh, weathered, ageless. Beneath the skin: the album’s instrumentation,archaic and retro-modern. The rich, resonant sounds of

vintage synthesizers, keyboards, organs; the theremin,a cimbalom. Guitars and Rhodes keyboards used asmuch for texture and presence as they are for harmonicdirection. Some of this driven by the soundtracks ofobscure or forgotten films. The arrangement of songs is

18 Mojo 1997.19 Q 1998.


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• 15 •

muscular, experimental, sinuous in its minimalism. All ofit throbbing with a warmth, a sympathetic bloodstream.

The album’s nervous system: the sound of recordingtechnology itself. A layer of vinyl artifacts — crackle,pops; the properties of audio tape, murky and rich.Hiss, decay; static, warp. The sounds of manipulation;of elements narrowed, stretched, compressed, distended.Pitch-shifted and time corrected. A concern with sonictexture, the product not only of veteran musician AdrianUtley’s love of vintage gear but of experimentation with

studio techniques by Geoff Barrow and sound engineerDave McDonald. The loops wound ventricular fromshards and echoes of other musics. A hip-hop aesthetic atthe bone: fearsome breakbeats that swing and snap andcrunch with the legacy of funk and rhythm & blues and

jazz; bass sounds thick with history and space.

* * *

The album’s popular regard has not abated. In the January 2003 revision of its “100 Greatest Albums Ever”poll, Q magazine readers collectively placed Dummyin 95th place. This book will attempt to elucidate thechanging fortunes of the album: by 2006, in the samepoll, it had increased in stature to 55th place.

* * *

Only now, writing almost 16 years after its release, doesDummy begin to emerge from the channel it coursedalongside albums like Massive Attack’s Protection (and,earlier, Blue Lines ), Tricky’s Maxinquaye, D.J. Shadow’s


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Endtroducing… Dummy’s immediate reception was one atodds with the expectations of almost everybody involved;

its sudden absorption into the culture overwhelming thealbum’s abstract, harsh, imperfect, out-of-balance edges. Dummy is driven from within by paradoxes: its soundsare violent, traumatic, but its effect somnolent, soothing.It displays a commitment to realism, to fidelity — BethGibbons’ voice is meticulously reproduced — but it alsomakes audible the technology used to capture thosesounds. It is shocking, lulling; austere, rich. It is of its

place and time, yet transcends both. It is deliberatelyconstructed yet also the product of an “if it works”approach. It is the sound of a talented group of people, carefully,masterfully, finding their voice. It is stylistically audacious,but it circles the point, accumulates, adheres, assemblesitself from gravity and inertia. It is a construct of lyrical

shards, images, fragments; of instruments and samplesand loops separated from their original contexts. Dummy has always been a supremely associativealbum, and in the years since its release it has been deep

within the lives of its listeners. Much of what we associate with it is added by us. The imagistic palette encompassesthe noir veneer of the night: shadows, cigarettes; theillumination of cities. The conceptual: exile, alienation,solitude. The emotional: loss, grief, isolation. Solace,desire, lust. Disconsolate, melancholia. Arousal. Despair. This book will describe the creation of Dummy, butit will also outline how this music has been heard, lived,used . How people have heard it, and when; in whosecompany it has surrounded them; how it has connectedthem to one another and to the world. How we can


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• 17 •

understand Dummy through the art — film, music,dance — it has inspired; through the lives of people it

has accompanied. How we have understood ourselvesthrough these songs.

* * *

“This is a terrible thing to admit,” confessed AdrianUtley to Sound on Sound in 1995, “but it wasn’t actually a

Theremin. It’s a synth sound made on an SH101, because

we couldn’t actually get hold of the real thing.”20

By the time Portishead made use of the sound, Theremin’s instrument had become associated, in filmslike The Day the Earth Stood Still , The Thing , Spellbound , The Lost Weekend, with the strange, the hallucinogenic,the alien, the ethereal. It had appeared occasionally inpopular music: as part of Brian Wilson’s textural experi-

mentation on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”; inLed Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” A revival, partlyinitiated by Dummy, was widespread by 1997, when theDaily Telegraph reported that “no pop group aspiringto the cutting edge can be without one. Portishead,Pavement, Eels, Crash Test Dummies, My Life Story:all have snapped up theremins and used them on recentalbums.”21

We hear in the theremin what we see in Metropolis : a version of the future that suggests how determined weare by our experience of the past. Like Metropolis , thereis something almost nineteenth-century in its view of the

20 Miller 1995.21 Richardson 1997.


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future; like the steampunk genre it is on the one handfuturistic, alien, other ; on the other historical, vintage,

retro — a characterization that touches Dummy too. Aslistener Kara Estes asked on Twitter, of “Sour Times,”“Why do I think of H. G. Wells with this song?”22

Theremin himself remained in the US throughoutthe ’30s, marrying African-American dancer Lavinia

Williams. He abruptly disappeared in 1938, havingreturned — or been returned — to the U.S.S.R. There,imprisoned, his skills were put to use developing

espionage equipment. In 1945 an eavesdropping deviceof his design was hidden in a large carved woodenGreat Seal of the United States of America which waspresented to the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, in whoseresidential study it sat undiscovered for 7 years. Theambassador was William Averell Harriman, with whom

Theremin had shared his passage to America aboard the

Majestic .

22 http://twitter.com/#!/karalainee/statuses/18884446149152768

http://twitter.com/#!/karalainee/statuses/18884446149152768http://twitter.com/#!/karalainee/statuses/18884446149152768


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Memory

Bristol — Violence and BMX bikes — Hip-hop — A Victorian seaside resort — Childhood experimentation —

Music, paint, and dance — The Dug Out — Abandoned

warehouses — The downland — Burt Bacharach and drum

machines overheard from trash cans — The Buffalo Posse —

“Sour Times” — Instruments ancient and modern — Films

shot through lampshades — Seven Blood-Stained Orchids — Themaking of tea — Late night crate-digging — Meeting over tea —

Songs about Gandhi — London — Bands named after projects,bands named after retirement homes

Bristol. Historically one of the largest cities in England,Bristol was in the eighteenth century a hub of thetrans-Atlantic slave trade; a hub of mercantile trade andcommerce. In the post-war period the city — like manyother urban centers across the U.K. — saw immigrationfrom territories previously part of the British Empire,including Afro-Carribean immigration to the St. Paul’sneighborhood. It was the site of one of the U.K.’s signif-icant civil rights struggles after a boycott in 1963 againstthe Bristol Omnibus Company led to national anti-discrimination legislation. A city with visible extremes


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of income: the residential grandeur of Clifton to therelative poverty of St. Paul’s.

Britain at the start of the ’80s. Facelessly grey,culturally exhausted. The post-war reconstructed urbancenters, monuments of planning and concrete, decayingand anonymous in the arms of former cities. Urbandecline; unemployment at its highest since the ’30s. Ahated Police stop and search law. Enoch Powell warningof racial “civil war.” In 1981 there were urban riotsin London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds. The year

before in St. Paul’s, Bristol. Police pinned against theBlack and White Café after a drugs and alcohol raid;reinforcements met with debris; the evening the neigh-borhood aflame. Skirmishes of sympathy in other, largely

white, neighborhoods: Southmead, Knowle, Hartcliffe. A city turned in upon itself, a nation irreconciled toits grey permanence. At fray with an idea of itself and its

memory of the future.

* * *

“Times were tight and sour,” in the words of “70s 80s,”a 2002 track by electronic downtempo act Nightmareson Wax, featuring vocalist LSK . The song is a memoirof what it was to be young — “70s baby, early 80s child”— amid the political and social and cultural compressionof the time. “Riots and violence on the T.V. … watchin’coppers get beat down.” The National Front; skinheadsand punks. “Miners strikes and BMX bikes,” raps Roots

Manuva on the “Upbringing Mix” of the same song.“Cuts in education; rising inflation. Police brutality andmass frustration.” And yet among it all is the insouciant,


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weightless thrill of being young, young: a multiculturalsociety on the cusp of becoming; a new generation, all

British, the divisions of their parents weaker amid them.In popular culture the possibility of celebration — thattelevision and music and fashion could release amongthem instead a shared identity. Ska, 2 Tone. The rebel-lious aesthetic of punk ripping across racial and socialdivisions. The sense that identities need not be inheritedbut could be compounded from the elements — any ofthe elements — so suddenly among them:

She was into Adam Ant and Wuthering Heights I was getting into Madness and grifter bikes.

The thrill in the air of creation. Portishead’s Dave McDonald remembers “there was a melting pot in thecountry, at the stage where you still had disco, funk, and

punk all mixed together.”

It was a very interesting period of time in England. Ithink who kind of sums it up is when you look at theClash, who were like a punk band playing reggae, withlike Don Letts, or you look at The Great Rock ‘n’ RollSwindle and you have the Black Arabs — a funk band,actually, in that film, doing Sex Pistols covers. For quite afew years, and rumbling on into the early ’80s, there wasa very healthy fusion in this country. Definitely in thiscountry. I don’t think it was anywhere else.

* * *

And then: hip-hop. Dazzling, electric. American.


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Pumas and Nikes and Pro-Keds brilliant and red and white and blue against the grey light and the grey

cities. Breakdancing, its implausible grace amongbeats manufactured in the brittle heat of Roland drummachines and the dense turbines of funk records. “Justenergy, just proper energy,” remembered Geoff Barrow.23 American. Quit your life and take up the decks. Vinyl,acetate, microphones; graffiti, breaking, beatboxing. Barrow remembered:

when hip-hop first hit suburban England, it kind oftook over and was massively exciting. It was a real thing

you could get into. It’s difficult to describe, but to a younger generation of sixteen-year-old kids it was that you wouldn’t go out and have a fight; you’d go out anddance against each other.24

It was not easy to hear — there was Mike Allen, andlater Tim Westwood, on London’s Capital Radio. Miles Johnson — D.J. Milo of legendary Bristol sound systemcollective the Wild Bunch — heard B.B.C. radio’s JohnPeel announcing Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock”:“This is what’s happening in New York.”25 A series ofcompilations named Electro; “It went from Electro One to Electro Fifty,” joked Barrow. “If you couldn’t afford tobuy the imports you’d go out and buy the compilation.”26

23 Breihan 2009.24 Platform.net undated.25 Johnson 1996, p. 83.26 Platform.net undated.


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And, overwhelmingly, hand-to-hand — tapes and recordslent and given by older siblings, older friends.

* * *

Geoff Barrow was born in 1971 in Walton in Gordano,a small coastal village on the outskirts of Bristol. Hisparents — his father a truck driver, his mother workedas a supermarket cashier — separated when he was ten,and he moved with his mother to nearby Portishead.27

Pronounced by area locals with a slight accent on thelast syllable, Portishead was in the nineteenth century anauxiliary dock for Bristol; it was a Victorian seaside resort.By the ’80s it largely served as a bedroom community fornearby Bristol, with numerous retirement residences. It

was not a hive of activity. Barrow was later to tell oneinterviewer that “It’s incredibly depressing and small-

minded. It’s just a very very boring place. I really wantedto fight and get away from there,”28 and another that “It’sa place you can go to and die.”29

He started learning drums at the age of eight, laterplaying for “a rock cover band called Ralph McTell’sOfficial Fan Club”30 — but, as he told Pitchfork in 2009,“I didn’t really like it. It was just a way to play the drums,

27 McLean 2008.28 Jenkins 1995.29 Bernstein 1995.30 Vibe 1995.


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really.”31 It was all about hip-hop. He was breakdancingat 11; at a certain point he “stopped drumming and

started D.J.-ing, mainly in my bedroom.”32

Second wavehip-hop acts like “Run-D.M.C., M.C. Shan, or RoxanneShanté.”33 “It was nothing special, and my equipment wascheap,” he recalled. “It wasn’t a club thing, just a littlesomething for me and my friends.”34

Andy Smith, later Portishead’s tour D.J., was oneof the only other people in Portishead with the sametastes. He ran a hip-hop night in the town’s youth

club, and there met Barrow — “We got talking overour mutual love of Run-D.M.C. and Public Enemy.”35 Smith’s scratching style was self-taught, and when hemet Barrow the two would compare technique and spendendless nights listening to records.36

Speaking to National Public Radio in 2008, Barrowremembered the first time he heard Public Enemy’s

“Rebel without a Pause”:

I heard this as a young teenager in a nightclub in Bristol.It was an underage nightclub so you could get there

without drinking and stuff. I kind of knew Bum Rush theShow before. It was a fairly alright nightclub but it was

just about kind of trying to get girlfriends and do the kindof thing you do when you’re a teenager. The D.J. used to— they didn’t have a D.J. booth; it was a time when they

31 Breihan 2009.32 Uhelszki 1995.33 Vibe 1995.34 Vibe 1995.35 Heller 2009.36 Jones 2006.


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were kind of like “I’m a bit of a superstar so I’m going toget on stage with my decks on.”

It was this amazing thing: this guy ran through thecrowd with this 12 inch vinyl on white label — kind oflike the Olympic torch or something … “I’ve got this

gold.” And he gave it to the D.J. and he just stopped like Whitney Houston in her tracks, or whoever it was at thatpoint, and just stuck it on. And it was a ginormous soundsystem in the nightclub, a really really good one, and it

just — it was the instant thing that completely blew my

mind forever and ever. It was just kind of, right, that’s itthen. I will be into girls at some point, but now I’m intoPublic Enemy.37

* * *

Bristol’s demographic and social breadth made it the

setting for musical and cultural innovation. Dave McDonald remembers:

Everyone I knew was creating something or makingsomething, was either spraying paint, painting on walls,or designing clothes, or making music. In many ways [it

was] a very creative time … You had the hip-hop and thepunk thing. And what was going on in New York — theelectronic sort of dance, and hip-hop — and punk. It wasall fused, fused in together.

In the early ’80s, post-punk bands like Mark Stewart’s The Pop Group; Pigbag; and Rip Rig + Panic, brought

37 NPR 2008.


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together influences including funk, dub, reggae, and free jazz. The city’s venues — particularly the legendary Dug

Out Club, on the edge of the Clifton neighborhood but within reach of St. Paul’s — provided a forum for culturalfusion. McDonald remembers:

That’s a big influence on me, being half Jamaican andhalf English. There was a Jamaican community in Bristoland [at] the period of time that I grew up in, there was anightclub called The Dug Out which everyone would go

to, which was like a real melting pot … everyone used tobe in the same room, all involved in these different scenesand sometimes these scenes would cross quite heavily. Somy interest was reggae and punk. And all my friends wereinvolved in that.

* * *

Every Wednesday at The Dug Out were the Wild Bunch,a sound system collective in the Jamaican model —D.J.s, engineers, and M.C.s. Core members were Miles

Johnson (D.J. Milo), Grant Marshall (Daddy G), andNellee Hooper; later they were joined by Claude Williams,Robert Del Naja, and Andrew Vowles. With performances,as writer Phil Johnson notes, in venues legal and otherwise(in abandoned warehouses, and on the 400-acre publicpark on the edge of Bristol called the Downs), they became“a legendary fixture of the Bristol scene.”38 A typical WildBunch set list might include jazz-funk, New Wave, punk,early hip-hop, electro, reggae, club-oriented R&B, disco.

38 Johnson 1996, p. 80.


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The Wild Bunch would face off against rivalsoundsystems: 2Bad, City Rockers, UD4, FBI Crew. At

the St. Paul’s Carnival they would block off CampbellStreet with speakers, 15 feet high, towering above thecrowd.39 “You could hear them like 10 miles away,”recalled D.J. Krust. “In the morning after one CarnivalI walked home to my house on the other side of Bristoland when I got there I could still hear them.”40

They successfully integrated the core technique ofhip-hop: two turntables and a microphone. Two copies

of the same record so that the instrumental break — thebreakbeat — could be constantly played while an M.C.rapped on top.41 Matt Black, later part of U.K. productionduo Coldcut, visited Bristol on vacation with friends in1984. Already inspired by 1981’s “The Adventures ofGrandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” and the1983 film Wild Style, he was struck by how successfully

hip-hop culture was being expressed in Bristol:

We heard the Wild Bunch playing, we went to The DugOut, and there were [graffiti] pieces by 3D [Del Naja]round town. And actually in London, there wasn’t thatmuch going that we’d seen, but here in Bristol it wasactually alive in a real convincing form … And we gotback to town, and I got my decks, and I decided “right,I’m gonna fucking learn how to do this.”42

39 Gillespie 2006.40 Farsides 2002.41 Farsides 2002.42 Gilbey undated.


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With a repertoire that brought together such broadinfluences, a deep understanding of soul, and an

overwhelming consciousness of dub’s sense of space,the original material produced by the Wild Bunchpresented challenges from a commercial perspective.4th & Broadway’s Julian Palmer, who signed the WildBunch in 1986, recalled later that “What they were doing

was ahead of its time … We could not get arrested with what they were doing, it just seemed too experimental.Everyone said it was cut at the wrong speed because it

sounded so slow in comparison.”43

A limited edition single — “Tearin’ Down the Avenue” — had been released in the U.S., but by thetime “Friends & Countrymen” was released in the U.K.in 1988, the Wild Bunch had effectively splintered after atour to Japan with Neneh Cherry. Nellee Hooper joinedproducer Jazzie B on sound system Soul II Soul, who

would have worldwide success with 1989’s “Back to Life.” Miles Johnson moved to Japan before later going to New York. Marshall, Del Naja, and Vowles formed, in 1988, Massive Attack. The B-side to both Wild Bunch singles was “TheLook of Love,” a tender Burt Bacharach cover voicedby future Massive Attack singer Shara Nelson, overa percussive backing track that still sounds radical inits space and force. The song was a product of D.J.

Milo’s experiments with mixing smooth R&B vocals andthundering hip-hop beats:

43 Pride 1995.


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I used to do a lot of blending. Getting Dennis Edwards’“Don’t Look Any Further” and running it with LL Cool

J’s “I Need a Beat.” Stuff like that. I’d call it my rough with the smooth mix. And that’s where the concept camefrom, of having a rough hip-hop beat with the singer onit.44

* * *

Another Bristol sound crew were 3 Stripe Posse,

comprised of Rob Smith and Ray Mighty. They heardthe Wild Bunch perform “The Look of Love” at the

Malcolm X center in St. Paul’s. “I thought yeah, this iship, this is what I want to do,” Mighty told Phil Johnsonin 1995. “Tough, loud beats, the odd little sample and a

vocal going on, slow, very rare groove with a dubby bassline in a stripped-back empty mix.”45

In 1988 they released two singles — “Walk On …” and“Anyone …” — that took Burt Bacharach songs and, withtheir melodies intoned delicately by R&B singer Jackie

Jackson, stretched them across dense hip-hop drummachine patterns and asthmatic scratching and synthetichorn stabs and spare haunting samples and poundingbass frequencies. There is still something radical inthe contrast between the density of their rhythmicpatchwork and the space and languorous pace that issomehow accorded to the gorgeous, lilting, melodies. The same sonic template — torch ballads withhip-hop breaks — was also being explored elsewhere:

44 Farsides 2002.45 Johnson 1996, p. 179.


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Tim Simenon, as Bomb the Bass, released a gorgeouslystripped-down version of “Say a Little Prayer” with

Maureen Walsh in 1988. Writer Phil Johnson alsohears an early expression in Mark Stewart’s “Stranger Than Love,” strapping a West Side Story vocal onto aSmith & Mighty production of composer Erik Satie’s“Gymnopedie Number 1.”46

In 1989 Smith & Mighty produced “Wishing on aStar” with rap group Fresh 4: the Rose Royce song setagainst a wispy, hazy sample from Faze-O’s 1977 “Riding

High” and the immortal “Funky Drummer” break. Thesong reached #10 in the U.K. singles chart. They alsoco-produced Daddy G’s “Any Love” (the first singlecredited to Massive Attack): tighter, funkier, but stillpaced behind a swooningly gorgeous vocal. The vocalist

was Carlton McCarthy — whose debut album, The Callis Strong , is, in the words of Phil Johnson, “the great lost

album of the Bristol sound.”47

Tim Saul remembers the influence of Smith & Mighty:

when I moved to Bristol as a 17-year-old, 18-year-old,I used to go and hang out outside their studio in St.Paul’s in Bristol actually over the road. And sit by therubbish bins of some flats and actually in the summer

you could hear what they were doing — they would havethe windows open — and that was part of my education,musically.

46 Johnson 1996, p. 69.47 Johnson 1996, p. 106.


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Dave McDonald was exposed to the material at itsinception, and in a sense felt immunized from its

nonetheless enormous influence:

It’s hard for me because I lived in the same house as RobSmith — he was a really really good friend. Even before

we lived in the same house I used to go to his house everynight and listen to records. And then I ended up livingin the same house as him and there was all this musicalequipment in there. And I can remember hearing those

tunes very very early in their early early stages. I don’tthink so much of an influence on me as I think they

would have been more of an influence on Geoff, becauseGeoff, living outside of Bristol, was very interested in

what was going on in Bristol. It was like a whole sort ofexotic world I think.

* * *

Neneh Cherry was a former singer in Rip Rig + Panic,and step-daughter of American free-jazz trumpeter DonCherry. She and future husband Cameron McVey wereboth, by 1987, closely associated with the “Buffalo”fashion movement of stylist Ray Petri and U.K. magazinesincluding Face and i-D. She and McVey — Booga Bear— became central figures in the Bristol music scene,and the production credits to her first album, Raw LikeSushi , read like a who’s who of the formative years ofU.K. downtempo music: McVey himself; Nellee Hooper;

Massive Attack’s Mushroom and 3D; Bomb the Bass’s Tim Simenon; future Tricky producer Mark Saunders;future Massive Attack producer Jonny Dollar. The album


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was an international success, led by singles including“Manchild,” and “Buffalo Stance,” and “Kisses on the

Wind,” which showcased the same mix of soul, hip-hop,and dance as the various Bacharach covers. There is a uniquely British timbre to these songs: anoptimistic, carefree quality with a particular pop sensi-bility. The open-minded feel — albeit shaded with aslightly self-conscious hipness — animated Soul II Soul’sfirst album, Club Classics Vol. One. The same sentiment

was to show through, years later, in M.I.A.’s debut album,

Arular . It is a weightlessness somehow associated withthe carefree blending of diverse influences, but alsothe feeling of operating within a particular look, a setof visuals, a fashion. Of working within a complete anduncontested aesthetic envelope.

* * *

1994. “Sour Times” is the song that signaled Dummy’scommercial potential. To unsuspecting listeners there wasthe attention-grabbing opening: a barreling tornado ofdescending strings, loping bassline, a jangling instrumentof indistinct origin, and a fistful of jagged guitar; acombination that seemed to epitomize the Portisheadsound. That jangling sound is a cimbalom, a kind of centralEuropean dulcimer — ancient instruments, stringsstrapped and bound over a trapezoid board, strings struck

with hammers. The theremin is modern and spectral,its functioning obscure and mysterious in the inter-action between atmosphere and operator. The dulcimeris ancient, material in its operation. Substantial where


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the theremin is ethereal. The irrefutable striking of onething with another. The sound made by these objects is

old . So too the sentiment of the song. The refrain — “Nobody loves me” — is so instantlymemorable, so distinctive in its delivery, that it is oftentaken for the song’s title. Even set within the ironies self-evident in Gibbons’ delivery, it overwhelms the next line— “Not like you do” — and indeed overwhelms the samemessage, expressed entirely without irony, in a thousand

other pop songs. The melody peaks on the refrain, descending just asemitone, arrestingly, on the word “me.” The closingline of the chorus — “not like you do” — almost thrownaway, dismissive, is an echo of the melody of LaloSchifrin’s “Danube Incident,” from the Mission: Impossible television series, from which the song’s main sample is

drawn. “Sour Times” is such a well-constructed song that iteffectively calls attention away from the artifice of itsconstruction. An extraordinarily clever piece of samplingtakes the lilting, swinging guitar-and-cimbalom clipof “Danube Incident” — winsome, romantic — andengulfs it in descending strings; upends it, establishes

within it a tight eddy of internal tension, sharpens therattling dulcimer, dusts it with the drum figures fromSmokey Brooks’ “Spin-It Jig.” It sounds as if the momenthas been inverted, turned inside-out; made of itself anegative. The cimbalom is changed from an atmosphericgarnish to a dominant part of the design of song, rattlingand shimmering within a channel that barely contains it. And yet there is so much subtlety too.


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The melody of the verse is all taut packets of synco-pation: agitated; agile, playful. Teasing the edges of

meaning, dancing, contained in just a few notes. Listento the jump Gibbons makes, at 3:11, to a higher note inthe final chorus. There is something just slightly strainedabout it, suggesting a frailty, a desperation, that is thenperfectly balanced by the throaty delivery of “true”seconds later. The word “courtesies” in the first verse, breathy andclose, making cover for the smooth delivery of “despise

in me” just a moment later. It is not a moment of withering self-judgment — although Dummy hasplenty of those — but instead a knowing acknowl-edgment. The “I” is not lingered over too long — amoment longer and it would tip the song too far intoself-recrimination, absolve surroundings and communitytoo much of their responsibilities. It’s a beautiful moment,

a perfect integration of melody and meaning. The songis not a featureless bemoaning of the loneliness of the world, but one that carefully implicates the self in its fate. And then the challenge — “Take a ride, take a shotnow” — the delivery slowing after the slight edge on“shot,” gliding magnificently through “now” to land,disconsolate, on the chorus.

* * *

A cimbalom is also used in John Barry’s soundtrack forthe 1965 British espionage thriller The Ipcress File, appar-ently inspired by the prominent use of a zither in AntonKaras’ score for 1949’s The Third Man.


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A critical shared influence of Portishead — unitingGeoff Barrow and guitarist/co-producer Adrian Utley,

as well as Tim Saul when he was involved — wasfilm soundtracks. The work of Lalo Schifrin, BernardHerrmann, Quincey Jones, John Carpenter, Ennio

Morricone, and Nino Rota. Tim Saul rememberslistening in Dummy’s pre-production sessions to Italiansoundtracks, Riz Ortolani; “Greek soundtracks as well.” While Barrow was not tremendously interested in thefilms themselves — “I just collect records I like: ones

from the late ’60s and ’70s, Italian, French and Americanspy movies and thrillers”48 — he had been followingthe trajectory of hip-hop, moving from sampling souland funk records to finding breaks on soundtracks.49 For Utley the appeal was partly instrumental — thetremolo guitar, for example, that was a trademark of’60s espionage movies.50 But for the band in general

the interest was in the forced experimentation that wasrequired to create suspense and other emotions in theabsence of tools like synthesizers. That was what Utleyheard in The Ipcress File — an experimentation withinstrumentation and arrangements that was absent fromsome of the composer’s other work.51 Or in “the electricguitar on The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, which is sucha disgusting noise when it comes in.”52 As Barrow put it,“they had to do it with guitars, backward tapes and all

48 Darling 1995.49 Uhelszki 1995.50 Uhelszki 1995.51 Innersound 2008.52 Miller 1995.


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kinds of madness.”53 It was an approach, an aesthetic,rather than simply an instrumental end result. Utley said,

all they’ve got is a Fender Rhodes and an echo unit. They haven’t got masses of technology, so they recordsomething really dodgy with that and then flip the tapeover so it’s backwards. It’s really inventive, a little bit crapand just sounds really vibey.54

The Ipcress File — aesthetically so similar to Dummy in

its angular, highly stylized approach and in its insouciant,deadpan tone — is quoted in the band’s soundtrackto their short film, To Kill a Dead Man. AlexanderHemming, the director, remembers meeting the bandand his reaction to tracks from Dummy:

I said they reminded me a little of soundtracks of movies

from the ’70s and then we spent the next few hourstalking about the movies we liked such as Ipcress Fileand Get Carter . Not just the soundtracks … but alsothe visuals too. The way odd camera angles were usedand also shooting through or past something in theforeground, whether it was a window, windscreen, mirroror anything else for that matter, the view often obscuredby something else.

To Kill a Dead Man almost serves as a tour of the band’ssoundtrack influences. And the opening chords to RizOrtolani’s gorgeous theme to the 1971’s Confessione di un

53 Gladstone 1995.54 Miller 1995.


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commissario (Confessions of a Police Captain) have a clearecho, beaten several octaves and registers down, in the

organ bass figures that give “Wandering Star” its unfor-giving inertia. Ortolani’s soundtrack to the 1972 film Sette orchideemacchiate di rosso (Seven Blood-Stained Orchids ) is jarringlyclose to Dummy: the spacious dynamic and tonal range;the funky drum pattern; the loping bassline and languidpace. The chiming upper register, archaic instrumentationshining in reverberation against electric underpinnings.

Not that the band necessarily saw the film itself, but thepalette of the opening scenes also matches Dummy: aneon urban nightscape, blues and greens, lights indistinctupon the darkness like shapes at sea.

* * *

Geoff Barrow’s severe dyslexia made studying difficult;an attempt to be a graphic designer finally thwartedby color-blindness after nine months of study. “For along time I didn’t really do an awful lot,” he said for aFrench documentary later. “And I wanted to do music.”Cold-calling Bristol studios for work, he met withoutsuccess — “Oh no, sorry, we’re completely overmannedand underpaid”55 — until he reached engineer Andy

Allen, who was then building Coach House Studios in theClifton area. In exchange for help with the construction,he offered to grant Barrow a Youth Training Schemeplacement.

55 Trynka 1997.


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* * *

Massive Attack were soon working out of Coach Houseto complete their debut album, Blue Lines . Massive Attack were three former members of the Wild Bunch:Grant Marshall, Robert Del Naja, and Andrew Vowles— Daddy G, 3D, and Mushroom. By that time Cameron

McVey and Neneh Cherry had established their CherryBear Organization, which had provided funding — andrecording time at their London house — to the band. Key

tracks from Blue Lines — “Safe from Harm,” “One Love,”“Unfinished Sympathy,” “Lately” — were recorded atCoach House. Blue Lines was an incredibly influential, genre-breakingrecord, establishing a template for what would later— controversially and imperfectly — become knownas “trip-hop.” Slow tempos; minor keys; female voices

soaring above funky organ loops and resonant basslines.Blue Lines retains an edge and a charm entirely its own;a range of influences, textures, backgrounds far broaderthan almost everything that followed it; a commitmentto minimalism that remains bracing and fresh; a pleasurein its own texture that is genuine, not characterized bythe exhibitionism of later imitators. There are directionsthe genre did not take. Some moments remain aston-ishing: the opening of “Five Man Army,” which takesthe drum sample from the start of Al Green’s “I’m Glad

You’re Mine” and allies it to a dub bassline, a transform-ative contrast to the hip-hop context in which the breakis normally used. The impeccably gorgeous “UnfinishedSympathy,” which radicalizes the drum machine samplesthat, in other records from the time, are now uselessly


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“I was interested in learning about the entire soundspectrum … I would analyze what made a popular song

work, trying to dig deeper into the psychology of thesound.”59 During this time a key influence was JonathanSharp — better known as Jonny Dollar — who with

McVey was co-producer of Blue Lines . Dollar’s work was characterized by his rigorous perfectionism andcommitment to minimalism. Talking to Sound on Sound in 2000, he commented that:

Where most people seem to go wrong with loop-basedrecords … is that they start out with the loop and thenthey forget that it’s the main thing on the record — theyget more interested in the things they’re adding, and itdoesn’t stay in the context of the loop so the loop endsup getting buried. We always put the loop up front witheverything else inside it. I don’t like too many parts

audible on a record, I like things fairly minimal.60

* * *

Cameron McVey was impressed with Barrow’s work andbought him an Akai sampler and recording time.61 He

was hired to contribute material for Neneh Cherry’ssecond album, Homebrew. In 2008 Barrow recalled, “I canremember doing three beats for Neneh and getting paida grand in cash! I was, like, I’ll give you 50 beats!”62 The

59 Vibe 1995.60 Senior 2000.61 Trynka 1997.62 McLean 2008.


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album’s seventh track, “Somedays,” is credited to Barrowas co-producer, and in some respects prefigures Dummy’s

arrangements. The song features a minor-key chordsequence played out on an electric piano; a drum pattern with a snare almost lost in its own reverb, a synth figuregliding above in a manner that recalls the “Mysterons”theremin. In the last 30 seconds of the song the track’sformative materials are replayed through a haze ofreverberation, foregrounding the constructed-ness of thetrack, the contingency of its materials.

Barrow also co-produced Tricky’s first recorded solosingle, “Nothing’s Clear,” which appeared on a charitycompilation album called The Hard Sell . From thesoundtrack to Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1986 film 37°2 lematin (Betty Blue) the song takes a tentative, uncertain,delicate piano riff, a featherlight sketch of dissonance. Itthen pummels it with horn stabs and a hustling bassline:

the boisterous attitude of the U.K.’s late ’70s 2 Tonegenre, the echoes of dub and ska and punk. In these early works it is possible to hear an interestin the charming effects of dissonance; a pleasure in theabstract nature of sounds taken to extremes. Above all apleasure in melody.

* * *

Tim Saul met Barrow during this period; he recalls that“there was quite a buzz about this young guy who hadbeen taken under the Massive Attack crew, under their

wing if you like. And Bristol isn’t that big a place. I canremember I was really curious to meet this guy.”


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Barrow was still spending time with Andy Smith, whoremembered in a French documentary after the release

of Dummy:

basically he had a sampler and a keyboard but he didn’treally have anything to sample. So he was a bit devoid ofstuff. So I used to go round with like crates and crates ofold records, and just used to go round his house all night,and we flipped through them and just put stuff together… I was saying “What do you think of this? What do

you think of that? What do you think of that?” I had somuch stuff. And that’s what were like the original demosfor the Dummy album was from those all-night sessions.63

* * *

Dave McDonald was then an engineer at State of

Art, a “very very plush high-end demo studio” thathe had helped owner Julian Hill put together. Hill —later known as Gobz from goth rock band Whores ofBabylon — introduced him to Geoff Barrow, with whom

McDonald’s musical connection was immediate:

He came in and we got on like a house on fire … So westarted, me and Geoff started, every bit of spare time Ihad, or evenings or whatever, I started to push more andmore for time and we were just getting more and moreinvolved in this, making this interesting music. Geoffhad an amazing ear for samples. I was very intrigued

with it, because I was more from the old school of

63 French television documentary.


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recording instruments. But I was very interested inall this new technology. He had acquired some of this

technology from some of the sessions he’d been doingup at the Coach House for Massive Attack … Cameronhad obviously seen the thing in Geoff and supplied him

with — I think it was an S900 sampler and a little digitalmixer. Real high-end stuff, you know? And a little drummachine.

He remembered that Barrow was then collaborating

with a number of people. From the town of Portishead were programmer Richard Newell and Rhodes playerNeil Solman. “It was very like how Massive Attack

worked,” recalled McDonald, “in the sense that there’slots of different artists. But everyone was an unknownartist. We were all completely unknown and we had noform whatsoever.” There were several singers involved

at that point — including Helen White, who went on torecord with Bristol downtempo unit Alpha; and a malesinger named Marc Bessant, a longtime friend of Barrow

who later helped develop the band’s visual materials. And a singer named Beth Gibbons.

* * *

Geoff Barrow had met Beth Gibbons among a number ofparticipants at a government-run Enterprise Allowance

job creation scheme. Barrow, who had been searchingfor a soul singer, remembered being approached byGibbons:


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There was a tea-break and she came over and asked“what kind of stuff do you do?” She gave me her number.

I sent her a tape, a backing track and she sang over that.It was strange because she sang a proper adult vocal, acover version of a song one of her friends had written.It was pretty bizarre because up till then all I’d got from

vocalists was stuff like “get higher,” “can you feel theheat?” or “move to the beat.” And she was singing aboutGandhi and stuff like that. It was pretty bizarre.64

He had been impressed by the “personal, honest view” ofher lyrics and the qualities of her voice. 65

When I first heard her voice I didn’t know what to makeof it, because I suppose — being into hip-hop or beinginto soul music styles, she had a strange voice comparedto that. She had come from folk and Janis Ian and Janis

Joplin. I just didn’t think it was going to work. But thenthere was this realness in what she was singing. Sherecorded this track called “It Could be Sweet” which isreally kind of like an early track. It wasn’t soul — butthen, it kind of was — and it wasn’t overtly jazzy. And it

wasn’t folk. But she brought this adultness to the track. All of a sudden it was — this is actually real . And she’ssinging about things that she obviously cares about.66

Her vocal range was also impressive. She visited Barrow— then living with his mother; “She was just deafening

64 Marcus 1997.65 Lewis 1994.66 B.B.C. 2010.


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… I thought my mum was going to have a right go! I was worried about the neighbours.”67

He sensed that her reaction to his approach was alsouncertain. “I think she wanted to be in this real musicianscenario, which was all she’d ever known. So meeting me,this guy with a couple of boxes making funny noises, waspretty strange for her … I think we were both a bit waryof each other but impressed with each other.”68

* * *

With work on Homebrew completed, Cherry and McVey— now Barrow’s manager — sought some time outof the country, and offered Barrow (with his extendedcollective) funding of about £40,000 and the use oftheir London home with its studio.69 “I just refused to‘produce’ for Geoff Barrow,” McVey told Tribe magazine.

“I just kept telling him to ‘fuck off’ and carry on in thesame direction he was already going by himself … I alsotold him to stick with the one singer and pointed outthat he’d be hard pressed to find a better name than hishometown’s.”70

The group was there for almost a year, over the courseof which, as McDonald recalls, “it started to whittledown into the main core of people.” Tim Saul, who hadmoved from Bristol back to London, saw in this time“a kind of natural process of distillation — that having

67 McLean 2008.68 Marcus 1997.69 McLean 2008.70 La Polla undated.


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“Wildwood”; Primal Scream’s “Give Out But Don’t GiveUp.”

A remix of Gabrielle’s “Going Nowhere” took theoriginal’s poppy, brassy optimism, and pounded it withthe breakbeat from Lou Donaldson’s “Pot Belly,” ahip-hop mainstay comprised of a busy snare and cymbalride, a blunted bassline, and flatended organ stabs. Thebreak is pushed hard ; the result is surprisingly unset-tling, and by the middle of the song many of the band’ssignature tricks are on display, including the impeccable,

dramatic timing with which new elements are drawn inand snapped out. But the vocal remains at the front, themelody at the centre of a soundscape which accrues thequalities of a vortex around it. On the basis of the demo and the Gabrielle remix,Unger-Hamilton signed Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbonsas Portishead. Adrian Utley drove the pair to London to

sign the contract.71

For some critics the band’s name was in keeping with the “the hometown tradition of hip hop: WattsProphets, Sugarhill Gang, Cypress Hill,” something inkeeping with Barrow’s dominant stylistic influence.72 But Barrow recalled the sense of mystery that the name‘Portishead’ somehow evoked for those not familiar withthe geographic locale:

We were called Portishead because we were all workingin London and my ex-manger would call us “The ladsfrom Portishead.” And then it just stuck. And then was

71 McLean 2008.72 Harrison undated.


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just this really weird ironic kind of — I hated Portishead— and we just called ourselves after the town. It was

ridiculous. But we couldn’t come up with a better name. And we used Portishead as a name, and people said “Ireally like that name; what’s that from?” Because theydidn’t know it was the town. And that has been it, eversince.73

73 B.B.C. 2010.


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Shock

A cacophony of metaphors — Grunge breakbeats —“Strangers” — The air under assault — Public Enemy —

Hard-bop jazz — More tea — A ’79 Chevy

Caprice Classic — The Roland TR-808 —

The resonant qualities of the human lung —

Student housing — Floors and ceilings —

Church bells and curfew — Highest tide

“Numb” was released in June 1994, the first single fromDummy. It was distributed to D.J.s first as a white label.

The sleeve featured a still from To Kill a Dead Man, as would Dummy itself and the singles for “Sour Times,”and “Glory Box.” On the cover of “Numb” the image isalmost abstract — a detail of a forearm, a hand, a piece ofmedical tubing. A hand raised, presumably to the head, in

an apparent gesture of despair, helplessness. The imageis grayed-out against a deep and foreboding blue stain;the single’s sleeve a flat unreadable cream. No intimationas to the song’s nature or to its musical workings. An artobject, distanced from its contents. The title track was accompanied on the A-side by tworemixes, entitled “Numbed in Moscow,” and “Revenge of


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the Number.” “We tended to have fun renaming them inquite obscure ways,” remembers Tim Saul. The remixes

on the B-side, “Earth — Linger,” and “A Tribute to Monk & Canatella,” are opaque references to two little-known Bristol bands, including Saul’s own Earthling.

* * *

What to make of this music. The immediate criticalresponse to Dummy was one of confusion brandished

to a hard point of aesthetic shock. It seemed to cross somany genres, to suggest so many moods. A cacophony ofmetaphors:

✒ “the torched soul of prime-era Peggy Lee dressed inspy movie, spaghetti Western and ’90s urban cool.”74

✒ “A chain-smoking Joni Mitchell hanging out withCypress Hill.”75

✒ A “near-ambient pastiche of dub, techno, R&B, andsoul.”76

✒ “The John Philip Sousa of the Prozac Nation?”77

✒ “Black-hearted soul stirs up a whole new genre:disque noir.”78

Early enthusiasts included legendary broadcaster Bob

Harris, who gave “Strangers” heavy airplay in London.

74 Darling 1995.75 Quoted in Darling 1995.76 Entertainment Weekly 1995.77 Entertainment Weekly 1995.78 Bernstein 1995.


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Like others, he struggled to arrive at a description that was not a hybrid of genre references:

It’s such an innovative album. The description “presentday urban blues” fits it very well. Soul comes in so manyforms — you don’t have to be Otis Redding to have soul— and the album’s part of an amazing surge of reallygood music coming out of the U.K. right now, at last.79

* * *

In the U.S. Dummy’s arrival had, perhaps, been to morefertile ground than is commonly thought. The use ofhip-hop-influenced breakbeats had been part of the alter-native American rock scene; Greg Milner has suggestedthat “an awareness of hip-hop is arguably the single mostrecognizable aspect of alt-rock in the nineties. Break

beats were everywhere — just listen to Dave Grohl’sdrumming on the chorus of ‘Teen Spirit.’ ”80 There was akind of cultural caesura at the death of Kurt Cobain —an event mentioned to me by numerous North Americanlisteners in connection with their experience of Dummy,a moment that seemed to suggest the exhaustion of alter-native rock, to allow, as Vancouver writer Sean Cranburynotes, “a move away from that organic guitar-drums-bass

verse-chorus-verse mentality.” MTV gave “Sour Times”heavy play as part of their Buzz Bin.81 By February 1995the single had reached #55 in Billboard ’s pop chart on the

79 Sexton 1994.80 Milner 2010, p. 179.81 Taraska 1997.


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back of extensive exposure on alternative radio.82 In theUK Dummy reached #32 in 1994 and peaked at #2 the

following May, with further chart success on the back ofthe prestigious Mercury Prize win later that year.

* * *

In April 1995 Portishead recorded a D.J. set for theB.B.C.’s famed Essential Mix series. The set is a showcasefor the band’s musical tastes, and the delight they

exhibit in the weathered sonic detritus of their ownproduction. The opening of “Strangers” is stretched toalmost 4 minutes, the mechanical roll and thrum of thesong’s conclusion distended and grafted back onto theintroduction. The sensation is piston-like, menacing,hydraulic, entirely unhuman; a momentum irresistibleby the time the opening saxophone sample sucks you

into the song’s beginning. At 11 minutes into the mix, thesong is repeatedly stalled upon the turntable’s chassis, amoment of pure rhythmic vertigo, an assertion of sound’spure substance, of its bone-rattling sovereignty amongthe world of things. The sample that opens the song is a saxophone figuredrawn from “Elegant People,” a 1976 track by jazz-fusion act Weather Report. On “Strangers” the momentis shifted down in pitch, transformed from an elegant,dreamy opening to a waxy, spooling threat that cleavesopen the start of the song. Then: the thundering opening sequence — the bassused as percussion, a klaxon-like sound scored over the

82 Entertainment Weekly 1995.


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top, a snare daubed with its own reversed decay, a guitarso distorted that it sounds reedy. Dummy is an album

characterized by dramatic contrasts; “Strangers” deliversthe most. It skids into a jazzy guitar riff, all lilt andswing, yet covered with such clatter and reverb that, withGibbons’ distant voice — “can anybody see the light?” —it sounds as if it was recorded in a cave.

* * *

One of Dummy’s recurrent themes is of isolation, and while “Strangers” furthers that — “Did you realize noone can see inside your view?” — it does so less by musingon loneliness, than by exposing the listener to the rawdisorientation of lived experience. “This ain’t real,” singsGibbons; and when the song gives way after 2 minutesto a glistening, graceful bridge, dreamily drawing breath

over shimmering strings and gentle horns, it is only totrigger another attack of pulmonary violence. Listened to in a club; listened to at high volume —Dummy is an album that restores itself at high volume asdoes a diver in a decompression chamber — the atmos-phere is filled with the sheer noise of the song. While thealbum’s resonant, physical bass figures are unremitting intheir pressure on one’s chest, in “Strangers” the experienceis more encompassing, disorienting, confusing, as if theair itself is under assault. It triggers alarm, but withholdsadrenaline. The song’s ending is a gradual shutting down, a denialof oxygen; the bottom of the song dropping away to leaveGibbons’ vocal exposed, breathy, and then caught by theasphyxiating backwash of its own reverb. Collapsing,


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shorn of its klaxon-like alarm, the song continues for 30seconds before abruptly, suddenly, ceasing.

* * *

For Adrian Utley, the discovery of hip-hop was “ahuge life-changing experience — like having a baby orsomething.”83 Like Geoff Barrow, he has spoken aboutthe influence of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back:

I bought that album on cassette, which made it soundeven better, and played it in my car at ridiculous volume …

And for me it was like it was a whole new exciting worldthat I knew nothing about … But I didn’t understand itand I think when I first met Geoff that was probably oneof the first tracks I talked about, or at least that album,

Takes a Nation of Millions . And like a lot of things in yourlife, sometimes you are alone with your contemporariesand you suddenly find that you are stepping out intoanother world and your friends are not seeing the same as

you are, and for me that very much was it. A lot of peopleof my age group at that time and within the world that I

was in were not into it. And I found it like a brave new,or a new way of interpreting music. It had the energy ofmusic I’d listened to in the past. So we spoke about that,and I was going, “How the hell — how do they do —

what — how is it made? How can that be made? Howdo they play it?”84

83 Thompson 2009.84 NPR 2008.


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* * *

Adrian Utley’s original inspirations had included JimiHendrix (“the sound was just so vicious and brilliant”)and Black Sabbath; he had played and recorded ingenres including disco and reggae.85 But by the early’90s he had impeccable credentials on the British jazzscene, having played with scene mainstays Tommy Chaseand Dick Morrissey, along the way working alongsideorganist Gary Baldwin (who plays Hammond on three

of Dummy’s songs). He founded a band called The GleeClub with Clive Deamer (whose drums appear on sevenof Dummy’s tracks). He had relocated to Bristol in 1986,relishing the vibrancy of its jazz scene.86 Nonethelesshe had begun to feel the constraints of jazz as a creativemedium, overdetermined in some way by the toweringinnovations of the giants of his inspiration. He told a

Dutch magazine in 1997:

It’s true that I played jazz for a long time with all sortsof people. But I stopped because I can never equal myheroes John Coltrane and Miles Davis. I’ll never be asgood or as spiritual as they were thirty years ago. That’s

why I thought it more useful to contribute something tothe present-day music, to start something new.87

* * *

85 NPR 2008.86 Johnson 1996, p. 168.87 Watt 1997.


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At Coach House Studios, Massive Attack’s Mushroomintroduced Utley to Tribe Called Quest’s second L.P.

— “which I liked because a lot of their sound was BlueNote, Grant Green samples and stuff”88 — and he metGeoff Barrow around the time of Massive Attack’s Blue Lines sessions:

he’d sampled a break from our drummer, who’s actuallyClive [Deamer], who plays on all our stuff. He had like a[Casio] FZ-1 sampler set up outside, with a lead through

to the live room, where we were playing. And he asked ifhe could use one of the breaks. And I remember saying, “No.”89

Tim Saul remembers Barrow and Utley bonding over“cups of tea and biscuits and listening to The Low EndTheory.” Utley absorbed Barrow’s extensive knowledge of

hip-hop and its production techniques; in return he wasfamiliar with the materials in hard-bop jazz from whichmany hip-hop producers of the time were sampling. Hehad been experimenting with hip-hop and jazz:

I was making loads of trippy beats and playing jazz overthem, but I never recorded it, I’d just sit there playing itincredibly loudly. There were no songs and people usedto listen to it and say there was no way it could be done.90

* * *

88 Johnson 1996, p. 170.89 B.B.C. 2010.90 Johnson 1996, p. 170


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In 1983 D.J. Jazzie Jay had been part of Afrika Bambaataa’sSoul Sonic Force collective, who had used the Roland

TR-808 drum machine on the 1982’s epochal “PlanetRock.” Made for just 3 years starting in 1980, the 808 was used in Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” in the same year, but its inferiority to the Linn LM-1 and the obviousartifice of its sounds kept it from high-end commercialadoption. Nonetheless, the distance in price from theLinn made it more accessible to hip-hop producers andothers lacking deep-pocket commercial backing.

With Rick Rubin, Jay produced T La Rock’s “It’s Yours.” He remembered the last stages of its production:

At that time I had a ’79 Chevy Caprice Classic and thesystem was unmatched. It’s not like today where theymake systems for cars. I had to actually go in with a saw,cut out half the back deck, put in four 8-inch woofers,

two 5¼’s in the door, midrange tweeters, three amplifiersbolted into the trunk, a three-way crossover in the glovecompartment, a Passaic equalizer, and a tuner in thefront … That was the criteria of whether “It’s Yours” hadenough bass because my car system at that time … it wasthe epitome of bass! We’d go upstairs in the Power Play,make a rough cassette, Rick would run downstairs andthrow it in the car and it had to have enough bass. That’sone thing he was meticulous on … “Yo, it has to havemore bass!” He’d go upstairs like, “Nope. Not enoughbass,” and the guy would be like, “There’s too much bassas it is! Look … the meters are peaking!”91

91 JayQuan and Aldave undated.


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“It’s Yours” was one of the first songs to take the charac-teristic kick drum sound of the 808 and sustain it,

exposing the deep booming bass sound of which it wascomprised — essentially a sine wave, a deep hum, with very little pitch content. Rick Rubin used the sound in productions for theBeastie Boys, Run D.M.C., and LL Cool J. Miamiproducers such as Amos Larkins began using the susta

Documents

Portishead's Dummy (33⅓ Series)