Trip Hop Hurray

By Joe Kavanagh

On the face of it, the dole queue is hardly renowned as the place where the answer to dreams are found, but, in 1991, a chance meeting on a UK welfare line between a supremely talented teen and a former farmer was enough to launch the career of one of Europe's most influential bands of the past two decades. If their birth was quirky then it only served as a marker for what would follow, as Portishead clung to their integrity almost as tightly as their privacy.

They resolutely refused to follow traditional rules in their quest to create music of permanence and importance, and in the event they wrote a new rule book, which has been followed by a generation of bands in their wake. In a music world rife with tabloid gossip, publicists and teeming masses bent on fame at all costs, Portishead's only statement was their music, until even that fell silent.

Now they're back with their first album in over ten years, and although some of their fans may view this as a nostalgic trip down memory lane, the band's eyes are fixed firmly on the future. Portishead have once again proven their class with an album brimming with ideas, that challenges the listener and adds a whole new set of conventions to the ones they seemingly conjured out of the air over a decade ago.

Geoff Barrow came to music early in life, hammering away on a drum kit by eight-years-old, but it was not until his parents' divorce a couple of years later, and his subsequent move with his mother to the coastal town of Portishead, that music truly became the focal point of his world.

In his own words: "There's nothing else I could have done. I was pretty useless at school. I wanted to be a graphic designer except I'm color blind. Then I couldn't have done an office job, because when it comes down to it, I'm absolutely useless when it comes to dealing with either reading or writing." An avid fan of all things electronic, he managed to talk his way into a job in a local studio, where he initially worked as a tea boy, but his employers were quick to recognize his ability, eagerness to learn and undeniable raw talent.

Within months, he has begun working with artists such as Tricky, Primal Scream, Paul Weller and fellow Bristol outfit, Massive Attack. His talent even saw him co-write and produce several tracks on Neneh Cherry's Homebrew album but despite such strides, it was a touch of providence that would shape the entire course of his career and life.

As part of the terms of him receiving benefits from the government, Barrow was compelled to attend a training programme offered by his local unemployment office, where he first met singer and farmer's daughter, Beth Gibbons. Initially, the pair did not exactly hit it off, Gibbons being unimpressed by the younger and less worldly Barrow.

A few months later however, the two agreed to try a collaboration and, pleased with their preliminary efforts, they began working together regularly. A short time later, Barrow had included jazz guitarist, Adrian Utely , and sound engineer, Dave McDonald, to their group, with each member having a say in all matters. They even gave themselves a name, allegedly inspired by the fact that everyone on the Bristol music scene referred to Barrow as "that guy from Portishead". Given that they originally never intended to perform live, the band was completely free to do as they wished in a sonic sense, taking inspiration from old and new music, as well as movies, art and essentially anything that could inspire, provoke or induce.

The band dedicated themselves early on to making music that would excite and challenge, or as Barrow's would later recall: "Yeah, when I get goose pimples, I know it's good. If you can rate that kind of thing, you know you're onto a good thing." Even their first demo was ambitious, forgoing the usual method of putting a few tracks on CD, and instead shooting a mini-movie, To Kill A Dead Man, which was written by and starred Gibbons and Barrow, featuring their music as the soundtrack. It was enough to spawn an industry buzz with the band settling on Go! Discs, who informed them that they would consider 50,000 album sales a major success for a debut album.

In 1994, the world at large was made aware of Portishead when the 11-track Dummy hit shelves and became one of the most celebrated debut albums of all time. Virtually defying description, one scribe for UK newspaper The Telegraph, came closest when saying: "Imagine the entire works of Joy Division sung by Dusty Springfield impersonating Billie Holiday, produced by A Tribe Called Quest." I personally, can remember exactly where I was standing the first time I heard it and what was going through my mind as I stood transfixed on a warehouse floor on Long Island: "Where the hell did this sound come from?" It turns out, I wasn't the only one, as the album went on to sell 150,000 copies in the US, virtually all of which was done by word of mouth.

Even more remarkably, the band played a sum total of one gig in the US in the first three years of their existence and steadfastly refused to meet with the media for interviews. To this day, there have been less than a handful of interviews with Gibbon, and none since 1995, giving her an almost mythical mystique in the world of indie music.

For the next three years, Portishead were one of the most popular, dynamic and influential bands on the globe, inspiring a whole generation of acts as they became - for better or worse - the acknowledged leaders of the trip hop movement. One more eponymous album proper would appear in 1997, in addition to a celebrated live album recorded at New York's Roseland Ballroom, a year later.

To the untrained eye, it appeared that Portishead had everything that any band could ever want but tales of nervous exhaustion, breakdowns and strife were never far away. They hated the fact that their music and by extension themselves - was being pimped around the world, aped by cheesy bandwagon jumpers and emulated by advertising executives eager to extract some of the band's zeitgeist for their own commercial ends.

Almost victims of their own success, they struggled to retain their creative vibrancy, with Barrow once recalling: It felt like we'd hit this Lara Croft moment where basically none of the keys work and every door is f**king locked! And you think, but there must be a key! I've got find this f***ing key."

Something had to give, although it wasn't quite the implosion that some expected, but rather a gentle tapering off, to the point that even the band didn't know whether they existed anymore.

Rumors emerged virtually every year, claiming that a new album was in the works. Barrow and Utely briefly lived in Australia in 2001 although their recordings proved a false dawn to those that optimistically wrote about an album appearing later in the year. There was even a rumor the following year that the new album was made and even given the title of Alien, but again, it proved utterly unfounded.

It was only when the band reformed for a one-off gig to benefit survivors of 2004's tsunami that the long march back truly began. It has reached its fruition with the release of Third last week, an album that is as challenging, innovative and perfectly poised between light and darkness, in a manner that only Portishead are truly capable of. In Barrow's words: "We really wanted to sound like ourselves but not sound like ourselves... It definitely doesn't have the pop element [of] Dummy, but there's a lot of people out there that want interesting music. And if we can be one of those bands that they can rely on to deliver that then that's fantastic... When you come back you don't want to tickle people under the chin-- you know what I mean?" Portishead have certainly achieved that with an album that puts them firmly at the forefront of the indie scene once more, although they remain uncomfortable with all of the machinations that lie between the pure act of making music and delivering it to the people.

Marvin Gaye once said that "great artists suffer for the people" and few artists more genuinely so than Portishead. If it's any consolation to them, music can only be a better place because of their suffering.