Portishead, the Blue Sound of Bristol

“Ohh...
Can anybody see the light
Where the morn meets the dew and the tide rises
Did you realize, no one can see inside your view
Did you realize, for why this sight belongs to you.”
(Portishead, “Strangers”)

This time I want to go back to writing about music.

Which does not happen often, despite being one of my greatest passions with photography and reading: after all, eye, hearing and mind and it can be said that 80% of the human being is given.

For now, I have written just about Glenn Gould and Erik Satie, and to my surprise, I recently discovered that the article on Erik Satie is among the most sought after in my Blog.

To think that it was born as a Blog on Photography!

But better this way, it makes no sense to limit yourself. I write about what I love and, as anyone who knows me knows, I am a voracious and curious person, especially as regards every form of art and culture.

Therefore, this time, I want to tell you about an album that is one of my absolute favorites and is back in my twenties.

 

The dear twenty years. There was also a nice series of documentary shorts at the time on MTV Italia which was titled “Avere Ventanni”, starring Massimo Coppola, it was 2004.

The university years. Greedy reading, compulsive music listening, late nights of dancing. These are perhaps the best years that never come back.

Then, often, it happens to be lucky enough to be present when a new style is born. To be there, on time.

Of course, it is not exactly like it was for those who lived Woodstock in '68 or attend a concert by Nina Simone or Miles Davis, or being there on 11 August 1973 when DJ Kool Here organized the first hip hop party in history, but I must say that I was exactly twenty when Portishead's debut album came out.

I experienced the birth of Trip Hop in real-time, and I believe that it is now increasingly difficult to witness such impactful phenomena on a musical level. By now every musical genre is shredded at the speed of light and blends smoothly with what came before.

Trap is all the rage now but it adds very little to hip hop aside from autotune. Maybe Skrillex and Dubstep were the latest new genre in the electronic arena, but they produced very little, if not a myriad of shoddy epigones. Very different was the Jungle and the Drum'n'Bass which, not surprisingly, have the same year of birth and place of the Trip Hop.

Nothing compared to the magnetic wonder that caught me listening to Portishead's debut.

It has remained one of my favorite records ever since. Indeed, when it often happens with my friends to entertain us with that nice little game of the three discs to take to a desert island (like the three books), or that you can only listen to those three for life, well, “Dummy” is one of my three.

That was truly a golden year: 1990!

I was still sixteen when the “Sound of Bristol” began to make a name for itself. At the time I was reading a lot more music magazines and I was always keeping up to date, more than now.

Bristol's underground scene was a cultural movement of the early 1980s. They were mostly musicians and graffiti artists, who contaminated reggae, hip hop, with a strong visual component linked to Street Art. Among the main exponents of this cultural ferment was the Wild Bunch, a collective of DJs active in the eighties who mixed electronic sounds with hip hop, dub, techno, and house: one of the founding members of the Massive Attack band, Robert Del Naja, was originally a graffiti artist, collaborating with local artist Banksy, now a world-famous artist with stellar quotes.

The first album that gave shape to this new genre was precisely that of Massive Attack, active since 1987, that “Blue Lines”, the debut album of 1991 which contains the masterpiece “Unfinished Sympathy”, sung by Shara Nelson.

The group, although formed by the three members of The Wild Bunch art community: Robert “3D” Del Naja, Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, and Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles, was a larger collective in which several voices were circulating, including Tricky. Already that album, at first listen, was very particular, with that mix of soul, reggae voices, on a slowed hip hop basis.

In 1994 the second album will be released, considered their masterpiece: “Protection”, with Tricky again before his abandonment for a solo career.

It was September 1994. Rolling Stone's Paul Evans gave the album 4 out of 5 stars, he called it: “A cool, sexy work, which delicately blends dub, club, and soul, having its roots in hip hop samples”.

Tracey Thorn's voice on the song that gave the title to the album is unforgettable, with a video that remains among the most beautiful.

But before that album was released, I started reading enthusiastic reviews of another group always on the same line of that genre that fascinated me, that Trip Hop that referred to the (mental) “trip” on a slowed hip hop production.

It was, therefore, a great pleasure to run to the record store to buy Portishead's “Dummy”. Now that there are almost only virtual stores and the songs are low-quality files, I never stop emphasizing the physical pleasure that you feel in removing the plastic from a CD, touching it, getting lost in that intense blue of the cover, that's how it is as for a book that you leaf through in the library and smell its pages. Then, when you get home, in your room, you insert it into the player and stare at the big black speakers waiting for the sound to envelop you. And what a sound that was!

“Mysterons”, the first track starts immediately heavy, with that scratching that marks the territory, but then comes the voice of Beth Gibbson, and here we could spend a long time listing synonyms to describe their nature: poignant, first of all, scratchy, excruciating, painful, melancholy.

Well, that was one of those moments where you ask yourself: what am I listening to? What is this? A new world.

 

Released on 22 August 1994 for the Go!Beat Records, Portishead's debut album won the Mercury Music Prize in 1995, cited by many on the best album lists of the 90s. “Dummy” was certified triple platinum in the UK in February 2019, with sales of 900,000 copies; worldwide, the album had sold 3.6 million copies by 2008.

The first core of the group was formed by Geoff Barrow, producer and DJ, and Beth Gibbons on vocals. While they were rehearsing the first song, “It Could Be Sweet”, in a studio, jazz guitarist Adrian Utley was drawn to that sound. As he tells in a rare interview with The Guardian to Jude Rogers, he thought that moment: “What is that?’ Just hearing the sub-bass and Beth’s voice – it was unbelievable. Like a whole new world that was really exciting and vital.”

Then he joined them, adding to Barrow's urban sounds his collection of TV-recorded spy films introduced his bandmates to unusual sounds from instruments such as cimbaloms and theremins.

In fact, it was that strange sonic concoction, in my opinion, the secret of the timeless charm of that album.

Gibson's aching voice – who admits in the interview that she was not in a perfect state of mental balance during the recording of the record – which rests on those sounds that are modern but at the same time come from an ancient era.

The production of the album used a number of hip-hop techniques, such as sampling, scratching, and looping but was not recorded digitally. Portishead not only sampled music from other records but also recorded their own original music which was then recorded onto vinyl records before manipulating them on record decks to sample. In order to create a vintage sound, Barrow said that they distressed the vinyl records they had recorded by “putting them on the studio floor and walking across them and using them like skateboard”, and they also recorded the sound through a broken amplifier.

Certainly, it is not a cheerful record, already from the cover with the fixed image of the singer Beth Gibbons taken from “To Kill a Dead Man”, the short film created by the band, thanks to whose self-composed soundtrack they obtained the record deal. The famous music magazine NME summed up the record as follows: “This is, without question, a sublime debut album. But so very, very sad. From one angle, its languid slow beat blues clearly occupy similar terrain to soulmates Massive Attack and all of Bristol hip-hop's extended family. But from another, these are avant-garde ambient moonscapes of a ferociously experimental nature.”

 

Of course, I, who between Mozart and Beethoven have always cheered for Beethoven (whose gigantography dominates from the top of the wall in my room), I fell madly in love from the first listening to this record, from the first to the last, sublime, track, that “Glory Box” that contains the sample of Isaac Hayes' “Ike's Rap II”, the same used by Tricky in his splendid debut album “Maxinquaye”, 1995, on “Hell is round the corner”, as a reaffirm the common provenance of that Bristol Sound.

And I'm not even talking about the lyrics, because for me music is essentially a matter of the gut, it is made up of sound, melody, vibrations, rather than meanings and rationality. With a separate speech obviously for Italian music, whose understanding is immediate and inalienable, I have always preferred by far the music of other continents, ethnic, just to avoid understanding – the same English I almost avoid understanding it just to leave to the words sung their function of sound rather than of meaning: if I have to read a text then I read it on the CD booklet or I go to read a book of poems.

It is no coincidence that among my favorite plays there has always been techno music, which is nothing but the primitive heartbeat straight in 4\4, with no meaning or concept other than that of being a pure sound that enters the bones.

Then, of course, you can't avoid Beth's heart-breaking voice singing in Wandering Star, “the blackness, the darkness, forever”, or crying in Sour Times, “nobody loves me, it's true, not like you do”.

What I mean is that she might as well have sung the shopping list, but with that intensity, emotional charge, and melancholy it would have had the same powerful effect.

 

Then, as far as the discourse relating to sad things is concerned, the same applies here as is true for any form of art. There are two ways of experiencing listening, viewing, or reading melancholy works of art: on the one hand, being sucked into them as if in a whirlpool and worsening what was already our sad starting condition; on the other hand, to use art as a catharsis, to let the songs, the photographs, the poems be the burden of our sadness and tears to take them away with them as if they were emotional sponges.

For sure there will be those who, after having listened to this record for the first time or who already knows it well, might think that I am crazy to choose it as a desert island record, but it's true, more than twenty years have passed since those of mine twenty years, but I still listen to it with immense pleasure, I never get tired.

And it is because in me there is a very strong melancholy dominant, a preference for low notes, the cello rather than the violin, the bass on the guitar, Nina Simone, the Cure, the deep bass drum of techno.

So I will always need something outside of me in which to abandon myself, be it a sound, an image, a verse, a melancholy that attracts my similar charge to relieve me of that pain.

After that first album, Portishead released two more records and a live with the orchestra then Beth Gibbson has choose a solo career. The following year the Tricky debut was released, and since then dozens of bands have tried to imitate that sound for decades and the term Trip Hop lost its meaning, becoming a cauldron in which bands like Archive, Smoke City, Pressure Drop, Morcheeba, Hooverphonic ended up. I stop here but I could go on for pages and pages. In short, a few with honors and many others with infamy. It is more worth recovering the first anthologies that came out in the same years, such as the cult ones “Headz 1 & 2” for Mo'Wax or “Back in the Base” for Ninja Tune, which collected the best of the abstract instrumental hip hop scene that was the basis of Trip Hop – albums that are nowhere to be found or at prices for collectors and that are a pride of my collection.

I regret it that, while I was able to see both Massive Attack and Tricky in concert in Italy, I have never seen Portishead.

I am writing about it here because I think this Blog was born to share with you everything I love and am passionate about. If only one of you could thrill in the same way.

This album is for me a wonderful memory of my twenties, but it's always here with me, like a photograph that one takes and keeps printed on one's desk.

I almost feel envious of those who have never heard it and maybe do it today for the first time, even if by now it is a sound that has become common (even if never at that same level of originality).

But that voice isn't. Beth will always sing for us, for our sadness, taking charge of it, as only the stars could do: Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse...

...and that everyone adds their own star to the night.

‘Dummy wasn’t a chillout album. Portishead had more in common with Nirvana’ 

Italian version