Dummy The old proverb ‘mighty oaks from little acorns grow’ was never truer than when Beth Gibbons and Geoff Barrow met on an Enterprise Allowance Scheme in Bristol in 1991. Tapes were exchanged on their tea break and a new band soon emerged. Portishead would inhabit their own demimonde on debut album .
With multi-instrumentalist Adrian Utley soon on board, they changed the way records were made, inspiring the warm crackle of the needle drop on a thousand intelligent hip-hop tracks, and opening the floodgates to a deluge of ersatz downtempo imitators...
we’ll not blame them for that. The coffee-table copyists couldn’t replicate the melancholia or come close to the attention to detail. There’s an idiosyncratic methodology at work on that borders on the virtuosic – something you might associate with , even if the results are very different sonically.
There are samples, of course, taking in the progressive jazz of Wayne Shorter’s on , the moody blues of Isaac Hayes’ on , or the cimbalom-enhanced by the legendary jazz and movie theme composer Lalo Schifrin on . What makes unique, though, is the fastidious way in which the band recorded their live instruments, pressing the results up on vinyl and then sampling themselves, giving everything a measured sense of uncertainty. There’s an odd marriage of warm analogue instruments with a patina of the uncanny, where scratching meets theremin, and cut-ups mingle with cold war twangy guitars.
That may sound cluttered – .
