There’s something brewing with Portishead. After the release of Third in 2008, the Bristol-based trio lay relatively low, focusing more on family and pet projects than driving the wheels off the tour van. But over last summer Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons and Adrian Utley began to again make their presence felt, packing in a hectic series of European festival dates before playing a bunch of North American gigs. It’s a sign that some fresh recording sessions may not be too far away.
In November, Portishead made it down to Australia for Harvest Festival. But before the band boarded the plane I had the pleasure of dialing Adrian Utley in Bristol. Actually, it was well before they boarded the plane – when Utley slipped onto the other end of the line, it was just days after the English riots in early August. It was a great opportunity to ask how a band such as Portishead – known for lurking about within the bleaker folds of British culture – reacted to such events, but also pick Utley’s brains on touring, new albums, and his and Barrow’s shared obsession with rap music.
This Q&A was originally used to construct a feature story for Junior Magazine, but is reproduced in its entirety for Passion of the Weiss. —Matt Shea
You’re in Bristol at the moment, so I take it, you haven’t been affected by the riots at all?
No. I’ve been away in the countryside for the last week. I’ve just been watching the news and there was some action here in Bristol, but I haven’t seen anything and certainly haven’t been affected by it, although I guess we’ve all been affected by it in one way or another. And also, just in terms of the record industry, the Sony warehouse was burnt down with tons of stock from very cool labels like Domino and Rough Trade and Beggars Banquet and XL.
That’s made news over here in the music papers. A lot of that stuff actually doesn’t get pressed here – it gets shipped out from the UK.
Right, OK. So it’s having an effect over there. It’s pretty shit, really.
Geoff spoke in an interview last month with The Guardian about finding inspiration in the recent Stokes Croft riots. Would this be the same, do you think? Do things like this flow into your music?
They will do, yeah. Geoff and I don’t write lyrics, so there’s not that there. But I think stuff from Third: that sound was inspired by the way we were living at that time, politically.
Similarly, the state of the UK around us is pretty fucked and if you start talking about it you end up in a mad chain of terror throughout the world, don’t you – starting off with a riot in a street next to you and ending up with the terrible shit that’s going on in the Congo, and then on into nuclear power in Japan. It’s just fucking endless, and that is the state that we live in, and I think your state of being is what makes your music.
I’m almost surprised you’re home, because it sounds like you guys have had a busy festival season in the northern summer.
Yeah, we have. We’ve been to around 15 festivals around Europe. It’s been really great, actually. We’ve been to Serbia and Slovakia and Poland and Hungary, and places that we’ve never, ever been before. It’s been important for us to go there, so it’s kept us pretty busy and been quite full-on, yeah.
You’re probably not what most people consider a festival band.
No (laughs).
I have a friend who just saw Portishead at EXIT and said that you were a great break from a hard-charging festival. Do you guys find it difficult to perform at festivals – to play to the back of the room, so to speak?
I think we’ve learned how to do it now, because we did headline lots of festivals in the late 90s. We’ve done it a few times now and we’ve learnt how to do it and understand that it’s okay as long as you don’t go on before Coldplay (laughs), which we have done a couple of times. I don’t think we’ll ever, ever do that again – be on with inappropriate bands.
You were saying your friend saw us at EXIT: I didn’t see much else there other than Grinderman, and somebody else just before us. But I didn’t get a sense until afterwards – I think Channel 4 here had made a documentary on EXIT festival – that there was quite a lot of dance music going on. I’d been to a few of these festivals, but I think within that we command our own world, and I think our music is strong enough to cut through, and we create a world with our visuals that we project and the presence that we have and the sound we spend an absolute aeon getting sorted out, so when we do play there’s no mistake about what we’re up to and what we’re trying to do.
I know you typically perform with other players. With festivals and those larger arenas, is it a case of adding even more people to the mix, or do you go the other way, simplifying the music, so to speak?
We always use the same people that we always have: a lot of people who have played with us since the beginning. Everything’s the same really. In some ways, even though you’re playing to 30,000 – 50,000 people, and the system’s huge, there is a problem sometimes sonically with things being set up for dance music – there’s a lot of sub bass, and we don’t in the main use a lot of that, even though we have lots of low end. We just do what we do and make it our world, if you like.
Talking about long gaps, I think a lot of people are still taken aback by how long it took you to record Third, particularly seeing as you never officially broke up. I understand, though, that you guys were always working together, more or less – is that right?
That’s right, yeah. I guess we’d just had enough of doing it for a bit, so we stopped and did other things. But we worked together on loads of stuff, and then Geoff and I came to Sydney to do some work down here, but did lots of other things as well. I think it’s the nature of the music we make that it burns brightly for us at the time that we’re making it. But it’s tough and it’s not a joyous experience all the time (laughs). So it’s hard to go back to put your head back into that world sometimes, and that’s why it took that long really. That’s just what happened and that’s the way it was, and now, learning from our history and wanting to do a record fairly a quickly, this is a reason for us to tour: to start the ball rolling on being together again and working. So we’ll go from this to the studio to start writing in January time, and hopefully we’ll do it in less than ten years (laughs).
How different were you guys when you got back together to lay down Third? Was the process – and is the process – a lot different to how it was back in the early days? And were you different people?
Yeah, definitely. We all changed quite a lot in that time and had learned a lot about things – we still are – so things had rolled on very much. Since touring in ’97 and ’98 we had made an album a year before that, so it’s years since we’d actually done an album – it was longer than ten years – and we’d certainly changed. We’ve got families, we’ve got different responsibilities and we’ve got different lives built on different experiences and we’d listened to different music. We wilfully wanted to change what we were doing into another world.
You talk about heading back into the studio in January. Were there many cuts left over from Third that you could funnel towards a new album?
There is stuff, but we’d just ditch it to be honest. I think there were some really good tracks left over, but none of us would want to relive that. We’d just start again, you know. We’ve got new ideas and we’re living in a different world with different feelings. The world’s a different place compared to what it was three years ago. We want to do different things now.
You talk of the world being a different place now. The internet and all the talk of the decline of the album: does that add any hesitation to a decision to record?
It’s as important as it’s always been, really. Obviously you have to survive and make money in the world in order to live. True, the world has changed and records have changed, but even though we’ve had to make money it’s never been our god or our pursuit in a massive way. So making a record is a record of time – a thing that stays there forever and that’s important. On all of our projects that we do outside of Portishead it’s the same thing. We’re all making records of what we’ve done over the years, so it’s important to do it, yeah. In the traditional sense it’s important to do it. We are a live band and we have been over the years, but it’s not our main focus like Metallica or something, I don’t know (laughs) – I know they have trouble in the studio. Their recording sessions seem like hell.
You tried for a long time to shake those trip-hop clichés whilst retaining your own sound. I remember Geoff making this Lara Croft metaphor in the late 90s about needing to find the right key before recording your third album – do you guys stress about that sort of thing now as you’re sizing up another record? Are you searching around for the key to what the new sound will be?
Yeah, always. But I think there’s a feeling brewing – an unspoken word between Geoff and I – about things, and we’re excited to have that headspace to tap into it. Yeah, we are and will be searching for the key to find the right door to go through. But I think we can try and make that a joyous experience in the future. It’s a tough one – all of that – and that’s what we are doing, yeah.
Searching for those ideas: does curating the festivals and being involved with so many bands help that?
Yes. It’s brilliant. It’s really inspirational – especially if it’s something like the ATP festival: because we curated it, the bands are either friends of ours our we have huge respect for and really love their music. So yeah, it’s really, really important. I saw things at ATP that I knew already, but it’s just inspiring to be around likeminded musicians. I was talking to Warren Ellis, actually, and watched Grinderman play, and it’s not often that you hang out with other musicians, really – well, for us it isn’t. We do it a bit, but not often with bands that are doing the same sort of thing that you are around festivals and stuff. It’s really inspirational, and I’d kind of forgotten exactly how inspirational it can be. I was overexcited about ATP – about all the bands that would be there, and going and saying hi – it was fantastic, brilliant.
Talking about your fans: are you sometimes surprised by the breadth of appeal of your music? When I mentioned that I was interviewing you I had all sorts of different people from all walks of life popping out of the woodwork.
Always. Not sometimes – always. Because if you could see where we make it. We’ve all got really nice studios, no questions about it: they look great, they are great, they’re full of amazing equipment. But that is the space that we live in; they’re not grandiose, huge studios or anything. We don’t use huge studios to go and make music. So it’s all very day-to-day, and then the struggle that we have to make music. I spoke to some people in Mexico and they asked me if I had any idea of the fan base for the band in that country and I said, “No. I haven’t at all. I’ve never been there.” And they were incredibly complimentary and I think we’ll be quite surprised when we get there.
When we went to Australia I was really surprised by the number of people who came to see us play. I was really, really surprised. Of course, because it’s just like in England, it’s more acceptable because that’s what we’ve done all our lives. I know that we do has fans in the world, but I never cease to be surprised – especially by distant countries. I know it’s crazy because you’re just around the corner in the internet age, but I still am surprised by it – I don’t know why.
You guys are closely linked with hip-hop in both directions – remixing The Pharcyde, being fans of Public Enemy and Chuck D performing with you guys on stage, your own love of Madlib, Adrian, and RZA sampling you for his Bobby Digital project – but do you think it catches a lot of your fans off guard that you’re so closely linked to rap music?
I don’t really know. Because it’s well publicized that the reason Geoff and I got together was because we were both into hip-hop, and Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions… was a massive record for both of us. When we did meet Chuck D, finally, and he did come and perform with us, it was un-fucking believable. I don’t know: I mean, I can hear it in our music. Our references – especially in the early days, things like “Over” on the second record – are so heavily based in hip-hop and sampling and loops and things. Even though we made them and we have our own take on it. I don’t know: once you’ve made something, it’s out in the world and people can make of it whatever they will. If you play it really loud it sounds like hip-hop sometimes (laughs).
Are there any other Stateside rap artists catching your ear at the moment?
Well, we had Company Flow at ATP, but that’s pretty old. They’re really cool. But I’m not such a fan now as I was. Geoff is, Geoff definitely is. But I’m losing it. I think MF Doom: I’ve liked his records and he’s cool, but my world is going somewhere else now and I’m veering off. I have great respect and I love my rap history, like A Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy, and I’m delighted that Public Enemy will probably doing some more stuff at our festivals. But I’m not really listening to hip-hop at all now; I’m not hearing too much that I like, you know.
Plans for the near future? it sounds like it’s not going to stop.
No, it’s literally not going to stop (laughs). We’ve got to make it stop a little bit in order to get something on record in January.
We’ve touched on this: you guys, do you see yourselves as being a little more orientated towards the live stuff these days?
I think being in the studio is the most important, but really it’s a balance of both. Playing live is important: we enjoy it and I think we’re OK at it. Being in the studio is certainly important as well – just being able to make new records and stuff. It’s a balance of both. I think live feeds us with something that we don’t get if we just stay in the studio forever.
