Tuesday 9th August
It is pretty rare for an artist or a group to come up with a different sound; after all ‘Pop Music’ as we know it is over 60 years old. Amplification and Electric Guitars changed music forever, then along came synthesizers and Electronic sounds. Computers and drum machines have made making ‘Music’ easier, but it is rare that a really new sound emerges.
I first heard Portishead music while watching ‘This Life’ on TV in the mid-nineties. The show was great, the storylines complex and real and the acting brilliant. And there was the music playing in the background. And some of this was Portishead. The group was formed in the early nineties and must be the shyest band ever. They do no publicity at all, and there albums (only three to date, and one live one) are getting fewer and further between. It is quite likely there may never be a fourth. Maybe they don’t have anything else to say.
They almost single-handedly invented trip-hop, a base heavy slower type of dance music with lots of weird noises, scratching and found sounds going on. And best of all Beth Gibbon’s highly stylised and emotional singing, which seems to come from another planet entirely. They don’t sound like any other band at all, and no-one has managed to copy them either.
For me, the first two records, Dummy (94) and Portishead (97) are simply hypnotic. I could listen to them all day on constant loop, if I am in the mood. Their latest ‘3rd’ was a disappointment – and nothing since then at all. Oh well. They always were a bit strange.
