DUMMY

Praise for the series:

It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized

that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric
Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in
the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and
eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic
personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review

Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes

just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone

One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut

These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate
fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your
house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album
and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these.
We are huge nerds — Vice

A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK)

Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon

Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype

[A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK)

 We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only
source for reading about music (but if we had our way …
watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything
there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check
out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork

For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our

website at www.continuumbooks.com
and 33third.blogspot.com

For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book
 Dummy

R. J. Wheaton
 The Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

www.continuumbooks.com

© 2011 by R. J. Wheaton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the written permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of
Congress

ISBN: 978-1-4411-8557-0

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions,

Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
 Contents

A Note on Sources vii

Dramatis Personæ ix
From the Ether 1
Memory 19
Shock 49
Intimacy 66
Solitude 86
Narcotic 105
Alienation 123
Solace 141
Resonance 161
Loss 180
Siren 202
Works Cited 225
Acknowledgements 233

• v •
 A Note on Sources

Research for this book involved interviews with a

number of sources, including discussions with Dummy
and Portishead sound engineer Dave McDonald, and
Portishead friend and collaborator Tim Saul. Quotations
from Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons, and Adrian Utley
were gathered from an extensive range of interviews and
articles written throughout the band’s history, particu-
larly from the period between the release of Dummy
in 1994 and Portishead in 1997. All of these sources are
annotated throughout and are listed at the end of the
book.

• vii •
 Dramatis Personæ

Po r t i s h e a d
✒✒ Geoff Barrow — producer, turntables, drums
✒✒ Beth Gibbons — vocals, lyrics
✒✒ Adrian Utley — guitar, co-producer
✒✒ Dave McDonald — sound engineer

C o n t r i b u t o r s a n d c o l l a b o ra t o r s
✒✒ Andy Smith — crate-digging
✒✒ Clive Deamer — drums
✒✒ Gary Baldwin — Hammond
✒✒ Neil Solman — Fender Rhodes
✒✒ Richard Newell — drum programming
✒✒ Andy Hague — trumpet
✒✒ Tim Saul — friend and collaborator; involved in
pre-production sessions; part of Earthling
✒✒ Miles Showell — mastering engineer
✒✒ Alexander Hemming — director of short film To Kill
a Dead Man and the first Portishead music videos

• ix •
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✒✒ Marc Bessant — friend and collaborator; visual

materials
✒✒ Ferdy Unger-Hamilton — A&R at Go! Beat Records
✒✒ Tony Crean — Marketing at Go! Beat Records

Bristol
✒✒ The Wild Bunch: Miles Johnson (D.J. Milo), Grant
Marshall (Daddy G), Nellee Hooper; Claude
Williams, Robert Del Naja, Andrew Vowles
✒✒ Massive Attack: Marshall, Del Naja, Vowles
✒✒ Rob Smith and Ray Mighty
✒✒ Neneh Cherry
✒✒ Cameron McVey — Massive Attack producer;
Portishead’s first manager; husband of Neneh Cherry
✒✒ Jonny Dollar (Jonathan Sharp) — Massive Attack
producer
✒✒ Tricky

• x •
 From the Ether

A storm at sea — One continent talking to another —

Childhood experimentation — The voices of the
dead — “Mysterons” — Animated dummies — A premonition of
misinterpretation — Verbal abuse as a characteristically English
means to express admiration — A dog barking — Midsummer
night — Nocturnal projections — The paranormal — Acclaim! —
An anatomy — Espionage

On December 21, 1927, the White Star ocean liner

Majestic arrived in New York City. It had been delayed
“through buffeting strong westerly gales and high head
seas.” It contained 17,661 sacks of mail, “the biggest
foreign mail on record.” The New York Times reported on
the prominent passengers, among them Polish pianist-
statesman Ignace Jan Paderewski and American financier
William Averell Harriman. A cold wave had seized the
city, filling the city’s shelters two days before. During
the course of the day a broken air line disrupted at least
20,000 travelers on the city’s subway system, forcing
passengers onto the tracks. A fire at 8th Avenue turned

• 1 •
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20 families from their homes. The Beethoven Symphony

Orchestra performed at Carnegie Hall.1
On board the Majestic was Lev Sergeyevich Termen,
aged 31. His name now was Theremin. He had invented
himself from thin air.
He was born in St. Petersburg in 1896. A childhood of
mechanical discovery: pendulums and the dismantling of
watches; astronomy, the discovery of a star. Experiments
with electricity, charged wires suspended above the heads
of his classmates and glass cylinders luminous in their
hands. At war: enlisted to the Reserve Electrotechnical
Battalion, erecting radio towers across the collapsing face
of Tsarist Russia.2
The instrument that bears his name came from exper-
iments conducted at the Physico-Technical Institute
on the outskirts of Petrograd. Experiments into the
natural capacitance of the human body: how the relative
proximity of the body to an oscillating circuit can
produce variations in its frequency. A performer stands
in front of the instrument and moves her hands near two
antennae, one of which controls the volume of resulting
sound and the other the pitch.
The sound appeared to emanate from nowhere. It had
a character that was unearthly and unsettling — both
electric and, in its lissome variation between tone and

1
  New York Times December 20, 1927a, 20 December, 1927b,
December 22, 1927a, December 22, 1927b, December 22, 1927c,
December 22, 1927d, December 22, 1927e, December 22, 1927f,
December 22, 1927g.
2
  Glinsky 2000, pp. 11–12.

• 2 •
 R. J. W heaton

volume, somehow possessing the qualities of a human

voice.
Newspapers described “probably the most amazing
music ever heard”; “a strange penetrating sound of a
quality human ears never before had heard.”3 Einstein,
attending a performance in Berlin, called it “an experience
as significant as that when primitive man for the first
time produced sound from a bowstring.”4

* * *

The sound of a Theremin is the fifth sound you hear on

Portishead’s 1994 album Dummy. It enters 12 seconds
into “Mysterons,” and signals the album’s wide range,
gliding several octaves above the song’s subatomic bass,
leaving Beth Gibbons’ vocal embayed in the song’s
midrange.

* * *

The instrument’s sound was said to come from the

ether, a formless medium believed to accommodate the
passage of radio waves, X-rays, and other elements of the
electro-magnetic spectrum. Some believed the ether to
accommodate the souls of the departed and that it would
allow an audience with the marooned voices of the dead.
In Paris, according to the Montreal Gazette, “Police
were called to keep order among crowds”; that “For the

  Jones 1927.
3

  New York Times December 22, 1927e.

4

• 3 •
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first time in the history of the Opera standing room was

sold in boxes.”5
What Theremin promised, he promised to the crowd.
The ability to create music from thin air; to create music
without classical training; that “the power of producing
beautiful harmony, until now denied all but a few,
may soon be within the reach of thousands.”6 A sound
beaconed by the technology of the future; that freighted
with it the strangeness of existence and the wake of the
past.

* * *

Things you may not notice about “Mysterons” on first

listen:
✒✒ At 0:12, 0:17, 0:23, and elsewhere, there is a vocal
sample scratched onto the surface of the song. It
underscores the song’s great rhythmic keel, the kick
drum that thumps through the song with a pulse-
like rhythm; the militant snare riff that impresses
everything around it. With the vinyl sounds — the
pop and crackle that open the song — the scratching
signals the album’s hip-hop aesthetic: that this will be
music constructed of other music. A deep, resonant
male voice intones “Portishead”; yet it is slowed and
weathered and manipulated to the point that it is
almost unintelligible, almost abstract noise: “Porter’s
… Head.”

  Montreal Gazette December 9, 1927.

5

  Montreal Gazette December 9, 1927.

6

• 4 •
 R. J. W heaton

✒✒ The subtlety of Beth Gibbons’ vocal delivery:

“somewhere where they can forget” — the second
syllable of “somewhere” cast away, speculative,
unknown. The end of “forget” delivered as if the
word itself is barely remembered. In the next verse,
“holding on” is dragged into the lilting swells of
“ocean.”
✒✒ The fretnoise on the opening guitar arpeggios — an
artisinal, workmanlike punctuation amid the other-
worldly sustain that sounds the depths of the song.
At 1:28, and at 2:49.
✒✒ At 0:47: the watery sound that swells into the song,
followed by three descending, drop-like notes,
impossibly delicate against the brittle twang of the
guitar and martial indifference of the drums.
✒✒ The chorus itself: the point and charge of the drums;
a question narrowed to the force of a statement.
“Did you really want.” The verb containing derision,
disbelief, accusation.
✒✒ At 4:07: the rattling echo of the snare sounds; then,
as the music becalms itself into a synthetic, abstract
conclusion, the crystalline sustain of a Roland
SH-101 synthesizer flattens the surface of the song.

It is a song so diverse in its influences, its range of

sounds, its intensity, the mystery of its meaning. “This
ocean will not be grasped.”

* * *

The song’s title comes from Captain Scarlet and the

Mysterons, a ’60s children’s science-fiction television

• 5 •
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series, featuring animated mannequins — dummies — in

a technique named “Supermarionation” by series creator
Gerry Anderson. The villains — the Mysterons — were
disembodied aliens whose voices, like the vocal sample
scratched into the beginning of the song, boomed at the
lower frequencies as if intoned through a megaphone.
The soundtrack music, by Barry Gray, has the swing
and campness of the English ’60s. But it also features
experimentation with electronic sound, including the
use of another early electronic instrument, the ondes
Martenot, which sounds in its eerie oscillation very much
like a theremin.

* * *

In 1994 Miles Showell was working in west London as a

mastering engineer at a facility then called Copymasters.
He had established a solid working relationship with
Ferdy Unger-Hamilton, the A&R director of Go! Beat
Records. Unger-Hamilton and guitarist Adrian Utley
brought him tracks for “Sour Times,” the second song
on Dummy, on quarter-inch tape, for a promotional 12”.
Showell recalls “I remember remarking to Adrian how
haunting and otherworldly the track was, especially Beth
[Gibbons]s’ vocal.” A few weeks later Portishead producer
Geoff Barrow and sound engineer Dave McDonald were
also present for sessions to master the entire album.
Showell remembers:

I was looking forward to the session as “Sour Times” had

made such an impression on me but to be honest I did

• 6 •
 R. J. W heaton

not expect the rest of the album to be as good as that. In

reality, of course, it proved to be a fabulous album. I can
distinctly remember thinking to myself, “This stuff is
fantastic, but it is such a shame that no one else is going
to get it.”

* * *

Dummy was released in the U.K. in August 1994. An

October release followed in the U.S., with the following
tracklisting:
✒✒ “Mysterons”
✒✒ “Sour Times”
✒✒ “Strangers”
✒✒ “It Could be Sweet”
✒✒ “Wandering Star”
✒✒ “It’s a Fire”
✒✒ “Numb”
✒✒ “Roads”
✒✒ “Pedestal”
✒✒ “Biscuit”
✒✒ “Glory Box”

“It’s a Fire” had not been part of the original U.K.

release. A later Canadian release added “Sour Sour
Times,” a starker, leaner remix of “Sour Times,” to the
end of the album.
Dummy spun off three singles: “Numb,” released
June  6, 1994; “Sour Times,” released July  25 (and

• 7 •
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re-released in April of the following year); and “Glory

Box,” January 2, 1995.

* * *

People remember, clearly, when they first heard Dummy.

Tim Saul, long-time collaborator of Portishead
producer Geoff Barrow, and contributor to Dummy’s
pre-production sessions:

I can always remember the first time that Geoff played

me “Sour Times.” I was pretty bowled over and I think
I abused him fairly, for about half an hour. I was really
envious. He continues to do this: he has an ability to pull
something out of the bag when you think that you know
what he’s going to do, and you kind of think you’ve got
a good gauge of maybe what he’s going to come up with
next. And yet he kind of throws you.

* * *

Ferdy Unger-Hamilton, who signed Portishead to Go!

Beat Records in 1993:

“Glory Box” was mind-blowing. I played it to the sales

team and they were like, ‘It sounds like a dog barking!’
Some people thought it was mad and others just got it. I
don’t know if I’ve ever felt like that since.7

* * *

  Quoted in Simpson 2008.

7

• 8 •
 R. J. W heaton

Andy Wright, a record producer who had just finished

working on Massive Attack’s Protection:

The first time I heard it was in a hotel room in Manchester.

Somebody had it on their Walkman, which they’d got
connected to some little speakers. And I thought, wow,
what the hell is that. I thought it sounded amazing.

* * *

Mark Oliver Everett, later to found indie rock band Eels:

Then one day during this bleak period in my life, I was

driving down the road and heard the English group
Portishead on the radio for the first time and it stopped
me cold. I had to pull the truck over to the side of the
road so I could really listen.8

* * *

Jay-Jay Johanson, Sweden, 1994:

I played it on my ghetto blaster to all my friends on

midsummer night around a campfire in the woods.
The effect was enormous. Some felt scared, some cried,
some became totally depressed. And I just adored it one
hundred percent.

* * *

  Everett 2009, pp. 105–106.

8

• 9 •
 dummy

Tony Crean, handling marketing of the album for Go! Beat,

later told writer Phil Johnson that Portishead were “a studio
band making esoteric music who initially didn’t want to play
live and whose singer didn’t want to do interviews.”9
Blue-painted mannequins were placed at visible
locations around London, marked only with the letter
“P,” drawing attention from national media and the
anti-terrorist squad who, it was said, suspected the
presence of explosive devices. Mysterious memorabilia
was distributed around London’s club scene.
Under cover of darkness a giant “P” was projected
onto the massive building belonging to MI6 — Britain’s
equivalent of the CIA — that sits in an impenetrable art
deco facade on the bank of the River Thames.

Dave McDonald recalls Crean’s energy:

He was brilliant — he was crazy. We were trying to calm

him down … He was doing things that I’d never seen
before like going around clubs and pubs and stuff just
leaving a box of matches with “P” written on them …
you keep showing something but not telling people what
it is, they think, what is this about?

* * *

The band made a 10-minute film, To Kill a Dead Man,

starring core members — producer Geoff Barrow,
singer Beth Gibbons, guitarist and co-producer Adrian
Utley, and sound engineer Dave McDonald — as well as

  Johnson 1996, pp. 164–165.

9

•  10 •
 R. J. W heaton

supporting musicians and collaborators including Richard

Newell and Tim Saul. The film, a short noir-inspired tale
of deception and revenge, was intended to allow the band
a chance to write a soundtrack, and to provide materials
for a music video — for “Sour Times” — and stills for
use in promotional art, including the cover of the album.

* * *

Dummy quickly became associated with the unusual. On

December 17, 1994, the B.B.C. aired “Weird Night,”
more than 3 hours of programming related to the
paranormal. Content included documentaries on urban
myths; a film called “The Last American Freak Show”;
testimonials of bizarre and unnerving coincidences; and,
inevitably, an episode of The X-Files. The introductory
preview featured a passage from “Mysterons” and a
slowed, pitch-shifted excerpt from “Biscuit.”

* * *

What to make of this music. Critics said it “sounded like

nothing else on earth”;10 it “seemed to come from the
past and the future at the same time.”11 The band created
“an invitation to a nightmare”;12 “a world so ghostly you
may think the C.D. player has channeled the musical
netherworld.”13

10
  Mixmag 1999.
11
  Lucas 1997.
12
  Lien 1997.
13
  People 1995.

•  11 •
 dummy

Dummy was named “album of the year” by U.K.

music scene periodicals such as Melody Maker, Mixmag,
The Wire, The Face, ID, and even daily newspapers like
the conservative Daily Telegraph.14 The following year
Dummy was awarded the fourth Mercury Music Prize,
the U.K.’s most prestigious musical accolade.
By the beginning of summer 1995, after Portishead
had completed a U.S. tour, the album had sold 850,000
copies worldwide.15 By the release of their second album,
Portishead, in September 1997, it had sold almost 2
million, and was double-platinum by January of the
following year.16 The band’s Third album was released in
April 2008; by then Dummy had sold 3.6 million copies.17

* * *

Somehow it became ubiquitous in public venues. Vancouver

writer Sean Cranbury, at the time bartending in the Ontario
rustbelt town of Hamilton – “The Hammer” – recalls:

it seemed to have its own kind of swagger, and its own

sensibility, and it was dark … dark and jagged and weird.
And Beth Gibbons’ voice was ghostly and incredible. And
yet it somehow, against all possible odds, it was capable
of getting some sort of mainstream airplay. “Sour Times”
— it still amazes me when I hear that song, to think that
people played that in cafés or played that in nightclubs or

14
  B.B.C. 2010.
15
  Miller 1995.
16
  Marcus 1997.
17
  McLean 2008.

•  12 •
 R. J. W heaton

in bars on a Friday or Saturday night. That was fucking

shocking.

* * *

Consider the qualities abundant in popular music that

are disconcertingly absent from Dummy:
✒✒ uncomplicated tenderness
✒✒ unconditional love
✒✒ actually, even the words “I love you”
✒✒ assertions of knowledge about infidelity, often by
means of hearsay
✒✒ statements of political philosophy — often out of
focus — mostly concerning working-class Americans
✒✒ sexual desire uncomplicated by things that include
reality
✒✒ moments that lend themselves to dancing
✒✒ moments that lend themselves to candlelight. Upon
a significant increase in volume, the quantities of
air mobilized by “Strangers” will actually extinguish
your candlelight
✒✒ reassurance that things will, actually, be okay.

* * *

And yet Dummy entered into popular consciousness

with astonishing speed. In October 1996, British music
magazine Mojo challenged readers to select their best
songs of the ’90s. From over a thousand reader entries,
four songs from Dummy made the final hundred — an

•  13 •
 dummy

achievement matched only by R.E.M.’s Automatic for the

People and Oasis’ Definitely Maybe.18
In February 1998, Q magazine published its readers’
poll of “100 greatest albums ever,” in which Dummy
was placed at number 16. Reader C. M. Dodd asked a
question that seemed to exemplify the album’s mystique
and its appeal:

Where did this come from? It tears out your heartstrings.19

* * *

An anatomy of Dummy.
Beth Gibbons’ vocals, closely recorded, intimate;
always distinct; never crowded. Breathy, intense, coy,
ironic, caressing, commanding, challenging. Her lyrics
are shards of imagery; non-narrative; fragments of self-
reflection. Closely observed emotional pain, isolation,
loneliness, exile, alienation. Desire, seduction; distance,
loss. Her voice is taut across the music’s surface; sometime
scarred, calloused, supple, fresh, weathered, ageless.
Beneath the skin: the album’s instrumentation,
archaic and retro-modern. The rich, resonant sounds of
vintage synthesizers, keyboards, organs; the theremin,
a cimbalom. Guitars and Rhodes keyboards used as
much for texture and presence as they are for harmonic
direction. Some of this driven by the soundtracks of
obscure or forgotten films. The arrangement of songs is

  Mojo 1997.
18

  Q 1998.
19

•  14 •
 R. J. W heaton

muscular, experimental, sinuous in its minimalism. All of

it throbbing with a warmth, a sympathetic bloodstream.
The album’s nervous system: the sound of recording
technology itself. A layer of vinyl artifacts — crackle,
pops; the properties of audio tape, murky and rich.
Hiss, decay; static, warp. The sounds of manipulation;
of elements narrowed, stretched, compressed, distended.
Pitch-shifted and time corrected. A concern with sonic
texture, the product not only of veteran musician Adrian
Utley’s love of vintage gear but of experimentation with
studio techniques by Geoff Barrow and sound engineer
Dave McDonald. The loops wound ventricular from
shards and echoes of other musics. A hip-hop aesthetic at
the bone: fearsome breakbeats that swing and snap and
crunch with the legacy of funk and rhythm & blues and
jazz; bass sounds thick with history and space.

* * *

The album’s popular regard has not abated. In the

January 2003 revision of its “100 Greatest Albums Ever”
poll, Q magazine readers collectively placed Dummy
in 95th place. This book will attempt to elucidate the
changing fortunes of the album: by 2006, in the same
poll, it had increased in stature to 55th place.

* * *

Only now, writing almost 16 years after its release, does

Dummy begin to emerge from the channel it coursed
alongside albums like Massive Attack’s Protection (and,
earlier, Blue Lines), Tricky’s Maxinquaye, D.J. Shadow’s

•  15 •
 dummy

Endtroducing… Dummy’s immediate reception was one at

odds with the expectations of almost everybody involved;
its sudden absorption into the culture overwhelming the
album’s abstract, harsh, imperfect, out-of-balance edges.
Dummy is driven from within by paradoxes: its sounds
are violent, traumatic, but its effect somnolent, soothing.
It displays a commitment to realism, to fidelity — Beth
Gibbons’ voice is meticulously reproduced — but it also
makes audible the technology used to capture those
sounds. It is shocking, lulling; austere, rich. It is of its
place and time, yet transcends both. It is deliberately
constructed yet also the product of an “if it works”
approach.
It is the sound of a talented group of people, carefully,
masterfully, finding their voice. It is stylistically audacious,
but it circles the point, accumulates, adheres, assembles
itself from gravity and inertia. It is a construct of lyrical
shards, images, fragments; of instruments and samples
and loops separated from their original contexts.
Dummy has always been a supremely associative
album, and in the years since its release it has been deep
within the lives of its listeners. Much of what we associate
with it is added by us. The imagistic palette encompasses
the noir veneer of the night: shadows, cigarettes; the
illumination of cities. The conceptual: exile, alienation,
solitude. The emotional: loss, grief, isolation. Solace,
desire, lust. Disconsolate, melancholia. Arousal. Despair.
This book will describe the creation of Dummy, but
it will also outline how this music has been heard, lived,
used. How people have heard it, and when; in whose
company it has surrounded them; how it has connected
them to one another and to the world. How we can

•  16 •
 R. J. W heaton

understand Dummy through the art — film, music,

dance — it has inspired; through the lives of people it
has accompanied. How we have understood ourselves
through these songs.

* * *

“This is a terrible thing to admit,” confessed Adrian

Utley to Sound on Sound in 1995, “but it wasn’t actually a
Theremin. It’s a synth sound made on an SH101, because
we couldn’t actually get hold of the real thing.”20
By the time Portishead made use of the sound,
Theremin’s instrument had become associated, in films
like The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing, Spellbound,
The Lost Weekend, with the strange, the hallucinogenic,
the alien, the ethereal. It had appeared occasionally in
popular music: as part of Brian Wilson’s textural experi-
mentation on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”; in
Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” A revival, partly
initiated by Dummy, was widespread by 1997, when the
Daily Telegraph reported that “no pop group aspiring
to the cutting edge can be without one. Portishead,
Pavement, Eels, Crash Test Dummies, My Life Story:
all have snapped up theremins and used them on recent
albums.”21
We hear in the theremin what we see in Metropolis: a
version of the future that suggests how determined we
are by our experience of the past. Like Metropolis, there
is something almost nineteenth-century in its view of the

  Miller 1995.
20

  Richardson 1997.
21

•  17 •
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future; like the steampunk genre it is on the one hand

futuristic, alien, other; on the other historical, vintage,
retro — a characterization that touches Dummy too. As
listener Kara Estes asked on Twitter, of “Sour Times,”
“Why do I think of H. G. Wells with this song?”22
Theremin himself remained in the US throughout
the ’30s, marrying African-American dancer Lavinia
Williams. He abruptly disappeared in 1938, having
returned — or been returned — to the U.S.S.R. There,
imprisoned, his skills were put to use developing
espionage equipment. In 1945 an eavesdropping device
of his design was hidden in a large carved wooden
Great Seal of the United States of America which was
presented to the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, in whose
residential study it sat undiscovered for 7 years. The
ambassador was William Averell Harriman, with whom
Theremin had shared his passage to America aboard the
Majestic.

  http://twitter.com/#!/karalainee/statuses/18884446149152768
22

•  18 •
 Memory

Bristol — Violence and BMX bikes — Hip-hop —

A Victorian seaside resort — Childhood experimentation —
Music, paint, and dance — The Dug Out — Abandoned
warehouses — The downland — Burt Bacharach and drum
machines overheard from trash cans — The Buffalo Posse —
“Sour Times” — Instruments ancient and modern — Films
shot through lampshades — Seven Blood-Stained Orchids — The
making of tea — Late night crate-digging — Meeting over tea —
Songs about Gandhi — London — Bands named after projects,
bands named after retirement homes

Bristol. Historically one of the largest cities in England,

Bristol was in the eighteenth century a hub of the
trans-Atlantic slave trade; a hub of mercantile trade and
commerce. In the post-war period the city — like many
other urban centers across the U.K. — saw immigration
from territories previously part of the British Empire,
including Afro-Carribean immigration to the St. Paul’s
neighborhood. It was the site of one of the U.K.’s signif-
icant civil rights struggles after a boycott in 1963 against
the Bristol Omnibus Company led to national anti-
discrimination legislation. A city with visible extremes

•  19 •
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of income: the residential grandeur of Clifton to the

relative poverty of St. Paul’s.
Britain at the start of the ’80s. Facelessly grey,
culturally exhausted. The post-war reconstructed urban
centers, monuments of planning and concrete, decaying
and anonymous in the arms of former cities. Urban
decline; unemployment at its highest since the ’30s. A
hated Police stop and search law. Enoch Powell warning
of racial “civil war.” In 1981 there were urban riots
in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds. The year
before in St. Paul’s, Bristol. Police pinned against the
Black and White Café after a drugs and alcohol raid;
reinforcements met with debris; the evening the neigh-
borhood aflame. Skirmishes of sympathy in other, largely
white, neighborhoods: Southmead, Knowle, Hartcliffe.
A city turned in upon itself, a nation irreconciled to
its grey permanence. At fray with an idea of itself and its
memory of the future.

* * *

“Times were tight and sour,” in the words of “70s 80s,”

a 2002 track by electronic downtempo act Nightmares
on Wax, featuring vocalist LSK. The song is a memoir
of what it was to be young — “70s baby, early 80s child”
— amid the political and social and cultural compression
of the time. “Riots and violence on the T.V. … watchin’
coppers get beat down.” The National Front; skinheads
and punks. “Miners strikes and BMX bikes,” raps Roots
Manuva on the “Upbringing Mix” of the same song.
“Cuts in education; rising inflation. Police brutality and
mass frustration.” And yet among it all is the insouciant,

•  20 •
 R. J. W heaton

weightless thrill of being young, young: a multicultural

society on the cusp of becoming; a new generation, all
British, the divisions of their parents weaker amid them.
In popular culture the possibility of celebration — that
television and music and fashion could release among
them instead a shared identity. Ska, 2 Tone. The rebel-
lious aesthetic of punk ripping across racial and social
divisions. The sense that identities need not be inherited
but could be compounded from the elements — any of
the elements — so suddenly among them:

She was into Adam Ant and Wuthering Heights

I was getting into Madness and grifter bikes.

The thrill in the air of creation. Portishead’s Dave

McDonald remembers “there was a melting pot in the
country, at the stage where you still had disco, funk, and
punk all mixed together.”

It was a very interesting period of time in England. I

think who kind of sums it up is when you look at the
Clash, who were like a punk band playing reggae, with
like Don Letts, or you look at The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll
Swindle and you have the Black Arabs — a funk band,
actually, in that film, doing Sex Pistols covers. For quite a
few years, and rumbling on into the early ’80s, there was
a very healthy fusion in this country. Definitely in this
country. I don’t think it was anywhere else.

* * *

And then: hip-hop. Dazzling, electric. American.

•  21 •
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Pumas and Nikes and Pro-Keds brilliant and red and

white and blue against the grey light and the grey
cities. Breakdancing, its implausible grace among
beats manufactured in the brittle heat of Roland drum
machines and the dense turbines of funk records. “Just
energy, just proper energy,” remembered Geoff Barrow.23
American. Quit your life and take up the decks. Vinyl,
acetate, microphones; graffiti, breaking, beatboxing.
Barrow remembered:

when hip-hop first hit suburban England, it kind of

took over and was massively exciting. It was a real thing
you could get into. It’s difficult to describe, but to a
younger generation of sixteen-year-old kids it was that
you wouldn’t go out and have a fight; you’d go out and
dance against each other.24

It was not easy to hear — there was Mike Allen, and

later Tim Westwood, on London’s Capital Radio. Miles
Johnson — D.J. Milo of legendary Bristol sound system
collective the Wild Bunch — heard B.B.C. radio’s John
Peel announcing Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock”:
“This is what’s happening in New York.”25 A series of
compilations named Electro; “It went from Electro One
to Electro Fifty,” joked Barrow. “If you couldn’t afford to
buy the imports you’d go out and buy the compilation.”26

23
  Breihan 2009.
24
  Platform.net undated.
25
  Johnson 1996, p. 83.
26
  Platform.net undated.

•  22 •
 R. J. W heaton

And, overwhelmingly, hand-to-hand — tapes and records

lent and given by older siblings, older friends.

* * *

Geoff Barrow was born in 1971 in Walton in Gordano,

a small coastal village on the outskirts of Bristol. His
parents — his father a truck driver, his mother worked
as a supermarket cashier — separated when he was ten,
and he moved with his mother to nearby Portishead.27
Pronounced by area locals with a slight accent on the
last syllable, Portishead was in the nineteenth century an
auxiliary dock for Bristol; it was a Victorian seaside resort.
By the ’80s it largely served as a bedroom community for
nearby Bristol, with numerous retirement residences. It
was not a hive of activity. Barrow was later to tell one
interviewer that “It’s incredibly depressing and small-
minded. It’s just a very very boring place. I really wanted
to fight and get away from there,”28 and another that “It’s
a place you can go to and die.”29
He started learning drums at the age of eight, later
playing for “a rock cover band called Ralph McTell’s
Official Fan Club”30 — but, as he told Pitchfork in 2009,
“I didn’t really like it. It was just a way to play the drums,

27
  McLean 2008.
28
  Jenkins 1995.
29
  Bernstein 1995.
30
  Vibe 1995.

•  23 •
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really.”31 It was all about hip-hop. He was breakdancing

at 11; at a certain point he “stopped drumming and
started D.J.-ing, mainly in my bedroom.”32 Second wave
hip-hop acts like “Run-D.M.C., M.C. Shan, or Roxanne
Shanté.”33 “It was nothing special, and my equipment was
cheap,” he recalled. “It wasn’t a club thing, just a little
something for me and my friends.”34
Andy Smith, later Portishead’s tour D.J., was one
of the only other people in Portishead with the same
tastes. He ran a hip-hop night in the town’s youth
club, and there met Barrow — “We got talking over
our mutual love of Run-D.M.C. and Public Enemy.”35
Smith’s scratching style was self-taught, and when he
met Barrow the two would compare technique and spend
endless nights listening to records.36
Speaking to National Public Radio in 2008, Barrow
remembered the first time he heard Public Enemy’s
“Rebel without a Pause”:

I heard this as a young teenager in a nightclub in Bristol.

It was an underage nightclub so you could get there
without drinking and stuff. I kind of knew Bum Rush the
Show before. It was a fairly alright nightclub but it was
just about kind of trying to get girlfriends and do the kind
of thing you do when you’re a teenager. The D.J. used to
— they didn’t have a D.J. booth; it was a time when they

31
  Breihan 2009.
32
  Uhelszki 1995.
33
  Vibe 1995.
34
  Vibe 1995.
35
  Heller 2009.
36
  Jones 2006.

•  24 •
 R. J. W heaton

were kind of like “I’m a bit of a superstar so I’m going to

get on stage with my decks on.”
It was this amazing thing: this guy ran through the
crowd with this 12 inch vinyl on white label — kind of
like the Olympic torch or something … “I’ve got this
gold.” And he gave it to the D.J. and he just stopped like
Whitney Houston in her tracks, or whoever it was at that
point, and just stuck it on. And it was a ginormous sound
system in the nightclub, a really really good one, and it
just — it was the instant thing that completely blew my
mind forever and ever. It was just kind of, right, that’s it
then. I will be into girls at some point, but now I’m into
Public Enemy.37

* * *

Bristol’s demographic and social breadth made it the

setting for musical and cultural innovation. Dave
McDonald remembers:

Everyone I knew was creating something or making

something, was either spraying paint, painting on walls,
or designing clothes, or making music. In many ways [it
was] a very creative time … You had the hip-hop and the
punk thing. And what was going on in New York — the
electronic sort of dance, and hip-hop — and punk. It was
all fused, fused in together.

In the early ’80s, post-punk bands like Mark Stewart’s

The Pop Group; Pigbag; and Rip Rig + Panic, brought

  NPR 2008.
37

•  25 •
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together influences including funk, dub, reggae, and free

jazz. The city’s venues — particularly the legendary Dug
Out Club, on the edge of the Clifton neighborhood but
within reach of St. Paul’s — provided a forum for cultural
fusion. McDonald remembers:

That’s a big influence on me, being half Jamaican and

half English. There was a Jamaican community in Bristol
and [at] the period of time that I grew up in, there was a
nightclub called The Dug Out which everyone would go
to, which was like a real melting pot … everyone used to
be in the same room, all involved in these different scenes
and sometimes these scenes would cross quite heavily. So
my interest was reggae and punk. And all my friends were
involved in that.

* * *

Every Wednesday at The Dug Out were the Wild Bunch,

a sound system collective in the Jamaican model —
D.J.s, engineers, and M.C.s. Core members were Miles
Johnson (D.J. Milo), Grant Marshall (Daddy G), and
Nellee Hooper; later they were joined by Claude Williams,
Robert Del Naja, and Andrew Vowles. With performances,
as writer Phil Johnson notes, in venues legal and otherwise
(in abandoned warehouses, and on the 400-acre public
park on the edge of Bristol called the Downs), they became
“a legendary fixture of the Bristol scene.”38 A typical Wild
Bunch set list might include jazz-funk, New Wave, punk,
early hip-hop, electro, reggae, club-oriented R&B, disco.

  Johnson 1996, p. 80.

38

•  26 •
 R. J. W heaton

The Wild Bunch would face off against rival

soundsystems: 2Bad, City Rockers, UD4, FBI Crew. At
the St. Paul’s Carnival they would block off Campbell
Street with speakers, 15 feet high, towering above the
crowd.39 “You could hear them like 10 miles away,”
recalled D.J. Krust. “In the morning after one Carnival
I walked home to my house on the other side of Bristol
and when I got there I could still hear them.”40
They successfully integrated the core technique of
hip-hop: two turntables and a microphone. Two copies
of the same record so that the instrumental break — the
breakbeat — could be constantly played while an M.C.
rapped on top.41 Matt Black, later part of U.K. production
duo Coldcut, visited Bristol on vacation with friends in
1984. Already inspired by 1981’s “The Adventures of
Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” and the
1983 film Wild Style, he was struck by how successfully
hip-hop culture was being expressed in Bristol:

We heard the Wild Bunch playing, we went to The Dug

Out, and there were [graffiti] pieces by 3D [Del Naja]
round town. And actually in London, there wasn’t that
much going that we’d seen, but here in Bristol it was
actually alive in a real convincing form … And we got
back to town, and I got my decks, and I decided “right,
I’m gonna fucking learn how to do this.”42

39
  Gillespie 2006.
40
  Farsides 2002.
41
  Farsides 2002.
42
  Gilbey undated.

•  27 •
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With a repertoire that brought together such broad

influences, a deep understanding of soul, and an
overwhelming consciousness of dub’s sense of space,
the original material produced by the Wild Bunch
presented challenges from a commercial perspective.
4th & Broadway’s Julian Palmer, who signed the Wild
Bunch in 1986, recalled later that “What they were doing
was ahead of its time … We could not get arrested with
what they were doing, it just seemed too experimental.
Everyone said it was cut at the wrong speed because it
sounded so slow in comparison.”43
A limited edition single — “Tearin’ Down the
Avenue” — had been released in the U.S., but by the
time “Friends & Countrymen” was released in the U.K.
in 1988, the Wild Bunch had effectively splintered after a
tour to Japan with Neneh Cherry. Nellee Hooper joined
producer Jazzie B on sound system Soul II Soul, who
would have worldwide success with 1989’s “Back to Life.”
Miles Johnson moved to Japan before later going to New
York. Marshall, Del Naja, and Vowles formed, in 1988,
Massive Attack.
The B-side to both Wild Bunch singles was “The
Look of Love,” a tender Burt Bacharach cover voiced
by future Massive Attack singer Shara Nelson, over
a percussive backing track that still sounds radical in
its space and force. The song was a product of D.J.
Milo’s experiments with mixing smooth R&B vocals and
thundering hip-hop beats:

  Pride 1995.
43

•  28 •
 R. J. W heaton

I used to do a lot of blending. Getting Dennis Edwards’

“Don’t Look Any Further” and running it with LL Cool
J’s “I Need a Beat.” Stuff like that. I’d call it my rough
with the smooth mix. And that’s where the concept came
from, of having a rough hip-hop beat with the singer on
it.44

* * *

Another Bristol sound crew were 3 Stripe Posse,

comprised of Rob Smith and Ray Mighty. They heard
the Wild Bunch perform “The Look of Love” at the
Malcolm X center in St. Paul’s. “I thought yeah, this is
hip, this is what I want to do,” Mighty told Phil Johnson
in 1995. “Tough, loud beats, the odd little sample and a
vocal going on, slow, very rare groove with a dubby bass
line in a stripped-back empty mix.”45
In 1988 they released two singles — “Walk On …” and
“Anyone …” — that took Burt Bacharach songs and, with
their melodies intoned delicately by R&B singer Jackie
Jackson, stretched them across dense hip-hop drum
machine patterns and asthmatic scratching and synthetic
horn stabs and spare haunting samples and pounding
bass frequencies. There is still something radical in
the contrast between the density of their rhythmic
patchwork and the space and languorous pace that is
somehow accorded to the gorgeous, lilting, melodies.
The same sonic template — torch ballads with
hip-hop breaks — was also being explored elsewhere:

  Farsides 2002.
44

  Johnson 1996, p. 179.

45

•  29 •
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Tim Simenon, as Bomb the Bass, released a gorgeously

stripped-down version of “Say a Little Prayer” with
Maureen Walsh in 1988. Writer Phil Johnson also
hears an early expression in Mark Stewart’s “Stranger
Than Love,” strapping a West Side Story vocal onto a
Smith & Mighty production of composer Erik Satie’s
“Gymnopedie Number 1.”46
In 1989 Smith & Mighty produced “Wishing on a
Star” with rap group Fresh 4: the Rose Royce song set
against a wispy, hazy sample from Faze-O’s 1977 “Riding
High” and the immortal “Funky Drummer” break. The
song reached #10 in the U.K. singles chart. They also
co-produced Daddy G’s “Any Love” (the first single
credited to Massive Attack): tighter, funkier, but still
paced behind a swooningly gorgeous vocal. The vocalist
was Carlton McCarthy — whose debut album, The Call
is Strong, is, in the words of Phil Johnson, “the great lost
album of the Bristol sound.”47
Tim Saul remembers the influence of Smith &
Mighty:

when I moved to Bristol as a 17-year-old, 18-year-old,

I used to go and hang out outside their studio in St.
Paul’s in Bristol actually over the road. And sit by the
rubbish bins of some flats and actually in the summer
you could hear what they were doing — they would have
the windows open — and that was part of my education,
musically.

  Johnson 1996, p. 69.

46

  Johnson 1996, p. 106.

47

•  30 •
 R. J. W heaton

Dave McDonald was exposed to the material at its

inception, and in a sense felt immunized from its
nonetheless enormous influence:

It’s hard for me because I lived in the same house as Rob

Smith — he was a really really good friend. Even before
we lived in the same house I used to go to his house every
night and listen to records. And then I ended up living
in the same house as him and there was all this musical
equipment in there. And I can remember hearing those
tunes very very early in their early early stages. I don’t
think so much of an influence on me as I think they
would have been more of an influence on Geoff, because
Geoff, living outside of Bristol, was very interested in
what was going on in Bristol. It was like a whole sort of
exotic world I think.

* * *

Neneh Cherry was a former singer in Rip Rig + Panic,

and step-daughter of American free-jazz trumpeter Don
Cherry. She and future husband Cameron McVey were
both, by 1987, closely associated with the “Buffalo”
fashion movement of stylist Ray Petri and U.K. magazines
including Face and i-D. She and McVey — Booga Bear
— became central figures in the Bristol music scene,
and the production credits to her first album, Raw Like
Sushi, read like a who’s who of the formative years of
U.K. downtempo music: McVey himself; Nellee Hooper;
Massive Attack’s Mushroom and 3D; Bomb the Bass’s
Tim Simenon; future Tricky producer Mark Saunders;
future Massive Attack producer Jonny Dollar. The album

•  31 •
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was an international success, led by singles including

“Manchild,” and “Buffalo Stance,” and “Kisses on the
Wind,” which showcased the same mix of soul, hip-hop,
and dance as the various Bacharach covers.
There is a uniquely British timbre to these songs: an
optimistic, carefree quality with a particular pop sensi-
bility. The open-minded feel — albeit shaded with a
slightly self-conscious hipness — animated Soul II Soul’s
first album, Club Classics Vol. One. The same sentiment
was to show through, years later, in M.I.A.’s debut album,
Arular. It is a weightlessness somehow associated with
the carefree blending of diverse influences, but also
the feeling of operating within a particular look, a set
of visuals, a fashion. Of working within a complete and
uncontested aesthetic envelope.

* * *

1994. “Sour Times” is the song that signaled Dummy’s

commercial potential. To unsuspecting listeners there was
the attention-grabbing opening: a barreling tornado of
descending strings, loping bassline, a jangling instrument
of indistinct origin, and a fistful of jagged guitar; a
combination that seemed to epitomize the Portishead
sound.
That jangling sound is a cimbalom, a kind of central
European dulcimer — ancient instruments, strings
strapped and bound over a trapezoid board, strings struck
with hammers. The theremin is modern and spectral,
its functioning obscure and mysterious in the inter-
action between atmosphere and operator. The dulcimer
is ancient, material in its operation. Substantial where

•  32 •
 R. J. W heaton

the theremin is ethereal. The irrefutable striking of one

thing with another. The sound made by these objects is
old.
So too the sentiment of the song.
The refrain — “Nobody loves me” — is so instantly
memorable, so distinctive in its delivery, that it is often
taken for the song’s title. Even set within the ironies self-
evident in Gibbons’ delivery, it overwhelms the next line
— “Not like you do” — and indeed overwhelms the same
message, expressed entirely without irony, in a thousand
other pop songs.
The melody peaks on the refrain, descending just a
semitone, arrestingly, on the word “me.” The closing
line of the chorus — “not like you do” — almost thrown
away, dismissive, is an echo of the melody of Lalo
Schifrin’s “Danube Incident,” from the Mission: Impossible
television series, from which the song’s main sample is
drawn.
“Sour Times” is such a well-constructed song that it
effectively calls attention away from the artifice of its
construction. An extraordinarily clever piece of sampling
takes the lilting, swinging guitar-and-cimbalom clip
of “Danube Incident” — winsome, romantic — and
engulfs it in descending strings; upends it, establishes
within it a tight eddy of internal tension, sharpens the
rattling dulcimer, dusts it with the drum figures from
Smokey Brooks’ “Spin-It Jig.” It sounds as if the moment
has been inverted, turned inside-out; made of itself a
negative. The cimbalom is changed from an atmospheric
garnish to a dominant part of the design of song, rattling
and shimmering within a channel that barely contains it.
And yet there is so much subtlety too.

•  33 •
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The melody of the verse is all taut packets of synco-

pation: agitated; agile, playful. Teasing the edges of
meaning, dancing, contained in just a few notes. Listen
to the jump Gibbons makes, at 3:11, to a higher note in
the final chorus. There is something just slightly strained
about it, suggesting a frailty, a desperation, that is then
perfectly balanced by the throaty delivery of “true”
seconds later.
The word “courtesies” in the first verse, breathy and
close, making cover for the smooth delivery of  “despise
in me” just a moment later. It is not a moment of
withering self-judgment — although Dummy has
plenty of those — but instead a knowing acknowl-
edgment. The “I” is not lingered over too long — a
moment longer and it would tip the song too far into
self-recrimination, absolve surroundings and community
too much of their responsibilities. It’s a beautiful moment,
a perfect integration of melody and meaning. The song
is not a featureless bemoaning of the loneliness of the
world, but one that carefully implicates the self in its fate.
And then the challenge — “Take a ride, take a shot
now” — the delivery slowing after the slight edge on
“shot,” gliding magnificently through “now” to land,
disconsolate, on the chorus.

* * *

A cimbalom is also used in John Barry’s soundtrack for

the 1965 British espionage thriller The Ipcress File, appar-
ently inspired by the prominent use of a zither in Anton
Karas’ score for 1949’s The Third Man.

•  34 •
 R. J. W heaton

A critical shared influence of Portishead — uniting

Geoff Barrow and guitarist/co-producer Adrian Utley,
as well as Tim Saul when he was involved — was
film soundtracks. The work of Lalo Schifrin, Bernard
Herrmann, Quincey Jones, John Carpenter, Ennio
Morricone, and Nino Rota. Tim Saul remembers
listening in Dummy’s pre-production sessions to Italian
soundtracks, Riz Ortolani; “Greek soundtracks as well.”
While Barrow was not tremendously interested in the
films themselves — “I just collect records I like: ones
from the late ’60s and ’70s, Italian, French and American
spy movies and thrillers”48 — he had been following
the trajectory of hip-hop, moving from sampling soul
and funk records to finding breaks on soundtracks.49
For Utley the appeal was partly instrumental — the
tremolo guitar, for example, that was a trademark of
’60s espionage movies.50 But for the band in general
the interest was in the forced experimentation that was
required to create suspense and other emotions in the
absence of tools like synthesizers. That was what Utley
heard in The Ipcress File — an experimentation with
instrumentation and arrangements that was absent from
some of the composer’s other work.51 Or in “the electric
guitar on The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, which is such
a disgusting noise when it comes in.”52 As Barrow put it,
“they had to do it with guitars, backward tapes and all

48
  Darling 1995.
49
  Uhelszki 1995.
50
  Uhelszki 1995.
51
  Innersound 2008.
52
  Miller 1995.

•  35 •
 dummy

kinds of madness.”53 It was an approach, an aesthetic,

rather than simply an instrumental end result. Utley said,

all they’ve got is a Fender Rhodes and an echo unit.

They haven’t got masses of technology, so they record
something really dodgy with that and then flip the tape
over so it’s backwards. It’s really inventive, a little bit crap
and just sounds really vibey.54

The Ipcress File — aesthetically so similar to Dummy in

its angular, highly stylized approach and in its insouciant,
deadpan tone — is quoted in the band’s soundtrack
to their short film, To Kill a Dead Man. Alexander
Hemming, the director, remembers meeting the band
and his reaction to tracks from Dummy:

I said they reminded me a little of soundtracks of movies

from the ’70s and then we spent the next few hours
talking about the movies we liked such as Ipcress File
and Get Carter. Not just the soundtracks … but also
the visuals too. The way odd camera angles were used
and also shooting through or past something in the
foreground, whether it was a window, windscreen, mirror
or anything else for that matter, the view often obscured
by something else.

To Kill a Dead Man almost serves as a tour of the band’s

soundtrack influences. And the opening chords to Riz
Ortolani’s gorgeous theme to the 1971’s Confessione di un

  Gladstone 1995.
53

  Miller 1995.
54

•  36 •
 R. J. W heaton

commissario (Confessions of a Police Captain) have a clear

echo, beaten several octaves and registers down, in the
organ bass figures that give “Wandering Star” its unfor-
giving inertia.
Ortolani’s soundtrack to the 1972 film Sette orchidee
macchiate di rosso (Seven Blood-Stained Orchids) is jarringly
close to Dummy: the spacious dynamic and tonal range;
the funky drum pattern; the loping bassline and languid
pace. The chiming upper register, archaic instrumentation
shining in reverberation against electric underpinnings.
Not that the band necessarily saw the film itself, but the
palette of the opening scenes also matches Dummy: a
neon urban nightscape, blues and greens, lights indistinct
upon the darkness like shapes at sea.

* * *

Geoff Barrow’s severe dyslexia made studying difficult;

an attempt to be a graphic designer finally thwarted
by color-blindness after nine months of study. “For a
long time I didn’t really do an awful lot,” he said for a
French documentary later. “And I wanted to do music.”
Cold-calling Bristol studios for work, he met without
success — “Oh no, sorry, we’re completely overmanned
and underpaid”55 — until he reached engineer Andy
Allen, who was then building Coach House Studios in the
Clifton area. In exchange for help with the construction,
he offered to grant Barrow a Youth Training Scheme
placement.

  Trynka 1997.
55

•  37 •
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* * *

Massive Attack were soon working out of Coach House

to complete their debut album, Blue Lines. Massive
Attack were three former members of the Wild Bunch:
Grant Marshall, Robert Del Naja, and Andrew Vowles
— Daddy G, 3D, and Mushroom. By that time Cameron
McVey and Neneh Cherry had established their Cherry
Bear Organization, which had provided funding — and
recording time at their London house — to the band. Key
tracks from Blue Lines — “Safe from Harm,” “One Love,”
“Unfinished Sympathy,” “Lately” — were recorded at
Coach House.
Blue Lines was an incredibly influential, genre-breaking
record, establishing a template for what would later
— controversially and imperfectly — become known
as “trip-hop.” Slow tempos; minor keys; female voices
soaring above funky organ loops and resonant basslines.
Blue Lines retains an edge and a charm entirely its own;
a range of influences, textures, backgrounds far broader
than almost everything that followed it; a commitment
to minimalism that remains bracing and fresh; a pleasure
in its own texture that is genuine, not characterized by
the exhibitionism of later imitators. There are directions
the genre did not take. Some moments remain aston-
ishing: the opening of “Five Man Army,” which takes
the drum sample from the start of Al Green’s “I’m Glad
You’re Mine” and allies it to a dub bassline, a transform-
ative contrast to the hip-hop context in which the break
is normally used. The impeccably gorgeous “Unfinished
Sympathy,” which radicalizes the drum machine samples
that, in other records from the time, are now uselessly

•  38 •
 R. J. W heaton

dated, but instead makes of them something glittering,

ringing, shining, a permanent crescendo.

* * *

Geoff Barrow found the environment at Coach House

welcoming:

I started getting on with G; they were all really friendly,

and Jonny Dollar was a really nice bloke. But I was a
terrible tape-op — I couldn’t clean the heads of the tape
machine, I couldn’t set anything up or plug anything
in. The only thing I was really good at was constantly
making tea.56

Nonetheless he used the time to learn. He remembered

using

this kind of Casio keyboard which — I know it sounds

like really small bait — but it actually had a sampler. And
a little Neve desk outside. So I used to just spend all my
time on that with a pair of headphones. Sampling bits and
bobs. And more messing around on my own stuff than
really working, you know.57

He remembered spending the 3 years at Coach House

“stuck in front of a computer screen … day in and day
out, programming stuff.”58 He told Vibe in 1995 that

56
  Trynka 1997.
57
  B.B.C. 2010.
58
  McLean 2008.

•  39 •
 dummy

“I was interested in learning about the entire sound

spectrum … I would analyze what made a popular song
work, trying to dig deeper into the psychology of the
sound.”59 During this time a key influence was Jonathan
Sharp — better known as Jonny Dollar — who with
McVey was co-producer of Blue Lines. Dollar’s work
was characterized by his rigorous perfectionism and
commitment to minimalism. Talking to Sound on Sound
in 2000, he commented that:

Where most people seem to go wrong with loop-based

records … is that they start out with the loop and then
they forget that it’s the main thing on the record — they
get more interested in the things they’re adding, and it
doesn’t stay in the context of the loop so the loop ends
up getting buried. We always put the loop up front with
everything else inside it. I don’t like too many parts
audible on a record, I like things fairly minimal.60

* * *

Cameron McVey was impressed with Barrow’s work and

bought him an Akai sampler and recording time.61 He
was hired to contribute material for Neneh Cherry’s
second album, Homebrew. In 2008 Barrow recalled, “I can
remember doing three beats for Neneh and getting paid
a grand in cash! I was, like, I’ll give you 50 beats!”62 The

59
  Vibe 1995.
60
  Senior 2000.
61
  Trynka 1997.
62
  McLean 2008.

•  40 •
 R. J. W heaton

album’s seventh track, “Somedays,” is credited to Barrow

as co-producer, and in some respects prefigures Dummy’s
arrangements. The song features a minor-key chord
sequence played out on an electric piano; a drum pattern
with a snare almost lost in its own reverb, a synth figure
gliding above in a manner that recalls the “Mysterons”
theremin. In the last 30 seconds of the song the track’s
formative materials are replayed through a haze of
reverberation, foregrounding the constructed-ness of the
track, the contingency of its materials.
Barrow also co-produced Tricky’s first recorded solo
single, “Nothing’s Clear,” which appeared on a charity
compilation album called The Hard Sell. From the
soundtrack to Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1986 film 37°2 le
matin (Betty Blue) the song takes a tentative, uncertain,
delicate piano riff, a featherlight sketch of dissonance. It
then pummels it with horn stabs and a hustling bassline:
the boisterous attitude of the U.K.’s late ’70s 2 Tone
genre, the echoes of dub and ska and punk.
In these early works it is possible to hear an interest
in the charming effects of dissonance; a pleasure in the
abstract nature of sounds taken to extremes. Above all a
pleasure in melody.

* * *

Tim Saul met Barrow during this period; he recalls that

“there was quite a buzz about this young guy who had
been taken under the Massive Attack crew, under their
wing if you like. And Bristol isn’t that big a place. I can
remember I was really curious to meet this guy.”

•  41 •
 dummy

Barrow was still spending time with Andy Smith, who

remembered in a French documentary after the release
of Dummy:

basically he had a sampler and a keyboard but he didn’t

really have anything to sample. So he was a bit devoid of
stuff. So I used to go round with like crates and crates of
old records, and just used to go round his house all night,
and we flipped through them and just put stuff together
… I was saying “What do you think of this? What do
you think of that? What do you think of that?” I had so
much stuff. And that’s what were like the original demos
for the Dummy album was from those all-night sessions.63

* * *

Dave McDonald was then an engineer at State of

Art, a “very very plush high-end demo studio” that
he had helped owner Julian Hill put together. Hill —
later known as Gobz from goth rock band Whores of
Babylon — introduced him to Geoff Barrow, with whom
McDonald’s musical connection was immediate:

He came in and we got on like a house on fire … So we

started, me and Geoff started, every bit of spare time I
had, or evenings or whatever, I started to push more and
more for time and we were just getting more and more
involved in this, making this interesting music. Geoff
had an amazing ear for samples. I was very intrigued
with it, because I was more from the old school of

  French television documentary.

63

•  42 •
 R. J. W heaton

recording instruments. But I was very interested in

all this new technology. He had acquired some of this
technology from some of the sessions he’d been doing
up at the Coach House for Massive Attack … Cameron
had obviously seen the thing in Geoff and supplied him
with — I think it was an S900 sampler and a little digital
mixer. Real high-end stuff, you know? And a little drum
machine.

He remembered that Barrow was then collaborating

with a number of people. From the town of Portishead
were programmer Richard Newell and Rhodes player
Neil Solman. “It was very like how Massive Attack
worked,” recalled McDonald, “in the sense that there’s
lots of different artists. But everyone was an unknown
artist. We were all completely unknown and we had no
form whatsoever.” There were several singers involved
at that point — including Helen White, who went on to
record with Bristol downtempo unit Alpha; and a male
singer named Marc Bessant, a longtime friend of Barrow
who later helped develop the band’s visual materials.
And a singer named Beth Gibbons.

* * *

Geoff Barrow had met Beth Gibbons among a number of

participants at a government-run Enterprise Allowance
job creation scheme. Barrow, who had been searching
for a soul singer, remembered being approached by
Gibbons:

•  43 •
 dummy

There was a tea-break and she came over and asked

“what kind of stuff do you do?” She gave me her number.
I sent her a tape, a backing track and she sang over that.
It was strange because she sang a proper adult vocal, a
cover version of a song one of her friends had written.
It was pretty bizarre because up till then all I’d got from
vocalists was stuff like “get higher,” “can you feel the
heat?” or “move to the beat.” And she was singing about
Gandhi and stuff like that. It was pretty bizarre.64

He had been impressed by the “personal, honest view” of

her lyrics and the qualities of her voice. 65

When I first heard her voice I didn’t know what to make

of it, because I suppose — being into hip-hop or being
into soul music styles, she had a strange voice compared
to that. She had come from folk and Janis Ian and Janis
Joplin. I just didn’t think it was going to work. But then
there was this realness in what she was singing. She
recorded this track called “It Could be Sweet” which is
really kind of like an early track. It wasn’t soul — but
then, it kind of was — and it wasn’t overtly jazzy. And it
wasn’t folk. But she brought this adultness to the track.
All of a sudden it was — this is actually real. And she’s
singing about things that she obviously cares about.66

Her vocal range was also impressive. She visited Barrow

— then living with his mother; “She was just deafening

64
  Marcus 1997.
65
  Lewis 1994.
66
  B.B.C. 2010.

•  44 •
 R. J. W heaton

… I thought my mum was going to have a right go! I was

worried about the neighbours.”67
He sensed that her reaction to his approach was also
uncertain. “I think she wanted to be in this real musician
scenario, which was all she’d ever known. So meeting me,
this guy with a couple of boxes making funny noises, was
pretty strange for her … I think we were both a bit wary
of each other but impressed with each other.”68

* * *

With work on Homebrew completed, Cherry and McVey

— now Barrow’s manager — sought some time out
of the country, and offered Barrow (with his extended
collective) funding of about £40,000 and the use of
their London home with its studio.69 “I just refused to
‘produce’ for Geoff Barrow,” McVey told Tribe magazine.
“I just kept telling him to ‘fuck off’ and carry on in the
same direction he was already going by himself … I also
told him to stick with the one singer and pointed out
that he’d be hard pressed to find a better name than his
hometown’s.”70
The group was there for almost a year, over the course
of which, as McDonald recalls, “it started to whittle
down into the main core of people.” Tim Saul, who had
moved from Bristol back to London, saw in this time
“a kind of natural process of distillation — that having

67
  McLean 2008.
68
  Marcus 1997.
69
  McLean 2008.
70
  La Polla undated.

•  45 •
 dummy

tried to work with a few singers Geoff recognized the

very special musical relationship that he and Beth had
got.” He also recalls Barrow’s style maturing during
that period, developing a strong style from minimal
technology:

you can hear Geoff developing as a producer with his

own particular way of approaching the production and
programming. The setup of an Atari 1040, Akai sampler,
combined with — I think it was a Yamaha drum machine
that he used. And then starting to find the best way of
making them work together. Actually a very minimal
setup.

* * *

At the end of the year, Dave McDonald recalls “we ended

up with a shedload of material, an absolute shedload
of material.” With the funding exhausted and McVey
and Cherry returning to London, the group relocated
to Bristol, establishing residence — with the benefit of
McDonald’s connections — at State of Art.
A demo tape was produced with versions of the
earliest songs that became part of Dummy — “It Could
be Sweet,” “It’s a Fire,” “Sour Times,” and “a lot of stuff
that’s never been released,” according to McDonald. It
attracted attention from Ferdy Unger-Hamilton who
was an A&R representative at Go! Beat, a subsidiary of
prominent label Go! Discs Records.
The band also started doing remixes “to raise money
to keep our little project going” — Depeche Mode’s “In
Your Room,” and “Walking in My Shoes”; Paul Weller’s

•  46 •
 R. J. W heaton

“Wildwood”; Primal Scream’s “Give Out But Don’t Give

Up.”
A remix of Gabrielle’s “Going Nowhere” took the
original’s poppy, brassy optimism, and pounded it with
the breakbeat from Lou Donaldson’s “Pot Belly,” a
hip-hop mainstay comprised of a busy snare and cymbal
ride, a blunted bassline, and flatended organ stabs. The
break is pushed hard; the result is surprisingly unset-
tling, and by the middle of the song many of the band’s
signature tricks are on display, including the impeccable,
dramatic timing with which new elements are drawn in
and snapped out. But the vocal remains at the front, the
melody at the centre of a soundscape which accrues the
qualities of a vortex around it.
On the basis of the demo and the Gabrielle remix,
Unger-Hamilton signed Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons
as Portishead. Adrian Utley drove the pair to London to
sign the contract.71
For some critics the band’s name was in keeping
with the “the hometown tradition of hip hop: Watts
Prophets, Sugarhill Gang, Cypress Hill,” something in
keeping with Barrow’s dominant stylistic influence.72
But Barrow recalled the sense of mystery that the name
‘Portishead’ somehow evoked for those not familiar with
the geographic locale:

We were called Portishead because we were all working

in London and my ex-manger would call us “The lads
from Portishead.” And then it just stuck. And then was

  McLean 2008.
71

  Harrison undated.
72

•  47 •
 dummy

just this really weird ironic kind of — I hated Portishead

— and we just called ourselves after the town. It was
ridiculous. But we couldn’t come up with a better name.
And we used Portishead as a name, and people said “I
really like that name; what’s that from?” Because they
didn’t know it was the town. And that has been it, ever
since.73

  B.B.C. 2010.
73

•  48 •
 Shock

A cacophony of metaphors — Grunge breakbeats —

“Strangers” — The air under assault — Public Enemy —
Hard-bop jazz — More tea — A ’79 Chevy
Caprice Classic — The Roland TR-808 —
The resonant qualities of the human lung —
Student housing — Floors and ceilings —
Church bells and curfew — Highest tide

“Numb” was released in June 1994, the first single from

Dummy. It was distributed to D.J.s first as a white label.
The sleeve featured a still from To Kill a Dead Man, as
would Dummy itself and the singles for “Sour Times,”
and “Glory Box.” On the cover of “Numb” the image is
almost abstract — a detail of a forearm, a hand, a piece of
medical tubing. A hand raised, presumably to the head, in
an apparent gesture of despair, helplessness. The image
is grayed-out against a deep and foreboding blue stain;
the single’s sleeve a flat unreadable cream. No intimation
as to the song’s nature or to its musical workings. An art
object, distanced from its contents.
The title track was accompanied on the A-side by two
remixes, entitled “Numbed in Moscow,” and “Revenge of

•  49 •
 dummy

the Number.” “We tended to have fun renaming them in

quite obscure ways,” remembers Tim Saul. The remixes
on the B-side, “Earth — Linger,” and “A Tribute to
Monk & Canatella,” are opaque references to two little-
known Bristol bands, including Saul’s own Earthling.

* * *

What to make of this music. The immediate critical

response to Dummy was one of confusion brandished
to a hard point of aesthetic shock. It seemed to cross so
many genres, to suggest so many moods. A cacophony of
metaphors:
✒✒ “the torched soul of prime-era Peggy Lee dressed in
spy movie, spaghetti Western and ’90s urban cool.”74
✒✒ “A chain-smoking Joni Mitchell hanging out with
Cypress Hill.”75
✒✒ A “near-ambient pastiche of dub, techno, R&B, and
soul.”76
✒✒ “The John Philip Sousa of the Prozac Nation?”77
✒✒ “Black-hearted soul stirs up a whole new genre:
disque noir.”78

Early enthusiasts included legendary broadcaster Bob

Harris, who gave “Strangers” heavy airplay in London.

74
  Darling 1995.
75
  Quoted in Darling 1995.
76
  Entertainment Weekly 1995.
77
  Entertainment Weekly 1995.
78
  Bernstein 1995.

•  50 •
 R. J. W heaton

Like others, he struggled to arrive at a description that

was not a hybrid of genre references:

It’s such an innovative album. The description “present

day urban blues” fits it very well. Soul comes in so many
forms — you don’t have to be Otis Redding to have soul
— and the album’s part of an amazing surge of really
good music coming out of the U.K. right now, at last.79

* * *

In the U.S. Dummy’s arrival had, perhaps, been to more

fertile ground than is commonly thought. The use of
hip-hop-influenced breakbeats had been part of the alter-
native American rock scene; Greg Milner has suggested
that “an awareness of hip-hop is arguably the single most
recognizable aspect of alt-rock in the nineties. Break
beats were everywhere — just listen to Dave Grohl’s
drumming on the chorus of ‘Teen Spirit.’ ”80 There was a
kind of cultural caesura at the death of Kurt Cobain —
an event mentioned to me by numerous North American
listeners in connection with their experience of Dummy,
a moment that seemed to suggest the exhaustion of alter-
native rock, to allow, as Vancouver writer Sean Cranbury
notes, “a move away from that organic guitar-drums-bass
verse-chorus-verse mentality.” MTV gave “Sour Times”
heavy play as part of their Buzz Bin.81 By February 1995
the single had reached #55 in Billboard’s pop chart on the

79
  Sexton 1994.
80
  Milner 2010, p. 179.
81
  Taraska 1997.

•  51 •
 dummy

back of extensive exposure on alternative radio.82 In the

UK Dummy reached #32 in 1994 and peaked at #2 the
following May, with further chart success on the back of
the prestigious Mercury Prize win later that year.

* * *

In April 1995 Portishead recorded a D.J. set for the

B.B.C.’s famed Essential Mix series. The set is a showcase
for the band’s musical tastes, and the delight they
exhibit in the weathered sonic detritus of their own
production. The opening of “Strangers” is stretched to
almost 4 minutes, the mechanical roll and thrum of the
song’s conclusion distended and grafted back onto the
introduction. The sensation is piston-like, menacing,
hydraulic, entirely unhuman; a momentum irresistible
by the time the opening saxophone sample sucks you
into the song’s beginning. At 11 minutes into the mix, the
song is repeatedly stalled upon the turntable’s chassis, a
moment of pure rhythmic vertigo, an assertion of sound’s
pure substance, of its bone-rattling sovereignty among
the world of things.
The sample that opens the song is a saxophone figure
drawn from “Elegant People,” a 1976 track by jazz-
fusion act Weather Report. On “Strangers” the moment
is shifted down in pitch, transformed from an elegant,
dreamy opening to a waxy, spooling threat that cleaves
open the start of the song.
Then: the thundering opening sequence — the bass
used as percussion, a klaxon-like sound scored over the

  Entertainment Weekly 1995.

82

•  52 •
 R. J. W heaton

top, a snare daubed with its own reversed decay, a guitar

so distorted that it sounds reedy. Dummy is an album
characterized by dramatic contrasts; “Strangers” delivers
the most. It skids into a jazzy guitar riff, all lilt and
swing, yet covered with such clatter and reverb that, with
Gibbons’ distant voice — “can anybody see the light?” —
it sounds as if it was recorded in a cave.

* * *

One of Dummy’s recurrent themes is of isolation, and

while “Strangers” furthers that — “Did you realize no
one can see inside your view?” — it does so less by musing
on loneliness, than by exposing the listener to the raw
disorientation of lived experience. “This ain’t real,” sings
Gibbons; and when the song gives way after 2 minutes
to a glistening, graceful bridge, dreamily drawing breath
over shimmering strings and gentle horns, it is only to
trigger another attack of pulmonary violence.
Listened to in a club; listened to at high volume —
Dummy is an album that restores itself at high volume as
does a diver in a decompression chamber — the atmos-
phere is filled with the sheer noise of the song. While the
album’s resonant, physical bass figures are unremitting in
their pressure on one’s chest, in “Strangers” the experience
is more encompassing, disorienting, confusing, as if the
air itself is under assault. It triggers alarm, but withholds
adrenaline.
The song’s ending is a gradual shutting down, a denial
of oxygen; the bottom of the song dropping away to leave
Gibbons’ vocal exposed, breathy, and then caught by the
asphyxiating backwash of its own reverb. Collapsing,

•  53 •
 dummy

shorn of its klaxon-like alarm, the song continues for 30

seconds before abruptly, suddenly, ceasing.

* * *

For Adrian Utley, the discovery of hip-hop was “a

huge life-changing experience — like having a baby or
something.”83 Like Geoff Barrow, he has spoken about
the influence of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of
Millions to Hold Us Back:

I bought that album on cassette, which made it sound

even better, and played it in my car at ridiculous volume …
And for me it was like it was a whole new exciting world
that I knew nothing about … But I didn’t understand it
and I think when I first met Geoff that was probably one
of the first tracks I talked about, or at least that album,
Takes a Nation of Millions. And like a lot of things in your
life, sometimes you are alone with your contemporaries
and you suddenly find that you are stepping out into
another world and your friends are not seeing the same as
you are, and for me that very much was it. A lot of people
of my age group at that time and within the world that I
was in were not into it. And I found it like a brave new,
or a new way of interpreting music. It had the energy of
music I’d listened to in the past. So we spoke about that,
and I was going, “How the hell — how do they do —
what — how is it made? How can that be made? How
do they play it?”84

  Thompson 2009.
83

  NPR 2008.
84

•  54 •
 R. J. W heaton

* * *

Adrian Utley’s original inspirations had included Jimi

Hendrix (“the sound was just so vicious and brilliant”)
and Black Sabbath; he had played and recorded in
genres including disco and reggae.85 But by the early
’90s he had impeccable credentials on the British jazz
scene, having played with scene mainstays Tommy Chase
and Dick Morrissey, along the way working alongside
organist Gary Baldwin (who plays Hammond on three
of Dummy’s songs). He founded a band called The Glee
Club with Clive Deamer (whose drums appear on seven
of Dummy’s tracks). He had relocated to Bristol in 1986,
relishing the vibrancy of its jazz scene.86 Nonetheless
he had begun to feel the constraints of jazz as a creative
medium, overdetermined in some way by the towering
innovations of the giants of his inspiration. He told a
Dutch magazine in 1997:

It’s true that I played jazz for a long time with all sorts
of people. But I stopped because I can never equal my
heroes John Coltrane and Miles Davis. I’ll never be as
good or as spiritual as they were thirty years ago. That’s
why I thought it more useful to contribute something to
the present-day music, to start something new.87

* * *

85
  NPR 2008.
86
  Johnson 1996, p. 168.
87
  Watt 1997.

•  55 •
 dummy

At Coach House Studios, Massive Attack’s Mushroom

introduced Utley to Tribe Called Quest’s second L.P.
— “which I liked because a lot of their sound was Blue
Note, Grant Green samples and stuff”88 — and he met
Geoff Barrow around the time of Massive Attack’s Blue
Lines sessions:

he’d sampled a break from our drummer, who’s actually

Clive [Deamer], who plays on all our stuff. He had like a
[Casio] FZ-1 sampler set up outside, with a lead through
to the live room, where we were playing. And he asked if
he could use one of the breaks.
And I remember saying, “No.”89

Tim Saul remembers Barrow and Utley bonding over

“cups of tea and biscuits and listening to The Low End
Theory.” Utley absorbed Barrow’s extensive knowledge of
hip-hop and its production techniques; in return he was
familiar with the materials in hard-bop jazz from which
many hip-hop producers of the time were sampling. He
had been experimenting with hip-hop and jazz:

I was making loads of trippy beats and playing jazz over

them, but I never recorded it, I’d just sit there playing it
incredibly loudly. There were no songs and people used
to listen to it and say there was no way it could be done.90

* * *

88
  Johnson 1996, p. 170.
89
  B.B.C. 2010.
90
  Johnson 1996, p. 170

•  56 •
 R. J. W heaton

In 1983 D.J. Jazzie Jay had been part of Afrika Bambaataa’s

Soul Sonic Force collective, who had used the Roland
TR-808 drum machine on the 1982’s epochal “Planet
Rock.” Made for just 3 years starting in 1980, the 808
was used in Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” in the same
year, but its inferiority to the Linn LM-1 and the obvious
artifice of its sounds kept it from high-end commercial
adoption. Nonetheless, the distance in price from the
Linn made it more accessible to hip-hop producers and
others lacking deep-pocket commercial backing.
With Rick Rubin, Jay produced T La Rock’s “It’s
Yours.” He remembered the last stages of its production:

At that time I had a ’79 Chevy Caprice Classic and the

system was unmatched. It’s not like today where they
make systems for cars. I had to actually go in with a saw,
cut out half the back deck, put in four 8-inch woofers,
two 5¼’s in the door, midrange tweeters, three amplifiers
bolted into the trunk, a three-way crossover in the glove
compartment, a Passaic equalizer, and a tuner in the
front … That was the criteria of whether “It’s Yours” had
enough bass because my car system at that time … it was
the epitome of bass! We’d go upstairs in the Power Play,
make a rough cassette, Rick would run downstairs and
throw it in the car and it had to have enough bass. That’s
one thing he was meticulous on … “Yo, it has to have
more bass!” He’d go upstairs like, “Nope. Not enough
bass,” and the guy would be like, “There’s too much bass
as it is! Look … the meters are peaking!”91

  JayQuan and Aldave undated.

91

•  57 •
 dummy

“It’s Yours” was one of the first songs to take the charac-
teristic kick drum sound of the 808 and sustain it,
exposing the deep booming bass sound of which it was
comprised — essentially a sine wave, a deep hum, with
very little pitch content.
Rick Rubin used the sound in productions for the
Beastie Boys, Run D.M.C., and LL Cool J. Miami
producers such as Amos Larkins began using the sustained
808 kick sound on tracks including Double Duce’s
“Commin’ in Fresh” and M.C. A.D.E.’s “Bass Rock
Express” (both 1985), reportedly discovering the sound by
accident and being impressed by the ecstatic reaction of
audiences to test pressings.92 Producer Mr. Mixx used the
sound on 2 Live Crew’s “Throw the D” in 1986.
These records were the founding statements of the
Miami Bass genre — cars, explicit lyrics, explicit imagery,
bass. Bass. Travis Glave recalls:

your car rattling so damn bad that you can’t see out your
rear view mirror. You could feel it in your chest and in your
gut. You would tie something on your mirror just to see how
much you could get it to jump when the 808 kick drum hit
… Your trunk was useless with all the speaker equipment
in it. A box with Twelve’s or Fifteen’s, an amp big enough
that you needed two batteries to run it, if you didn’t, your
headlights would be dimming to the sound of the bass.93

The sound was on every major hip-hop release by 1987,

1988; heavily in use by producers like Marley Marl and

  PapaWheelie 2005.
92

  Glave 2008.
93

•  58 •
 R. J. W heaton

Ced Gee. It was possible to produce it without the 808

itself: a synthesizer could sound a low-frequency sine
wave which was then triggered by a kick drum and only
slowly released. It resounds through the classic Juice
Crew sides, through the Ultramagnetic MCs’ Critical
Beatdown. So pneumatically present in tracks like “The
Symphony” and Biz Markie’s “Make the Music With
Your Mouth Biz” that it makes the songs pitch and roll at
every hit. Public Enemy’s Yo! Bum Rush the Snow; Eric B.
& Rakim’s Paid in Full. N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton.
Its mutations in Miami — 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty as
They Wanna Be, Afro-Rican’s “Give it All You Got” —
were bounced back into the hip-hop mainstream. On
Eric B. & Rakim’s “Mahogany,” from 1990’s Let the
Rhythm Hit ‘Em, the bass sustain is so long that it has
an almost deafening momentum of its own, driving the
song forward with the force of mortar fire. Only Rakim’s
sway and pokerfaced swagger holds it to the click and
snap of the “So Glad You’re Mine” sample, which is left
tap-danced and sprawled across the top of the track.

* * *

Our ability to hear in the sub-bass range is limited; our

ability to reproduce these sounds for mass consumption
was for decades compromised by the tendency of record
needles to jump out of the groove if bass sounds were
mastered at high volume, particularly in stereo.
Our experience of these sounds is as physical as it is
auditory. They pass through us, seem to resound within
our ribcages, to precipitate an unsettling of the spaces

•  59 •
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around us — cars, bars, clubs — as the long waveforms

pass through and around all intervening structures.
Resonant frequencies: the tendency for structures
to vibrate in sympathy with an external waveform that
matches their own natural peak oscillation. Bridges,
towers, vehicles. Absorbing more energy than they can
contain, structures weaken, collapse. This is why soldiers
across a bridge are instructed to march in breakstep.
In 2004 a report in the medical journal Thorax
described the sudden onset of pneumothorax — a
condition in which “a small rupture in one of the lungs
allows air to leak into the space between the lungs and
the chest wall, causing the lung to collapse.” The report
suggested as a possible cause that the subjects’ lungs were
vibrating at the same frequency as the loud bass sounds
to which they had exposed themselves.94

* * *

The 808/sine bass sound is all over those early, seminal

Bristol sides. T La Rock’s “It’s Yours” was, according to
the D.J. Milo-curated collection Story of a Sound System,
a part of the Wild Bunch’s mid-’80s repertoire. The
sound appears on the Wild Bunch’s “The Look of Love”;
Massive Attack’s pretty, lilting 1990 single “Any Love”;
Carlton’s The Call is Strong. Bomb the Bass producer
Tim Simenon used it on “Say a Little Prayer”; it forms
part of the thump and stroll of Soul II Soul’s Club Classics
Vol. One. Somehow the cumulative effect of the sound on
these sides is to buoy as much as propel the vocals. With

  Reuters 2004.
94

•  60 •
 R. J. W heaton

the decayed snare gasp it is one of the elements of Neneh

Cherry’s “Somedays” — produced by Geoff Barrow —
that anticipate Dummy.

* * *

And it is everywhere in Dummy. It lends “It Could be

Sweet” its pulsing impetus; it impels the heart-stopping
introduction to “Pedestal.” On “Mysterons” it arrives
alongside the theremin sound and it resounds upwards
through the song like a series of reverberations cast
through an anchor chain from unseen depths.
Dummy is an exceptionally bass-heavy album. Many
of the songs — in another inheritance from hip-hop
— do not have a distinct bass part throughout, but
those frequencies are never untroubled. Organ parts,
amplified to emphasize shattering low-frequency
vibration; kick drums with the space cleared around
them to allow unimpeded detonation. The album’s
basslines themselves are designed — sculpted, almost
— for dramatic effect as much as musical. Listen to the
double bass on “Numb” slam into the song’s firmament;
the dreamy textured harmonics of “Pedestal”; the
swooning upward motion of the basslines in “It Could
be Sweet” and “Its a Fire.”

* * *

The floors and the ceilings through which Dummy

spread. The floors and the ceilings that this album
damaged. The fixtures and the paint that it loosened
from walls.

•  61 •
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A poster to the 4AD-L mailing list in January 1995

described momentarily hearing Dummy in a Virgin
record store in Nottingham — “I swear the floor was
physically shaking” — before it was abruptly replaced
with “Chris Rea or some other commercially acceptable
shopping muzak.”95
Larisa Alexandrovna has written lyrically on her blog
of her own discovery of Dummy as a student:

I was sitting in my bedroom and I heard “Roads” by

Portishead emanating from the downstairs apartment.
The two guys below me could not have been more
different from the rest of us. I was madly in love
with one of them (in that whole Petrarchan model of
admiring someone from afar way) and it so happened
that his bedroom was directly below mine, in that poorly
constructed, thin-walled, thin-floored building. Needless
to say I was hyper-aware of every sound, movement,
breath coming out of my bedroom floor.96

Ira Tam, living in a turn-of-the-century three-storey

house — “knob-and-tube wiring” and walls of “wire
mesh with plaster over it” — in the Annex, Toronto’s
student quarter. “I would play Portishead a lot. The
people who lived below me could always tell when I
was playing Portishead. They could hear the bass. They
could really hear the bass.”

* * *

  Norman 1995.
95

  Alexandrovna 2008.
96

•  62 •
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In centuries past the ability to manipulate large volumes

of sound — sounds that could make buildings vibrate,
sounds that announced themselves — was the province
only of military or ecclesiastical authority. Church bells,
cannon fire. Through history, loud reverberant sounds
have been associated with emotion, fear, control, power,
community, celebration, solemnity, the regulation of
work, the threat of invasion and the invasion of epidemic,
with the mercurial pitch and implacable reach of nature.
Those cues could be inclusive, signaling to those
within hearing that they remained within the safety and
province of what R. Murray Schafer called “acoustic
communities” — parishes, the North American “long
farm.”97 Rival localities would engage in a kind of aural
arms race to erect the most arresting vertical vista and
bell quality of the parish church’s tower.98
But the sounds could also be exclusive, malevolent,
demonstrating a taut and one-sided relationship with
authority. At the end of the 1830s, an English actress
and diarist named Frances Kemble was en route to her
husband’s Georgia slave plantation. She heard:

a most ominous tolling of bells and beating of drums,

which, on the first evening of my arrival in Charleston,
made me almost fancy myself in one of the old fortified
frontier towns of the Continent, where the tocsin is
sounded, and the evening drum beaten, and the guard set
as regularly every night as if an invasion were expected.
In Charleston, however, it is not the dread of foreign

  Schafer 1997, p. 215.

97

  Corbin 1998, p. 43.

98

•  63 •
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invasion, but of domestic insurrection, which occasions

these nightly precautions; and, for the first time since my
residence in this free country, the curfew (now obsolete
in mine, except in some remote districts, where the
ringing of an old church bell at sunset is all that remains
of the tyrannous custom) recalled the associations of
early feudal times, and the oppressive insecurity of our
Norman conquerors.99

* * *

This is in part the radicalism embedded within hip-hop,

block parties; dub, sound systems. The ability to proclaim
impromptu communal gatherings; to do so in the face of
official authority, of municipal legislation. In atmos-
pheric space that in centuries past was militarized.
Bass frequencies, having the longest waveform, will
travel further than other frequencies. This is why the
bass sounds are all that is audible from a distant sound
source; why church bells and fog horns, overheard in the
distance of the night and under the cloak of darkness,
heard across the tops of cities and reverberating among
the hills of coastal bays, are stripped of the full and truthful
reproduction of their sound. There is the suggestion of
the familiar, but also a reminder that we exist in the
dominion of the unknown. So “Mysterons,” “Strangers,”
“Wandering Star.” Songs saturated in bass, so redolent
of the night, suggesting in their presence the comfort
of companionship but in their form the distress of exile.
The unknown. The blackness of darkness forever.

  Kemble 1961, p. 39.

99

•  64 •
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Personal stereo equipment has given individuals

themselves control of the acoustic space around them
— space that now reaches deeply into that of others; of
strangers. The production of noise is now part of the
experience of leisure, the expression of taste, the display
of consumer status. We are far from a world where
sound was the medium of state and gods. This is not just
the assertion of musical taste, but the celebration of the
primacy of taste itself. We have made the atmosphere
itself aesthetic; we have made a medium of desire from
the resonant qualities of architecture.

* * *

Resonance occurs also in the Earth’s waters. There are

a handful of places on the planet where the distance of
the movement of water from one end of an inlet to the
other happens to match the length of the tide produced
by the gravitational pull of the moon and the sun. Such
resonance produces extraordinarily high and low tides.
One of the places where this phenomenon is visible is
at the docks in Portishead.

•  65 •
 Intimacy

The beehive — The state of the art — Magpies —

“Vienna” — Just bubbling all day — Nina Simone and Ray
Charles — Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records
Inc. — The right vibe — A guy with a cutting press — A good
steak — The Woolsworth — “It Could be Sweet” — The
integumentary system — Not a traditional songwriting
situation — Vampires in New York

State of Art Studios is located on an industrial trading

estate on the east side of Bristol — “not in the most
salubrious part of town; it’s a bit down at heel really,” says
Tim Saul. In 1993 it was very new, well equipped, and,
for a demo studio, very large. Dave McDonald, having
helped owner Julian Hill build the studio, was familiar
with the facilities:

I think it was probably at the beginning of, you could say,

the budget recording revolution, where you didn’t have
to buy a 24-track 2-inch machine or you didn’t have to
go out and remortgage your house to buy a Neve desk
and all that kind of stuff. It suddenly became feasible that

•  66 •
 R. J. W heaton

for say £15,000 — which was a lot of money then — you

could actually kit your whole studio out.

Adrian Utley quickly became a part of the sessions. “Sour

Times” had been “pretty near to its final version,” Utley
recalled in 1996, when Barrow asked him to contribute
a guitar part. From there he was asked to assume some
production responsibilities, including arranging and
writing.100 “Sour Times” was the song that provided a
roadmap between the material accumulated in London
and the material that would eventually form much of
Dummy. “[That song] saved it all, really,” Barrow said in
1995.101
Tim Saul was invited by Barrow to join the sessions
to contribute ideas. He arrived from London in October
1993 and remembers the frenetic activity:

I think we had three different setups within there — one

for Geoff, if I remember, one for Adrian, and one for
myself. And we were just basically experimenting, sort of
working up ideas, writing tracks, demoing ideas. Like a
small beehive — a factory — of activity really. We were
experimenting quite a lot with making our own samples.
So we would invite different musicians into the studio,
record, and do live sessions. I mean that was going on
anyway with people like Adrian. Obviously … he came
from much more of a live background than the rest of us
at that point. But we also brought in people like Jim Barr,

  Johnson 1996, p. 171.

100

  Darling 1995.
101

•  67 •
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and John Baggott, Clive Deamer — who all ended up as

being very much part of the Portishead live band.

* * *

By 1988, the dominant strain of hip-hop beat construction

had shifted slightly away from the drum machine and
back towards the progressively more ingenious art of
sampling. Part of the craft was crate-digging — the
obsessive search for obscure records which might contain
a few seconds, ideally an instrumental “break” which
could be repurposed — looped again and again — as a
compulsive, propulsive beat.
Hip-hop’s producers found raw materials in their
parents’ record collections, making it — almost uniquely
among popular musical movements — something where
the parental influence was not just something to rebel
against but also something with which to collaborate.102
The art was relentlessly inventive, competitive. Mr.
Walt, producer for hip-hop group Black Moon, remem-
bered that “Our era, how we came up, was all about using
a beat that no one else had used before. In our crew it
was that, and then always: ‘Whose beat is going to be
fresher?’ So the competition was fierce.”103
Among the available techniques: time correction,
slowing or accelerating a sample to make it fit relative
to other parts (often other samples); by so doing, pitch-
shifting: making it higher or lower, for a particular
sonic effect or to tune it to other samples; filtering:

  Coleman 1997, pp. 164–165, 194, 306, 435.

102

  Coleman 1997, p. 56.

103

•  68 •
 R. J. W heaton

emphasizing some elements of the frequency mix so that

particular timbres and even instrumental parts (frequently
a bassline) could be isolated; stereo separation: sampling
just one side of the mix, usually to isolate or privilege a
particular instrument, but leaving the tell-tale detritus of
other parts.
Sometimes the ideal loop would be nascent in a
record, and a producer would chop and slice samples to
assemble a loop from different parts of the same record,
laboriously reordering minute fragments of sound.104

* * *

Producers would manipulate samples in order to demon-

strate their skill relative to their peers, and indeed to
prevent any immediate recognition of the source sample.
To Tim Saul the appeal of hip-hop production was
“a magpie instinct … the idea of taking a lot of small
fragments from different places, manipulating them,
and then creating something new with that.” Learning
their craft as producers in Bristol in the early ’90s, he
and Barrow would engage one another in “sparring,” in
“sample challenges”:

you give somebody a ridiculously bad-taste piece of music,

and you say “right, go on then: make a tune out of that.”
And I can remember Geoff making some great tracks
— that didn’t end up on the Portishead album — out of
things like “Vienna” by Ultravox. I have a horrible feeling
Bonnie Tyler featured somewhere in there as well. He did

  See Coleman 1997.

104

•  69 •
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something with “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” And I think

at those moments that’s probably when I realized just
how talented he was, when he made a fairly reasonable-
sounding hip-hop beat out of something so atrocious.

In this context Andy Smith’s impeccable crate-digging

credentials were, as Dave McDonald remembers, a
critical creative influence. He “used to come up all the
time, bringing records up and playing records. Huge
influence on everything that we did … [he] was forever
just throwing music our way.” Andy Smith remembered
that “I used to take records round and say ‘do you know
this, do you know that?’ … I just used to give [Geoff]
ideas of loops that he would make into tracks that went
onto the first two albums.”105

* * *

Dave McDonald describes the process used in exploring

samples for Dummy:

We would listen to tons and tons of records. And …

Geoff would just start looping them. I’d be in the studio
at the desk, he’d be looping, and we would just listen
through to things … And you’d have a loop just almost
bubbling all day, just cooking all day, just on the pot. Just
looping around and different ideas going down onto it.
And it would start to either take form or just get put
aside, just be put onto DAT for a later date or just for a
reference. And then try something else.

  Smith undated.
105

•  70 •
 R. J. W heaton

There were moments of fortuitous discovery and

moments of pure alchemy. A technique that Tim Saul says
was used extensively was playing two samples together
“and then filtering off completely the top end of one and
the bottom end of another. And then the curious thing
that would happen was that you would create something
entirely new.” Dave McDonald recalls the same thing in
manipulating the speed of samples:

The amazing thing is when you start playing around with

records, when you start slowing stuff down, what you
actually hear in there — which you would never hear at a
normal speed — is quite incredible. It’s like when you get
Nina Simone and Ray Charles. You speed Ray Charles
up, and Ray Charles suddenly becomes Nina Simone.
You slow Nina Simone down, she suddenly becomes Ray
Charles.

Sampling thins the line between listening and creating;

it allows listeners to hear something hidden within
the depths of a song and surface it in ways that the
original artists may never have imagined. It exposes how
listening is itself a creative act. Like Theremin it offered
something democratic; as M.C. Doodlebug, from band
Digable Planets, recalled, “We were people that loved
music and wanted to make music, but there weren’t
music programs in inner-city schools. Kids couldn’t learn
guitar or bass. All we had was records and turntables and
we were creating our own sound.”106

  Coleman 1997, pp. 168–169.

106

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“It was a push towards originality,” says Tim Saul.

“That was what was really driving it.”

* * *

The obscurity of samples was not just a question of

creative oneupmanship but also a way to avoid expensive
legal battles or sample clearance fees. Out-of-court settle-
ments — famously including between The Turtles and
De La Soul in 1989 for the sample used on “Transmitting
Live From Mars” — had kept legal precedent from
being established. But in 1992 a ruling by the United
States District Court found that Biz Markie’s sample of
a Gilbert O’Sullivan record for “Alone Again” consti-
tuted copyright violation, entrenching the increasingly
expensive and litigiously dangerous need for sample
clearance.
By 1993, some artists were turning to musicians
to reproduce samples rather than pay an expensive
fee. Butterfly, from Digable Planets, remembers the
production of “Last of the Spiddyocks”: “I think what
I did was instead of clearing the Art Farmer [sample],
I credited it to someone playing it live, so that I didn’t
have to pay for the sample. Back then, sample clearances
was a motherfucker.”107 Nonetheless on some occasions
it became next to impossible to capture the exact nature
of the loop. Attempting to reproduce a Sly and Family
Stone sample for the song that became “Make Munne,”
Mr. Walt from Black Moon recalled that “[Nervous
Records founder] Michael Weiss didn’t want to clear the

  Coleman 1997, p. 171.

107

•  72 •
 R. J. W heaton

sample, so we brought a million people into the studio

to replay it, but it was never the right vibe. And after all
that, we ended up going back to the original loop. It was
a bootleg to start with so we wasn’t worried, but Michael
was sweating it.”108

* * *

During the Dummy sessions, Portishead turned towards

producing its own samples, recording Geoff Barrow
and Adrian Utley and performances from a host of
other musicians, many of them from Utley’s extensive
network. Many of these musicians — Clive Deamer, Jim
Barr, John Baggott, Gary Baldwin, Andy Hague — later
became part of Portishead’s extended band for touring.
Dave McDonald remembers that:

Once you find loops or find an idea, there’s an idea of

creating this loop yourself. And modifying it. And doing
what you need to do to it. So we would create the loop —
Adrian and Geoff would come in and Geoff would play
some drums, Adrian would be doing his guitars and bass
on it and stuff, I’d be recording it. We’d get this loop and
— we’d get loads of them onto DAT. And then we would
get them all pressed up on vinyl. So you would end up
with like a 12-inch with say thirty samples on.

This process not only allowed the band greater creative

control over their samples, but also to move away from

  Coleman 1997, p. 67.

108

•  73 •
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the risk of being easily imitated immediately upon a

track’s release. As Barrow explained:

What happened was, within hip-hop, if you sample a

beat, that record’s out there, so what happens is a week
after, someone else might use it, and that takes away your
fresh sound.109

Given the local experience with reggae versions and

dubplates, McDonald recalls it being relatively easy —
and inexpensive — to “find these little places where a
guy’s got a cutting press … and get a couple of acetates
cut.”
But the process of recording original samples was
actually more labor-intensive than simply sampling a
break. It was important to the band that the aural finger-
print of old vinyl was preserved — that the “made”
samples sounded every bit as aged and authentic as the
“found” samples.
They were concerned to capture all the extraneous
noise that it might otherwise have been impossible to
remove from an old record. Fragments of a vocal line
that had just finished. Reverb and decay from instru-
ments on the other side of the stereo mix. “You go into
every little, tiny little bit of what makes a good break,”
recalled Barrow, “and just do it yourself.”110
Tim Saul recalls making the “loop slightly off so it
sounds a bit like a sample,” deliberately mis-timing a
break to make it apparent that it was a sample — so

  Uhelszki 1995.
109

  Platform.net undated.
110

•  74 •
 R. J. W heaton

that “the listener hears it and realizes that it’s a loop, an

obvious loop.” McDonald elaborates:

There was a lot of tricks that we used to use with loops

which were slightly out of time, where within the loop
you’d have the next, the slight bit of the next bar within
the loop so it gives it a falling feel, but it’s still a loop …
A loop is normally 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4. But if you were to
do a loop, if you go 1-2-3-4-51-2-3-4-5 you don’t end up
with a circular loop, you end up with a sort of egg-shaped
loop. So it gives the track a roll.

This extended to preserving the sound of vinyl itself. As

Barrow noted in 1997, “to incorporate the sound of vinyl
is as important as the instruments playing.”111 McDonald
recalled what would happen when a freshly pressed
acetate of the band’s samples was received:

you would spend the next day or couple of days with this
vinyl on the record decks — and almost like a lathe, you
know, Geoff cutting them backwards and forwards to
wear the record out so then it creates an age to it, so it
sounds very authentic and old. I always remember that
process. The aging process. Like a good steak.

* * *

These vinyl artifacts are all over Dummy. With the

opening guitar arpeggios of “Mysterons” the pop and
dirt are the first sounds of the album. On “It’s a Fire” the

  Goldberg 1997a.
111

•  75 •
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mechanical movement of the turntable is almost palpable,

particularly during the first verse, and it suggests a
distance from the material which is jarringly at odds with
the proximity of Gibbons’ voice. On “Biscuit” each snare
hit drags behind it a smear of vinyl dirt.
Barrow has described the reaction to these sounds in
numerous interviews:

People were taking it back to Woolworth’s because it was

crackly. Which is hilarious. Taking back CDs because it’s
got record crackle. ‘There’s something wrong with my
CD!’112

The sampler itself lent a sonic imprint to Dummy. The

band was using an Akai S-1000 sampler — “horrible
thing,” recalls Dave McDonald, citing the unintuitive
interface that only Barrow could navigate. The sampler’s
limited memory and bit resolution meant that it could
not reproduce sounds with complete fidelity. A kind of
distortion — known as bit-crushing — was therefore
contributed. Again, this provided a unique texture — one
indelibly associated with golden age hip-hop.

It doesn’t give it a true sound, but it gives it a … to come

back to the steak analogy again, it’s like the difference
between the cow and a well-hung steak. They’re the same
thing but they’re miles apart. It just gives it an age.

* * *

  B.B.C. 2010.
112

•  76 •
 R. J. W heaton

“It Could be Sweet” was the first track completed on

Dummy, a song Beth Gibbons brought to Geoff Barrow
in the early stages of their professional relationship.113
Adrian Utley recalled that it “was totally done when
Geoff played it to me … I was absolutely blown away.”114
It is in many ways the most traditional of Dummy’s
songs — the song that most closely recalls the template
popularized by Bomb the Bass, Smith & Mighty, and the
Wild Bunch’s “The Look of Love.” Assembled within
the tight auditory envelope of a drum machine, it is
punctuated by synthetic horn stabs that come from a
specific period in late-’80s popular R&B. They are
perhaps the only part of the album that sounds dated, an
artificial sound lacking the retro this-was-already-old vibe
of — as an example — the twangy ’60s soundtrack guitar
of “Sour Times.”
The vocals, too, recall perhaps some of Sade’s ’80s
singles: breathy and full but somehow retaining a kind of
fey, offhand delivery. But the song takes the torchsong-
and-beats formula beyond that of genre borrowing and
mash-up. Compare the use it makes of the 808/sine bass
sound which opens the song with its artificial punch
and throb. The resonance here feels almost too precise,
as if tuned to a frequency that in an artificial vibration
too closely aligned to that of your eardrums will enact
damage hydraulic and lasting. At the appropriate volume
— which is to say loud — it makes of the air something
pneumatic, the benign atmosphere of the song made
somehow malicious, treacherous. It is a fantastic sound.

  van den Berg 1995.

113

  Trynka 1997.
114

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On songs such as 2 Live Crew’s “Throw the ‘D’” — a

cornerstone of the Miami Bass sub-genre — that bass
sound has all the subtlety and coy intent of a poledance
on cash money day. Listened to on headphones, the effect
is oddly cerebral; heard — experienced, rather, since the
sensation is physical more than it is aural — through a
loud speaker, the effect is deliberately penetrative. The
sound goes right through you.
But on “It Could be Sweet” the sound is surrounded
with washy Rhodes keyboard figures, and the gently,
woozily rising bass notes. It does not puncture the
texture of the song but rather finishes it to a taut, impen-
etrable surface. It cumulatively pushes on the surface of
your attention rather than boisterously clamors for it.
There is significantly less dynamic range on “It Could
be Sweet” than elsewhere on the album: less contrast
between peaks and valleys of sheer volume. Instead,
its close-up, familiar surface feels intact, devoid of the
piteous scars of other songs. It plays between the aural
violence of “Strangers” and “Wandering Star.” To the
degree that Dummy has an integumentary system it is
“It Could be Sweet,” a song that — without the vulner-
abilities of “It’s a Fire,” or “Roads” — serves to provide
integrity, to allow repair, to protect.
The surface of this song feels intimate; it feels young;
it feels new. But there is not a trace of naivety — instead
there is the swooping, worn, weariness of the lyric which
is, somehow, insufficient to extinguish hope.
The song’s skin is the Rhodes piano part, indistinct
at its edges, encircling — caressing — the melody. This
is an extremely tactile song. Everything is close to the
surface. The drum sounds are waxy, lustrous; against the

•  78 •
 R. J. W heaton

supple weave of the instruments, the candor of the vocal

gives the song a claustrophobic sound that is almost
febrile in its closeness. It is breathtakingly intimate.
Where other songs array a minefield in the complexity
of their emotions, “It Could be Sweet” distills sentimen-
tality into its very specific, immediate agonies, into its
exquisite doubts. At the end of the song, the vocal finishes
with a swooningly lengthy rendition of the final word —
“swe-ee-ee-ee-eet.” It is deliberately, deliciously intimate;
it traverses several meanings (nostalgia, reflection, regret,
memory) that have been gorgeously implicit within the
preceding 3 minutes. The vocal is recorded so close that
you can hear an intake of breath and a plaintive, tactile
sigh. It’s a moment so redolent with her presence, with
another person’s breath, that many of those meanings are
suddenly rendered overtly, complicatedly sexual. You can
hear her lips, her mouth.
It is, in the original sense, obscene — a moment that
would, should, be rendered off stage.

* * *

The initial part of the band’s working process was to

assemble a track from a fragment — “soundtrack-type
sounds — weird, vibey little things,” as Adrian Utley
told Sound on Sound in 1995 — that could be sampled,
looped, augmented, manipulated, treated, weathered,
warped, compressed, until it delivered a particular atmos-
pheric feel.115 These initial ideas would be produced on
guitar, bass, organ, drums. “Inspiration can come from

  Miller 1995.
115

•  79 •
 dummy

anywhere,” stated Utley. “It could be a sound from an

organ with an unusual echo or something on it, or it
could just be a beat that Geoff’s put together.”116 It was a
working method that allowed spontaneity in the service
of atmosphere. Geoff Barrow remembered the genesis
of “Numb” in a session involving Clive Deamer, organist
Gary Baldwin, and Utley (on double bass):

I had an idea in my head of what I wanted, and I’ve

still got this session tape where it’s Gary going, “So
um — do you want something a bit more . .” and then,
all of a sudden, they kind of drop into the first four bars
of “Numb” now, which is the double bass, the organ,
and the side stick. And they literally just pull it out of
nowhere … And it’s like, bang.117

Once the initial idea was captured, perhaps 2 minutes,

it would be mixed as if it were a complete track. At that
point manipulation and processing might take place.
There were “loads of things that we do with it,”118 as
Barrow later described the band’s process:

we either bounce it down to a quarter inch machine or

we put it through some other techniques, compressor,
filter or whatever. And then we put it on tape and then
listen back to it like it was an old record, almost. And then
choose the best part of it.119

116
  Miller 1995.
117
  B.B.C. 2010.
118
  Young 1998.
119
  Goldberg 1997a.

•  80 •
 R. J. W heaton

That part would then be passed to a sampler — “usually

through a mono headphone output.”120 With the most
compelling fragment of the track sampled, its dormant
qualities could be exposed. As Utley recalled:

As soon as it goes into the sampler, then it becomes

something else, because you can re-trigger it. You can slow
it down, speed it up, instead of playing. And it suddenly
becomes this other thing that’s always been in our head.121

At this point the pressing to vinyl might be undertaken

with other fragments — an “album of ideas,” as Barrow
put it — allowing further sonic manipulation.122

And then that’s fucked around with on decks, and

stretched, so you get distortion. And then that goes back
into the sampler.123

Further live instrumentation and other materials

might be added — “we add real guitar again or we add
more instruments to build it up”124 — in the service of
producing a rough arrangement, with a chorus.125
At that point the rough outline of the track could be
given to Beth Gibbons, who would write the lyrics and
melody.

120
  Young 1998.
121
  Young 1998.
122
  Young 1998.
123
  Young 1998.
124
  Goldberg 1997a.
125
  Miller 1995.

•  81 •
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This was a collaborative, communal process with, as

Adrian Utley put it in 1997, “vague” role boundaries.126
“We talked so many ideas over and structure,” says
McDonald. “Discussing samples, how we were going to
edit this, how we were going to do that.” “It’s not like
a traditional songwriting situation,” said Utley, “sitting
down and strumming a guitar or whatever, although a
couple of the songs could be done that way now, but they
didn’t come about that way at all.”127

* * *

Two songs from Dummy appear in Michael Almereyda’s

Nadja, a 1994 vampire film set in contemporary New
York. Shot in black and white, the film also features
scenes — primarily those from the vampires’ perspective
— filmed with a Fisher-Price PXL-2000, a toy camera
which records onto cassette at low resolution.
“Strangers” was a late addition to the film. It sounds
over a scene in which Nadja tracks down a victim, while
she herself is chased. Pursuit. She seems to glide in
the foreground; the figures in the background forever
unable to gain upon her. “I didn’t want to wallpaper
the soundtrack with Portishead,” recalls Almereyda, but
by the time of the film’s release, Dummy’s commercial
appeal was evident:

I’d been content with Simon [Fisher Turner]’s score

for that scene — it’s still audible as an undercurrent, a

  Watt 1997.
126

  Miller 1995.
127

•  82 •
 R. J. W heaton

gathering drone with a feedback twang accompanying

the moment when Nadja lights a cigarette and sails on.
[Producer] Mary [Sweeney] pushed for more Portishead
when our commercial prospects were looking dim — the
album was out by then, an irresistible hit — and we threw
it into the re-mix.

It’s a stunning moment. Nadja’s face, framed hard and

cold; gliding, gliding; untroubled by the figures of
mundane pursuit behind. The smoke from her cigarette
serenely obliterating the urban background. The disori-
enting buzz and clatter of the song’s guitar, the distorted
klaxon noise the perfect rendition of panic. Flight. There
is a menace serene and indifferent in its inevitability. All
the time in the world.
The other scene appears earlier in the film. Nadja
walks, alone, on a city street; “Roads” is the soundtrack;
the scene is intercut with images from a frenetic
nightclub. It begins to snow.
Like Dummy, Nadja conducts itself against a tapestry
of human interventions against the night — the faces
of cities, the interior glow of apartment buildings and
diners and bars, the company of music. The film’s
structure is fragmented; its momentum more associative
and elliptical than driven by narrative. It traverses grief,
wonder; anomie, exile. Paranoia, self-deception. There
is a ramshackle make-do-ness in some of the characters’
affectations — particularly Peter Fonda’s Van Helsing —
and a camp, self-conscious humor. These seem somehow
in tune with Dummy’s deliberate pushing of sounds,
instruments, into the terrain of accident, of contingency.
In its approach to genre it is not at all dissimilar; like Jim

•  83 •
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Jarmusch’s later Ghost Dog, it borrows, weathers, discards

husks. There are moments of brilliant aural and visual
intensity; moments indistinct, dull, numbed, out of focus,
obscured.
Almereyda agrees that there is a close likeness between
Dummy and Nadja:

It’s fair to say that the throb and glide of the music felt
close to the heartbeat of the movie … The lo-fi element,
the collage of old and new sound, the record-player hiss
riding beside fat electronic beats, corresponds in some
way to blurry Pixelvision paired with black-and-white
35 mm. And yes, there’s a shared sense of playfulness, of
quotation, a kind of reverse retrofitting — familiar arche-
types and atmospheres applied to reflect a particularly
intoxicating form of modern loneliness. The ominous
orchestration gives way to the ache in Beth’s voice, nearly
every song disintegrates into a confession of longing —
sure, yes, this all felt, still feels, related to my movie. And
that’s how the excerpt of “Roads” was intended — as an
inner voice rising up out of the drone and dance music
supplied by Simon Fisher Turner, a cry in the dark
eclipsing all other sound, enveloping Nadja as she walks,
smiles and cries in the snow.

* * *

The band’s focus was always clear. For Dave McDonald,

“we wanted an album which was a hip-hop album with
songs.” Barrow said the same thing. “We’re really into

•  84 •
 R. J. W heaton

making songs. Songs. That’s the most important thing is

the songs.”128
The characteristically slow pace — and minor key —
of the material was not a deliberate artistic statement but
a natural expression of the band’s influences and inclina-
tions. As Adrian Utley described it, “Always soundtracks,
always minor-key ones, slightly atonal, shifting, on the
sad side.”129 Barrow was starker:

I can’t stand the light stuff. I can’t stand it. I’m not into
it. In a sense all the hip hop I liked was very, very dark
hip hop. And when I was sampling I was always looking
for something that had a strange emotional content to it,
something that sparks some kind of emotion or theme
or atmosphere. That’s always my problem when we’re
working. I always think it’s not enough. It’s not dark
enough. It’s not emotionally hooked enough. But if I
can get some emotion musically before Beth begins to
write and sing over the tracks then there’s something for
her to hook into. A thread she can follow. We’re looking
for something that is quite emotionally powerful. And I
don’t want to take anyone down when they listen to our
music but I just don’t think there’s an awful lot of music
out there that does it to people. And people can handle
emotion.130

128
  Uhelszki 1995.
129
  Platform.net undated.
130
  Marcus 1997.

•  85 •
 Solitude

Of rural origins — Talk Talk — The listener a composer —

A diarist — “Wandering Star” —
The planets in their courses — A teenage runaway — Witch
music — The noise from the bar — Control and fate — A
promise fulfilled — Melody — Photography and mystery —
Electronic lullabies — The younger generation

Beth Gibbons has conducted so few interviews that it is

difficult to surface information about her background.
Among the facts available: she was born in 1965 in
Keynsham, a small town halfway between Bristol and
Bath. Her parents divorced when she was young; with
her three sisters she grew up on her mother’s farm, about
20 miles from Exeter. Work; solitude.
She told Stuart Clark in 1995 about the expected
trajectory of her life:

Coming, as I did, from a fairly isolated rural community,

the expectation was that I’d meet someone locally, get
married and have kids. It was all very rustic and cosy but
there weren’t that many people at home I got on with

•  86 •
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and that caused me to feel rather detached. You know,

whatever destiny had in store for me, it wasn’t becoming
a farmer’s wife!131

At 22 she left for Bath. Looking for insights into

her lyrics from the scraps of biographical information
available is largely futile but there is, in her description
of that moment, a very poised understanding of the situa-
tions we find ourselves in and of our own complicity in
prolonging them.

I didn’t escape from the country until I was 22. Most the
friends I did have locally had gone off to university but,
not being much of an academic, I’d remained behind.
It was funny because even though I was frustrated and
wanted to get out, leaving home was quite scary. It wasn’t
necessarily the reality I wanted but it was one I felt
reasonably capable of dealing with.132

The few interviews that she has given contain as much

speculation about her musical inspirations as they
do confirmation. She has suggested that her family
owned very few records — mostly compilations —
and that she would sing along to the radio. She has
named Nina Simone and Janis Joplin as singers that
she “likes”; Otis Redding, Jimmy Cliff.133 She has
pointed fans to Grace Slick, to Dead Can Dance’s

131
  Clark 1995.
132
  Clark 1995.
133
  Gibbons 1995.

•  87 •
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Lisa Gerrard;134 she told a Dutch interviewer in 1995

that “in my early twenties I kind of went into an indie
mode of like Sinead, Sugarcubes, Cocteau Twins, Pixies;
I used to like Janis Ian when I was younger.” While
admitting that “probably those were my influences,”
she was nonetheless tentative about a direct aesthetic
correlation: “I basically came out of the other end of
whatever, of youth maybe, and I don’t know what was
an actual major influence.”135
It is possible to hear aspects of these artists in Beth
Gibbons’ voice; it is also possible to hear, as vocalist Helen
White observes, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Ella
Fitzgerald; Sarah Vaughan, Sandy Denny, Joni Mitchell.
The range of influences points to a highly personal
approach, rather than one driven by extensive or delib-
erate training; indeed, she suggested to Ben Thompson
that “I’m not technically a very good singer — if anyone
says I am I know they don’t know what they’re talking
about. If I wanted to be, I’d have to give up smoking and
have lessons.”136
Her experience prior to meeting Geoff Barrow had
included some live experience with local bands. She had
also connected with Paul Webb, bassist for Talk Talk, who
she met when he was conducting auditions for the band
which was to become .O.Rang. She appears amid the
sprawl of noise that opens that band’s 1994 album Herd
of Instinct; she and Webb would collaborate on 2002’s Out

134
  van den Berg 1995.
135
  Gibbons 1995.
136
  Thompson 1998, p. 221.

•  88 •
 R. J. W heaton

of Season. In an interview in 1995 she described Webb as

“probably my biggest influence.”137

* * *

Talk Talk were an English band active in the ’80s, initially

identified with the New Romantic and synthpop genres,
although their later albums — particularly 1988’s Spirit
of Eden — rejected those characterizations in favor of
collage-style material accumulated from lengthy studio
experimentation and improvisation.
It is in song-writing structure that the influence
on Dummy is perhaps most discernible. Songs build;
melodies, lyrics, and vocal inflections accumulate; and, by
alluding to impressions, experiences and images, rather
than spelling them out, these songs slowly aggregate to
an emotional state.
Like Beth Gibbons, later, Mark Hollis’ voice ranges
from the guarded and the non-committal to something
more expansive, forceful. There is something in the
melodic songcraft, too, a modest, careful movement
between intervals; a carefully, evenly distributed
emotional pressure along the length of a line. There’s a
moment in 1982’s “Today” — the band’s first successful
single — at the end of the second line of each verse, when
in the descending path of the melody and the timbre of
Hollis’ phrasing — “Commit me to a life within a fool”
— you can hear a similarity to the entrance to the chorus
of “It’s a Fire”: “So let it be known for what we believe
in.”

  Gibbons 1995.
137

•  89 •
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From the band’s later albums there is the sonic

experimentation — the pleasure in texture — that serves
as a signal of the post-rock movement but also a clear
analogue to Dummy. In “Wealth,” the purity of the
song’s organ tones, the intimacy and proximity of its
vocal — you can hear the intake of Mark Hollis’ breath
— in these there is the suggestion of “It’s a Fire.” You
can hear something of “Roads” in “Inheritance,” the
vocal sitting on top of the thick electric piano bedding,
particularly apparent when the song ends and the sustain
is audible for several thick, tremulous moments. Songs
are dominated by a slower pace — “The Rainbow,” when
it eventually begins, drags along over a bass figure that is
indistinct in its imperious thrum.

* * *

After the band, at State of Art, had produced a rough

cut with the basic arrangement, and a structure allowing
verses and chorus, it would be sent to Beth Gibbons. Her
preferred listening experience was intense. “She’s got
a setup at home,” Geoff Barrow told an interviewer in
1997, “and she’s got all the bottom out of her system and
as much treble as possible. She listens to the music with
headphones, blaring away. She loves it that way, with
vocals really tearing your head off.”138
Gibbons would build lyrics and melody on top of the
tracks — making her at the same time both listener and
composer. The process was exceptionally difficult; she
described it to Dutch Oor magazine in 1995:

  Taraska 1997.
138

•  90 •
 R. J. W heaton

I have to add something to his music, not distract from

it. It has to stay equal and sometimes that takes a great
deal of effort. It is almost maths: you feel like the music
needs something, but you don’t know what. So you start
searching: fitting, measuring, testing. Over and over
again choosing another angle. And sometimes that’s a
frustrating process, especially if after three days nothing
has come up.139

Gibbons has emphasized the emotional and personal

associations that she has when writing a song. For her
the songs are “like a diary,” and she has suggested that
the emotional resonance for her is primary — that “I
still like something I’d have sung ages ago just because I
remember the way I felt at the time.”140
There were exceptions to the process: “It’s a Fire”
and “It Could Be Sweet,” among the earliest material to
make it onto Dummy, were songs written by Gibbons
in advance of the tracks upon which they now rest.
Sometimes Gibbons herself would manipulate a track
to make it fit her melody; as Geoff Barrow would tell
Platform:

she’ll re-sample it — slow it down, or speed it up and

re-loop it, and send it back with a song on it — and
you’re thinking “Where’s one? Where does it drop?” And
it’s because she’s got it looped in-between the first bass
drum and the first hi-hat.141

139
  van den Berg 1995.
140
  Gibbons 1995.
141
  Platform.net undated.

•  91 •
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There would be very little interference from the rest

of the band. “I don’t get involved,” Geoff Barrow said
in 1995. “Lyrically, I trust her. She is being honest.
She’s not writing a song just to make money or sound
distressed.”142 The limit of his involvement would be to
suggest a minor change to the melody:143

we have this kind of thing where sonically, if something

doesn’t seem like it works, then I’ll speak up and say it.
Like if the melody line just doesn’t seem like it holds, or
a couple of words, sonically it just sounds weird, then I’ll
ask her to go in and change it. But that’s about as far as it
goes. And when it comes down to the lyrical content and
everything else, I just don’t really get involved.144

Their working processes were so separate — and, indeed,

so intensely dedicated to the music — that it was only
after the release of Dummy that Barrow and Gibbons got
to know one another. During the recording of the album
they spent little time socializing, even when working
side-by-side in the studio to record the vocals. As Barrow
recalled:

we had nothing particularly in common … and we wouldn’t

really talk. I had mates and they’re all really young friends
and we all seemed young to her, do you know what I
mean? And to us, she seemed … well, hippyish and we
kind of didn’t know where she was coming from. We were

142
  Darling 1995.
143
  Darling 1995.
144
  B.B.C. 2010.

•  92 •
 R. J. W heaton

friendly but didn’t really know anything about each other.

And when we were in the studio it was all purely about the
music. We just worked and got on with it. We didn’t bring
anything into the studio, no drugs, no beer, nothing. Do
you know what I mean? It wasn’t anything personal. We
just talked about music.145

* * *

The fourth song on Dummy, “It Could be Sweet,” has

its influences tattooed upon its skin, an intimate and
breathy creation in the warmth of its youth. “Wandering
Star,” the fifth, is subcutaneous; muscle and pulmonary
inertia. It is a song so visceral in its construction that its
influences seem forcefully rejected. Origins recessed —
creeds and schools in abeyance.
The introduction is a series of four low-register
chords, each one playing for four beats. If you listen
loudly or carefully enough you can hear that the release
of the fourth iteration of each chord is somehow artifi-
cially curtailed, lending a subtle impetus to the following
chord, as if the sheer force of it clears an envelope of
space in its approach. It suggests something driving,
industrial, almost abstract. On the second and fourth
beats you can hear a foresign of the song’s harsh snare
sounds, a pistonlike echo emitting like an exhaust from
each backbeat.
Imagine what this song would have sounded like
before the addition of vocals: the chords, the whiplike
snare, and thumping kick drum — these all continue

  Marcus 1997.
145

•  93 •
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essentially uninterrupted for almost 2 minutes. And yet

that tiny irregularity between the duration of each chord
suggests something human — an urgency, an exhaustion
— behind each blow. The kick drum part, thumping
around the chords at the first and third beats of each
measure, offers — like Massive Attack’s later “Teardrop”
— an echo of the human heartbeat.
Listen, at 3:05, to the moment where the elements
of the song drop away, a system in disrepair, decom-
pensation. Gibbons’ voice disappears. The bass chords
cease. The guitar riffs and record scratches flirt, dovetail,
become intwined, fall, decay, fail. Arrest. Then the kick
drum, unpaused, all force — timing, kick — throws the
song back into its rhythm, restarts the bass in a moment
of sonic defibrillation, and the song resuscitates —
drums, guitar, turntables; a shimmering haze which at
3:55 momentarily fragments; the crossfaded scratching
at 3:59 eddied across the song’s fraying horizon.
“Wandering Star” is the hydraulic, forlorn heart of this
album. It is a song about solitude: its lyric is breathy, alone,
isolated above the pounding throb of its arrangement.
And yet the vocal has a delicacy that on close listening is
almost astonishing. Listen to how Gibbons holds the “s” at
end of “stars” — suggesting a caress, a welcome, comfort.
The chorus is a passage from the King James translation
of the Epistle of Jude, which vengefully declares the fate of
apostate men and angels, comparing their eternal exile to
the errant trajectories of the planets:

clouds they are without water, carried about of winds;

trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead,
plucked up by the roots;

•  94 •
 R. J. W heaton

Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame;

wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of
darkness for ever.

The lyrics and Gibbons’ delivery cleverly recontextualize

the passage. The tone is not the wrathful admonition
of wrongdoers, but instead a mournful evocation of the
condition of exile, of inconsolable loneliness. It becomes
a plea for company and solace. “Please could you stay a
while to share my grief?”

* * *

Music may reach us collectively but it must first touch

us individually.
Rock singer and rapper Nikki Lynette grew up in and
around Chicago, alternating between the city’s suburbs
and its inner city; between Beverly and Englewood;
between a childhood home and battered women’s shelters
throughout Illinois. In high school, suffering depression,
Dummy was the album that she listened to on repeat,
lying for hours in the bathtub, enduring abdominal pain
that doctors could not diagnose. It was the album she
longed for when confined in a juvenile psychiatric ward
for depression. It was the album she listened to endlessly
when, as an outpatient, she was not allowed to socialize
with friends. For her, “songs like ‘Nobody loves me, it’s
true, [not like] you do’ — it really resonated with me
because of the fact that — it was how I felt, like, nobody
loves me.”
Dummy became her “coming-of-age soundtrack”:

•  95 •
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When I found out my best friend was gay we were

listening to Portishead. When I remembered for the
first time that I had actually been molested as a child I
was listening to Portishead. When I decided to run away
from home and I left at four in the morning with as
much stuff as I could carry I was listening to Portishead.
Even though I went through some really tough times,
[Dummy] has music that keeps you calm and brave in the
face of whatever your tribulation is.

For many listeners it was the songs on Dummy, the vocal

and lyrical content, that touched them first, touched
them most deeply. Singer Belinda Kazanci remembers
hearing Dummy at a party. “I think it just stopped me
in my tracks.” She had been interested in electronic and
dance music but this was different:

I realized there was a lot of song. It wasn’t just electronic

music with a couple of quick vocal parts only; this was
actually full songs with these beautiful electronic beats
and arrangements. And I think what threw me more
than anything was Beth Gibbons’ voice. She has such
a haunting, sad, eerie, dark, yet beautiful voice. I had
never heard a voice like that. And it drew me in. I just
remember sitting there and listening to the entire record
over and over again.

Accessible, inaccessible; Dummy exemplified everything

necessary to become an underground album, a badge of
identity. Writer Sean Cranbury remembers that “they
were just weird enough that you could like them — but
they were too weird for some of your friends.” For

•  96 •
 R. J. W heaton

Sebastian Hanna, then a student in Vancouver, “it was an

album you felt you were missing out if you didn’t get, lost
if you didn’t know … the need to connect with that, as a
relief from what was boring, was intense.”
For Nikki Lynette, listening to Portishead placed
her in direct conflict with many of her peers and friends
whose tastes fit more conventionally into a black urban
aesthetic:

Fortunately for me, I didn’t really have that hang-up.

My best friend was listening to it, she introduced me
to it. And after I got over the initial shock of listening
to something that wasn’t cool among my crew, among
my social scene, I grew to love it. So they would call it
“witch music” and they wouldn’t want to listen to it. And
it’s almost as if their refusal to listen to it strengthened
my resolve because there was nothing anybody could say
that could explain to me why they were hating on this
dope-ass music. I was pretty pig-headed about it. I still
am. Can’t nobody tell me nothing about Portishead.

* * *

The requirement to tour and support Dummy, including

a U.S. tour in April 1995, put pressure on the band’s
inclinations. Barrow commented that “we never really
wanted this tour. We just wanted to put out lots of
records.”146 Beth Gibbons told a Dutch interviewer that
“I don’t like being up on stage that much, I don’t think.
Especially when it’s at night — after night. I’m just not

  Jenkins 1995.
146

•  97 •
 dummy

very good at it. I never know what to say.”147 There

were initial problems, recalls Dave McDonald, with
adequately representing Gibbons’ vocals:

Beth was onstage a very quiet singer … and she was very
shy onstage, and what our main problem used to be was
getting the vocal across the music. I remember when we
were doing shows in America first of all, people would
turn up just to say that they’d been to the show, and be
at the bar making loads of noise. And we couldn’t get the
vocals loud enough to drown those people out. So we
tried a few things and then we came up with an idea of
having lots of separate speakers on the front truss which
were dedicated to her vocal. So basically we had a whole
separate PA for her vocal. And then the main left and
right stack of the PA taking strain of the music. And once
we hit that point then it was fine, you know? Then as
her confidence arrived more and more then the speaker
started to disappear more and more.

The sudden popularity of the album ensured that they

were quickly playing to audiences of thousands. At
larger shows it was harder to connect with an audience;
Adrian Utley observed that “you start to get into a real
showbiz scenario, with a fucking great snake-pit with
all the photographers in it.”148 He noted years later that
“Geoff had never done those entry-level gigs playing
to no people.”149 Barrow hated traveling, and he found

147
  Gibbons 1995.
148
  Johnson 1996, p. 172.
149
  McLean 2008.

•  98 •
 R. J. W heaton

his perfectionism challenged, his desire to keep things

within control. “And when you’re playing live there isn’t
that feeling. It’s totally uncontrollable. You have about
fifteen per cent of control, and fate is guiding the way.”150
Nonetheless they brought the same perfectionism
— and logical rigor — to their live performances as
they did to studio production. “I wanted it to be a live
thing rather than a computerized event,” said Barrow.151
“We’ve put together a proper band, no samplers or
sequencers … I do a bit of scratching on top, but that’s as
techno as it gets.”152 Adrian Utley relished the return to
his background of playing live and quickly engaged with
arranging, rehearsing, and indeed recruiting a group of
musicians (including many who had contributed to the
album) to reproduce the unique feel — if not the precise
sound — of the songs. And Geoff Barrow made good on
a years-old promise he had made to Andy Smith during
the long nights spent listening to old soul and funk
records together:

He said at the time that if he became big, I could D.J.

for him on tour. It was all pie-in-the-sky in those days,
really. But when Geoff did the first Portishead album, it
actually started selling well. [Laughs.] So he took me on
two world tours.153

* * *

150
  Uhelszki 1995.
151
  Darling 1995.
152
  Newsday 1995.
153
  Heller 2009.

•  99 •
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Gibbons quickly established that she would not conduct

interviews, not only to avoid fielding endless questions
about her lyrics’ contents, but also due to uncertainty
about the way that people would perceive the music.154

I do get nervous and paranoid and that other stuff but,

really, it was the fact that when the album came out I
wasn’t sure if it was any good or not. You could have
said it was crap and I’d probably have agreed with you
whereas now I know it’s not bollocks.155

Her reluctance created “this nonsense mystery-woman

thing,”156 and when Barrow hated being photographed —
“That’s not what I am in the industry for; that’s not why
I make music”157 — the two positions were written about
as if they were a pose, an attempt to appear enigmatic.
As the two signatories to Go! Beat, Gibbons and Barrow
were the focus of the media attention, and Portishead
were written about in early days as if they were a
duo. Barrow expressed in interviews his anxiety that
Dave McDonald and Adrian Utley were not receiving
adequate recognition and characteristically cited his own
“naivete” at the industry process.158
In truth they were simply uninterested in navigating the
channels of biographical exposure, identity performance,

154
  B.B.C. 2010.
155
  Clark 1995.
156
  Taraska 1997.
157
  Taraska 1997.
158
  Goldberg 1997b.

• 100 •
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and publicity stunts that are expected of successful bands.

As Barrow told Julie Taraska in 1997:

There is this huge gap between rock ’n’ roll bands and
the general public. It’s great for people like Oasis; they’re
brilliant, they know how to play the game, and you need
that in rock ’n’ roll. But we, literally, can’t deal that way.
Even if it prevents us from selling records — and it does
— sometimes we get really unhappy doing TV things
and stuff like that. We’re not into lip-synching and all
that crap.159

* * *

Dummy contains relatively few windows-down belt-out

melodies; very few hooks of such extravagant catchiness
that would they anchor frequent radio play. Those do
exist, of course: “Sour Times” is a song of brilliant
complexity and density within its first 36 seconds, but
when the refrain breaks — “Nobody loves me” — it pulls
the rest of the song into its tight orbit. It’s impossible to
hear other parts of the song without feeling the gravita-
tional pull of that semitone descent.
But elsewhere melodic subtlety dominates. Verses on
songs like “Glory Box” and “Wandering Star” have tight,
intricate internal rhythms — pockets of local melodic
play. Songs like “It’s a Fire,” and “It Could be Sweet”
contain gorgeous melodic fragments assembled only by
the extravagantly graceful phrasing that Beth Gibbons
brings to them. Phrases are cast out like celestial bodies

  Taraska 1997.
159

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well beyond their apparent limits, words selected almost

arbitrarily for emphasis. Not knowing what will happen
next, you cannot stop listening. You do not have the
reassurance that a predictable melodic resolution is
imminent. At some moments the phrases are loose,
generous, almost speculative; in others strong with
inertia and inevitability. The listener can only regard
with wonder the passage of these melodies through the
flares and silence of the music below.
There is little to distinguish verse from chorus in
“Wandering Star.” The song barely pauses; Gibbons’
vocal changes little in pitch or in tone. The entire song
takes place on the first five notes of a B minor scale,
with the exception of the last note before each verse,
which dips a semitone to converge on the major third
of the dominant chord. It seems like a simple melody.
But there is a tightly coiled tension augmented by the
bleakly abstract arrangement of the song. The chorus
offers a little more space, the highly syncopated figures
of the verse elongated, tension bleakly dispelled. But the
effect is moderated by the lyrical darkness and the almost
immediate return of the unremitting bass figure.
At times it’s almost as if the song is too fast, the tempo
too urgent for this melody. Without the guardrails of
the arrangement, what would this melody sound like? In
performances in support of 2008’s Third, the band had
refined a version of the song stripped down to the dense
bass comps, the vocal, and a gorgeous, shimmering guitar
part — all tremolo, keening and shimmering slide, and
the beck and fade of Utley’s volume control. It sounds
a little like some moments from Daniel Lanois’ 2005

• 102 •
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album Belladonna. The tenderness and the vulnerability

that lie nascent in the song are brought to the fore. It’s a
gorgeous arrangement.
For all the narcotic qualities of “It’s a Fire,” and
“Roads,” “Wandering Star” is the song on Dummy that
most resembles a lullaby. Its minor key somnolence; its
rocking, heartbeat bass. The presentiment of danger that
lies so close to the surface in some lullabies — “Away,
thou black dog, fierce and wild”; “When the bough
breaks” — is near: “the masks that the monsters wear.”
The lyrics of “Wandering Star” take a moment of
judgmental exile and transform it into a longing for
solace in a world of loneliness and loss. The melody
makes of it a dark cousin to “Twinkle Twinkle Little
Star,” and Dummy offers in this song — alongside perhaps
Massive Attack’s “Teardrop,” and Tricky’s “Poems” —
a dystopian electronic lullaby, amid its machine-like
ruinscape Gibbons’ voice, caressing with cool fingertips
your wounded wounded heart.

* * *

Given the band’s working process, it is impressive how

organic, how whole, these songs are. In part this is due
to the extent to which Barrow would further manipulate
the underlying tracks once Gibbons’ vocals had been
recorded. Describing their working process in 1998, he
said he would “move it totally around, and make beat
drops on simple things like words — when you want that
word to come out at you, you drop the beat, and put in

• 103 •
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an air pocket.”160 Additional sounds and samples would

be added to the track — sometimes entirely transforming
the original materials. Gibbons cited the “I’ll never fall
in love again” sample on “Biscuit” as something that was
added after the vocal was complete. “The sample makes
the song but it was actually an afterthought.”161

* * *

Dummy is an album of contrasts, and Gibbons’ lyrical

maturity serves as a foil to the almost reckless ambition
of the album’s sonic world — formally experimental,
sometimes circushouse and ramshackle in its innovation
— which is plainly the product of a young mind.
Musing on her professional relationship with Geoff
Barrow — 7 years younger than her — in an interview
in May 1995, she spoke about relationships with younger
people:

however unintentional it might be, there are times when

you feed off their youth to curb your own cynicism.
You’ve no right to do that, of course, but when I
meet people like Geoff, and other men his age, their
perspective seems nicer. They’re of a slightly different
generation, so they’ve had different influences and seem
more aware of them. You’ve got to watch it because,
remember, they haven’t lived the extra 10 years that you
have. You can’t do their growing up for them.162

160
  Young 1998.
161
  Clark 1995.
162
  Clark 1995.

• 104 •
 Narcotic

Trip-hop — Lessons — Thinkin’ of a master plan —

Acid jazz — Label creep — I cried to dream again — Lullabies
and drug songs — “It’s a Fire” —
Breaths and lipsmacks — Railway stations and
Noël Coward — Impossible sounds —
A vocal performance — The big moments —
Suspect of certainties — Vocal frying — Oracles

In the June 1994 issue of British dance magazine Mixmag,

an article by Andy Pemberton described “trip-hop”:

a deft fusion of head-nodding beats, supa-phat bass and

an obsessive attention to the kind of other-wordly sounds
usually found on acid house records. It comes from the
suburbs, not the streets, and with no vocals you don’t
need to be American to make it sound convincing. All you
need are crazy beats and fucked up sounds and you’ve got
the most exciting thing to happen to hip hop in a long
time.163

  Pemberton 1994.
163

• 105 •
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Pemberton cited D.J. Shadow’s 12-minute “In/Flux” as

the genre’s founding record. Shadow — real name Josh
Davis — was then 22; “In/Flux” was his first single for
James Lavelle’s U.K.-based Mo’ Wax label. Shadow’s
work did not come from acid house, but instead was in
the tradition of early ’80s hip-hop instrumental sample
collages like Double Dee & Steinski’s “Lessons” singles.
The tradition had been sustained by U.K. production
duo Coldcut, who in 1987 subjected Eric B. & Rakim’s
“Paid in Full” to a 7-minute remix that augmented
the original with numerous materials including a vocal
sample from Israeli singer Ofra Haza. D.J. Shadow was
among those — others included Dan “The Automator”
Nakamura, and Jurassic 5’s Cut Chemist — to pick up
the tradition.
At more than 12 minutes, “In/Flux” is, like the records
that influenced it, a mélange of samples from funk, soul,
rock, jazz, and spoken-word fragments from film and
television. What distinguishes it from much of what
came before is a slowdrag tempo, and an aesthetic which
allows space for the texture of its component parts to
be explored and hammered out in front of the listener
rather than bolted to an exercise in rhythmic propulsion
from beginning to end.
The tempo; the absence of rap; the eclectic samples in
the service to mood rather than impetus and rhythm; all
these aspects of “In/Flux” seemed to mark the beginning
of a something new — although perhaps only to those
not familiar with the trajectory of hip-hop over the
preceding few years. These sample and beat-collage
techniques had, of course, animated and sustained
hip-hop from its birth. Indeed, critics like Peter Shapiro

• 106 •
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point to the true origins of ‘trip-hop’ as far back as the

slow, spacious, experimental 1983 single “Beat Bop” by
Rammellzee and K-Rob.164
There was, assuredly, more going on than a restatement
of the founding principles (at a lower tempo) of instru-
mental hip-hop. The U.K.’s rather self-contained ‘acid
jazz’ scene — which principally wed ’70s jazz-funk to
breakbeat loops, with, occasionally, an electronic veneer
— had begun to spill into adjacent genres. The textural
innovations of drum & bass (then known as jungle) were
in the air — synthy abstract artifacts that would buoy and
envelop that music’s supersonic, quantumsized break-
beats. So too were the psychedelia and boundless energy
of acid house, including the tendency to cheesy, squelchy
electronic sounds and humorous vocal samples.
Those influences are all apparent on the early Mo’
Wax releases, including the label’s first compilation,
Royaltie$ Overdue, which features, alongside “In/Flux,”
a Portishead remix of a track by Bristol band The
Federation. The connections with acid house and acid
jazz were critical, and the reference to the same hallu-
cinogenic drugs provided the “trip” in the genre name.
The idea of revitalizing these genres with an infusion
of hip-hop was quite deliberate. Shadow himself under-
stood the leap that Lavelle was making, speculating that
“In/Flux” “was well received in England because acid jazz
was kind of starting to annoy a lot of people, and it was
a fresh sound, I think, for a lot of people out there.”165
Writing for Wire, Ian Penman described trip-hop as “a

  Shapiro 1999, p. 333.

164

  Wilder 2005, p. 60.

165

• 107 •
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fusion of Acid Jazz’s fixation with retro correctness —

beats, grooves, scenes, vibes, collars, etc. — enlivened by
the avant garde fisticuffs of hiphop”; it offered to bring
hip-hop’s disruptive sensibilities to a scene “texturally
dead, stylistically dated, vocally constipated, carnally
void.”166

* * *

The Mixmag piece itself made no mention of the artists

from Bristol — which was unsurprising since they came
from an adjacent musical trajectory, one that had been
underway since at least the mid-’80s.
But the slippage did not take long at all. ‘Trip-hop’
was so messily inclusive — touching American instru-
mental hip-hop, U.K. acid jazz holdovers, loopy acid
house beats, early “big beat” experimentation — that it
was only a matter of time before it became a catch-all
label. By April 1995, an alternative genealogy of the
term had become established, with Billboard suggesting
that “the Wild Bunch … was at the forefront of the wave
of lazy, dub-infused British hip-hop that has attracted
the name ‘trip-hop.’”167 B.B.C. Radio One’s Andy Parfitt
pointed to Tricky, Portishead, and Massive Attack —
“blimey, they’re all from Bristol actually, funnily enough”
— as exemplars of the label.168
Perhaps it was the overlapping hip-hop influence;
more likely it was the perception that Blue Lines, Dummy,

166
  Penman 1994.
167
  Pride 1995.
168
  Quoted in Johnson 1996, p. 162.

• 108 •
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and others offered, in their dragging, slowed tempos and

subdued vocal delivery, a musical experience analogous
to recreational drug use. A refraction of the world that
was blurred, numbed, “blunted” — in contrast not only
to the brightness of commercial rock and pop music but
also the snap and blast of hip-hop and the compressed
rhythmic cycles of dance music. A musical experience
that — like lullabies — offered an aperture into a world
with a softer line between imagination and reality; a
world more comfortable in the partial consciousness of
itself than in the full and harsh reflection of its edges.

* * *

“It’s a Fire” opens with a string phrase, two lines counter-

pointed in a minor key, two lines lingering slightly longer
than expected at the end — stretched, a tightening of the
skin. A moment of miosis. The organ clean, cleansing,
calm. The astonishing proximity of the vocal. The first
34 seconds of the song offer soft relief from the awesome
range of the preceding 25 minutes. There is no cavernous,
space-clearing bass; instead the song is close, supple. The
track is empty of the collisions and the incendiary hiss
of the album’s drum parts. Gibbons’ voice sits directly at
the front of the mix, clean, the opening sibilance neatly
extinguished under the warm, lingering fold of “fire.”
The organ lifts on the word “dreams”, suggesting a
purity and optimism that disguises the regret of the full
lyric (“these dreams have passed me by”).
What kind of fire does this song invoke? There is
something almost religious about the opening moment:
the choral-like strings with cathedral-like reverberation.

• 109 •
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The first verse balances on the word “salvation,” the

organ beneath is clean, round, whole. After the weathered
violence of “Wandering Star,” there is a purifying quality
to the arrangement of the song, far from connotations of
destructive fire, of lust, of danger.
But it is a moment of misdirection; betrayal follows
at once. The invocation of “desire” is immediate; the
promise of salvation instead “getting me down.”
Then: the song’s bass plunges into the song, filling it
to the walls of its veins; a narcotic, somnolent warmth; a
smothering, asphyxiant warmth.
“It’s a Fire” is one of the older tracks on Dummy. “I
can remember hearing the roughs to that from when
I first met Geoff,” recalls Dave McDonald. “It was a
very old track from the Cameron days.” The song was
not included on the U.K. release of Dummy, instead
appearing on the single release of “Sour Times,” where
its clean, warm resonance serves as foil for the title track’s
clamorous harrow.
If “It’s a Fire” is one of Dummy’s slighter songs, it
nonetheless divides the album in two. It begins after the
relentless march out of “Wandering Star,” and without
it the passage into “Numb,” with its similar palette and
similar tempo, means that the middle of the album is
characterized by inertia rather than difference. The
presence of “It’s a Fire” lends Dummy a more measured
pace, putting less pressure on “Roads,” and in a sense
allowing that song to breathe more on its own rather
than primarily relieve the abstract, radical momentum.

* * *

• 110 •
 R. J. W heaton

On the first line of “It’s a Fire” there is a momentary

lipsmack before the first word; the collected sibilance
of “it’s” is harsh and abrasive before the next two words.
There is an audible intake of breath — short, curt —
before “these dreams.” On the “p” of “passed me by,” the
expulsion of air on the plosive pushes the microphone’s
diaphragm against the casing of the mic, registering a
slight, dull thud. There is a slightly longer, although
courser, intake of breath before “this salvation,” again
with a rough sibilance on “salvation” which contrasts
with the smooth, languorous delivery of “and desire.”
It’s a beautiful sequence, astonishingly unmediated
and intimate. Yet it showcases a number of elements
which would ordinarily be removed in post-production.
Recordist Jay Hodgson points out that as a sound
engineer “when you’ve got a close-mic’d vocal track, the
very first thing you do before you do anything else is you
go in and you cut out the breaths.” But those touches
remain on Dummy.
Sometimes the vocals were not re-recorded after
the State of Art sessions but, to preserve the feel of
the original recording, the original demo takes were
instead used for the final recording.169 Dave McDonald
remembers that the spontaneity, the authenticity, of the
vocal take was critical:

There was a bit of a battle sometimes between me and

Geoff about cleaning things up. I’m very in the world of,
that was it: that’s the take and that’s the take. And all those
little noises and little things are part of it. Right down

  Miller 1995.
169

• 111 •
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to — sometimes I would lose battles like — on “Roads,”

right at the end on the masters that I have here you have
Beth saying something like “Oh, that’s it. It’s over.” And
I just said, we should always keep that. And she agreed
with me but Geoff wanted to get rid of it so we got rid of
it. So there’s always been those little natural things and
I think Beth was very much into that sort of — being a
country girl — the sort of “organic way” really. So that’s
what we liked.

The choice of microphone — an AKG 414 — contributed

to the vocals’ particular sound:

That was just our mic of choice. And also of budget,

really, at that early stage. It was all we could really
afford in State of Art … The 414 microphone has the
C12 capsule in it which was — when you see those old
pictures of someone like Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra,
when they’re using an AKG C12 microphone it’s exactly
the same capsule so you kind of get the old sound … That
was something I was deliberately seeking. I’ve always
liked the sound of old vocals. I grew up listening to old
records. I love that intimacy.

The vocals on Dummy are also highly compressed, which

is to say that they are processed in a way that ensures
that the dynamic range is collapsed: the volume of
quieter elements is brought closer to that of the naturally
louder elements. Andy Wright, a producer who worked
on Massive Attack’s Protection, describes a record with
a compressed vocal as one with “a lot of presence …
you can hear all the breaths and all the nuance in the

• 112 •
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recording.” Dave McDonald rhapsodizes the effect of

the Teletronix LA-2A compressor on the album’s vocals
— “it just instantly changes them and brings them alive.”
Gibbons’ vocals were also subject to equalization, in
particular boosting frequencies in the 1-kiloHertz range
to deliver something like “a Tannoy effect. Like you
would hear in [public address systems in] old factories or
in buildings or old train stations … You’d hear it on like a
Noël Coward record.” It’s the sound you can hear promi-
nently on “Numb” and “Pedestal” — a slightly artificial,
processed sound, almost nasal. As Jay Hodgson points
out, the frequencies in that range are below audible
“sibilance (s, ch, and t sounds)” but “above the boomy
chest resonance area.” The frequency boost in that area is
utterly distinctive. As Dave McDonald describes the old
records characterized by that sound: “they almost sound
like they’re in your ear. And it just seemed to suit her
voice, and that’s what we always went with.”
The vocals were also fed through a Roland Space Echo
delay unit — the kind used to produce the vocal echo
that characterizes many dub recordings. Dave McDonald
cites the technique as “one of my favorite things” with
“such a beautiful sound to it,” a technique that dated back
to his earliest engineering work and reggae influences.

The sound of a vocal or anything on tape, it just seems

to give it — it puts it in another world. Anyone you
actually play a vocal to — [a vocal] which has gone
through a Space Echo — just seems to instantly love
it. I still don’t understand what it is to this day. I can
understand the scientific side of it — the compression,
the tape’s compressing … — but there’s a little magic

• 113 •
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in there somewhere and I don’t know what it is. So the

vocal had a lot of Space Echo on. Even if it’s not delay
it’s still gone through the tape to give it that flow and the
sort of juddering of tape. It just gives it an organicness,
you know?

At all points in the album’s production and recording

process — recording, processing, mixing, mastering —
the focus remained on getting and keeping the vocal to
the front. Songs. Miles Showell, who mastered the album,
recalls that the band “were after an early ’60s ‘in your
face’ vocal style”:

the vocal was mixed very high in the track on the masters
… In the late ’60s and into the ’70s and ’80s vocal levels
in relation to the track generally got lower. This had the
effect of making the singer one of the instruments as
opposed to singing over the band. The whole Portishead
approach was to have Beth’s voice way out front.

“If you can’t hear the vocal,” says Dave McDonald,

“what’s the point?”

* * *

The conspiracy between technology and voice. The

effect of tape delay; the simulation of public address
systems. Technology, as Steven Connor points out,
allows us “to discover sounds previously inaudible to
us, the sounds of the stars, and of the foetal heatbeat”.170

  Connor 1997a.
170

• 114 •
 R. J. W heaton

Without technology it would be impossible to capture

the elements — the breaths, the sighs, the exaggerated
plosives and sibilance — which make the vocals of
Dummy seem so naturalistic, so intimate. But the
technology itself mediates and transforms these sounds.
Connor suggests that “we overhear the microphone
listening, breeding with the noises of the body … When
we speak into a microphone, with a telephone or tape-
recorder, some part of us surrenders to, is spoken by the
equipment.”171
This implication of technology into the organic is
what allows us to hear sounds that we are otherwise
trained — culturally conditioned — to ignore. These
sounds — “all the minute muscular movements of the
larynx and the breath,” in the words of psychoanalyst
Guy Rosolato — recall infancy, recall the vocal exper-
iments conducted before we discard such “marginal
sounds” in favor of “retaining only those which allow for
optimal communication.”172
Perhaps this is why Gibbons’ voice commands such
attention: there is something transgressive about its
proximity, its pure exposure. Something liberating in this
anatomy of the qualities of the human voice: a magnifi-
cation of the everyday, an expansion of the real. As Walter
Benjamin suggested of film: “With the close-up, space
expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.”173

* * *

171
  Connor 1997a.
172
  Rosolato 1974, pp. 76–77.
173
  Benjamin 1973.

• 115 •
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“It’s a Fire” widens gradually. Only when Gibbons’

delivery dips slightly, an edge of anger at the end of
“for time and again,” a tiny coagulation of force, is
the Hammond organ driven hard, coarse against the
channels of the melody. The moment is seamless, almost
inaudible, but subtly increases the body temperature of
the song. Anticipation.
There are moments of such deception and deceit in
this song. Images of disguise, masks; salvation compro-
mised by desire; life as a farce. The Hammond organ,
sympathetic companion to Gibbons’ vulnerable voice,
shining and shimmering and humming throughout the
song, is remorselessly punched away by the sub-bass kick
drum at 1:39.
There are moments of such ambient — anaesthetic
— grace in this song. The pervading warmth. Gibbons’
multiple-note articulation of “fail,” which draws all
the wound from the word. The inclusive lyric “what
we believe in” offers the reassurance of company, of
communal solace. The chorus — “breathe on, sister,
breathe on” — gliding through in a bloodstream of
organ and bass.
The song closes on ambiguity, appending “like a fool”
to the final chorus, and fading away in either a graceful
retreat into sleep or a delusional descent into oblivion
before the drillbit opening of “Numb.”

* * *

The drama of this album’s vocal performance.

There are the flights and dives to the top and the
bottom of her vocal range. Hear, for example, the forlorn

• 116 •
 R. J. W heaton

depth of “circumstance will decide” in “Sour Times”;

moments later, in the final chorus, a leap into “loves me.”
There are the giddy, schoolgirlish, coquettish peaks in
“Numb” — “and this loneliness,” somehow adding an
extra couple of syllables to the word — that, together
with the artificial, narrow tone of the voice itself, suggests
a persona painfully ill-at-ease in its self.
And there are the extremes in delivery. The smooth,
caressing tones of “Sour Times,” not nearly as self-
pitying as many people remember the song. The almost
unreadable, opaque coyness of “Numb” or “Pedestal.”
And there are the album’s big moments: the stately
defiance of “Roads,” the sultry, commanding irony of
“Glory Box.” In “Numb” there is the extraterrestrial
line — “a lady of one” — that closes the track, a line
that brings with it a synthetic trail of white noise, a
vapor trail smeared across the surface of the song. In live
performances this is delivered with an almost toxic wash
of reverb.

* * *

You can hear Gibbons delighting in the sounds that she

is able to make. Amidst the reverb, compression, and
frequency manipulation with which her voice is treated
on “Pedestal,” her voice in the chorus is punctilious in
its pronunciation of “pedestal”; the invocation of “your
destiny” has almost a camp villainy to it. On “It Could
be Sweet” there is the airy, fragile pronunciation of “last
time” and the French accent on “love affair.”
Gibbons is not afraid to weather a syllable, to take it
through multiple emotional valences in the same breath.

• 117 •
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Listen to “It’s a Fire,” to the vocal parkour that takes place

across the emotional outcroppings of “fail,” at 2:24, the
deft landings on the following lines on “life,” “farce,”
“breath,” “mask.” I have heard cover versions where the
treatment of these words is preserved as if the words
were merely inconvenient vessels to the delivery of a
particularly complicated melody. In Gibbons’ perfor-
mance the integration of melody and sense is complete.
There’s the drunken slur of the first verse in
“Strangers,” winsome, forlorn; too jaded to be plaintive
but too weary for defiance. And then, just seconds later,
the rich, challenging, soulful bridge — “Ooooh, to set
aside your fears in life” — and the knifelike stabs of
the chorus. It is as if there was another singer, voiceless
through the guitar-and-detritus verse, engaged only at
the chorus by the industrial soundscape that collapses
onto the song.
Adrian Utley has said, of Gibbons’ technique:

She’s got an amazing voice, first of all. She’s got amazing

voices. She has different elements to her voice that you
can always know it’s her but she can sound remarkably
different from one track to another.174

She told Ben Thompson in 1994 that:

The fun for me is finding a tone which goes with the

backing track … when I’m singing “Numb,” to me that’s
me trying to be a black soul singer. At other times I might
be trying to be Neil Young or Tom Waits. That might

  NPR 2008.
174

• 118 •
 R. J. W heaton

make me false, but I think it’s more honest to admit it.

I think if I just found one style and stuck to it, I’d get
very bored. People who do that just end up imitating
themselves.175

* * *

There are some great subtleties of meaning. The refrain

of “Sour Times” would be belted out by a lesser singer,
but Gibbons’ restraint renders it instead with a breathy,
insouciant delivery, suggesting the possibility of meeting
the coldness of the world with an indifference and
withdrawal on one’s own terms. In the same song, after
the ghostly meandering of “Who am I? What, and
why?” there is the assertion that “All I have left is my
memories of yesterday.” The knife-edge pronunciation
of “left” sounds almost calculating, which makes the
peculiar frailty of the closing half of the line seem instead
knowing, toying, coy, suggesting that she controls the
disclosure of those memories. A poker player with the
cards against her chest.
She is suspicious of given certainties. “This life ain’t
fair,” she sings in “It Could be Sweet,” but the line is
almost thrown away, more spoken than intoned; there is
a delicious swoop through “You don’t get something for
nothin’,” undercutting the glib certainty of the cliché.
Elsewhere she uses tone to puncture aphorism — a
hardness, a determination, creeping into “for time and
again” in “It’s a Fire.” She is always multiplying meaning
in this music. In “Pedestal,” after the line “You abandoned

  Thompson 1998, p. 221.

175

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me” — the last syllable drawn into a deadspin of rever-

beration — there is just enough closeness, just enough
softness on the following line — “how I suffer” — that for
a second it is possible to hear in it some sarcasm.
The self in these lyrics is constantly under pressure
from the world around it: “circumstance will decide,”
she sings in “Sour Times.” Yet even at the moments of
most painful self-abnegation, Gibbons finds a way of
suggesting some control; of protecting a core of agency,
of action; of withholding the possibility of self-assertion.
That comes across in the most flagrant ironies in these
lyrics, in the extended refrains of “Sour Times,” and
“Glory Box.” But it is a level of complexity woven into
the fabric of the album. Dummy offers in its approach
— systematic, ironic, complex, and compromised — an
examination and rejection of so many versions of the
modern — female — self, that it makes of this music a
protest album, a plea — a cry — for freedom from over-
determination by the world outside.

* * *

Listeners have always remarked on the qualities of

Dummy’s vocals. Bram Schijven says that “Beth’s voice
just goes through my bone and marrow.” Lee Thomson
hears “Joy, pain, suffering. Her range is fantastic. It’s
compelling, absolutely compelling. It’s disturbing — but
in a most gratifying way.”
For Belinda Kazanci one of the standout features of
Dummy is “the details — especially Beth Gibbons’ voice:
even just the way she takes breaths in between the notes
and the melodies, it’s so detailed.”

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Vocalist Helen White points to Gibbons’ technical

range, from the “‘wispy’ kind of voice … very delicate
and fragile and ‘clean’ sounding” that was typical of even
the better indie/alternative female singers of the time, to
more unorthodox sounds:

Her use of vocal “frying” — using the lowest vocal

register, through a loose glottal closure, to permit air
to bubble through slowly with a popping or rattling
sound — a kind of growly, sultry sound, often used to
sound “sexy,” was very well placed. A singing technique
that has classical types cringing in their boots but one
that pop/folk and jazz singers use as and when they deem
necessary.

Nikki Lynette heard the contrast between the “little

thinner, really effeminate voice” that was typical in R&B
at the time, and Gibbons who:

can have a tiny little voice, or she can have this big voice
that roars, or she can cackle almost, or she can basically
whisper … There are times when they’re doing these
cute little melodies with this tiny little feminine little
voice and these tiny little accents. And then there’s times
when it’s like — “As long as I have tried” — these roaring,
cackling, powerful, I don’t give a fuck type voices.

* * *

Gibbons’ voice is pushed to extremes on Dummy. On

“Numb,” “a lady of one”; on “Glory Box,” “this is
the beginning of forever and ever,” the line soaked

• 121 •
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in reverb and decay. Her voice is taken to its limits

by frequency manipulation and signal processing and
emotion brilliantly volatile like the contact of lithium
and water.
Steven Connor has pointed to the cultural signifi-
cance of the female voice:

The mythological voice of the siren is a female voice

… Why is the voice of alarm a female or an infantile
voice? Is the fact that high-pitched sounds are so much
more arousing for human beings (and other animals?)
just coincidence? Perhaps it is that the female voice
has been associated in so many cultures and at so many
different times with what is unearthly. The song of the
siren promises a bliss that is not of this world. The
voice of the God that is transmitted through his oracles,
whether the pythian priestess at Delphi, or the Cumaen
sibyl is shattered and estranged by its relay through the
female person and her vocal apparatus … The piercing
sweetness of the soprano, or, in previous eras, of the
castrato, embody the experience of voice as pure, quasi-
divine power, transcending the ordinary functions of
speech and communication. The siren belongs to the
world of shrieks, wails, and lamentations, where the body
speaks from a place beyond or before culture, before or
behind the human.176

  Connor 1997b.
176

• 122 •
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A plenitude of releases — The trip-hop moment —

A plenitude of labels — Making out … and drinking tea —
“Numb” — Blade Runner — The absence of rules —
“That sounds too normal”— Trapdoors —
Roy Orbison — The General Assembly of the International
Music Council of UNESCO — Muzak — Shopping carts —
The avant garde — Hearing voices

Massive Attack’s second album, Protection, released

in September 1994; Tricky’s Maxinquaye released in
February 1995. In May, Earthling — comprised of
Portishead collaborator Tim Saul with rapper Mau —
released Radar.
1994 through 1997 saw, among many others,
releases by other bands from Bristol including The
Federation, Purple Penguin, Statik Sound System, Monk
& Canatella, Invisible Pair of Hands (which included
Portishead associates Jim Barr and John Baggott), Alpha.
Smith & Mighty finally had a full-length album release
in 1995, Bass is Maternal.

• 123 •
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On the Mo’ Wax label: D.J. Shadow’s debut album

Endtroducing… was released in November 1996. D.J.
Krush, Attica Blues, Dr. Octagon, U.N.K.L.E.
On Coldcut’s Ninja Tune label: D.J. Food, 9 Lazy 9,
Funki Porcini, The Herbaliser; Coldcut themselves; D.J.
Vadim, Amon Tobin.
Elsewhere, to name just a few of very, very many:
David Holmes, Fila Brazilia, Nightmares on Wax, Dan
the Automator. Mainstays of the early ’90s including
Bomb the Bass, Depth Charge. Neneh Cherry’s third
album, Woman. The acid-jazz influence taken to a harsh,
crisp edge by Red Snapper.
Kruder & Dorfmeister, Tosca. Howie B, engineer on
Soul II Soul’s Club Classics Vol. One and Blue Lines. Skylab.
Lamb, Death in Vegas, Hooverphonic. Mono, Olive,
Sneaker Pimps, Morcheeba. REQ. Rae & Christian.
From France: D.J. Cam and Kid Loco. Luke Vibert
(under his own name and others).
Label-specific collections: Grand Central’s Central
Heating; Cup of Tea’s Coffee Table Music. Numerous Ninja
Tune collections. And wave after wave of compilations:
Give ’Em Enough Dope, three volumes; Dope on Plastic,
eight. This is Trip-Hop. This Ain’t Trip-Hop. Trip-Hop
Boutique. The Trip Hop Test.
The dizzying variety of sources, sub-genres, micro-
movements, and nuances. All of the following could be
seen at some point as shelf markers in record stores in
the U.K. during the mid-’90s:
✒✒ trip-hop
✒✒ downtempo
✒✒ breaks

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✒✒ breakbeats
✒✒ beats & breaks
✒✒ acid jazz
✒✒ jazzy beats & breaks
✒✒ blunted beats
✒✒ abstract hip-hop
✒✒ dance
✒✒ chillout
✒✒ lounge
✒✒ nuJazz
✒✒ lo-fi.

Some of these became, later, discrete sub-genre labels in

different contexts. All of them translated poorly overseas,
particularly in the U.S. where the genre complexity that
then — and still — characterizes British dance music was
impenetrable, and boring, to a mainstream music media
surveying a much larger terrain from a much higher
altitude. ‘Electronica’ became the catch-all label, with
trip-hop as its moody emo variant.
All of this, to one degree or another, was aimed at
a market broadly understood to want an accessible
electronic music, to some extent derived from beat-based
production, paced somewhat slower than hip-hop, and
without too many distracting aggressive elements.
It was also a market served somewhat concurrently
by the big beat genre — faster, louder, foregrounding
the acid house and psychedelia influences. Even drum
& bass (formerly known as jungle) reached mainstream
commercial success for a brief period, culminating in
Bristol-based Roni Size and Reprazent’s Mercury Prize-
winning New Forms.

• 125 •
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* * *

Among this the ubiquitous presence of Dummy. For

a brief moment it was possible to hear the album in
nightclubs and bars, in people’s homes, to read about it
in newspapers and magazines — without the exposure
in one of those arenas alienating another. Perhaps this
was in part to do with the band’s reserve, their unwill-
ingness to engage in the more nakedly commercial
pursuit of popularity. They did not seek over-exposure.
Yet the album was everywhere. As Helen White recalls,
“Everyone suddenly liked them.”
In February 1995, Entertainment Weekly quoted “Gen
X expert” Michael Krugman on Dummy:

It’s music that’s as appropriate if you’re making out at

home, or home alone pining … And isn’t that pretty much
why people listen to Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra?177

It became impossible to escape the album, particularly

after its initial flourishes of chart success — in the U.K.
it reached #3 in January of 1995 and #2 in May — it was
awarded the Mercury Music Prize in September 1995.
It was suddenly background music everywhere: people’s
apartments; bars; cafés; clothing boutiques.
It seemed to accommodate so many uses. One post to
the 4AD-L mailing list noted in January 1995 that:

Every song is “close”, it’s a very private album. It’s the

kind of album you can snuggle up in your sofa and drink

  Entertainment Weekly 1995.

177

• 126 •
 R. J. W heaton

tea to … It’s a very convenient album for people like me

who has very little other music they can play while having
guests. It’s quiet. You can dance to it. You can sing along
with the lyrics. You can do the dishes to it.178

* * *

There’s a moment in Richard Donner’s 1995 movie

Assassins — a Sylvester Stallone/Antonio Banderas vehicle
— when the Banderas character prepares to attack the
heroine from her neighbors’ apartment. The neighbors
— just having had a ferocious domestic argument — are
about to become collateral damage in the service of the
film’s meaningless narrative. “Sour Times” is playing
in the background, its jangling cimbalom effectively
telegraphing the disorientation that is to follow. At the
same time, though, there is the suggestion that this music
is just that — background music; disposable.

* * *

“Revenge of the Number,” one of the remixes on the

original single release of “Numb,” is in some ways the
most accessible way into “Dummy” for the general
listener. It takes the vocal of “Numb” in its austere
isolation (“this loneliness — it just won’t leave me alone”)
and sets it astray amid a series of bouncy, pockety loops.
In contrast, the original version of “Numb” is a
ruthless experience. The opening organ tone, driven
hard through a Leslie speaker, is polished to a hard

  Ingelbrigtsen 1995.
178

• 127 •
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edge. It has a percussive quality itself amid the rimshot

snare hits and it collides with a bassline that lurches
woozy and punchdrunk thereafter throughout the length
of the song. Like so many of the album’s tracks, the
arrangement is deeply abstract, strange. When it lacks the
vocal to organize the air around it, the song’s atmosphere
is thin, reedy; it seems composed of elements moving
in opposite directions — the bass swaying forward; the
turntable scratches slicing, scattering shrapnel, evacu-
ating the upper registers of the song.
There are colossal quantities of air moved about
in “Numb” — but there is so little air at its core. As
elsewhere, Beth Gibbons’ voice is remarkable for its
volume and range even when so little seems to come
from her lungs. “‘Cause I’m still feeling lonely — Feeling
so unholy” has a front-of-the-mouth innocence that
charms all the charge from the otherwise impious impli-
cations of the lyric. But the path to the chorus moves
through a soulful, agonized expression (on “reveal what
I”) to the distended, almost over-articulated “loneliness”
of the chorus. Gibbons’ vocal is scratched onto the
surface of the song, a technique first used in 1988 by
Run-D.M.C.’s song “Beats to the Rhyme.”179 In the
middle of the song there is a moment, at 2:03, where a
slab of the song’s bassline lumbers forward and in the air
above it is the shredded detritus from Barrow’s boards:
fragments of Gibbons’ voice sheared from their origin;
indecipherable radio noise; a “yeah,” muddied in reverb,
slowed, and cast in an accent distinct but impossible to

  Jenkins 1999, p. 60.

179

• 128 •
 R. J. W heaton

identify in the trauma of its separation from a gospel

churchfront or a streetcorner somewhere.
Gibbons’ voice sounds both besieged and somehow
comforted by the space that the song’s arrangements
allow. Its distance from the abstract, machinelike palette
is the perfect parallel of a self isolated and alienated
from its surroundings. In the final moments, a raw cry
of existence — “a lady of one” — is almost evaporated
into the hollowing, cyclonic wail of sound that the song
unleashes upon it.

* * *

Geoff Barrow recalled in 2010 of Dummy that:

The strangest thing, and the most annoying thing, is that

“chill-out” thing, that’s come out of it. For me. Dummy
as chill-out, yuppie, shagging music. It wasn’t supposed
to be about that. It wasn’t like something to kind of like
chill to. It was actually supposed to be quite harsh, and
alternative, and noisy.180

That potential for easy listening was something that

the band had worked against from the outset. Barrow
remembered, as the band added the guitar parts to
“Glory Box,” “we were like, ‘What are we doing?’ It just
seemed so horribly commercial. I hated commercial
music.”181

  B.B.C. 2010.
180

  B.B.C. 2010.
181

• 129 •
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The commercial reception troubled Beth Gibbons

too:

You write songs and you hope you’re gonna communicate

with people — half the reason you write them in the first
place is that you’re feeling misunderstood and frustrated
with life in general. Then it’s sort of successful and you
think you’ve communicated with people, but then you
start to think you haven’t communicated with them at
all — you’ve turned the whole thing into a product, so
then you’re even more lonely than when you started.
But when you think about something like the mannekins
[sic] in Blade Runner, the only reason they think they’re
human is the pictures they hold.182

* * *

The band left State of Art at the end of 1993 and moved
to Coach House Studios to complete the album. Adrian
Utley recalled that “We did go down to a big London
studio to mix, but we hated the result because we weren’t
used to it. We know that the studios around us have got
what we need and we know the sound of them.”183
It was not possible to recreate some of the State of Art
material with the same character, so the original 16-track
demo tracks were laid down to the 24-track at Coach
House. Adrian Utley told Sound on Sound that “When
you first get that vibe of the moment, it’s a pain in the
arse trying to recreate it. Once it’s on tape, as far as I’m

  Thompson 1998, p. 222.

182

  Miller 1995.
183

• 130 •
 R. J. W heaton

concerned, that’s it, even if it’s got little mistakes in it. To

us, saying, ‘Okay, let’s go to a real studio now and do it
for real’, is a ridiculous concept.”184
Tim Saul describes the process as “demo-itis”:

As a producer you’ll go through months of working on

a track and in your mind you’ll think, “I’m going to tidy
that up later.” In the final mix. And then actually when
you get to the final mix you tidy it up and you realize
that you’re taking out something which actually gives it
its character.

“We were quite commando at that stage,” recalls Dave

McDonald. “We knew what we were doing to a degree
but we weren’t sort of high-end studio bods. It’s a policy
that … it doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as it
sounds okay.”
No rules. “There’s nothing you can’t do,” Barrow said
in 1997. “To achieve a sound on a beat or on a vocal or
on a guitar or whatever, there’s nothing that is wrong to
achieve that sound.”185
There was an aesthetic of imperfection. “I’m not
so keen on modern technology,” Barrow told Spin in
February 1995, “that’s why a lot of our stuff sounds
rough. If you polish everything up too much, it sounds
stale. Like plastic music.”186 Talking to Michael Goldberg
in 1997, Barrow railed against the restrictive production
methodology of the ’80s — “everything had to be

184
  Miller 1995.
185
  Goldberg 1997a.
186
  Bernstein 1995.

• 131 •
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cleaner, everything had to be tighter. It kind of squashed

a lot of the emotion and mistakes and all kinds of things
that go to make good music out of the music.”187
The band was deliberately trying to produce music
that would challenge quick absorption into the culture,
a too-easy integration into the collective aural imagi-
nation. Tim Saul remembers that:

Beth would kind of goad Geoff into not making the

music sound too — not that he was [inclined to] — too
formulaic. I can remember times where she would just
say, “That sounds too normal.”

* * *

There are numerous moments on Dummy that confound

your first reaction, that present discoveries to additional
listening. Moments that defy easy listening. The album’s
imperfections. “We’ve put some trapdoors in our music,”
Barrow told Jaan Uhelszki in 1995.188
Among them the willful detritus of the recording
process. Dave McDonald remembers:

We sampled one of Adrian’s guitar loops, and it was

picking up the radio. The amp was picking up the radio
for some reason, just as we were doing the take on it. It
was talking about Roy Orbison … that was the only take
which was the perfect take. But it was damaged because
it had this vocal sound in it. But we kept it — and that’s

  Goldberg 1997a.
187

  Uhelszki 1995.
188

• 132 •
 R. J. W heaton

on the album somewhere … I always remember that as

being very very bizarre.

The opening chords of “Roads,” so smothering, thick,

so absolute, are nonetheless occasionally smudged,
individual notes landing fractionally out of time with
one another. At 1:25 in the same song there is a noise in
the background which sounds very much like someone
dropping something. It’s perfect.
There are of course the vocal intrusions — Gibbons’
voice captured to a closeness beyond intimacy. The
moment, for example, near the end of “Roads” where you
can clearly hear her swallowing. There is what sounds
like a failed vocal sustain right at the end of the final note
of “Pedestal”: a moment of gorgeous fragility.
As Adrian Utley told Phil Johnson: “There was an
awful lot of time spent on it though there are still things
that we didn’t get right, like an out-of-time piano on one
track, so there’s still a rough edge to it.”189

* * *

In October 1969 the General Assembly of the

International Music Council of UNESCO proclaimed
that:

We denounce unanimously the intolerable infringement

of individual freedom and of the right of everyone
to silence, because of the abusive use, in private and
public places, of recorded or broadcast music. We ask

  Johnson 1996, p. 171.

189

• 133 •
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the Executive Committee of the International Music

Council to initiate a study from all angles — medical,
scientific and juridical — without overlooking its artistic
and educational aspects, and with a view to proposing
to UNESCO, and to the proper authorities everywhere,
measures calculated to put an end to this abuse.190

* * *

Music has become ubiquitous. Oliver Sachs has pointed

to the contrast with the nineteenth century, when music
had to be sought out — at church, parties, concerts. But
with recording technology:

Half of us are plugged into iPods, immersed in daylong

concerts of our own choosing, virtually oblivious to
the environment — and for those who are not plugged
in, there is nonstop music, unavoidable and often of
deafening intensity, in restaurants, bars, shops, and
gyms.191

In the modern atmosphere, music now resides alongside

the sound of transportation; alarms; sirens; machinery. R.
Murray Schafer, writing in 1977, pointed to one corrective
strategy: “audioanalgesia, that is, the use of sound as a
painkiller, a distraction to dispel distractions.”192 Muzak.
What he decried as “bovine sound slicks”: music “not
intended to be listened to consciously. Thus, the Moozak

190
  Schafer 1997, 97.
191
  Sacks 2008, p. 53.
192
  Schafer 1997, pp. 96–97.

• 134 •
 R. J. W heaton

industry deliberately chooses music that is nobody’s

favorite and subjects it to unvenomed and innocuous
orchestrations.”193

* * *

Moments in Dummy are punishingly loud; they strike with

such force, such taut violence, that, completed, finished,
the air itself rings dented in their wake. Elsewhere the
music proceeds with edges tightened, focused, chiseled,
and its qualities thus sharpened are used to breach your
attention. In case you have been sleeping.
The aggressive mid-range on Dummy; the snares that
explode in your face. Something of the aural fistprint of
punk. Dave McDonald agrees: “It’s there. I’ve arrived.”
Portishead had produced an album braced and steeled
in its architecture against the desire to listen to it in
the background. And yet it had become background
music — easy listening; useful music; music of practical
purpose: an accompaniment to conversation, to dinner
parties; a representation of consumption. Something
middle-class and conventional. “It was just badly inter-
preted, our music,” recalled Geoff Barrow in 2008, “it
was so terribly interpreted.”194

* * *

And yet we may need a more nuanced understanding

of what “background music” actually does. Writer Sean

  Schafer 1997, p. 96.

193

  Jones 2008.
194

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Cranbury, tending bar in the mid-’90s, remembers

playing tracks from the album — “perpetrating it on
people” — for something jarring in its qualities:

what Portishead would bring to it was a sense of dislo-

cation. It’s very easy for people to come in, start drinking,
kind of get locked into a rhythm of drinking and some
really average music being played, and it’s a night like
every other night. So as bartender my job — as musical
coordinator — was to keep things interesting. So it would
be like going from “Sour Times” to the first No Doubt
album to Bjork’s Debut to Beck’s Odelay to Maceo Parker’s
Life on Planet Groove. And back to Dummy and then
Jane’s Addiction or whatever … [Portishead] were that
kind of thing where you would end up halfway through
a conversation you’d look at the person beside you — if
you were a customer I saw this happen — and they’d be
like “What is this?”

He recalls one of the bar managers describing Dummy —

in language prefiguring a future Anti-Pop Consortium
record — as “like shopping carts being smashed together
in a parking lot. And I thought, that’s an awesome obser-
vation. It does actually sound a bit like that. She didn’t
mean it as a compliment.”

* * *

Is it still possible to produce avant garde music? R.

Murray Schafer has suggested that the concept of music
as a rarified, separate entity, something to be enjoyed
exclusively in aesthetic terms, is a concept unique to

• 136 •
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Western thought — and a concept of recent origin. He

suggests that “In many cultures the word ‘music’ does
not exist at all”; that in other cultural environments
“music is effortlessly associated with dance, with physical
tasks, with social festivities and celebrations of all kinds.”
In European culture, by contrast, “What makes it special
is its abstraction from daily life, its exclusivity.”195
Yet our experience with contemporary music is no
longer so. It is certainly ambient and, in its universal
ambience, functional: we do listen to music while working,
laboring, driving. That experience may be communal —
music playing in a bar or a store or heard through the
walls of a neighbor’s apartment. Or it may be personal,
delivered through headphones from a personally curated
media library or a cloud-based streaming service. Music
is everywhere; and, as a consequence of that ubiquity, it is
put to use in contexts unimaginable by its creators.
In 1977’s The Tuning of the World, Schafer pointed to
tape and radio as the two technologies to have enabled
this “irrationality of electroacoustic juxtapositioning,”
and he termed the separation of sounds from their
origins schizophonia. He associated it with a feeling of
“aberration and drama,” and pointed to the introduction
of “many contradictions into modern life and … the
breakup of unified cultural systems and values.”196
Hip-hop, of course, took this aesthetic sensibility
to extremes, taking sounds that had, demonstrably, an
origin outside of their use in hip-hop, and fundamentally

  Schafer 1992, pp. 34–35.

195

  Schafer 1997, pp. 90–94.

196

• 137 •
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reimagining them in new environments. M.C. Doodlebug,

of Digable Planets, mused:

When we got in the game, James Brown had gotten

looped to the point where it was like: “Is James Brown
real, or does he only exist as something to sample and
make a record out of?”197

Sampling is so radical in its removal of materials from

their original contexts that the vinyl crackles and artifacts
are necessary to remind us that it does come from an
identifiable timeline. Particular instruments, timbres,
styles, and genres all provide cultural connotations that
we use to ground ourselves in the music we hear, to
understand what is ‘normal’ and ‘experimental’ within
our experience of it.
But what if speed of communications, or the obscurity
of a sound’s origins, themselves exceed the strength
of those referents? Music can be communicated faster
now than our own ability to gradually form an appre-
ciation of its genre or origin. It can now be chanced
upon — in the immediate environment, through walls
and doors and floors, from cars or from public spaces,
from online recommendations and social media, and
from chance encounters. Our ability to shuffle at random
through enormous music libraries, in our pockets or
in the cloud, removes from us the need to self-identify
according to our taste or mood. Listening becomes a
fragmented experience; an experience always prone to —
sometimes governed by — chance discovery and chance

  Coleman 1997, p.165.

197

• 138 •
 R. J. W heaton

juxtaposition. Aesthetic dislocation is now the norm.

Our entire music environment has become, in effect,
one enormous sampler, introducing music in contexts
completely unimagined by the authors of the sound.
Our exposure to music is no longer limited by genre
or biography, but is something associative, trans-global,
cross-generational, contextless, accidental, situational.
We are confronted with contrasts in style or genre that
are more profoundly disruptive to a particular piece of
music’s internal cohesion than any deliberate avant garde
artistic mission, framed only in the narrow context of its
particular origin and conventions, could ever be. It is
harder to be radical and experimental in contemporary
music because our contemporary experience of music is
itself radical and experimental.

* * *

Julian Jaynes has suggested that we are able to resist

being overpowered by the perspectives and instructions
of others because they exist at a spatial distance from
us, and because we are able to develop opinions of them
against which to evaluate their viewpoints. We are more
easily dominated by those that are closest to us, or of
whom we cannot form distant opinions. These are not
tactics available to those who hear auditory hallucina-
tions — voices — because they arrive unprompted,
unmeasured by distance, unattached to an originating
source that can be judged and rejected.198

  Jaynes 1976, p. 98.

198

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Music that reaches us unprompted, unsolicited, by

chance, to which we are accidentally exposed; music that
arrives without familiar cultural attachments, without
context. That music seems to overwhelm us in its
immediacy, its seductive force, its inescapable proximity.
This music was written for me, or, this music is attacking me.
Is this experience like that of hallucination?

• 140 •
 Solace

The sky at war — Rehabilitation — Consolations —

The Fender Rhodes — Fusion — A dog — Vintage
instruments — Frankenstein repairs — Cassettes — “Roads”
— Earth-shattering vibration — A working man’s club band
and the London Philharmonic Orchestra — The right syllables
— Communication — Mannequins and dummies —
Public assembly — Post-apocalyptic drought — Grief —
The sensation of evil — Fireworks

The skies over Europe, 1943. The Boeing B-17 Flying

Fortress. The Consolidated Aircraft B-24 Liberator.
Death within reach. The skies aflame, blackmorrowed;
in the kindling of cities and shipyards and factories below
history itself inflammate. The souls of thousands a-tinder
and, in the skies above, airmen in the thin clasp of an
atmosphere amok with flak and the riot of war.
Rehabilitation. In Greenboro, North Carolina, at
the Army Air Forces Basic Training Center, Harold
Rhodes, former piano instructor, now Private, builds
small 29-note keyboards using aluminum tubing salvaged
from the wings of B-17s. The Army Air Corps lap model

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can be played in bed.199 It contributes to the relief

and recovery of thousands of veterans, “fingers left
with severe adhesions, stiffened tendons or frost-bite
complications.”200
In motion, it was occupational therapy; at heart, in
mind, it was music therapy. Music as solace from the
world was not new: in World War I music had been
performed at veterans’ hospitals; and the therapeutic
effects of music had been known for centuries. 201 In his
1621 book The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton
described music as “a sovereign remedy against despair
and melancholy:”202

The sound of a trumpet on a sudden, bells ringing, a

carman’s whistle, a boy singing some ballad tune early in
the street, alters, revives, recreates a restless patient that
cannot sleep in the night.203

* * *

After the war Rhodes developed the “Pre-Piano,” a

38-note electric piano with built-in amplifier marketed
to the general public; in the 1950s he joined with Leo
Fender, producing the 32-note Piano Bass. In 1965, in a
venture now owned by CBS: the Fender Rhodes electric
piano. It had a thick, resonant sound, smothering and

199
  Pareles 2001.
200
  New York Times July 23, 1927.
201
  Sacks 2008, 273.
202
  Burton 2001, p. 117.
203
  Burton 2001, p. 116.

• 142 •
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warm in its reach; its ringing upper register, clear and

open; its bright attack, acerbic bite, full sustain. And, of
course, as an electric instrument, the ability to manipulate
it through effects processors and amplification choices.
By the mid-’70s the instrument was in wide use in rock,
R&B, and jazz — most famously in the epochal fusion
recordings featuring Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Joe
Zawinul: Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew;
Hancock’s Head Hunters; albums by Return to Forever;
Weather Report. Its place in hip-hop’s sonic fuselage
was guaranteed by heavy use by jazz-funk mainstays
including The Crusaders and Bob James.

* * *

“We were really into the sounds of old instruments,”

recalls Dave McDonald:

We used to have a ridiculous saying: “Low tech, low

spec? I’ll buy two of them.” … If the instrument was
slightly damaged or — a lot of these old instruments were
never produced exactly the same, so every instrument had
character. And that’s what we were into: the character of
instruments.

He sees in that preference the influence of the music the

band were playing to one another, “all from that ’50s,
’60s, early-’70s period.” Geoff Barrow saw it as a means
to longevity:

We wanted to do something hopefully that was going to

last a long time. Because music today it doesn’t seem to

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have a long life span. And it has to do with something

sonically with old records, that I’m really interested in.
When it sounds old, people always think that it’s good …
if we get something that sounds really old and it gives it
that warmth, it kind of like triggers off sound thoughts
in people’s heads without them even knowing about it.204

There was also a sense of versatility that came from

using original instruments instead of the preset sounds
available on modern keyboards:

We just don’t believe in that. If it’s gonna be a

Hammond, it’s gonna be a Hammond. Or it’s gonna be
a Vox Continental. Those [modern keyboard] sounds
are restricted by the programmer at Yamaha or Korg
or whatever. They’re made to sound like a Hammond,
but in reality, a real Hammond organ has got over 1,000
sounds. Which means you can experiment [with] it and
get your own sound or get a similar sound to one of the
great Hammond players.205

A Fender Rhodes. Two Vox Continentals. An ancient

L-100 Hammond organ that served as the sleeping place
for the studio dog until it one day caught fire. It was
finally pressed back into service after serving as a table in
State of Art’s lounge. “The character of it was the smell
of it,” recalls McDonald. The dog was uninjured.
McDonald also credits the involvement of “the Bailey
brothers,” two local repair merchants who were said

  Uhelszki 1995.
204

  Goldberg 1997a.
205

• 144 •
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to live together in a house “full of old equipment and

broken stuff.”

And because we used so much old equipment, our

equipment was breaking down forever. So these guys
would just turn up, and cart this stuff off. And I don’t
know what they’d do. They were like something out of
The Hills Have Eyes, they’d sort of butcher these things
and get them going again. And they’d never be the same.
But they would be brilliant, you know, they would work
and be slightly odd. So I think I’d have to give some
respect to them for the sound of some of the things.
Because I know what they were doing wasn’t correct.

* * *

The band’s obsession with cassette noise also added

depth, warmth, texture. “They love analogue tape,”
recalls Miles Showell, who mastered both Dummy and
1997’s Portishead. Material, once recorded, would be
transferred — “bounced” — to cassette, so that some of
the sonic qualities of that medium would be preserved in
the final masters. Jay Hodgson points out the qualities
that distinguish cassette from digital media: “it’s soupy,
everything’s a bit mushy. There’s a low pass, a low bias to
it; high end stuff tends to get crushed out on tape.” You
can hear, on “Roads,” some tape hiss, slightly panned to
the right side of the mix. (It’s easier to hear at the end of
the track, when it cuts out slightly before the end of the
final chord.)
Dave McDonald suggests how extensive this technique
was:

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There was a lot of bouncing to cassette. A lot of bouncing

to cassette. I remember we used to have a Tascam cassette
player, a professional Tascam cassette player which we
used quite a lot for putting stuff to cassette. And that’s
part of the maturing process. And then we did a string
session and … instead of putting them to DAT [Digital
Audio Tape] we put them to cassette, which I remember
raised a few odd looks from people …
It’s the sound of cassette. It’s just got a sound to it, you
know? DAT doesn’t have a sound to it. DAT is just 1s and
0s. And you can’t hear the 1s and 0s. The tape is — you
can hear the compression, you hear the tape slowing and
stretching and doing all its organic sort of things. It’s a
physical process. It’s a tape running across a piece of metal.

* * *

Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936 about the elaborate

staging necessary in film to make invisible the high
involvement of technology in its production:

The representation of reality by the film is incomparably

more significant than that of the painter, since it offers,
precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of
reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality
which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is
entitled to ask from a work of art.206

Dummy, in contrast, challenges — represents the decay

of — the idea of an unmediated representation of reality.

  Benjamin 1973, p. 227.

206

• 146 •
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For Portishead, technology was not a transparent means

to convey sound from source to destination. It was a
stage in the process, a stage that — thrillingly — intro-
duced complexity, noise, distortion, ambiguity, accident,
contingency. In Dummy the sounds of tape bed, turntable
chassis; of the years worn into a vintage instrument. The
repair choices. Cables, amplifiers. Transmission via the
FM airwaves. A delight in decay, atrophy, loss. Nothing
is unmediated in Dummy, no experience indivisible from
the circumstance that produced it. “We put stuff on
tape,” said Barrow in 1997. “We put beats to vinyl, then
we sample them. We stick things through little amps and
re-record them again. Usually, the crappier the machine,
the better it sounds.”207

* * *

The Fender Rhodes passage that opens “Roads” swells

in its own tremolo, the chords so deep and resonant that
it commands the song’s extensive dynamic range — the
moment of actual silence between chords at 0:37; the
descent from its climactic moment, the bass solo drawing
the song as, at its height, the strings froth and spray
about it. The Rhodes remains a depthless bed below,
bearing the song throughout its length.
Dave McDonald recalls:

The Fender Rhodes — there was a very specific sound

on that that we used to get, which was all to do with the
trem and using the very low frequencies on the Fender

  Goldberg 1997a.
207

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Twin [amplifier]. A lot of people I’ve worked with since,

they still don’t get how to do a Fender Twin, how to get
that sort of earth-shattering vibration, the power and the
energy to it.

The effect is deeply rhythmic. The chords are driven

forward under their own current. On live performances
you can see Beth Gibbons move to an underlying tempo
of the song that is unmistakably implied by the astonishing
vibration of the chords. When the drums finally enter they
are understated: clipped, dry, and muted — a contrast to
the percussive poundwork elsewhere on the album.
When the strings enter after the first chorus, it is
to explore reaches of the song that have already been
charted by implication. But the approach is at first distant:
as if light across, at night, the surface of the water. The
guitar, iridescent, awash in wah-wah, will slowly saturate
the track; the strings swell with the song, engulf it, rise
with it; bring within it wave upon wave of resonance,
warmth, momentum, inertia. There is an immensity to
the music here, something majestic. When the bass pulls
away from the center of the song after the second chorus
it is to sound something fathomless. There is so little
in “Roads” that sweeps in different directions; and in
its arrangement — so broad, so warm, so limitless in its
depth — it grows from something intimate to something
universal.

* * *

Tim Saul recalls the band listening extensively to Suite

London, a 1972 album by The Peddlers — “a very

• 148 •
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strange kind of mixture of almost working man’s club

crooning over really interesting arrangements with the
London Philharmonic. For some reason we kept going
back to that and we loved that.” With songs written by
keyboardist-singer Roy Phillips and arranged by Peter
Robinson, it is possible, as Bas Möllenkramer points out,
to hear dual Rhodes parts on songs like “Impressions:
Movement I.”208
Suite London isn’t unknown to electronic downtempo
listeners: “I Have Seen” was covered in 2001 on Zero 7’s
Simple Things. And there is some obvious textural overlap
with Dummy: the thundering moments of bass, strings,
and electric piano on “Sequence of Thought”; the slow,
bass-driven opening of “Raining in London,” its drums
practically made for breakbeats.
But it is the album’s opening track, “This Strange
Affair,” with which Dummy most obviously resonates. It
opens with a rich, throbbing low-register chord sequence
played on a Fender Rhodes. Roy Phillips’ voice sits
tender and full above it, and at the song’s conclusion
it will exhaust itself into a cloud of reverberation. The
strings conspire thickly beneath it; there is a dramatic
pause before the drums barricade the song. A ballad
made magnificent in the enormous space between the
arrangement and the human voice.

* * *

Dummy’s lyrics are imagistic, impressionistic. Elliptical.

Shards of imagery — “a faithless path to roam,” “where

  Möllenkrame, undated.
208

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the morn meets the dew and the tide rises.” There are
many moments which seem to voice the emotional
everyday, albeit from a sorrowful, lonely, self-regarding
perspective: “It’s just I’m scared; got hurt a long time
ago”; “I can’t understand myself anymore.” But they are
almost always followed by something that undercuts the
familiarity, that moves towards imagery that is almost
surreal, that plays with the texture of words (“sensation;
sin, slave of sensation”), or that uses near-rhyme to
present a coy humor (“But I’m still feeling lonely —
feeling so unholy”).
The album’s lyrics are so elliptical that it is as if select
words or phrases have been removed; as if they are the
associative output of some emotional state, the narrative
order of which is lost forever except by what it suggests to
the listener. These songs are not clear narratives. Instead
they accumulate; they become the product of fragments
which may mean something different to each listener.
In this patchwork construction the lyrics are not unlike
the production process that went into the underlying
tracks — sounds that seem to cohere together through
some alchemy, some internal logic the workings of which
remain obscure. Reading the lyrics without the music
is unsettling; yet restored to the music the strangeness
seems to recede, as if neutralized by an otherworldliness
of another order.
Beth Gibbons has described her song-writing
accordingly:

it’s almost the atmosphere you create by juggling the

words round rather than what you actually say. It’s not so
much a matter of a beginning or an end as a feeling which

• 150 •
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you have to express in different ways or a word that has

got the right syllables.209

This inscrutability, opacity, is intrinsic to her approach.

“I think she’s kind of asking more questions than being
fragile, really,” Geoff Barrow has said. “And showing her
frustration with modern society.”210
Talking to Stuart Clark in 1995, Gibbons conceded
that she was “naturally pessimistic,” but denied that the
songs on Dummy were a naked expression of personal
suffering. “I’m not trying to save on psychiatrist’s bills.
It’s more me asking, ‘does anyone else feel this way?’
And if it does reach the point where it gets uncom-
fortably personal, I tend to disguise what I’m saying in
the phrasing.”211 It is, indeed, the impossibility of true
connection — communication — that is suggested by
the content and the form of these lyrics. Adrian Utley
reported a conversation in which she explained her
reluctance to grant interviews “because that’s what I’m
talking about in my lyrics all the time, the inability to
communicate.”212
But there remains a commitment to emotional honesty.
“The difficult part of it,” she told Ben Thompson in
1994, “is to connect with what you really feel rather
than the way in which it’s been portrayed that you ought
to.”213

209
  Thompson 1998, p. 221.
210
  NPR 2008.
211
  Clark 1995.
212
  McLean 2008.
213
  Thompson 1998, p. 221.

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* * *

The opaque nature of the album’s lyrics is in keeping

with the inscrutability of the title — Dummy — which
suggests multiple meanings but defies final definition.
Dumb: a mute inability to communicate. Dummy:
a pacifier. Dummy: an artificial personality, something
adjacent or replacement to a real identity: a mannequin
that can be adorned with changing personalities. As if
one’s identity must adjust in different contexts, adapt to
different audiences; as if identity is an experiment, always
contingent, subject to experimentation.
And, against this, dummy, an insult, a self-chastising
stupidity — a refusal to feel self-pity but never an unwill-
ingness to engage in self-reflection and anger.
Somehow in these meanings there is the feeling of
a lack of agency — of being acted upon rather than
acting. And a struggle to become aware that it is delusion
to believe that identity is the dominion of the self,
rather than — like the album — something collectively
assembled from the materials around and before us.

* * *

Dummy’s songs explore the self. The accused self of “It

Could be Sweet.” The isolated, misunderstood self of
“Numb.” The abandoned, suffering self of “Pedestal.”
Lost, exposed, world-weary. Trapped, left behind.
Self-distrusting. But those sentiments — even when
clearly expressed — are never the story of each song;
they never center a narrative, never dominate. Instead
they are surrounded, beset, thicketed, by the confused,

• 152 •
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imagistic, fragmented experience of the world, never

fully revealed; never fully understood.
The problem of perspective occurs again and again:
the impossibility of truly seeing things through the eyes
of another, the limiting viewpoint within which we view
the world. In “Strangers,” she sings, “Did you realize,
no one can see inside your view?” In “Glory Box” she
challenges listeners to “take a little look from our side,”
and invokes the possibilities of “this new frame of mind.”
Other selves appear, glimpsed in questions and accusa-
tions: “Did you really want?”; “Not like you do”; “You
abandoned me”; “Give me a reason to love you.” But
these others are always in the second person. Never “he”;
never “she.” Even “they” only appears once, on “Roads”
— “regardless of what they say.” The effect should be
claustrophobic, giving the impression that the self is
more acted upon than creating itself — but Gibbons’
vocals always undermine the other, and always speak of
the self-abnegating self with irony, distance.

* * *

The band has made explicit political comments in inter-

views. Geoff Barrow, for example, expressed shock at
1994’s Criminal Justice Act, which provided for the
regulation of outdoor gatherings at which the music
played was “wholly or predominantly characterised by
the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”214 The

214
  Goldberg 1997. The pertinent text of the Criminal Justice
Act (1994) can be found online at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/
ukpga/1994/33/part/V/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves

• 153 •
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kind of gatherings that, years before, the Wild Bunch and

the Bristol sound systems had engaged in.
Nonetheless, Dummy is not an overtly political
album. Yet there is something profoundly disruptive
in its focus on the contingent, provisional nature of
individual identity; on the impossibility of establishing
and maintaining a sense of self in isolation from others.
This is not an album about community, or about
society. But it is an album about the complexity of
identity, the permanent engagement upon the terrain
of relationships. Exile, betrayal, distrust; desire — all
these emotional states take place at the ever-shifting
boundaries of our relationships to one another. Such
a position is a corrosive response to the dominant
political philosophy of the ’80s and early ’90s: the idea
of pure agency, that unmediated personal ambition and
meritocracy were the ideal determinants of the structure
of society.
Dummy instead presents a vision of identity that is
fraught, fragmented; of secret identities hidden in the
shadows of the official self.

* * *

“Roads” appears in Rachal Talalay’s 1995 film Tank Girl,

an adaptation of the iconic comic book, set in a post-
apocalyptic future in which drought is the condition
of the world. Talalay has suggested that the film’s final
execution was compromised because of studio inter-
ference, and commercial considerations also shaped the
soundtrack. But she remembers that “Portishead was
used from the beginning and no one had any problems.”

• 154 •
 R. J. W heaton

The song appears after Lori Petty’s title character has

witnessed the murder of her friends and been captured
by the corporation that controls distribution of the
Earth’s remaining water supplies. “Roads” accompanies
a scene in which she — like the other enslaved workers
— wash themselves down in an abrasive shower of dust,
powder, ash. Talalay remembers:

Ironically the scene in the dry showers in Tank Girl

was written as horrifying — the powder rough and just
another no-water indignity. However, in my (sometimes
failed) attempts to move away from cliché, I decided that
Tank Girl was tough enough to enjoy the pain. So I shot
it as something pleasurable — a calm interlude from the
misery of the slavery. This doesn’t really come out in the
film but the sequence turned into a little respite from
the violence. We then put “Roads” against it and it was
perfect tonally, then tweaked the sequence to work rhyth-
mically to the song. It’s one of my favorite sequences
and the Portishead song is perfect — beautiful but
haunting — and works well with the wide slow motion
interlude. There are some moments when music simply
has synchronicity with the time and place.

* * *

Solace.

Many men are melancholy by hearing music, but it is a

pleasing melancholy that it causeth; and therefore to such
as are discontent, in woe, fear, sorrow, or dejected, it is a

• 155 •
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most present remedy: it expels cares, alters their grieved

minds, and easeth in an instant.215

Amy Clarke used “Wandering Star” as the song against

which to choreograph material “about the struggle to
break out of a part of life that restricts you.” The song
provided a strong correlation for those themes:

The anger and the pain that you can feel when it feels like
you’re trapped and there is no way out. But the support
you can find when you discover other people with similar
pain … It was a great track to input choreography with
writing and pain because of the distorted noises within
the song.
The women of the dance unite towards the end
and collectively dance out their anguish in unison. And
though it is still there, there’s a newfound unity between
them as the song ends.

Struggling with the circumstances surrounding her

father’s death, Lee Thomson — who recorded a simple,
affecting YouTube cover of the song — recalls how
“Roads” reached her:

it captured especially — more than any other song — the

agonizing struggle that I faced with my dad’s suffering
and then the end of his life. The opposition that I faced in
trying to rectify a situation which was just overwhelming.
For me that song — and the amount of convoluted hints
and the angst that it evokes, for me, is the feelings of lost

  Burton 2001, p. 118.

215

• 156 •
 R. J. W heaton

hope I had, and how alone I felt. Trying to help my dad.

Against a lot of opposition.

Music may give us comfort because we recognize within

it that others have felt the same as we. That there are
others abroad upon the night. To hear a shared pain; to
hear it explored in terms that may help us better under-
stand it. Of Dummy, Dayna Vogel says: “I find it a dark
album but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. They’re not
happy songs. They don’t make me feel happy. They make
me feel deeply.”

* * *

At the outset of Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote

“Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon
we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities.”
Central to the achievement of “Roads” is that the vocal
is not lost against the breadth and majesty of the song,
but instead preserves in itself something that is signal,
fixed, human.
There is such doubt in this song; the questions
Gibbons asks — “can’t anybody see?” — are so immense.
But they are framed with such certainty, with such clarity,
that they feel like an acknowledgment, a statement of
rights.
“Roads” is an astonishing vocal performance. Eight
times the song asks the same question — “How can it
feel this wrong?” — and each expression of that universal
question brings within its arc more meanings. There is
a searching clarity in the first iteration, a clarity that
seems to grow at the beginning of the second statement,

• 157 •
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almost with the force of an accusation, but then tails into

a moment of doubt — “this wrong?”
The second verse, as if bestruck by the doubt, is
quieter than the rest of the song; it is also strangely
unbalanced, the first word (“storm”) almost unintelli-
gible; the second line — “I feel” — is adrift, unattached
to any other sentence. “I got nobody on my side /
And surely that ain’t right,” Gibbons sings, faltering
on the last word as if doubting the truth of her claim;
repeating it again, more lyrically, as if drifting further
from certainty. Is there enough doubt in the world?
“How can it feel this wrong?” Even posing that
question — again and again, undrowned by the sweep
of the world — becomes a statement of consciousness,
of defiance, a plea against the arbitrary and indifferent
work of the world upon us. Compare the same words
at 1:29 and, later, at 3:48, the defiance, the doubt;
the perseverance. The refrain is voiced breathy with
fleeting determination, sibilant with anxiety; an almost
undetectable protest on “can”; a wounded evocation on
“feel”; a fracture of disbelief on “wrong.” Again; again.
How I am abroad upon the deep.

* * *

“How can it feel this wrong?” The quintessential

humanist question, asserting the place of the self in the
world; asserting the right of the self to question the
world.
In an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Tara — the
lesbian partner of one of the main characters — tells her
terrifying father, hesitantly, “It doesn’t feel … evil. Sir.”

• 158 •
 R. J. W heaton

“Evil,” he replies, a heartless and callous restatement

of the world’s wrong, “never does.”

* * *

After the tempest of the song’s crescendo, the bass solo

moving across the song as a rip current, the questions
return, more forlorn, so destitute that the very word —
“wrong” — is invisible in uncertainty, almost swallowed
by the song, so wounded and fragile in the uncertainty
of its own statement. But the voice survives, asking with
beautiful vulnerability, with becalmed persistence, as the
song recedes, why the world is as it is. To not be lost in
the unshored and harborless immensities.
Elsewhere in Dummy, Gibbons asserts, deflects,
bullies, abnegates, threatens, promises, denies, comforts,
defends, protects, flirts. There are a few things she does
not do. She does not genuflect, defer, flee, avoid, or
mitigate. It is always an active performance. She is always
there. She seduces, commands, caresses, ignites.
In “Roads,” she pleads.

* * *

The empowerment that this music represents. As Lee

Thomson suggests:

It sustains for me times where I’m either depressed,

feeling rejected or disappointed, feeling maybe a victim
in some way, whether that’s my own doing or thoughts
or I actually am feeling a victim of some kind. It’s just
empowering. Even from a weak vantage point, if you

• 159 •
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listen to that album, you’ll be empowered, and inspired,

and strengthened.

The band was well aware of the impact of “Roads.”

Miles Showell mastered the album in early summer
1994, recording track-by-track to a “dump” tape, a
technique which allowed no ability to make changes. But
he needed to dub the album again to another cassette
when it was realized that “the pause after ‘Roads’ and
before ‘Pedestal’ was a bit too short and it needed to be
lengthened in order that the listener could take in the
impact of ‘Roads’ before anything new came crashing
in.”
“Roads” was never a single; it must exist as one of the
most beloved album tracks of all time. Even the concert
clips and covers posted to YouTube receive special
dedications to loved ones. This song is beloved. Listen to
the applause — rapture — that greets the opening chords
on the band’s 1998 Roseland NYC Live release.
It is as though “Roads” is a celebration. Tim Saul
remembers the evening on which the vocals were
recorded. “It was bonfire night. I can remember very
specifically that it was bonfire night and the fireworks
were going off somewhere outside and we were trying to
finish vocals off.”

• 160 •
 Resonance

Beirut — An airstrike — We’ll get back to you —

Permission — Chet Baker — Jazz quartets and slowed-down
hip-hop — Studio trends — Beach guitar —
Advertisements and imitators — Swinging London — Cover
versions — Noise — Punk — Two mics and a drum kit — A bush
radio — An amazing sucking sound — “Pedestal” —
EQ and compression — Snares —
A refusal to submit to exile

Zeid Hamdan was 15 or 16 when he first heard Dummy.

He was in Beirut’s legendary B-018 club, named for the
apartment from which owner Naji Gebran used to run
a club named Musical Therapy. B-018 is now located on
the site of a former quarantine camp, the location of a
massacre at the outset of Lebanon’s limitless civil war. In
the middle of the ’90s it was on the industrial edge of the
city; unlicensed, remote; “known to play the really edgy
music as soon as it was released,” recalls Hamdan.
Hearing “Glory Box” he was stunned by the
arrangement: “minimal; the vocals really in front …
Compared to the Arabic music, which is really loaded
with arrangements, I felt that Portishead had something

• 161 •
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really pure.” He was to hear in Massive Attack’s Mezzanine

a similar aesthetic direction: “just a bass line, a kick and a
rimshot, and beautiful vocals on it.”
His reaction was immediate. “I really wanted to hear
Arabic music this way.”
Playing guitar in a band, he was already working with
Yasmin Hamdan (no relation), a singer who he felt had
“the same vibe, and same sensuality in her voice.” The
approach of their band, SoapKills, was a marriage of
aesthetics and necessity: when other members of the
band withdrew from musical careers, Hamdan replaced
the bass and drum parts using a Roland Groovebox. “I
didn’t want to go complicated, so I really programmed
essentials. Linear beat; bassline just to support the
synthetic drum. So that’s why I had this very pure sound,
with not so much arrangement on it.”
You can hear some these ideas being worked out on
Live at Circus, a partial recording of a June 1999 concert
that was interrupted by an Israeli airstrike. “Habibi” is
a traditional song; in SoapKills’ arrangement it has the
synthetic stamp of a drum machine, a puncturing snare
sound and colliding breakbeats underpinning a jazzy
trumpet solo. Bater, in 2001, is leaner, starker; songs like
“Lé Zaalen” and “Coit Me” stretch Yasmin Hamdan’s
voice intimate and supple across the songs’ slow builds.
There’s a fantastic rhythmic drop on the latter track, a
bassline throbbing its way into the coalition of breaths
and lips and fingertip guitar riffs and the crisp edges of
drums within which the song has swollen.
SoapKills’ approach to Arabic popular music isolated
them from their peers — “we were the only people
who were playing around with Arabic music, trying to

• 162 •
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modernize it,” recalls Hamdan. “All the others were very

respectful to Arabic music; they would never propose
a new way for it.” That attitude remains shared by the
generation of media programmers who determine what
receives radio airplay in Lebanon, for whom SoapKills’
material was “too much underground and unacceptable”:

We would go to a radio station and ask them to play;

they would say “But what is this kind of music? When
do want us to play it? We cannot play it between this
pop star and this pop star.” They would say, ‘leave us the
CD and maybe we’ll play it at midnight.’ And in fact they
didn’t play it.

* * *

As musician and recordist Jay Hodgson suggests, Dummy

“basically made electronica safe in a pop context,”
3 to 4 years before the crossover success in North
America of Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers.
For him Dummy’s production methodology prefigures
the “project” approach that digital audio workstations
— ProTools, Cubase, Ableton Live, Reason — now
allow, wherein experimentation with unusual sounds
and timbre are made possible by plugins and presets.
“[Dummy] is so forward-thinking to a certain extent. It
makes so much more sense to me now, as a listener, than
it did back then.”
Mark Oliver Everett, of alternative rock band Eels, has
cited Dummy’s production aesthetic as a key influence on
songs like “Novocaine for the Soul,” and “Susan’s House”:

• 163 •
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The combination of “loops” made from drum patterns

mixed with Lalo Schifrin film-score samples and the
singer’s voice on top of it all fascinated me, and I was
immediately inspired to get back into my old sound-
collage world — but apply it to my new songwriting
world.216

Belinda Kazanci, who with Adam Beltran is part of

Echocell, heard in Dummy an approach that brought
together many of the musics that had inspired her. “It
was like, here it is: this is what you’ve been looking for.”
Dummy offered many musicians permission to bring
together the sounds that had inspired them; to make
music in ways that would not otherwise have been
acceptable. Jay-Jay Johanson is a Swedish musician
whose first two albums track fairly closely to a stylistic
roadmap provided by Portishead. Dummy provided a way
to move beyond the constraints of his original musical
inspiration:

Chet Baker came to my small town when I was 14. I

usually never went down to my dad’s jazz club but this
night I decided to go. Chet’s performance changed my
life. I realized that even though I was shy, I could also be a
performer. The way Chet was sitting there in the shadow,
whispering in the microphone made me understand that
you don’t need to be extrovert to be on stage. I started
writing more jazz-oriented songs after that evening, but
it took many years until I found a way to arrange and
produce my songs. I created a jazz quartet but hated the

  Everett 2009, p. 106.

216

• 164 •
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traditional result. I wanted something more modern and

mysterious. It wasn’t until Portishead released Dummy
that I got inspired and encouraged. I decided to slow
down my hip-hop singles by playing them on 33 rpm
instead of 45. I sang my own melodies to the instru-
mental b-sides on wrong tempo and I felt that I was on
the right way.

* * *

Andy Wright — who had worked on Massive Attack’s

Protection — produced “Leave Me Alone,” a track from
Natalie Imbruglia’s 1997 album Left of the Middle. The
song circulated online (and still does) mis-credited in
such a way as to suggest Portishead’s involvement. Many
of the trademarks of the downtempo sound are there: the
vinyl pop and crackle; a drop-out chorus with a flightly
vocal over an indistinct, retro-sounding sample; a loping
bassline; the drum loops; the close and intimate vocal;
the tremolo guitar resembling in its timbre the cimbalom
of “Sour Times.”
“There are always trends in the studio,” Wright notes,
particularly around drum sounds:

Those sort of things had a fairly long tail. You have a

year of people going, “Can we have a snare a bit like ‘She
Drives Me Crazy’ by Fine Young Cannibals or ‘Word
Up,’ Cameo, or something like that. There was a real
kind of Bristol wave around that time. Blue Lines was the
first of those albums, and then Dummy, and Protection.
They were all kind of leading the way at that time …
It was all kind of fairly downbeat; in terms of recording

• 165 •
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you’d never pull a sound off any kind of sample library;

almost every sound on there had to be spun in off vinyl
and recorded and if you just took a snare sound for
example it would come in off a record. Somebody would
go “I like that snare sound there” and you’d spin it in and
edit it. That was just the way it got made at the time. A
combination of samples and loops and ambiences and
strings with a combination of emotive singing and rap.

Producers would acquire drum loops and sounds and

unused ideas from previous projects — in Andy Wright’s
case, including from Massive Attack’s Protection — for
use in future projects. Working with optical drives —
then expensive — with a capacity of perhaps just 600
megabytes, there were necessarily limits on the number
of sounds that a producer could have available at one
time.
The tremolo guitar sound on “Leave Me Alone” was
not an attempt to echo Portishead but instead a remnant
of the work Wright had been doing — a few hours before
meeting Imbruglia — to pitch a commercial soundtrack
in style of beach guitar pioneer Dick Dale.
This is how genres retain their shape. Inertia; the
constraints of technology; coincidence. Accident. Taste.
Not — or not alone — the calculation of commercial
prospects.

* * *

Portishead refused — refused — to license music for

advertisements. But Tim Saul remembers having conver-
sations with people adamant that they had heard tracks

• 166 •
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from Dummy used in commercials. ‘Soundalike’ tracks

were being produced to serve as substitutes, the product
of an attitude that Saul describes as “oh well if we put a
guitar that sounds a bit Bond-y over a slowed-down beat
then that’s gonna work.”
Adrian Utley in 1997 was sanguine about imitators,
suggesting that “I think it’s not that bad. They only
sound like us in a very superficial way.” He pointed in
particular to Beth Gibbons’ voice as something that
distinguished their sound. But he did admit an irritation
with “the way our guitar and singing was shamelessly
copied” for a Range Rover commercial.217
Geoff Barrow was dismissive of bands working in
an immediately proximate style, “not because of any
comparisons with us — it’s just that, literally, I don’t get
any emotion from it.”218 Utley told an online chat group
in 1997 that “I think people should maybe be influenced
by us and move it on one … That’s part of the reason we
felt we had to reinvent ourselves.”219
Tim Saul contrasts the exhaustive production and
songwriting stages that went into Dummy with some
of the music that followed. “It tended to be a little bit
like looking for that sort of atmosphere a little bit by
numbers. I think you can hear when a musician has gone
through a process. And when they’ve jumped on the
fashionable thing.”

* * *

217
  Watt 1997.
218
  Goldberg 1997b.
219
  Utle, undated.

• 167 •
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Dummy seemed to precipitate — license — a resur-

gence of interest in a certain period in British culture;
a nostalgia for the ’60s, for the cultural posture of the
Bond films; for John Barry, Shirley Bassey; Cold War
espionage films; London’s club scene, including the
legendary Eve Club on Regent Street (where Portishead
played one of their first live media events). It was allied
to the cultural boosterism that saw trip-hop hyped
as an authentic British response to American hip-hop,
or “Britpop” (a similarly porous label) positioned as
a response to American grunge. Both were associated
in some ways with the “Cool Britannia” term which
seemed to culminate in the election of Tony Blair’s “New
Labour” government in 1997. At this remove it feels
implausibly dated and somewhat empty of substance.
In an interview with Stuart Clark, Beth Gibbons was
skeptical about the authenticity of the sentiment:

You know, it’s mainly the people who weren’t around

during the ’60s that hanker after them. I can’t say I share
the obsession myself but it was the decade when Britain
got its own pop culture and I imagine there was a feeling
among musicians and filmmakers that they were breaking
new ground because everything before them had been so
staid and establishment. Personally, I think a lot of the
records and TV programmes that are held up now as
high art are complete bollocks, but I wouldn’t say that to
Geoff because he’d be most offended.220

  Clark 1995.
220

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Many of Dummy’s signature sounds became common coin

in the second half of the ’90s. The John Barry soundtrack
allusions; the highly processed vocal track; the theremin.
It’s easy to see in this a kind of easy imitation. Yet so many
of these moments had independent expressions which
were striking in their own right. Mono’s “Life in Mono,”
with its crisp allusions to John Barry’s Persuaders! theme
(not to mention its sample from The Ipcress File). The
introduction to “Life in Mono” sounds like seven tracks
accelerating, backwards, a shuddering retreat into the
arms of a vocal which has the most astonishing and elegant
delicacy. There was Shirley Bassey’s actual appearance,
arch, campy, on The Propellorheads’ caustically decon-
structive big beat album Decksanddrumsandrockandroll.
Goldfrapp’s “Lovely Head,” and “Pilots,” with Alison
Goldfrapp’s voice, liquified and poured through a Korg
MS-20 synthesizer to collapse the difference between the
human voice and the theremin.

* * *

Dummy itself erects bulwarks against its imitation. The

album is such a complex creation of its constituent parts
— confederation might be a better word; alliance — that
it resists the simplification required for easy absorption.
The inimitable range and emotional accuracy of Gibbons’
vocal performance; the band’s treatment of the instru-
ments and the sounds within their armory. There is such
a close identification between song and arrangement that,
the melodic strength of these songs notwithstanding, the
very definitiveness of their treatment on Dummy has in
some ways prevented their further distribution.

• 169 •
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Many of the treatments that you might expect to be

transformative are in fact retreads. A version of “Roads”
that appears on doom metal band My Dying Bride’s
2001 album Meisterwerk 2 is a restatement of the original
arrangement of the song. So too, by and large, is the
cover of “Glory Box” by singer-songwriter legend John
Martyn, although his alteration of the lyrics, removing
the explicit gender references, unforgivably defangs
the song. Key Beyond’s masterful 2006 recreation of
“Wandering Star” is a virtuoso symphony of beatboxing
but it is not a total re-imaging of the song itself.
Most of the admittedly few tracks that sample from
Dummy do so boringly — the opening of “Wandering
Star” meaninglessly co-opted into Three 6 Mafia’s 2003
“Fuck that Shit”; shards of the song confusingly woven
into Canibus’s 2003 “Psych Evaluation.” True, a snatch of
the overdriven organ that opens “Numb” was used effec-
tively — soulful; unsettling — in a remix of Aaliyah’s “If
Your Girl Only Knew.” But the brief moment of “Numb”
that appears in the roll-call of influences and hat-tips
that comprise the hidden introduction to Unkle’s 1998
Psyence Fiction, a cornerstone of the downtempo genre, is
in a sense emblematic of Dummy’s superficial, unstated,
influence.

* * *

And there are the moments on Dummy that challenge

— defy — imitation. Sounds that are abstract, industrial,
synthetic; grinding dirt and static into the surface of
the sound. Intersecting waves of synthetic sound close

• 170 •
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“Mysterons,” anaesthetizing each other into silence.

Harsh, abstract sounds hover over the last minute of
“Numb,” all reverberation and repeating delay. In “Glory
Box” there is the moment, at 4:13, where the snare and
silt of the song lie pulverized beneath the remorseless
bass and kick drum.

* * *

There is an aggression to the album’s drum sounds, with

some distortion clearly audible — perhaps the product
of the low resolution sampler used. On tracks like
“Mysterons,” recordist Jay Hodgson hears a frequency
boost in the “danger range,” an area of the midrange in
which human hearing is so good that “it doesn’t take a
lot of volume to make something sound too loud.” The
effect reminds him of punk:

punk records are often mastered so the midrange is right

out front because that sounds really aggressive and loud.
And you hear the pick attacks and you hear the sneer. It’s
a really aggressive range.

* * *

Dave McDonald recalls that “on the drum sounds we

were obsessed with old records, old soul tunes. It’s
basically what the hip-hop guys were sampling at that
stage.” In 1995 Geoff Barrow had pointed to 1976 as a
year after which material was no longer useful for the
purposes of sampling because “the production of drums

• 171 •
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sort of changed around then.”221 McDonald enjoyed the

way that lo-fi recording choices maintained the feel of
vintage records:

[On] a lot those old records the drums were quite

slapdash, the way they were done … There’s the classic
thing that — 24 microphones around the drum kit, it just
reeks of indecision, you know? Whereas if you’ve got two
mics around the drum kit and the drummer’s playing it
right, there you go. It cuts down your options. You have
to get it right.

The treatment of drums after they were recorded was

representative of the entire recording process:

Sometimes we would pass the drums back through a

little Marshall practice amp. We used all those techniques
of passing drums back through amplifiers. I think at
one stage I had an old 1960s bush radio, and we had a
little transmitter. And we put the sound — I know we
definitely did this once or twice with Beth’s vocals —
sent it through the FM airwaves and just re-recorded it
through the old little Bush FM radio. A lot of just manip-
ulating the sound once you’ve got it. What I was saying
about the slapdash drum thing: if you just record the
drums, and you listen back to it, you think eugh, that’s not
that interesting. But then you have to remember when
those old guys did it then those drums were compressed
and bounced and then put onto a record, and then you
hear that record and that record’s like 20 years old and

  Jenkins 1995.
221

• 172 •
 R. J. W heaton

— it’s just got character to it because it’s gone through all

these processes. And that’s very much what we did with
our drums. We processed. But in a very commando way.

Just as on the vocals, compression was used on the

album’s drum parts, flattening the difference between
the naturally louder and softer elements of a sound. But
the band also foregrounded a technique — referred to
as “pumping” — that was regarded as unorthodox, even
incorrect, by audio professionals.
Pumping occurs when compression is removed from
a sound in an unconventional manner, and the return
of its component elements to their natural relationships
confounds the aural expectations of the listener. For
example, a drum sound naturally decays after its first
impact, trailing into softness. But if compression has
been applied and is then released faster than the natural
decay of the sound, aspects of that sound will seem to
increase in volume while the listener expects it to decrease.
Pumping is an entirely artificial sound: a product of
studio signal processing.
Dave McDonald recalls the band’s discovery of the
technique:

We kind of discovered — by accident — there was a

Drawmer compressor unit, the LX20; we found that if
you reversed — if you took the attack on a very slow
speed, and the release on a very fast speed, and you put
it onto a drum beat, you would get this amazing sucking
sound … and we just became obsessed with that. That
was our little secret tool.

• 173 •
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* * *

“Pedestal” is characteristically sinewy in its arrangement,

not least in the economy of its introduction: the shuttling,
shuffling pulsebeat, a kick drum so thick and dense it
sounds like a mutiny in the republic of silence. Then the
turntablism skids across the surface of the song before
igniting around it the hissy detritus of the ride cymbals.
The bassline swings around the bottom of song as if
tethered to it, an abductor muscle, pulling away at the
beginning of every measure.
The compression-induced pumping — that “sucking”
sound that Dave McDonald describes — is plainly
audible on the ride cymbals in this song, rebuking
the natural tendency of those sounds to recede amid
their own glitter and hiss. It’s a radical sound. “There’s
all these rules for dynamics processing,” suggests Jay
Hodgson. “You’re not supposed to compress to the point
where the pumping’s really obvious. Well they do it
really obviously. It’s pumping.”
It almost sounds as if the ride cymbals are being
played in reverse. The effect distributes across the
firmament of the song a gorgeous meniscus of sound,
a dome of residual fizz, opening the middle of the song
for the plunging, suspended bass line and the two alter-
nating harmonics that vault, sway across the top of it. It’s
dreamily seductive.
The lyrics on “Pedestal” are among the most opaque
in the album, although as elsewhere they acquire — in
the accumulation of images and the emptying-out of
emotional commonplaces (“You abandoned me … Lost
forever”) — a kind of cumulative emotional weight, in

• 174 •
 R. J. W heaton

this case a sense of dreamy contemplation of the nature

of isolation.
The vocal entrance into the song is so sudden, and
so densely reverberated, that it piles into the rhythmic
impetus that culminates the end of the first line, the
crowding of syllables onto “miracle.” From this the next
line is a relief of tension, a descent into aridity — “Where
the wind blows dry” — a trick that is repeated in the
second verse.
The instrumental break in the middle of the song —
building on the squalls of white noise that appear at 1:04
— is one of the most abstract moments in the album,
a collision of sounds being cast beyond each other by
Barrow’s turntables. But the coy, muted trumpet solo that
follows — released, too, from Barrow’s decks — helps
establish a textural imprint of jazz more clearly on this
song than anywhere else on the album. As in bebop the
rhythmic architecture of the song is splayed out across
cymbals as much as driven into the ground on a snare
and kick. On a bootleg version of the track, performed
in Blackpool in May 1995, you can hear the band stretch
into the song’s abundant swing, and it is almost as though
“Pedestal” contains another song entirely, a dreamy,
woozy ballad with a weatherless good nature — “Hush,
hear him cry” — to offset its stark unreadability.
There is a tension in “Pedestal,” a dual quality that
characterizes many of Dummy’s songs and suggests both
its widespread appeal and why so many attempts to
absorb its influence are led astray. “Pedestal” does sound
like a jazzy ballad. “Wandering Star” contains within it
the suggestion of a lullaby; “Roads” is an anthem in the
guise of a ballad. Composed in a kind of collaborative

• 175 •
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isolation, these songs are actually amalgamations of

multiple songs. Covered by unwary imitators, they break
open and threaten to consume them.

* * *

The sense that Dummy is an overwhelming aesthetic

presence is something that Michael Almereyda has
suggested, recalling its place in his 1994 film Nadja:

Sixteen years later, reviewing the two patches where we

featured Portishead, I’m surprised by how brief they are.
In my memory, the songs threatened to overpower the
scenes or, rather, to vampirically fasten onto them, to take
possession of the images and never let go. Now, trolling
through YouTube, I see that someone has chopped and
spliced the entire movie to accompany the full length
and trajectory of “Strangers.” Taking a cue from a bit of
Nadja’s dialogue, it’s titled “Comfort in Shadows,” and it
shows just how companionable these sounds and images
can be. Late in the fading day, I completely approve.

* * *

Dub’s influence on Dummy is much more tonal and

textural than it is rhythmic, something that distinguishes
it slightly from Bristol compatriots like Massive Attack
and Tricky. “Pedestal” is just one of the songs on which
the band’s studio aesthetic is comparable to that of dub
— as Jay Hodgson suggests, the “heavy-duty reverb
and fast repeating delay” applied at around 2:00 are a
convention of that genre. Its techniques are apparent

• 176 •
 R. J. W heaton

in the extensive use of Space Echo on Gibbons’ vocals.

Dub’s dragging tempos and awareness of space are
everywhere on the album; above all its studio production
aesthetic is a critical part of Dummy’s story.
The willingness to foreground studio processing was
also something Geoff Barrow had been exposed to at the
Coach House. Massive Attack producer Jonny Dollar,
who was something of a mentor to him, spoke to Sound
on Sound in 2000 about the unusual timing gap which
appears around the Bob Dylan sample on Gabrielle’s
“Rise”:

We knew that it would cause the FM compressors on the

radio to suck and blow like crazy, and that it would act as a
little bit of a hook. People love the sound of compression
happening, and you miss that a lot on modern records. On
old records, you can really hear the compressors working
and it makes them much more exciting — it’s the reason
the Led Zeppelin drums sound so good, for example.222

Tim Saul points to Geoff Barrow’s command of

technique:

amongst Geoff’s musical vision … he was an absolute

demon with the science of EQ’ing and compressing. And
he developed that working alongside Dave McDonald.

Barrow himself is more modest, seeing the sonic experi-

mentation as in part a by-product:

  Senior 2000.
222

• 177 •
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It comes down to … naivety on my part. Trying to get like

a retro sound, and just not getting it. It kind of ended up
weird, and it’s not exciting enough, so you over-compress
it. You just make it all lumpy and everything else.223

“It was all about making things old,” recalls McDonald.

“But full of energy.”

* * *

You can hear some of the album’s frequency manipulation

in play by comparing the variety and texture of Dummy’s
drum sounds. Listen, for example, to the massive snare
sound on “Biscuit” — metallic, harsh, distorted, leading
a trail of detritus and noise. Now the tidy, compressed
sounds on “Roads,” where the drums feel uncharac-
teristically discrete, the kick drum abbreviated in its
sustain. There’s a similarly compact snare sound on “It’s
a Fire,” as if the bottom frequencies have been sliced
away. On “Wandering Star,” in contrast, the filtered and
quieted snare hit that is almost inaudible at the start
of song continues under the main snare hit to add a
prolonged block-like feel. On “Strangers” there is almost
a sandpaper-like quality to the aggressively pumped
snares, amid that track’s percussive complexity. “Gone
back to Portishead for some drum inspiration,” posted
Jamie Floodgate, of London’s Tomb Crew, on Twitter.
“Damn, nobody does drums like on ‘Strangers’.”224

  B.B.C. 2010.
223

  http://twitter.com/#!/jamietombcrew/status/35017153526636544
224

• 178 •
 R. J. W heaton

* * *

Musicians as diverse as video game soundtrack composer

Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill) and Kanye West have cited
Portishead as an influence.225 It is next to impossible to
detangle the varied influences of the stronger formative
downtempo artists — Portishead, Massive Attack, Tricky,
D.J. Shadow, Dan the Automator, D.J. Krush, and others;
nonetheless the strength of that collective influence is
clearly exerted upon a generation of producers including
Blockhead, RJD2, Danger Mouse, and Diplo.226

* * *

Zeid Hamdan continues to face cultural resistance in

his native Lebanon. The country’s media class persis-
tently resists his electronic arrangements with Arabic
vocals. And with Lebanon lacking effective copyright
enforcement, he collects little from the limited exposure
his music and his remixes do receive. He depends upon
support from abroad: international licensing of his work
for film; tours to Italy, London. But he lacks domestic
success.

So somehow I consider I haven’t succeeded musically. I

don’t want to go and live abroad. My real challenge is
that my people like it and it becomes here a success. So I
will stay here until it does.

  Paiva 2006.
225

  Levinson 2005.
226

• 179 •
 Loss

“Biscuit” — A creative transformation — Sick of love — Song of the

South — Genre exhaustion — The problem with trip-hop — The
Bristol scene — The denial of tea — Ducking —
A martial art — Mono — The trappings of success — The
rules — Doubt — A way out — Portishead — Films shot through
cymbals — Burnout — Another strange record

“Biscuit” is the slowest song on Dummy at 126 beats

per minute. It is the least popular song from Dummy
— receiving the least attention on Twitter; showing the
fewest number of listens on Last.fm (accepting that “It’s a
Fire” is handicapped by its exclusion from some editions
of the album). Ahead of the slow rise into the magnetic
presence of “Glory Box,” which follows it, “Biscuit”
brings the album to its knees.
“Biscuit” is a difficult song in spite of its relatively
open lyrics. The album’s techniques and methodologies
are stressed and exhausted to the point of decompen-
sation, a system in failure. In its last 70 seconds it drags
behind it a weathered, distressed vocal sample from
Johnnie Ray’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” The horn

• 180 •
 R. J. W heaton

figures from the same song have been implicated in the

song’s exoskeleton by the dirty snare hits and the impos-
sibly pneumatic and resonant Fender Rhodes bass riff.
Gibbons’ voice offsets the harshness of the materials with
a chalky innocence, almost lilting, vigilantly pivoting
into the song. There’s an amazing delicacy on the word
“ago,” at 1:05, an ascent with the properties of helium.
The conventionality of some of the lyrics — “I’m lost,
exposed” — is undercut by the diffuse, ethereal nature of
their delivery.
Without the counterpoint of Gibbons’ vocals, the
underlying direction of the track could veer towards
menace — something that comes across in the use of the
song’s opening moments as a sample for American rapper
Nine’s “Know Introduction.” There is huge vinyl dirt on
“Biscuit”: needle crackle and hiss apparently triggered by
the snare hit, a trail of debris behind the drum’s searingly
bright entrance.
More so than “Sour Times” or “Glory Box,” which
also erect their infrastructure around a sample from
another artist, “Biscuit” foregrounds the transformative
effects of sampling. Ray’s 1959 single is a peppy, upbeat
song. There is almost no emphasis on the backbeat; the
snare drum is barely audible in the mix, appearing at
moments with a snappy fill true to its military origins.
Where “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” is a march,
“Biscuit” is a dirge. Everything in Ray’s song pops, snaps,
rings. Everything in “Biscuit” warps, slights, stretches,
decays. The dominant feeling is one of drag. “Please help
me understand the way the angels plan our love affairs,”
sings Ray, implying some measure of reason in the
workings of the heart, some reason in the distribution

• 181 •
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of fate in the world. “Biscuit” lurches forward through

a sense of wounded mechanics, an arbitrary display of
happenstance and chance, its subjects cornered in a
universe whose workings are mysterious and obscure,
with Gibbons singing “I can’t make myself heard no
matter how hard I scream.”
It’s a breath-taking transformation: “Biscuit” is
complicit in the ransacking of the bright, peppy, good
nature of Johnnie Ray’s original. It’s hard to imagine
artistic transformation of this type being consensual.
This is not homage, tribute, allusion, pastiche. It is use.
“It’s over now,” sings Ray, the words suggesting an
insouciant nostalgia forever undogged by failure. “I
tried to take the chance to feel the thrill of romance
and love.”
“It’s over now,” sings Ray on “Biscuit,” 4 years after
his death, halfway through the song, with a despair
unmarked in its reach.

* * *

How it is that people fall out of love with the music that
once delighted their senses. In Twelfth Night, Orsino,
exhausted by love, sick with love and sick of love, pleas
for music to be silenced:

If music be the food of life, play on,

Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again! It had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound

• 182 •
 R. J. W heaton

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
’Tis not so sweet as it was before.

Overfamiliarity; over-exposure. A resonance too close

with memories now too painful to revive.
Gwen Howard, remembering a former relationship
that had been annealed in the heat of “Glory Box” and
the second half of Dummy:

I don’t really remember why we didn’t work out in the

end. All I remember is that I wanted to never listen to
that album again. I tried listening to it when we broke up,
but I could only get through the first half, surprisingly,
even though I would always skip it before. The last half
just brought back too many things I didn’t want to be
reminded of at the time. I haven’t listened to it since then.

Or: an absorption into the culture so extensive — or

so narrow — that further listening no longer seems
necessary, no longer seems productive. By 1997, even
ardent fans began to weary of Dummy’s over-use in an
ever-narrowing set of contexts. Mojo reader Ray Pelipetz,
nominating “Mysterons” in a reader poll of the best
tracks of the 1990s, described it as

Ludicrously influential slo-mo spookiness: reinvented

hip hop, redeemed the Theremin as a credible musical
instrument, and provided the soundtrack to every bloody
“mysteries of the paranormal” documentary on telly.227

  Mojo 1997.
227

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This is why we turn from music that meant a great

deal to us but begins to traffic in popular acclaim. Its
valences are now beyond our control. Associations that
were personal are tarnished by collective commerce. The
music consorts with us no longer as a confidante but as
a courtesan.

* * *

The sudden, almost absolute cultural familiarity with

Dummy had made it vulnerable not just to imitation but
to parody. As late as May 2003 the British comedian
Bill Bailey  performed for B.B.C. 6 a version of Disney’s
“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” mimicking many of the
production tics that imitation and over-familiarity had
compressed into the popular imagination of the band’s
sound.
Critical fondness for Dummy weakened; Phil Johnson
suggested in his book Straight Outa Bristol that “it has to
bear the stigma brought on by its success, as so familiar
has the record become — played to within an inch of
death on radio and as ambient mood music in cafés and
bars — that its difficult to feel sentimental about it any
more.”228

* * *

How usual is it for such a number of genre-defining

albums to appear within 18 months of one another?
Dummy, Protection, and Maxinquaye, and, on Mo’ Wax,

  Johnson 1996, p. 160.

228

• 184 •
 R. J. W heaton

D.J. Shadow’s Endtroducing… They seemed, between

them, to effectively to outline the limits of the genre.
Widening the same channel, of course, were Dan the
Automator, Howie B, D.J. Krush, D.J. Cam; a host of
artists on Ninja Tune. But very little of it achieved the
commercial success of those albums; very little of it had
a song- rather than a loop-based architecture.
Against this background, Morcheeba, Lamb, Sneaker
Pimps, Hooverphonic, Mono, and others could only look
imitative, even though many of them had tracks that
were striking at the time and remain listenable.
It’s important to remember that Massive Attack’s Blue
Lines, not Dummy, was the first album-length popular
synthesis of soul, hip-hop, Lover’s Rock, a punk aesthetic,
and the host of other influences to arrive at the sound
later labeled trip-hop or downtempo. Blue Lines was
released in 1991. How much of the genre’s innovation
had already taken place by the time of Dummy’s release?
It’s hard to listen to albums such as Wagon Christ’s
Throbbing Pouch without hearing things — the oceanic
bass throbs of “Rexcist,” or the timbral experimen-
tation of “Pull My Strings” — already being pushed to
extremes. And that was in 1994.
Much of Portishead’s experimentation had taken place
behind closed doors. With greater commercial oppor-
tunity, more aggressively involved management, and
a weaker commitment to perfection, it’s possible that
a sub-standard first album could have been released,
assembled from material recorded at Cameron McVey’s
house, in 1993. There might have been a number of
singers; the critical contribution of Adrian Utley and
associated musicians would not have been present. In

• 185 •
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that context, Dummy would now seem like a significant

evolution, rather than a statement of intent.
In any event, little seemed to move the genre forward
in the immediate aftermath of 1994–1995’s key releases.
Even as soon as 1996, critics like Wire’s Simon Reynolds
were complaining:

Ideas that last year seemed explosive with potential, appear

to have already played themselves out. TripHop, for
instance, promised the ultimate in fucked up, anything-
goes, neo-B-boy abstraction, yet too often delivered a
half-assed sequencing of borrowed bits and bobs, and
a mood spectrum ranging from cheesy affability to pale
blue.229

Even as trip-hop was burning itself out — or, rather,

reclining sedately into a chaise longue — big beat, the
genre’s burly cousin, was achieving massive commercial
success. A loud, combustible fusion of hip-hop breakbeats
and acid house, exemplified by the Chemical Brothers,
Fatboy Slim, and The Prodigy, big beat’s popularity —
including in the U.S. — consumed much of the oxygen
that might otherwise have led to a more sustained period
of electronic innovation in mainstream popular music.
Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, Portishead’s eponymous
follow-up, and Tricky’s pair of sequels (Pre-Millennium
Tension, and Nearly God) would be released 2 to 3 years
later, but by that time there was simply nowhere to go,
and even if there had been, so many of the core artists
would not have wanted to go there.

  Reynolds 1996.
229

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 R. J. W heaton

* * *

“None of us ever believed in the thing ‘trip-hop’,” Geoff

Barrow told the B.B.C. in 2010.230 The label was deeply
unpopular with many of the musicians to whom it was
applied. Adrian Utley remembered it as “a journalistic
catchphrase for generic music that came after us and a
plethora of bands that were forced into sounding like us
because we were successful.”231
The label seemed contrived, something imposed upon
artists from wildly disparate musical backgrounds. To
some it was reductive, suggesting a slavish relationship
to hip-hop — an imitation, a failure to effect a trans-
formative treatment of influences — or a cheapening
of that genre’s vibrant dominant influence. For others
there were suspicious racial overtones, perhaps the impli-
cation that a predominantly black art form was in some
ways being made more accessible by white musicians.
Moreover the association with background ambience for
bars, lounges, and dinner parties suggested a particular
class trajectory: hip-hop’s rough-edged, often militant
street attitude (and origins) softened and smoothed for a
bourgeois palette.
Barrow had always downplayed attempts to claim a
cultural tradition so associated with African-American
culture. “I would never make out like I was a hip-hop
kid,” he told Michael Goldberg. “Because I’m a little
white kid from England. I’m not living the lifestyle. It’s
disrespectful [to] people who have either chosen to live

  B.B.C. 2010.
230

  Gundersen 2008.
231

• 187 •
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the hip-hop lifestyle or who have been made to because

of the surroundings they live in.”232
With this in mind it is possible to understand some of
the disquiet at articles suggesting trip-hop was “the most
exciting thing to happen to hip hop for years.”233 Or, of
Dummy:

For 45 minutes it seemed conceivable that the world’s

most popular music had not been invented at Bronx
block parties at the end of the ’70s at all. Instead it
seemed far older, a product of ’60s spy themes, ’50s
crooners and ’40s torch singers.234

In these genre labels, ambitious artists saw their music

categorized with material that was commercially oppor-
tunistic, quickly produced, and destined for transience.
Complex production processes were characterized as
“crazy beats and fucked up sounds”235 — quirky party
noises, cheap effects, spoken-word samples taken crudely
and obviously from cult films. These were the materials
of novelty ephemera, unserious, unambitious. A world
away from Portishead’s belabored and artisanal sound-
craft. ‘Trip-hop’ came with a built-in incentive for artists
to transcend it, spurn it, leave it behind, in order to prove
their own authenticity. Only the imitators remained.

* * *

232
  Goldberg 1997b.
233
  Pemberton 1994.
234
  Harrison, “Review”.
235
  Pemberton 1994.

• 188 •
 R. J. W heaton

The presence of a “Bristol sound” was also endlessly

invoked by the national and trade press. The term was
almost absurdly reductive for a city with such a complex
and multi-faceted musical base, numerous studios and
venues, and a musical environment that collectively
voiced and reimagined influences as diverse as punk,
reggae, Lover’s Rock, dub, ska, rock, hip-hop, electro,
house, and drum & bass.
Nonetheless, it’s easy to see why journalists — and
listeners — perceived a shared genealogy and assumed a
continued collaboration. For example: Tricky appeared
on Massive Attack’s Blue Lines and Protection. For
“Overcome,” on his debut album Maxinquaye, he reused
lyrics from Massive’s “Karmacoma.” A Portishead remix
of that track appeared on the single and on numerous
compilations.
Phil Johnson’s suggestion of a “house style” is perhaps
as close a statement as it is possible to make. A “slower,
heavier, lover’s-rock-paced pulse” that was displayed
first by “the Wild Bunch’s ‘The Look of Love,’ Mark
Stewart’s appropriation of Smith and Mighty’s ‘Stranger
Than Love,’ and Smith and Mighty’s own ‘Walk On By’
and ‘Anyone.’”236 But the desire to identify a local sound
exerted crushing pressure. It eliminated difference,
narrowed the aesthetic range, and constrained many
bands coming out of the region. “People will try to put us
into a Bristol scene,” Earthling’s Tim Saul told Billboard
in 1995, “but listen to our album and you’ll hear levels

  Johnson 1996, pp. 197–198.

236

•  189 •
 dummy

of irony and humor that aren’t in some of those other

people’s music.”237
If anything, a more realistic model might be Bristol
as an anti-scene: a space sufficiently distant from the
London record industry that innovation — not neces-
sarily with regard to other innovation from the same
place — could take place. Geoff Barrow told a French
documentary after the release of Dummy that:

It’s relaxed down here. It’s a creative area. You don’t get
the pressure from the big London record companies or
anything like that. That’s why there’s a lot of good experi-
mental music down here. In London it’s like, if you’re
in the music industry you get surrounded by the music
industry because it’s everywhere you look in London. In
Bristol you just don’t get it.

The characterization of a local scene was continually

rejected by Portishead; the idea that these artists were
collaborating on a collective sound was simply not
reflective of the relationships or production method-
ologies at play. Barrow observed that “people keep their
projects and their work pretty private — and I would say,
pretty paranoid.”238
“There is no scene,” said Adrian Utley. “Of course
we know Massive, Tricky and Smith & Mighty but we
don’t hang around the same studios.”239 Beth Gibbons
commented, “The notion of a Bristol ‘scene’ makes

237
  Pride 1995.
238
  B.B.C. 2010.
239
  Watt 1997.

• 190 •
 R. J. W heaton

wonderful copy for you guys but I’m afraid we don’t go

down the pub together in a big gang or drop round each
other’s houses for cups of tea.”240

* * *

Some of the techniques employed in the studio make

Dummy resemble something more like sculpture, like
design. In his book Understanding Records, Jay Hodgson
describes the extensive use made by the band of “ducking,”
whereby a particular instrumental track, sometimes just
for fractions of a second, is made relatively louder or
quieter in certain frequency ranges to allow another
track to be more clearly audible or impactful. It is typical
to duck mid-range instruments under a vocal track,
but Dummy is replete with examples. On “Biscuit” the
third note in the Rhodes bass riff seems to draw for a
split second the entirety of the rest of the track into a
compact, dense, sonic implosion. Hodgson describes the
complexity of that passage:

The main 8-second sample which underpins the track,

audible in its entirely from 0:12 to 0:20, features at least
the following ducking sequence during its first iteration:
(i) the opening kick, on the downbeat of bar one, ducks
everything but the Fender Rhodes; (ii) the second kick,
which sounds like it is accompanied by some kind of
sub-bass, on beat two, ducks everything which precedes
it, including the vinyl hiss, the Fender Rhodes and the

  Clark 1995.
240

• 191 •
 dummy

resonance of the first kick and snare hit; and (iii) the
second snare hit ducks everything which precedes it.241

What is remarkable about the number and the complexity

of these ducking choices in Dummy is how difficult
they would have been to undertake before the software
sound-processing plugins now available via digital audio
workstations like ProTools. “At the time,” Hodgson
recalls, “it was mysterious how they were getting a lot of
these things to happen.”
Dave McDonald admits that the mixing process was
arduous, manual:

We were not using automation. We didn’t have

automation for these mixes. The artistic thing — you do
many runs of it until you find the mix that you like. But
as you’re actually doing those mixes you’re finding out
what works, what works, what works … Like a martial
art. It’s like a pattern. You learn the moves to what makes
that track sound correct and right. Once you learn that
pattern you never forget it. You can probably put me in
front of the desk now with those tracks running and I
would do exactly the same things.

* * *

Dummy has little in the way of stereo separation, in part

because of the limitations of the sampling hardware
the band had used to build the tracks. Dave McDonald
recalls that: “If you were to sample stuff in stereo on an

  Hodgson 2010, p. 97.

241

• 192 •
 R. J. W heaton

Akai S1000 you’d have no memory at all. But if you were

to do it in mono, you could probably get your 30 seconds
of whatever it was. If you did it in stereo you wouldn’t
get anything.”
But it also allowed Portishead to stay true to their
influences:

I think there was quite a deliberate decision to keep it

that way … a lot of the records we were listening to were
mono. There wasn’t much stereo spread going on. So I
think it was just a deliberate decision really. And also I
think at that stage we hadn’t learnt our trade fully. So it
was an easier decision to work in the world of mono —
with a hint of stereo.

Where stereo differentiation does exist, the effect is

subtle but lends to the album’s presence. Some reverber-
ation on the vocals; the organ in “It’s a Fire.” On “Roads”:
some tape hiss, the wah-wah guitar panned slightly to the
left; some depth and complexity to the strings. There’s
a delay effect on a sample at 2:22 in “Strangers” which
rings out on the left side of the mix. And, on “Glory Box,”
the opening loop seems to swagger into view from one
side of the mix to the other; the ragged guitar parts that
appear at the end of the first verse claw asymmetrically
against the sides of the song.

* * *

In some ways, Dummy had been too successful for its own
good, a problem that Geoff Barrow foresaw in 1995. “We
didn’t expect to sell more than 30,000 copies in England,”

• 193 •
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he told Cary Darling. “I wanted to release three albums

before we crossed the channel, and it’s all gone wrong.
And I think it will finish us, to be absolutely honest.”242
With the album’s commercial and critical success came
greater creative freedom and less immediate pressure to
produce a second album quickly.243 And there was the
lethally short trend cycle governed by the U.K.’s over-
saturated media environment. Barrow predicted that
“the second album will be damned in England. There
are trendier people out than us now.”244 “Even if the
second album was good, fundamentally good,” said Beth
Gibbons, “I don’t think they’re going to say it’s good.”245
Still, the essentials of Portishead’s sound seemed
viable. Barrow told Jaan Uhelszki that: “Obviously
there’s going to be a natural progression, but I’m not
going to go looking to find something that has to be on
the other side of the world.”246 But by the time of the
publicity interviews surrounding 1997’s Portishead, their
second album, it was clear that such an approach had
been deeply compromised. Adrian Utley commented
that — quite apart from the “enormous” pressure,

Another disturbing thing was hearing a lot of our sounds

in T.V. commercials and all kinds of other bands. We
didn’t want to have anything to do with that entire
trip-hop wave, it only made our music more cheap. We

242
  Darling 1995.
243
  Barrow 2000.
244
  Darling 1995.
245
  Gibbons 1995.
246
  Uhelszki 1995.

• 194 •
 R. J. W heaton

started distrusting our own sound and everything we

believed in. We came into this stage in which we imposed
several stupid rules on ourselves; we weren’t allowed to
use Fender Rhodes piano anymore, no guitar, no strings
— ridiculous really.247

Moreover, what had been one of the Portishead’s

core creative processes seemed under threat. Record
companies were beginning to serve the sampling market
with mass-produced compilations, which, along with
bootlegs, were taking the challenge out of crate-digging.
The discovery, the promise of alchemy, were gone.
“Because all the struggle of developing those sounds has
kind of gone out the window,” Barrow said. “And now it’s
like cans of beans on the shelf.”248
Portishead responded by building a rich library of
custom samples. Dave McDonald recalls that:

The whole idea of the second album was about — these

were the kind of conversations we had — imagine your
greatest record collection ever, with the greatest samples
in. And so we spent two years making this greatest record
collection ever, with the greatest samples in. And after
two years we didn’t have a single song or tune. But we
had some amazing samples. And suddenly realized that
you have to put an album together from that point.

A further creative block was Geoff Barrow’s perfec-

tionism. He described it with characteristic candor:

  Watt 1997.
247

  Goldberg 1997a.
248

• 195 •
 dummy

When I actually went to work on all the ideas I had,

everything sounded awful, so we literally just had to start
from scratch. Thirteen months in and I was completely
lost. I’d go into the studio, be working and it sounded
okay, but it just wasn’t good enough for the second
record. I overanalyzed. ‘How can I make another record
that will sell like Dummy? How can I make people
happy?’249

It became an immobilizing, agonizing experience. The

only relief was “when Ade turned up his guitar and I got
on the drums and basically we just smashed the hell out
of everything.”250
That, ultimately, was what provided a way out. With
the insistent need to complete at least one track, “Half
Day Closing” was the product of a jam by Barrow on
drums and Utley on bass. From there, Barrow remem-
bered, “it took five months to finish the rest of the
album.”251 In the process they rediscovered their sound,
and were able to cast aside the rules they had imposed
upon themselves. Equivocating about whether to use a
theremin on the introduction to “Humming,” Adrian
Utley recalled:

There was a moment … when we questioned if we could

use that sound. And the decision was ultimately up to
Geoff — if he’d said, “No we can’t,” we would have
dropped it. Then we thought, So, we shouldn’t use it ‘cos

249
  Hughes 1997.
250
  Trynka 1997.
251
  Wiederhorn undated.

• 196 •
 R. J. W heaton

it was on the first album? Does that mean we shouldn’t

have Beth singing ‘cos she was singing on the first album?
Or guitar, ‘cos we had guitar on the first album? The
Theremin is a sound I love, and I got really pissed off
with people going, “Oh, everybody’s using Theremins.”
It’s a voice we have. And we all finally decided, fuck it,
this is one of our sounds, and we are going to use it. Yes,
fuck it.252

* * *

The album itself, released as Portishead in September

1997, is different from Dummy. There is a stronger
live aesthetic to it, although the production remains
predominantly sample-based, albeit with fewer from
other artists. The vocal processing is even more experi-
mental: Dave McDonald remembers running Gibbons’
voice through a bullet microphone, a Leslie speaker and
the Space Echo. “Then you’re really going into weird
and wonderful worlds.” There is a movement away from
the warmth of Dummy, a greater emphasis on the higher
frequencies — what Steve Berson, a mastering engineer,
characterizes as “a lot of sizzle … it’s fairly brittle … it
has this artificial sparkliness to it.”
The production feels cleaner — but more spacious,
too, with even more room between the vocal and instru-
mental parts, which feel more abrasive. The overall
experience is perhaps more dramatic, more theatrical.
The menace is symphonic where Dummy’s is propulsive;
the suspense meticulous. The dominant emotions are

  Trynka 1997.
252

• 197 •
 dummy

mysterious, aloof, where Dummy’s, for all their intimi-

dating candour, are democratic. It is a much stronger
album that people typically remember: austere, extrav-
agant, thrilling. In research for this book I came across
many people who were influenced, moved, and shaken
by Portishead. Dummy inspires shock, solace; Portishead
inspires duck and cover.

* * *

Part of the publicity tour for Portishead was a one-off

concert in New York’s legendary Roseland Ballroom,
filmed, according to Adrian Utley, in the style of an old
movie capturing Miles Davis’ collaborations with Gil
Evans — “cameras moving slowly or having to look
through cymbals to see Geoff across the room … we
wanted it to have a slowed-down, drifting across the
room feeling.”253 Recordings of the concert were later
released both as an album and video. The songs from
Dummy on Roseland NYC Live are of course different from
the original versions, recorded after years of touring and
performing the material, recorded before an audience of
rapturous fans instead of in solitude and obscurity. There
is a crispness and confidence to these performances;
“Strangers” seems almost to swing, to swagger; “Sour
Times,” without its Lalo Schifrin sample, is the thick and
murky treatment that the band had characterized as a
“grunge version.”254

  Polygram Press Release undated.

253

  Miller 1995.
254

• 198 •
 R. J. W heaton

* * *

Following the Portishead tour, the band took an extended

hiatus after personal and creative burnout. Over the
following years, Geoff Barrow spent time in Australia; he
later told The Guardian that during that time “I thought
that every idea that I had about music was fairly boring. I
had no direction to go in — no real spark.”255 He founded
a record label, Invada, with Australian hip-hop producer
Katalyst. Tim Saul co-produced with him 2003’s striking
McKay, a marriage of “the kind of beats production that
we’re into, but with an authentic American soul vocalist.”
Adrian Utley worked on soundtracks and contributed
to Goldfrapp’s 2000 album Felt Mountain. He also worked
on Beth Gibbons’ Out of Season, her collaboration with
former Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb. Other Portishead
alumni appear on the album, including John Baggott,
Gary Baldwin, and Clive Deamer. Tracks like “Spider
Monkey” — particularly in its live performances —
suggest some of the directions that 2008’s Third would
take.
Dave McDonald returned to live work — Air, Sigur
Rós, Junior Senior, Florence + the Machine, Adele. “I
like that one take and I like the energy,” he says. “It’s an
artistic thing. As opposed to a technical thing.”

* * *

Desire for new material from Portishead continued.

Live bootlegs circulated online, as did tracks purporting

  Lynskey 2008.
255

• 199 •
 dummy

to be Portishead material, including Natalie Imbruglia’s

“Leave Me Alone,” and tracks from Empathy, the 1998
debut album by U.K. band Mandalay. There were some
abortive attempts to record material in 2001 but, Geoff
Barrow later told Uncut magazine, “It didn’t feel like we
were breaking any new ground.”256
Work on Third began in 2005. The band’s traditional
methodology simply no longer worked:

It just seemed so backward, and like something we’d done

too many times. The songs sounded okay as instrumental
hip hop, but as soon as Beth started singing, it was like
“Oh man, no way”. The idea of us just trying to be Gang
Starr with Beth on top just was not really interesting to
any of us any more — her included. We ended up going
back to early hip hop drum machines, because they were
the only things we could really stand listening to. The
idea of classic breaks that had been chopped up was not
really palatable any more.257

The process was no less tortuous — Barrow quipped in

2008, “If we didn’t have to work this way, we wouldn’t,
believe me” — but it had changed. 258 There was a delib-
erate move away from the sonic signature of the first
two albums — “writing a big string thing, and playing
a Rhodes piano, is just so obvious” — and a shift from

256
  Robinson undated.
257
  Thompson 2009.
258
  Robinson undated.

• 200 •
 R. J. W heaton

“beats” and towards “a live groove from start to finish,”

hammered out on guitar, keyboards, drums.259
The revision extended to the band’s visual aesthetic.
Long-time collaborator and designer Marc Bessant
moved away from the band’s classic iconography —
“anonymous, utilitarian, noir overtones” — to something
more in keeping with “the new music so brutal and
honest.” The record had “the most austere of sleeves,
nothing but everything, essential minimalism.”
The resulting album was very different, and surprised
— and alienated — many listeners, although Barrow
asserted in an interview with NPR that the same reactions
had been elicited by Dummy:

it was the same questions we were asked about when we

first came out. It was just seen as a strange record. And
then our second album was a strange record. And now
this one’s a strange record. It was just how the first album
has been absorbed into the mainstream.260

  Robinson undated; Jones 2008.

259

  NPR 2008.
260

• 201 •
 Siren

Associations — Internet sex threads — Languorous

lovemaking — A taxonomy of desire — “Glory Box” —
A sample — A Christmas party — Timing —
A man with a megaphone — Traditional gender roles —
A glory box — Meanings — A night in the city —
Climax — Noise and nightclubs —
A mastering session — The divination of success — Elder
siblings — Contradictions — Connections

Among the song lyrics and shout-outs, the following

are terms, phrases, and topics commonly or occasionally
associated on Twitter with Dummy and its songs:
✒✒ mesmerized
✒✒ a bit gloomy
✒✒ #songsthatleadtosex
✒✒ spy movies
✒✒ in tears
✒✒ #hot
✒✒ pure sex

• 202 •
 R. J. W heaton

✒✒ vehicular fires causing traffic delays in the Portishead

area
✒✒ #soundslikeopium261
✒✒ midnight
✒✒ haunting
✒✒ orgasmic
✒✒ break-up song
✒✒ always
✒✒ still
✒✒ every single time
✒✒ música relaxa
✒✒ música para striptease
✒✒ sleeping
✒✒ nostalgia
✒✒ on the train
✒✒ orgasmos
✒✒ #fuckmusic
✒✒ sexy music
✒✒ sexmusic
✒✒ genuinely sexy
✒✒ sensual
✒✒ música exala sexo do início ao fim262

* * *

There exists a Facebook group called “I Love having sex

to PortisHead.”263 A description helpfully clarifies the
premise:

261
  http://twitter.com/#!/SouthofDevin/statuses/9927415509815297
262
  http://twitter.com/#!/oguicezario/statuses/14272529929601024
263
  http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=94992862893

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For those who love sex with portishead playing in the

background

A thread on Reddit proclaims “I just had the most

amazing triple orgasm masturbating to Portis Head
and Planet Earth. (dont judge me.)”264 A Google search
for ‘portishead sex’ yields at least eight results before
the inevitable dating and swingers sites relating to the
municipality of Portishead.
Nerve.com, an online magazine dedicated to sex,
relationships, and popular culture, announced the
upcoming release of Third in a post entitled “Soon
There Will Be Another Portishead Record to Screw
To.”265 There are message threads with titles like
“Your favorite songs/music to have sex too”266 and
“Favorite songs too have sex too!!!!”267 and “Do you
have sex with music on? (and if so, give examples).”268
Among the answers, song titles from Dummy recur
with a frequency unmatched by even Marvin Gaye and
Sade.

* * *

264
  http://www.reddit.com/r/sex/comments/ed4k3/i_just_had_the_
most_amazing_triple_orgasm/
265
  http://www.nerve.com/archived/blogs/soon-there-will-be-
another-portishead-record-to-screw-to
266
  http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?30,576726
267
  http://www.side-line.com/forum/threads.php?id=1598_0_20_0_C
268
  http://www.yelp.com/topic/los-angeles-do-you-have-sex-with-
music-on-

• 204 •
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For Dayna Vogel, Dummy in some ways outlines the

journey she has made since 1995, when she self-identified
as bisexual but was only dating men:

The experience I have of sex with women is very different

from the experience I had of sex with men. It’s not a
negative thing … it’s just a very different experience, and
in my path to discovering that for myself, I guess Dummy
helped. By somehow mirroring maybe my experience …
something about a languorous session of lovemaking. I’ve
had it on endless repeat and it plays several times — and I
never had that experience in my sex life with men.

She describes how her wife experiences Dummy: “it

makes her feel fluid. It makes her feel like she can
permeate another body … I think that’s a fair description
of what it can add to a room. A looseness. Warmth.
Liquid.”

* * *

This music’s place in a partial map of desire.

✒✒ August Rodin’s The Kiss, secluded from the public in
1893 at The Chicago World’s Fair.
✒✒ Film noir: Art Deco; fedora hats; cities punctuated
by neon. Voices bathed in shadow and night. The
first 20 minutes of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity;
the first 20 minutes of Lawrence Kasdan’s Double
Indemnity (better known as Body Heat). Gilda; Laura.
✒✒ “Roads,” endless in the subliminal throb of its intro-
duction. As used in Ilene Chaiken’s The L Word: a

• 205 •
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rich, symphonic longing; the illicit and inevitable

consummation of an affair. There is a moment of
extravagant doubt — the forethought of regret,
hesitation on the lips, before the haltless longing.
“How can it feel this wrong?”
✒✒ Christopher Marlowe’s translations of Ovid’s Elegies:
“What arms and shoulders did I touch and see?”
“Night shameless, wine and love are fearless made.”
Or John Donne’s poetry: “This bed thy centre is,
these walls, thy sphere.”
✒✒ The plunging, dipping bassline of “Pedestal”: a
movement supple and infinite; regular, rhythmic,
repetitive; cumulative.
✒✒ Cocktails: the pouring of spirits into vessels; the thin
film of liquids residual against the side of glasses.
Exhibition, aesthetics. The slow slip of inhibition
upon the tongue.
✒✒ Solo Andata’s “Together Apart” from the 2006
album Fyris Swan. A hymn to the skin; breath, touch,
gesture. Used in a Calvin Klein commercial featuring
Eva Mendez, the full version banned from U.S.
television networks.
✒✒ “It Could be Sweet”; “It’s a Fire”. The touch of
her voice, breathy sibilance; proximity, intimacy,
presence. Close enough to hear everything, close
enough to forget what you should know.
✒✒ And: “Glory Box.”

* * *

“Glory Box” features one of the better-known samples

on Dummy, a thick, languid loop pulled from the opening

• 206 •
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of Isaac Hayes’ “Ike’s Rap II,” from his 1971 double

album Black Moses. It sounds like the loop is actually an
amalgam of more than one moment from the first minute
or so of the track, seamlessly stitched together to avoid
Hayes’ vocal and to make the string figure gracefully
rise and descend in ways that it does not on the original.
The tumbling, jangling piano riffs that are prominent on
“Ike’s Rap II” are filtered right to the back of the mix in
“Glory Box”; they are barely audible, kindling carefully
separated from the sparklike vinyl artifacts that becrackle
the song. The bass is drawn out, descending steplike
and longlimbed before the listener, footsteps amid the
delicious natural resonance of the song’s snare sounds.
The sample commands “Glory Box,” despite efforts
by Adrian Utley’s guitar to slowdance it to the floor.
But Beth Gibbons’ vocal crackles like lightning above,
threatening to ignite at every moment the song in its
indefinable heat.
The sample is irresistible. According to one source,
Geoff Barrow played Tricky a demo of “Glory Box” in a car
outside a Christmas party hosted by Fruit, the management
company that represented both acts. The sample later
appeared on Tricky’s “Hell is Round the Corner.” The
band were diplomatic when asked by interviewers about
the apparent coincidence; later, there was reportedly “an
incident” at the Mercury Music Awards ceremony at which
Maxinquaye was nominated alongside Dummy.

* * *

With “Roads,” in particular, “Glory Box” has generated

numerous covers on YouTube. There is a Latin jazz-pop

• 207 •
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cover of “Glory Box” on YouTube, shocking in the

caustic reach of its tastelessness. There is an emo cover
of “Glory Box” on YouTube. There is a harmony and
synthpop cover of “Glory Box” on YouTube. There is a
bedroom-and-acoustic-guitar cover of “Glory Box” on
YouTube. There is another — there is always another
— bedroom-and-acoustic-guitar cover of “Glory Box”
on YouTube.
More than one of these covers speeds up through its
duration, the song almost impossible to contain in its
inertia.

* * *

There is on Dummy a dramatic rhythmic sensibility, a

permanent sense of tension, rarely released, drawn from
hip-hop’s swung, snappy syncopation. A delight in the
entrance, the manifestation, of rhythm. Geoff Barrow
described the appeal to The Wire magazine in 1998:

that dangerousness, when you put on an old record,

whether a soundtrack, a soul record, and it’s got an
orchestral build-up, and then you hear the beat drop
on it — for me, there’s nothing like it. That gives me
shivers: that is the absolute right thing that should be on
the record. And creating that atmosphere is what we’re
all about.269

You can hear those moments throughout Dummy: the

opening of “Strangers”; the moment in the middle of

  Young 1998.
269

• 208 •
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“Wandering Star,” at 3:21, where the song is open at its

chest; the moment of superb rhythmic battery in the
middle of “Numb.” You can hear the impeccable sense of
timing in Barrow’s turntablism: the hold and release of the
vocal sample at the end of “Biscuit”; the guitar riffs cast
across the surface of “Wandering Star.” The kick and lurch
lent to “Mysterons” with the “Porter’s Head” vocal sample.
(He can be heard doing the same thing on a vocal sample
recorded in the same style — Barrow’s own voice through
a megaphone, according to more than one interviewee —
on Earthling’s “Nefisa,” from 1995’s Radar.)
One of the least appreciated aspects of Gibbons’ craft
is her sensitivity to timing. Listen to what she does to
articulate the word “loneliness” on “Numb”; how the
verses on “Wandering Star” sew so much rhythmic
complexity into the mirthless dirge of the song’s bass
riffs. (A bizarre Latin-jazz cover of “Wandering Star,”
by Quantic & His Combo Bárbaro, uncoils some of the
song’s rhythmic possibilities.) Watching the way Gibbons
moves in concert — during the introduction of “Roads”
in the Roseland performance, for example — you can see
her deep, somatic, understanding of the rhythm of these
songs.
There is a conspiracy of timing between her voice
and the album’s ferocious snares, an ability to pivot
from disconsolate malaise to dervish impetus as the
songs’ backbeats detonate around her. On “Glory Box,”
listen to how time is spooled up and then cast out in the
first lines of the lyric: the subtle push into “tired” and
“playing” after the pressurized delivery of the words
that precede them. The testing, flexing timing that leads
into the “bow and arrow.” She is toying with — teasing

• 209 •
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— the apparently untroubled rhythmic core of the song.

Listen to the pressure she exerts on “you” at 1:55, a
fraction of a second later than you would expect. She is
in consummate control.

* * *

With a chorus as immediately quotable as that of “Sour

Times,” “Glory Box” has been subject to numerous inter-
pretations. Prominent is the belief that the lines “I just
wanna be a woman,” and “don’t you stop being a man,”
constitute a call for return to traditional gender roles.
As Beth Gibbons pointed out in an interview with Ben
Thompson in 1994:

The key line in the song really is ‘Move over and give
us some room’, because I do think that women are very
much taken for granted. I’m more an easy-going than a
rabid feminist, but women in general are very supportive
to men — history has made them like that — and this is
not something that is always reciprocated.270

A glory box — better known as a hope chest in North

America — is a chest used to contain items collected
by a young woman in preparation for marriage. It’s an
image that stands with razorsharp irony against some of
the lyrics. But the overt sexuality of the song itself, the
resolute sense of longing, suggests additional meanings.
As with other songs on the album, the lack of a final
precision leaves it open to interpretation, although the

  Thompson 1998, p. 222.

270

• 210 •
 R. J. W heaton

sense of gender role empowerment — of liberation — is

never missed.
For Belinda Kazanci:

I think — “Give me a reason to love you, give me a

reason to be a woman, I just want to be a woman” — it’s
just so simple. I think every woman feels that way. And
she’s saying it. She’s outright saying it.

For Nikki Lynette, who covered the song in a mixtape

with elements of Camp Lo’s “Luchini” and Portishead’s
“Only You”:

To me that song captures the way a woman feels like glory:

she’s kind of guarded; she’s protecting her heart. But at the
same time, while being guarded and protecting her heart,
she’s still dealing with guys and still kind of fraidy and cold
and detached. And I think that kind of sums me up pretty
well. I have this horrible gaping fear of commitment but I
do have these times where I don’t want to be so guarded.
And I would totally not be that way more if a guy gave me a
reason to not be. I think any woman can relate to that song.

For singer Helen White, “Glory Box” exemplifies the

melodic reach of Dummy, and the extent to which its
arrangements complement Beth Gibbons’ voice: “Who
didn’t just want to be a woman listening to that song?”

* * *

Gwen Howard remembers the first time she heard

“Glory Box.” At 19; dating a man five or six years older;

• 211 •
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a sophisticate of music, the city; of travel. “He was every-

thing I was not, but wanted to be.” Staying with him in
the city; listening to music together while falling asleep.
The close presence of doubt: the age difference; his
experience in the world.

That night we went to sleep and I knew something was

wrong. I knew we were on the outs, but I savagely wanted
this to work. I can still remember that I thought the end
of the world would happen if our relationship ended … I
couldn’t sleep and I just got it into my head that I needed
to mend this.

She remembers the kiss. The kiss.

Then it happened … “Glory Box” came on. And it wasn’t

just the sound of the song it was the words that just
happened to fit perfectly in that moment: “I just want to
be a woman …”

“Things happened.” The mix C.D. on repeat.

“Glory Box” played a few times through before we were

done. I fell in love with him then, while that song was
playing. I ditched Britney and Justin and got hooked to
“real” music, I was no longer afraid of relationships or
kissing or boys or being not good enough.

* * *

In Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1996 film Stealing Beauty, “Glory

Box” is used in the scene in which Liv Tyler’s character,

• 212 •
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exploring her own somehow particularly American

innocence, decides to take control of her experience. To
pursue. It is an understated use of the song; clear in its
intent but still somehow thoughtful, delicate; a moment
of soft determination in the film’s soft, slow narrative.
In a Twitter post, Elizabeth De La Piedra described:

Highschool nostalgia. Listening to Portishead on the

bus. Beth you dream. Didn’t every girl want to lose it to
Glory Box #stealingbeauty271

* * *

In contrast: in Andrew Niccol’s 2005 Lord of War the

song is used without irony, a scene of thoughtless
exploitation: two girls in a failed African state offered,
offering themselves, to a mercenary gun dealer. The
use of the song feels opportunistic. “It’s like everyone
wants to use “Glory Box” in sex scenes,” complained
Geoff Barrow in 2008. “Can you not fucking hear what
she’s singing?”272

* * *

There are numerous videos on YouTube and elsewhere

in which pole dancing in practice or performance takes
place to songs from Dummy.

271
  http://twitter.com/#!/lizbebz/status/50564723007176704;
Elizabeth De La Piedra can be found at http://elizabethsmart.tumblr.
com/
272
  Lynskey 2008.

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Others take the Sofia Coppola-directed video of The

White Stripes’ “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with
Myself,” Kate Moss dancing in the video’s thick, redolent
waves of darkness and light, and set it to the centrifugal
throb of “Glory Box” or “Numb.”
In these performances the guitar solo in “Glory Box”
seems somehow to loosen itself from the song, to engage
in a tensile flirtation with the fluid and supple limbs of its
interpreters.

* * *

A few reasons why Dummy is a great guitar album:

The simple arpeggios — long and resonant — that
open Dummy, so drenched in reverb that it immediately
sets expectations for the album. The effect is rather
like being so accustomed to the pitch and roll of a ship
that it is only with great surprise that you perceive the
undulation of the external world.
The swinging jazz chords that offer brief respite from
the sonic turbulence of “Strangers.” “That was an absolute
piece-of-shit acoustic we found lying around the studio,”
Utley told Guitar Player magazine in 1995. “We tuned it up,
recorded it onto a dictaphone, and put it on ‘Strangers.’”273
On “Wandering Star,” the mysterious swelling,
shimmering sound that appears around 1:48; chords
washed backwards into the song by the manipulation of
the guitar’s volume.
Like the broad, washy wah-wah on “Roads,” or “Sour
Times,” with its twangy reverb and edgy, brittle tones,

  Fine 1995.
273

• 214 •
 R. J. W heaton

these are moments of texture, rich and suggestive, to

augment each song’s unique atmosphere. “This is not
a guitar thing, really,” Utley told Jason Fine for Guitar
Player in May 1995. “It’s about using guitar as a source
rather than guitar for guitar’s sake.”274

* * *

“Glory Box” is where one of Adrian Utley’s original

influences — Hendrix — is most audible: the harnessing
of feedback, the overdriven distortion, the imitation of
the cadences of the human voice. There are two parts,
thickly interwoven from the end of the first verse.
There’s a fantastic moment of metallic shrapnel amid
the distortion that closes out the first chorus, at 1:09;
and diminishing eddies of feedback receding back into
the song seconds later. The guitar solo sounds like an
explosion from the heart of the song: a Hammond organ
thickly underbleeding it, ruthlessly driven through a
Leslie speaker. The effect is raging, astringent, something
progressively untethered from the song. Geoff Barrow
recalled:

I can remember Ade playing the guitar in “Glory Box”

and we were always worried that it was just too straight,
him playing. So he was playing, and I had a hold of his
whammy bar, and by the end of it — if you listen to it —
it’s going absolutely wrong. It’s out of tune and everything

  Fine 1995.
274

• 215 •
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— but still kind of hangs in there. It was those scenes of

trying to push things out.275

It’s a part that foregrounds the band’s delight in noise,

instability; their desire to create a listening experience as
harsh as it is accessible. At the end of the song, starting
at 4:13, the bass and kick drum are hauled to the top of
the mix; everything else is submerged beneath a thrilling
smear of dirt and reverberation; the song lies inverted
in a piston-like performance of its tension. Something
hydraulic, withdrawing, asthmatic, mechanical. It sounds
like warfare; it sounds like release.

* * *

Dummy was mastered in early summer, 1994, by Miles

Showell at a West London facility called, at the time,
Copymasters. “I pretty much took what they gave me
and made it a bit more extreme,” Showell remembers.
“I made it my mission to have hip-hop bass juxtaposed
with the lo-fi samples they were using as I thought it
was a brilliant contrast.” The band wanted “big bass
and huge drums, a very percussive sound,” but they
loved the a high contrast approach that, in hindsight,
distinguishes Dummy from many albums mastered just
a few years later at the beginning of the ‘Loudness
wars’:276

  B.B.C. 2010.
275

  See Milner 2010, Chapter 7, for an excellent discussion of “The

276

Loudness Wars.”

• 216 •
 R. J. W heaton

I suggested to them that to keep the contrast between

the more delicate parts and the louder bits would make it
very dramatic. I played them an example of mastering it
“squashed to hell” so it was all loud all the time, then the
same track but mastered with a more dynamic approach
keeping the quieter parts in proportion. They agreed
with me that the second approach was far and away better
and this was the blueprint for the whole album.

* * *

Perhaps it is true that, amplified to its most cavernous

qualities, Dummy exemplifies the alienation and violence
outlined by Jacques Attali in his 1985 polemic, Noise:

The popular dance, which has in part become a concert,

is a release for violence that has lost its meaning. Carnival
without the masks and the channeling of the tragic; in
which the music is only a pretext for the noncommuni-
cation, the solitude, and the silence imposed by the sound
volume and the dancing; in which even in its worldly
substitute, the night club, the music prevents people from
speaking — people who in any event do not want to, or
cannot, speak.277

And yet in some ways the opposite is true. Music

governed by chance, or music operating at extremes,
releases a set of social interactions that explode the
possible. Loud music deafens us to our inhibitions. It
puts us in an alien soundscape where the atmosphere

  Attali 1985, p. 118.

277

• 217 •
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itself, so different from its normal state of rest, response,

seems alive with contingency. Surely this cannot last.
We are so subject to its terms. Anything could happen.
Experienced in a communal setting, an atmosphere and
ribcages reverberating to an external heartbeat; acted
upon, together. Sounds resonant at once in one another’s
bodies. We must lean close to one another to be heard:
lips close to ears, necks. We speak curtly, we are heard
partially: meaning is elliptical, subject to interpretation,
ambiguous. Does he mean what I think he means? Pauses are
no longer prolonged, uncomfortable: they are licensed.
These are the elements of flirtation: uninhibitedness,
proximity, ambiguity. Loud music makes us strangers
to ourselves, intimates to others. It becomes a social
lubricant.

* * *

Dave McDonald remembers completing work on Dummy

at Bristol’s Coach House Studios:

we were very very close to completion and some of the

guys next door — I think it was with Neil Davidge who
used to do a lot of stuff with Massive Attack — they
were hearing it … You know when you play something
to somebody and they kind of go “oh, yeah, that’s nice”?
But then you play something to somebody and they’re
just there listening? And they’re still there listening.
And they’re still listening? That’s quite unusual when
people are involved in music. To just not move from that
spot and listen to the end of it. And then want to hear
something else.

• 218 •
 R. J. W heaton

That happened a few times. And then you kinda knew

that, ah, this is maybe going to work.

* * *

For listeners — like me — who were turning 18, 19,

20 at the time of Dummy’s release, it seemed to offer
a kind of generational differentiation. A release from
the collective identity defined around and inhabited by
our elder siblings — an identity already being reified,
ossified, becoming the subject of winsome nostalgia
in the seminal Gen X films (Singles, Reality Bites) and
grunge albums of the first years of the ’90s.
Dummy spoke to us in a way that albums of a couple
of years before — The Stone Roses, Pills ’n’ Thrills and
Bellyaches, Screamadelica — had only suggested. Those
were the albums that spoke to our elder siblings. We
heard them through particleboard walls and from cars
driven away into the flare of the evening.
I remember hearing Massive Attack’s Blue Lines within
the context of Soul II Soul’s Club Classics Vol. One: a thick
synthesis of influences, of sounds, of ideas not before
brought together. Blue Lines was a record of rebellion, its
chin smugly forward; its noncommittal cross-racial dynamic
a thumbed nose at the British popular culture that still
retained the trace of racial and social and cultural divisions.
Blue Lines was the album you heard later, heard from your
brother’s stereo, heard after Club Classics, heard from car
stereos under the sodium haze of streetlamps igniting softly
within the murk and haze of the blunt summer twilight.
Dummy was a younger sibling to Blue Lines’ elder:
freer perhaps to have an identity on its own terms, less

• 219 •
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marked by the struggle to define identity itself. Yet it

is the witness to consequences, an intimate of doubt.
Romantic, ironic. Unrequited love; sour independence.
It is an album of the thick night, of two a.m. midnight.
Desire, despair. Resonant comfort; unanaesthetized loss.
Blue Lines was a record of rebellion. Dummy is a
record of disorder.

* * *

It is an album of contrasts. The vocals so isolated,

alone, intimate; the background massive, reverberant,
constructed. Its impact is physical as much as it is intel-
lectual or emotional. Vintage instruments, thick and
resonant in their presence, tighten the atmosphere to
a skin. The snares snap and crackle and inflame the
air before you. The bass sounds shudder against your
heart. Yet meaning is deferred, understanding denied.
Lyrics sketch a self amid fractured images, expres-
sions of solitude, grief, alienation, distance, exile. Vocal
inflections suggest multiple meanings. Beth Gibbons’
perpetual voice recognizes, describes, acknowledges,
consoles — allows — more varieties of pain and longing
than we know the words for. And yet behind it, a warmth:
weathered and aged sounds organic and rich in their
texture. A statement luminous of the self against the
strangeness of the world; and, so stated, it becomes a
consolation for those same conditions.
Assembled, collaboratively, in the studio, and in
isolation. It is human and it is artificial. Its touches are
immediate: Gibbons’ vocals rich with sounds heard only
in the most intimate presence of another, suggesting

• 220 •
 R. J. W heaton

no intermediate technology. And yet it comes from

a production approach that favors the weathering,
twisting, wearing down of isolated fragments, moments.
Songs were allowed to coalesce, conglomerations of
texture, coalitions of accident. Atmospherics, space, and
“vibe”; above structure, formula, or convention. Studio
noise — unusual or unintended echos or fragments from
recording setups. The sound particular to an instrument; a
timbre unique to its tuning or treatment or its replication
through an amplifier intended for another purpose. The
sound of technology itself. A delight in artifice. Songs not
just an interaction of melody and harmony, mathematical
and calculated, but an encapsulation of the conditions of
their production. An engagement in the materiality of
the world.
Dummy’s aesthetic is drawn from hip-hop, with which
it shares its thunderous bass, its downsampled mono drum
samples, its riffs from funk and R&B and soul. And yet the
theremin recalls the ethereal delusions of the late nineteenth
century, the unrealized futurescapes of the early twentieth.
The hammered dulcimer of “Sour Times” reaches —
through The Ipcress File, through The Third Man — to a
Central European past of indeterminate antiquity. Gibbons’
voice invokes the vivid, hollowed grief of a Billie Holiday.
The female voice pressed to the edges of expression by
technology. Synthesizers and electric pianos saturated by
warmth and texture, born in veterans’ hospitals, fired in the
engines of jazz fusion. Something organic yet mechanical:
meaning distributed across voice and technology.
Permanently unfamiliar in its depths and forcefully
strange in its presence; yet its avant garde inclina-
tions absorbed too quickly; its strangeness masked in a

• 221 •
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world where communications are instantaneous, music

ubiquitous, connections associative, influence diffuse.
Music’s ubiquity has increased even as the absolute power
of its cousin, night, has waned. Dummy is, at low volume,
an album quintessentially ambient, easy to make ubiquitous
and to defang. Yet in the strangeness of its arrangements
and its lyrics — a strangeness easily uncloaked with an
increase in volume and attention — there is the presence
of the nocturnal conditions of the past.
The manifestation of these — and other — contra-
dictions, Dummy remains open to as many responses as
there are individuals who hear it. It assembles itself anew,
coalescing from the darkness before each listener, each
listen, only to disappear unresolved into the anonymous
consolation of the night.
Although the album was built — built, not recorded
— collectively, we do not respond to it — at first —
collectively. We create our own valances to this music. It
is not music that we hear and say “I want to be a part of
that”; instead: “that music is part of me.”

* * *

And yet: so many people I spoke to, in writing this book,

put me in touch with other people to whom they had
become connected by Dummy. Lee Thomson observed
that “Anyone that’s ever bonded with me on an intimate
level — friend or lover — has experienced Portishead
through me if they haven’t already.”
It was a key connection between Nikki Lynette and
the charismatic best friend who first insisted she listen
to Dummy’s slowed-down breakbeats. “Very few of my

• 222 •
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black friends liked the album,” she remembered; “as a

young rapper, it was considered odd that I split my time
between freestyling with my crew and running around
with my gay, punked-out BFF singing ‘Wandering Stars’
a capella in two-part harmony.”

* * *

The experience of connection was true too for those who

were involved in making the album.
For Tim Saul:

If I free associate, it makes me think of family, actually.

I mean very specifically my musical family. Particularly
Geoff is like family to me. I suppose personally for me it
makes me think of a time where I was starting to find my
voice as a musician and it was just an amazing experience,
to have been involved, even in a slightly fly-on-the-wall
way, in such a great piece of music, great piece of art.

Adrian Utley commented in an interview for the B.B.C.

in 2010:

I’ve never really felt this empathy that I feel when we’re
together. Even though sometimes we can squabble and
it’s not always easy. I think we’re all very close and we’re
all kind of musically close. We all understand and trust
each other. I think that sort of happened fairly quickly. It
sounds so epic when you say it but it’s not like that. You
feel like you’ve come home at last.278

  B.B.C. 2010.
278

• 223 •
 dummy

* * *

At its most intimate, Dummy remains richly associative;

for all its misplaced categorization, its submergence into
the musical environment of the mid ’90s, it retains, in its
warmth and its edge and its intimacy and its strangeness,
the ability to connect people. Across borders; through
walls.
There is a solitude in its throat, but a community at its
heart.
“If you listen to the Dummy album,” says Nikki
Lynette, “it does not sound like they were trying to
define the times. It doesn’t sound like they were trying
to define this whole sub-genre. It doesn’t sound like they
were trying to relate to millions and millions of people.
They just did.”

• 224 •
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• 232 •
 Acknowledgements

Portishead are known for their reluctance to give inter-

views, preferring instead to let the music speak for itself.
I hope that this work will not impede that objective but
instead suggest new perspectives on Dummy and on the
other music discussed in this book. This book owes a
great deal to the journalists and music critics who have
interviewed and covered Portishead since 1994. I have
noted all sources as transparently as possible throughout.
Two invaluable online resources are Phead (http://phead.
org) and Heikki Hietala’s [P] (http://kotinetti.suomi.net/
heikki.hietala/index.htm).
I am inexpressibly grateful to numerous people
for their time, patience, and insight, including — but
certainly not limited to — Michael Almereyda, Tom
Astor, Marc Bessant, Steve Berson, Amy Clarke, Sean
Cranbury, Zeid Hamdan, Alexander Hemming, Jay
Hodgson, Gwen Howard, Jay-Jay Johanson, Belinda
Kazanci, Nikki Lynette, Nightmares on Wax, Bram
Schijven, Miles Showell, Anna Shusterman, Rachel
Talalay, Ira Tam, Lee Thomson, Dayna Vogel, Helen
White, and Andy Wright. And, most particularly, to Dave
McDonald and Tim Saul.

• 233 •
 dummy

I am indebted to Jay Hodgson, musician, recordist,

and writer, for his innumerable insights into Dummy and
production techniques. To identify just two areas, this
book’s discussion of Dummy’s vocals and its snare sounds
would not exist in the same form without his perspective.
Similarly, my thanks to Steve Berson, Mastering
Engineer at Total Sonic Media, for his considerable
insight, including into the album’s stereo differentiation;
and to singer/songwriter and vocal coach Helen White,
M.Mus., for the benefit of her experience and insight (not
to be confused with the Helen White who recorded with
Bristol band Alpha). All errors are, of course, my own.
Zeid Hamdan’s music can be found at http://www.
lebaneseunderground.com and http://www.lebaneseun-
dergroundshop.com. Please see the online resources
below for links relating to other music and musicians
described in this book.
I must thank Steven Connor for his earlier critical
guidance, so important in matters of taste, style, and
judgment, and, for the purposes of this book, subject matter.
My limitless thanks to those whose support sustained
me during the writing of this book, many of whom
became at various stages this book’s first readers. Among
them: Freddie Arps, Sam Mamudi, Natalie Bromehed,
Justin Sorbara-Hosker, Sebastian Hanna, Margaret
Abela, Rekha Lakra, and Chris Mousseau.
Mike Denney, not least for the long-standing excel-
lence of his musical taste; the PopMatters team; the people
at Literature & Latte for their outstanding Scrivener
software; David Barker for his extraordinary patience
and support; all at Continuum for this opportunity.
My family.

• 234 •
 R. J. W heaton

* * *

For further material, including a discography and further

listening resources, please visit http://www.rjwheaton.
com/dummy or http://www.facebook.com/dummy333.
The author can be found online at http://www.rjwheaton.
com and on Twitter as @rjwheaton.

• 235 •
 Also available in the series:
 1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren
Zanes
 2. Forever Changes by Andrew
Hultkrans
 3. Harvest by Sam Inglis
 4. The Kinks Are the Village Green
Preservation Society by Andy
Miller
 5. Meat is Murder by Joe Pernice
 6. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
by John Cavanagh
 7. Abba Gold by Elisabeth
Vincentelli
 8. Electric Ladyland by John Perry
 9. Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott
10. Sign O’ the Times by
Michaelangelo Matos
11. The Velvet Underground and Nico
by Joe Harvard
12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo
13. Live at the Apollo by Douglas
Wolk
14. Aqualung by Allan Moore
15. OK Computer by Dai Griffiths
16. Let It Be by Colin Meloy
17. Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis
18. Exile on Main Sreet by Bill
Janovitz
19. Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli
20. Ramones by Nicholas Rombes
21. Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno
22. Murmur by J. Niimi
23. Grace by Daphne Brooks
24. Endtroducing … by Eliot
Wilder
25. Kick Out the Jams by Don
McLeese
26. Low by Hugo Wilcken
27. Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey
Himes
28. Music from Big Pink by John
Niven
29. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by
Kim Cooper
30. Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy
31. Doolittle by Ben Sisario
32. There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles
Marshall Lewis
33. The Stone Roses by Alex Green
34. In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar
35. Highway 61 Revisited by Mark
Polizzotti
36. Loveless by Mike McGonigal
37. The Who Sell Out by John
Dougan
38. Bee Thousand by Marc
Woodworth
39. Daydream Nation by Matthew
Stearns
40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson
41. Use Your Illusion Vols. 1 and 2 by
Eric Weisbard
42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth
Lundy
43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by
Ric Menck
44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin
Courrier
45. Double Nickels on the Dime by
Michael T. Fournier
46. Aja by Don Breithaupt
47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the
Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor
48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz
49. Achtung Baby by Stephen
Catanzarite
50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott
Plagenhoef
51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich
52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl
Wilson
53. Swordfishtrombones by David
Smay
54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew
Daniel
55. Horses by Philip Shaw
56. Master of Reality by John
Darnielle
57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris
58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden
Childs
59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron
60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by
Jeffery T. Roesgen
61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob
Proehl
62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate
63. XO by Matthew LeMay
64. Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier
65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton
66. One Step Beyond … by Terry
Edwards
67. Another Green World by Geeta
Dayal
68. Zaireeka by Mark Richardson
69. 69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol
70. Facing Future by Dan Kois
71. It Takes a Nation of Millions to
Hold Us Back by Christopher R.
Weingarten
72. Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles
73. Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo
74. Song Cycle by Richard
Henderson
75. Kid A by Marvin Lin
76. Spiderland by Scott Tennent
77. Tusk by Rob Trucks
78. Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne
Carr
79. Chocolate and Cheese by Hank
Shteamer
80. American Recordings by Tony
Tost
81. Some Girls by Cyrus R. K. Patell
82. You’re Living All Over Me by
Nick Attfield
83. Marquee Moon by Bryan
Waterman