Portishead

Portishead, British trip-hop group who popularized the genre in North America by fusing dance music conventions such as drum loops and samples with atmospheric cabaret-style vocals. Principal members included lead singer Beth Gibbons (b. January 4, 1965, Keynsham, Bath and North East Somerset, England), producer Geoff Barrow (b. December 9, 1971, Walton-in-Gordano, North Somerset, England), and guitarist Adrian Utley (b. April 27, 1957, Northampton, Northamptonshire, England).

Barrow, who was active in the Bristol music scene in the early 1990s, got his start in the recording industry writing songs for Neneh Cherry and doing production work for trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack. Gibbons had been earning a living as a nightclub singer when she and Barrow met in 1991 while participating in a job-training program at the Bristol unemployment office. They collaborated on a number of songs and dubbed themselves Portishead, after the town where Barrow grew up. Meanwhile, Barrow continued working as a producer and remixed songs for a diverse collection of groups that included Primal Scream, Ride, and Depeche Mode. During this time, Portishead’s core lineup was completed with the additon of Utley, a veteran jazz guitarist who had previously recorded with guitar viruoso Jeff Beck.

The group’s debut album, Dummy (1994), was widely hailed as a dark masterpiece. Gibbons’s vocals, which alternately evoked Billie Holiday’s growl and Judy Collins’s plaintive soprano, served as an anchor for the instrumental experimentation of Barrow and Utley, who integrated sound loops, samples from 1960s film sound tracks, and theremin solos into a sonic mélange that achieved massive crossover success. The album’s retro sound and melancholy lyrics appealed to an adult alternative rock market that had traditionally eschewed dance music, and the heavy rotation of videos for the singles “Sour Times” and “Numb” on MTV sparked additional sales. Dummy went on to capture the 1995 Mercury Prize for album of the year, and it was certified gold in the United States.

The band’s second album, the self-titled Portishead (1997), was a solid follow-up to Dummy, and the haunting video for the single “Only You” became a staple on MTV. After the release of the live album PNYC (1998), the band went on an extended hiatus, with individual members pursuing solo projects. Gibbons teamed with former Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb (who billed himself as Rustin Man) to produce Out of Season (2002). The album represented a radical departure from the electronic wizardry of Portishead, with acoustic guitars and simple piano melodies taking the place of samplers.

Portishead reunited in 2005, playing a handful of live dates and collecting material for a new album. The appropriately titled Third reached the Billboard Top Ten in its first week of release in 2008, and critics praised the band’s reinvention of itself. Although the group had not totally forsaken its trip-hop roots, the driving beats of songs such as “We Carry On” and “Machine Gun” offered a harder, more industrial sound than any of Portishead’s previous works.

Portishead continued to tour and to make festival appearances, and in 2015 the band contributed a searing cover of ABBA’s “S.O.S.” to the dystopian film High Rise. Though all members pursued different projects thereafter, Portishead did not formally break up.