Portishead's Dummy (33⅓ Series)

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

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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, particularly 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.

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Dramatis Personæ

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

drums

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

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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 pianiststatesman 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

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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 experiments 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.

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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 *

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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. *

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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.   New York Times December 22, 1927e.

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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. *

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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 pulselike 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.   Montreal Gazette December 9, 1927.

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✒✒ 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 otherworldly 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.” *

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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. *

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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

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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.”

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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

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re-released in April of the following year); and “Glory Box,” January 2, 1995. *

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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.

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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

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  Quoted in Simpson 2008.

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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.

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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

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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.

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  Everett 2009, pp. 105–106.

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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?

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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.

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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. *

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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.” *

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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     12   13   10 11

Mixmag 1999. Lucas 1997. Lien 1997. People 1995. •

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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 *

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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     16   17   14 15

B.B.C. 2010. Miller 1995. Marcus 1997. McLean 2008. •

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

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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. *

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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

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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

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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 selfreflection. 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.   Q 1998.

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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. *

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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. *

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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 •

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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 •

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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. *

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“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 experimentation 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.   Richardson 1997.

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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

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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 significant civil rights struggles after a boycott in 1963 against the Bristol Omnibus Company led to national antidiscrimination legislation. A city with visible extremes •

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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 neighborhood 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. *

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“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, •

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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 rebellious 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.

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

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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

    25   26   23 24

Breihan 2009. Platform.net undated. Johnson 1996, p. 83. Platform.net undated. •

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And, overwhelmingly, hand-to-hand — tapes and records lent and given by older siblings, older friends. *

*

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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 smallminded. 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,

    29   30   27 28

McLean 2008. Jenkins 1995. Bernstein 1995. Vibe 1995. •

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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     33   34   35   36   31 32

Breihan 2009. Uhelszki 1995. Vibe 1995. Vibe 1995. Heller 2009. Jones 2006. •

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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

*

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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.

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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.

*

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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.

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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

    41   42   39 40

Gillespie 2006. Farsides 2002. Farsides 2002. Gilbey undated. •

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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.

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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

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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.   Johnson 1996, p. 179.

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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.   Johnson 1996, p. 106.

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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.

*

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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 •

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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 sensibility. 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. *

*

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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 interaction between atmosphere and operator. The dulcimer is ancient, material in its operation. Substantial where •

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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 selfevident 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. •

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The melody of the verse is all taut packets of syncopation: 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 acknowledgment. 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. *

*

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A cimbalom is also used in John Barry’s soundtrack for the 1965 British espionage thriller The Ipcress File, apparently inspired by the prominent use of a zither in Anton Karas’ score for 1949’s The Third Man.

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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     50   51   52   48 49

Darling 1995. Uhelszki 1995. Uhelszki 1995. Innersound 2008. Miller 1995. •

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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.   Miller 1995.

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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 unforgiving 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. *

*

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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.

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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 astonishing: 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 transformative 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 •

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dated, but instead makes of them something glittering, ringing, shining, a permanent crescendo. *

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

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“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

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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     61   62   59 60

Vibe 1995. Senior 2000. Trynka 1997. McLean 2008. •

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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. *

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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.”

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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

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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.

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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. *

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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:

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

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… 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 *

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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     69   70   67 68

McLean 2008. Marcus 1997. McLean 2008. La Polla undated. •

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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.

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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 •

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“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 unsettling, 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.   Harrison undated.

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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.

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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 •

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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 littleknown Bristol bands, including Saul’s own Earthling. *

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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.     76   77   78   74 75

Darling 1995. Quoted in Darling 1995. Entertainment Weekly 1995. Entertainment Weekly 1995. Bernstein 1995. •

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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

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

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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. *

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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 jazzfusion 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.

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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. *

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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 atmosphere 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, •

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shorn of its klaxon-like alarm, the song continues for 30 seconds before abruptly, suddenly, ceasing. *

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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.   NPR 2008.

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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

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

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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

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

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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.

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“It’s Yours” was one of the first songs to take the characteristic 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.   Glave 2008.

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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. *

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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

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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 *

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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.

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the decayed snare gasp it is one of the elements of Neneh Cherry’s “Somedays” — produced by Geoff Barrow — that anticipate Dummy. *

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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.” *

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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.” *

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  Norman 1995.   Alexandrovna 2008.

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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.   Corbin 1998, p. 43.

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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

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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 atmospheric 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.

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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. *

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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.

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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

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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.   Darling 1995.

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and John Baggott, Clive Deamer — who all ended up as being very much part of the Portishead live band.

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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, remembered 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, pitchshifting: 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.   Coleman 1997, p. 56.

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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 *

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Producers would manipulate samples in order to demonstrate 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.

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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 reasonablesounding 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 *

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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.

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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.

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“It was a push towards originality,” says Tim Saul. “That was what was really driving it.” *

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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 settlements — 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” constituted 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.

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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 *

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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.

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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 fingerprint 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 instruments 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.   Platform.net undated.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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  B.B.C. 2010.

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“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 torchsongand-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.   Trynka 1997.

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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, impenetrable 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 vulnerabilities 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 •

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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 sentimentality 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. *

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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 atmospheric feel.115 These initial ideas would be produced on guitar, bass, organ, drums. “Inspiration can come from   Miller 1995.

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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     118   119   116 117

Miller 1995. B.B.C. 2010. Young 1998. Goldberg 1997a. •

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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.     122   123   124   125   120 121

Young 1998. Young 1998. Young 1998. Young 1998. Goldberg 1997a. Miller 1995. •

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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 *

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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.   Miller 1995.

126 127

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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 disorienting 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 •

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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 archetypes 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.

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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

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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 inclinations. 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

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

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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

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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 situations 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

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

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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 deliberate 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

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

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of Season. In an interview in 1995 she described Webb as “probably my biggest influence.”137 *

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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.

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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. *

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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.

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

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

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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

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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 artificially 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.

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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, decompensation. 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; •

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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?” *

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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”:

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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 •

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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.

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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.

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

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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

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Uhelszki 1995. Darling 1995. Newsday 1995. Heller 2009. •

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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,

    156   157   158   154 155

B.B.C. 2010. Clark 1995. Taraska 1997. Taraska 1997. 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

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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 gravitational 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.

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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

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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. *

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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

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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 *

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

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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.

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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 instrumental 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 breakbeats. 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 hallucinogenic 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 understood 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.   Wilder 2005, p. 60.

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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 *

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

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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. *

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“It’s a Fire” opens with a string phrase, two lines counterpointed 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. *

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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.

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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 prominently 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.

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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.

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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 taperecorder, 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 experiments 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 magnification 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 *

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

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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 compromised 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.” *

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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 selfpitying 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. *

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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’ performance 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.

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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

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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.

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me” — the last syllable drawn into a deadspin of reverberation — 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 overdetermination by the world outside. *

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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.”  120 •

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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.

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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 significance 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, quasidivine 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.

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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.

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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, micromovements, 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  124 •

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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 Prizewinning 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 unwillingness 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.

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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

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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. *

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“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.

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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, evacuating 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 implications 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.

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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. *

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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.   B.B.C. 2010.

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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

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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.   Miller 1995.

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

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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 imagination. 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.”

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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.   Uhelszki 1995.

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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 *

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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.

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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

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

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industry deliberately chooses music that is nobody’s favorite and subjects it to unvenomed and innocuous orchestrations.”193 *

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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 interpreted, our music,” recalled Geoff Barrow in 2008, “it was so terribly interpreted.”194 *

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And yet we may need a more nuanced understanding of what “background music” actually does. Writer Sean   Schafer 1997, p. 96.   Jones 2008.

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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 dislocation. 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 observation. It does actually sound a bit like that. She didn’t mean it as a compliment.” *

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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.   Schafer 1997, pp. 90–94.

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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 appreciation 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.

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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. *

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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 hallucinations — voices — because they arrive unprompted, unmeasured by distance, unattached to an originating source that can be judged and rejected.198   Jaynes 1976, p. 98.

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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?

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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  141 •

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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

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

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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. *

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“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  143 •

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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.   Goldberg 1997a.

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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.

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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:  145 •

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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.

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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.

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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 — introduced 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 *

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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.

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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. *

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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. *

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Dummy’s lyrics are imagistic, impressionistic. Elliptical. Shards of imagery — “a faithless path to roam,” “where   Möllenkrame, undated.

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

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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 unwillingness 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. *

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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 accusations: “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. *

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The band has made explicit political comments in interviews. 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

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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. *

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“Roads” appears in Rachal Talalay’s 1995 film Tank Girl, an adaptation of the iconic comic book, set in a postapocalyptic future in which drought is the condition of the world. Talalay has suggested that the film’s final execution was compromised because of studio interference, and commercial considerations also shaped the soundtrack. But she remembers that “Portishead was used from the beginning and no one had any problems.”  154 •

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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 rhythmically 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.

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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

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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.

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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 understand 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.” *

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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 unintelligible; 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. *

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“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 •

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“Evil,” he replies, a heartless and callous restatement of the world’s wrong, “never does.” *

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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. *

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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.”

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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.

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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”:

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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 soundcollage 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.

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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 instrumental b-sides on wrong tempo and I felt that I was on the right way.

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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. *

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Portishead refused — refused — to license music for advertisements. But Tim Saul remembers having conversations 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.” *

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

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Dummy seemed to precipitate — license — a resurgence 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.

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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 deconstructive 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. *

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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 instruments 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 effectively — 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. *

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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

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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. *

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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.

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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

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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 manipulating 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.

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— 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.

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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 alternating 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 •

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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. *

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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.

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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 •

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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 experimentation as in part a by-product:

  Senior 2000.

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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.” *

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

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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 *

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Zeid Hamdan continues to face cultural resistance in his native Lebanon. The country’s media class persistently 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.   Levinson 2005.

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“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 decompensation, 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 •

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figures from the same song have been implicated in the song’s exoskeleton by the dirty snare hits and the impossibly 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. *

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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

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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.

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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. *

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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 *

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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.

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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 experimentation 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 opportunity, 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, anythinggoes, 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.

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“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 transformative treatment of influences — or a cheapening of that genre’s vibrant dominant influence. For others there were suspicious racial overtones, perhaps the implication 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.   Gundersen 2008.

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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 opportunistic, 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 soundcraft. ‘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. *     234   235   232 233

*

Goldberg 1997b. Pemberton 1994. Harrison, “Review”. Pemberton 1994.  188 •

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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.

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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 necessarily 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 experimental 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 methodologies 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   Pride 1995.   B.B.C. 2010. 239   Watt 1997. 237 238

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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 *

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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.

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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.

*

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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.

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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 reverberation 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. *

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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 oversaturated 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     244   245   246   242 243

Darling 1995. Barrow 2000. Darling 1995. Gibbons 1995. Uhelszki 1995.  194 •

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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 perfectionism. He described it with characteristic candor:   Watt 1997.   Goldberg 1997a.

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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 remembered, “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   Hughes 1997.   Trynka 1997. 251   Wiederhorn undated. 249 250

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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

*

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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 experimental: 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 instrumental 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.

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mysterious, aloof, where Dummy’s, for all their intimidating candour, are democratic. It is a much stronger album that people typically remember: austere, extravagant, 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. *

*

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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.   Miller 1995.

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*

*

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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.” *

*

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Desire for new material from Portishead continued. Live bootlegs circulated online, as did tracks purporting   Lynskey 2008.

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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 deliberate 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

  Robinson undated.   Thompson 2009. 258   Robinson undated. 256 257

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“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.   NPR 2008.

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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

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✒✒ 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 *

*

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There exists a Facebook group called “I Love having sex to PortisHead.”263 A description helpfully clarifies the premise:   http://twitter.com/#!/SouthofDevin/statuses/9927415509815297   http://twitter.com/#!/oguicezario/statuses/14272529929601024 263   http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=94992862893 261 262

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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. *

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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-beanother-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-withmusic-on-

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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.” *

*

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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 introduction. 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.” *

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“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. *

*

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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. *

*

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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.

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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. *

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With a chorus as immediately quotable as that of “Sour Times,” “Glory Box” has been subject to numerous interpretations. 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.

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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?” *

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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 everything 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.

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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

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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 *

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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. *

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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.

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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 *

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“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.

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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. *

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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.   See Milner 2010, Chapter 7, for an excellent discussion of “The Loudness Wars.” 275 276

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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.

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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 noncommunication, 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.

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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. *

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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 •

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That happened a few times. And then you kinda knew that, ah, this is maybe going to work.

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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. *

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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 intellectual 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, expressions 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 •

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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 inclinations 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 — contradictions, 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.” *

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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.” *

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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.

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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.”

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Richardson, Paul. “Wave your hands, and wooooo!” Daily Telegraph, June 21, 1997. Robinson, John. “Up Close and Personal: Geoff Barrow.” Uncut, undated. Online: http://www.uncut.co.uk/music/portishead/ reviews/11429 Rosolato, Guy. “La Voix: entre corps et langage.” Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 38 (1974). Translated in course materials for “Hearing Things” as part of MA Cultural and Critical Studies programme, Birkbeck College, 2000–2001. Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2008). Schafer, R. Murray. The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977). Schafer, R. Murray. “Music, Non-Music and the Soundscape.” In John Paynter, Tim Howell, Richard Orton, and Peter Seymour (Eds.), Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought (London: Routledge, 1992). Senior, Mike. “Johnny Dollar & Simon Palmskin: Recording Gabrielle’s ‘Rise’ ”, Sound on Sound, July 2000. Sexton, Paul. “Portishead Find Place on UK Map.” Billboard, October 8, 1994. Shapiro, Peter. Drum ’n’ Bass: The Rough Guide (London: Rough Guides, 1999). Simpson, Dave. “Profile: Geoff Barrow.” Guardian, April 11, 2008. Smith, Andy. Interview with Zeynep Is¸ıl Is¸ık for “30 Desibel” for Kanal B. Online: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=TwboRmCQWVY Taraska, Julie. “Sweet & Sour Times.” Request, October 1997. Thompson, Ben. Seven Years of Plenty: A Handbook of Irrefutable Pop Greatness 1991–1998 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998). Thompson, Ben. “Light in the West.” Observer, February 17, 2008. Trynka, Paul. “You Only Live Twice.” Mojo, October, 1997. Uhelszki, Jaan. “Understanding Portishead.” Addicted to Noise, 1.03, March 1995. Online: http://web.archive.  231 •

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org/web/20000903074908/www.addict.com/issues/1.03/ Cover_Story/Portishead/ Utley, Adrian. IRC Chat. Online: http://freespace.virgin.net/sour. times/interviews/adrian_chat1.html van den Berg, Erik. Interview with Beth Gibbons. Oor, No. 6, April 8, 1995. Translated by the author. Vibe. “Portishead.” June/July 1995. Watt. Interview with Adrian Utley. No. 54, December 1997. Wiederhorn, Jon. “Attitude and Armageddon: A Chat with Portishead’s Geoff Barrow.” Microsoft Music Central, undated. Online: http://kotinetti.suomi.net/heikki.hietala/Interviews/ Geoff%20Attitude.htm Wilder, Eliot. Endtroducing… (New York, NY: Continuum, 2005). Young, Rob. “Tangled Up In Blue.” The Wire, No. 198, December 1998.

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Acknowledgements

Portishead are known for their reluctance to give interviews, 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 •

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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.lebaneseundergroundshop.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 excellence 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 •

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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.

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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