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Source: The Georgia Strait, Volume 31, December 11-18, 1997 Written by John Lucas parts sent to the Portishead Mailing List by Jules
INWARD LOOKING PORTISHEAD DIGS DEEPER FOR ORIGINAL IDEAS

Whatever else Portishead may be, it is not a trip-hop band. Despite the Bristol, England-based group's penchant for scratching, funky breakbeats, and samples, Geoff Barrow is quick to distance its music from that label. On the phone from a tour stop in Atlanta, Georgia, Barrow explains that, in England, trip-hop is "seen as a really dirty word." Trip-hop, he says, is a form of instrumental dance music that was developed by DJs in New York, and has nothing to do with the slow, soulful mood music proffered by Portishead. In 1994, at roughly the same time that this nascent genre was taking root in English clubs, a new sound was emerging from Bristol. Portishead released its first album, Dummy, and like-minded artsts such as Tricky and Massive Attack were rapidly attracting the attention of the fickle British music press. Somewhere along the way, the signals got crossed, and the Bristol sound was incorrectly slapped with the dreaded label.

"We don't come from dance culture," says Barrow, who plays keyboards and drums in the band. "We've never particularly been into dance culture. But it's so massively huge in Europe, and a lot of the people who were making this so-called trip-hop came from dance culture. They worked in clubs and came out of house music, and slowed stuff down and did all that kind of stuff. FOr us, we were never about that. It was never about club music. So we always felt completely separated from that."
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Portishead's Eclusive Image and Enveloping Sound
by Cindy Waxer, from Network V.11, n.4 parts of article sent to the Portishead Mailing List by Grace Leung

"When we made Dummy, we thought, and this is not any kind of false modesty or anything, we thought if only we could sell enough copies to make another record," says Adrian Utley, bassist/keyboardist of UK's Portishead, his voice trailing off into the distance.

Named after the seaside resort hometown of the band's mastermind Geoff Barrow, Portishead formed after Barrow met vocalist Beth Gibbons in the unemployment office. Shortly thereafter, local jazz musician Adrian Utley was recruited to join the fledgling group along with Dave McDonald, the band's engineer. "I come from a playing background, Geoff comes from sampling records and programming which I laterally got into and that's how we met," explains Utley.

..."We do play minor key music and slow tempos. It's really what we do. That's just how it comes out. I don't think it particularly comes out through depression, it comes out through an emotional kind of impact," says Utley, shriking the notion that the band's music is a soundtrack to suicide.

...Whereas Dummy includes samples from disparate sources, Portishead features the band sampling themeselves....This complicated process involved constructing an original drumbeat or hiring an orchestra to play a melody, pressing it on acetate and then sampling the sound form vinyl to create a finsihed track with the ambiance of a tatered blues record. "I should think that for every one track on the album, we probably did ten or fifteen backing tracks that didn't work," says Utley of a laborioius procedure necessitating two years of daily studio work.

...Portishead became enveloped by their own dismal and foreboding music. "We went through a really kind of dark, long creative point where we were kind of doubting everything that we were oding and didn't really believe in ourselves anymore -the light had gone out really," says Utley, explaining the difficulty the band faced while making a second album.

Yet it is precisely Portishead's commercial success that seems to feed its refreshingly uncommercial sound. Realizing that the only excape form creative paralysis was to, as Utley says, "put our foot on the petrol," Portishead embarked on creating an album whose excellence depends upon its idiosyncratic imperfections. "We're kind of influenced by musicians form soundtracks where you get an Italian drummer that has been told to play James Brown or something...but he came form another world and so the way he would play it would be a little bit crap you know, a little sticky sounding, so we're into that kind of enthic," says Utley of the album's unpolished glitches.

[on the media sessions] ---"Beth does have her photo taken and we are going to have our photos taken together but we won't be in a studio and it won't be with a a lot of expensive clothes on that we can't afford," says Utley, downplaying Portishead's stranglehold of their public image.

[on the subject of All Mine video] --- based on an 1968 Italian talent show, the video has been shunned by MTV programming directors who believe that heavy rotation depends upon a band's willingness to spin its public image. "I suppose [MTV] just wants every video to look the same and it doesn't look like everything else," says Utley.

[blah, blah conclusion]
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