You'd have to look far and wide before you came across a more reclusive rock star than Geoff Barrows of Portishead. Probably all the way across the Atlantic, to a small sleepy town five miles down the Bristol Channel on England's craggy West Coast.

There's not much to recommend in Portishead, which stands on the spot of a 17th century village. It's got drab weather, shipping docks, and not much else except its proximity to Bristol, "the gateway for the Empire." For some, it's the mouth of hell. Where nothing ever changes, and people go, according to an expatriate, "just to die."

This is a city that time seems to have left behind, where people are cordial, down-to-earth, and a little shy. Just like Geoff. He and his mother moved here when he was thirteen, after his parents divorced. Mom never left. But Geoff moved fifteen miles to Bristol and picked up some work in "a dodgy rock band" playing drums on the weekends.

He got his first real job at sixteen as a tape operator at Coach House Studios where Portishead now record. This is the place where he was first asked to write some demos for Neneh Cherry's Homebrew album, and where he remixed singles by Depeche Mode, Primal Scream, Paul Weller, and Gabrielle.

Although Portishead, the band, is on the brink of international success, and could have their choice of any state of the art facility, Barrow remains here, at the place that gave him his first break. But it's not clear whether that has more to do with his hatred of change than any sense of loyalty.

Barrow is a man of deep convictions, and honest but complex feelings. He is harsh and uncompromising about his own performance; driven by an inner fire that demands perfection to quench its fires. But just as Barrows demands so much from himself, he is surprisingly gentle and solicitous with others. During my transatlantic interview with him last week, he was reluctant to talk about himself, but was concerned whether I had enough information to stitch together a story, and patiently explained some of the intricacies of how he makes Portishead records. Like sampling from recordings he makes of his own songs.

He is self-effacing to the point of pain, and doesn't seem to know his worth in the marketplace; something that is unusual, yet so refreshing in a musician. He is happiest locked in a sound studio mixing up his strange aural cocktails. Pure brisk shots of jazz, symphonic snippets, soul riffs, and liberal doses of silence. Shaken not stirred, just like the James Bond soundtracks he samples from.

Geoff at twenty-three isn't much different from Geoff at thirteen, only now he scratches and DJs in a studio instead of the back bedroom where he used to play weird bits of this and that, creating his own sonic Frankensteins, and causing his neighbors to raise their eyebrows askance, wondering what that quiet young gent was up to.

Geoff Barrow is still a quiet gent, and what he was up to is now apparent for all the world to hear. By all accounts they like what they hear. Dummy, Portishead's debut album, was named Melody Maker's 1994 Album of the Year, and their second single, "Glory Box," entered the English charts at number thirteen.

In America, the haunting, plaintive "Sour Times (Nobody Loves Me)" is now an MTV Buzz Clip, and is hypnotizing fans with its strange hybrid of hip hop breaks and spy movie samples that cut in and out beneath the unsteady, shifting sand of vocalist Beth Gibbon's haunting, suicidal refrain.

Portishead is disturbing, yet strangely compelling. Odd meowing, scratches, and bits of songs dropped into other songs create an unsettling landscape that you're almost afraid to enter. A moonscape, really. But as eerie and funereal as the songs are, they catch you unaware and lodge in your subconscious, forcing you to confront your own haunted houses. Just when you think that you can't take any more they show you the trap door. And you're back again among the living, with only a slight chill to remind you where you've been.