Portishead - Dummy
Good people of Blue Moon, I give you Portishead, possibly the world’s most genuinely reluctant (and therefore probably coolest) popstars. I’m going down the BH classics route here as I’m sure a fair few on this thread own this album which came out of nowhere but sold in huge numbers.
I think I’ve said before that the 90s were a funny decade for me, musically and otherwise. Long story short, I lost both my parents in relatively quick succession and found, with the first person I’d ever properly fallen in love with, that you can’t “save” someone who doesn’t want to be saved and that at some point you might need to make a decision as to whether you save yourself or go down with the ship. I’d have much preferred if it was a case of “one day she cut her hair, and I stopped loving her” but sadly grown-up life didn’t turn out to be quite that simple.
Outwardly things were going well, I was doing well at work and materially I was the model of an upwardly mobile young man!! But emotionally I was more than a bit all over the shop and at some point, I started shutting down. My musical response to all this was frankly a bit odd. I sort of hid myself away and started buying all sorts of genres of music I had hitherto little or no knowledge of. I would sit there alone late at night listening to Giant Steps, or some Steve Reich or Clifton Chenier (you don’t sit at home listening to old school zydeco on your own in the dark if things are going well) or learning a Verdi libretto or listening to Faure’s Requiem. I was spending hours, in fact days, of my life comparing Roger Norrington’s historically informed performances to recognised classic recordings to decide which I preferred. To what end? f**k knows. Arguably I was having a mental health crisis, but it just chose to manifest itself in the form of music; maybe that was what kept the wheels on the wagon for everything else?
So, I had my music from the 80s and a burgeoning collection of random music but virtually nothing contemporary from the 90’s as they were unfolding. I can count on the fingers of one hand the 90’s bands whose music I bought at the time (and I’ll probably nominate another of those next time out).
However, at the start of the decade before things went a bit weird, I’d bought Blue Lines and loved it but found I could only listen to it so much before I decided that it was still missing something for me. Nonetheless, it had probably preconditioned me for something like Dummy to come along. I didn’t buy it immediately, my dad had just died prior to its release and so I didn’t really take any notice at the time, but eventually I thought I need to find out what the fuss was all about. I can’t remember exactly when I bought it but I’m glad it wasn’t when it was being raved about because I would probably have overplayed it and then discarded it – whereas this way it actually just got played more and more over time as a realised how brilliant it was. It didn’t quite break the cycle of buying insane amounts of music and going down genre rabbit holes, but it grounded me a little bit more in the land of the contemporary and the living.
The trip-hop tag seemed a bit inadequate. Hip hop, bluesy, jazzy, electronica; it’s one thing to drag in a load of styles; but to them make it sound like its own coherent new thing is more than a little impressive. To me Portishead are virtually their own genre. I love this album for loads of reasons, but here’s just four of them:
- The combination of richness and restraint
- The contradictory nature of much of it
- The care taken over it and the quality of the sounds
- Beth Gibbons
I could use loads of adjectives to describe it: rich and sparse at the same time; effortlessly cool but exuding warmth; it shimmers but at the same time manages to pulse and throb; full of samples (and btw anyone sampling Isaac Hayes and Weather Report is worthy of your attention) and technology but unmistakably human; hard as nails but achingly fragile; sinister but comforting. It’s full of contradictions and always keeps you on your feet. Just when you think you know where a track is going it does the opposite of what you might expect.
I like an interesting bit of production but I’m not keen on over production – however this is one of the most produced records you could find – but it’s the exception that proves the rule. The level of care taken borders on obsession. There’s loads online about the detail of what they did for those who are interested; suffice to say it feels like everything has been crafted deliberately and with the utmost consideration. It does this from the off with the subtle changes to the drum pattern as Mysterons progresses, you know this album will reward paying close attention.
For all the technology involved it’s worth noting this is not a digital recording and moreover there’s tonnes of texture and tone delivered by ‘proper’ instruments none greater than the keyboards. I will never get bored of listening to the treatment of the Rhodes piano at the start of Roads. But it’s not just the Rhodes, there’s Vox and Hammond organs scattered around at various points, rarely in your face but they are there. Then there’s the smattering of guitars, Adrian Utley is a talented musician but one who shows absolute restraint until the last track and even then, it’s more about the soundscape he creates. There are various moments throughout the album where you think they might let rip and then they just dial it back. At first, I found it mildly frustrating then I found it remarkable.
99 times out of 100 I would lose my shit about the amount of post processing Beth Gibbons voice has gone through on some of the tracks; however, it’s not there to mask inadequacies but simply to get the sound they want. If anything, it highlights the occasional limitation, but it creates a film noir intimacy that she’s singing gangsters secrets into your ear in a dingy nightclub. Is she the kind of girl who’ll sell you out in the final reel as she simply shrugs about your naivety, or is she the tragic heroine who’ll sacrifice herself so you can escape? What was it she was trying to tell you anyway?
Gibbons’s voice epitomises the contrasts of the album as a whole – ethereal head voice and warmer chest voice, at the risk of sounding like a Cointreau ad, it’s ice and fire. She’s an intelligent singer in that she thinks about how she’s delivering the sounds, letting the vocal melody and chord changes determine some unusual phrasing. Waif like, wafer thin at times – she says she’s not much of a singer but then it turned out that she could replicate this sound live so what does that say about her skills?
When she sings the refrain in Roads, which in many ways is the centrepiece of this album, it’s simultaneously the most broken and defiant sounding voice in the world. Maybe that’s where I was and that’s why I love this.
So back to where I started this review, was this album therapy? Possibly. Even now I sometimes find myself curling up in a foetal position when I listen to parts of it! Life is complicated, life can be dark, it can be fragile, it can sometimes drag you to the edge; but life is beautiful, full of unexpected twists and turns and life is precious.
But to label it as some form of personal therapy is to sell it incredibly short. I eventually caught up a bit with 90’s music but found I’d already been spoilt. For me, you can stick your Britpop up your arse, this is the greatest British band of the 90’s (NO and DM being products of the 80s) – recognised across Europe but prophets in their own land and all that. This album came out at a time when I was discovering the likes of Ellington and Coltrane, Puccini and Verdi, it held its own with them in a way that to be honest most of their contemporary's releases never could, and for me it still holds its own today.
For those unfamiliar, play on the best equipment you can access either at night or as the light fades. For those familiar, please feel free to fill in the many gaps I’ve left about this fascinating album and band.
