NYLON - June 2008 - (Page 122) Portishead have been laying low for the past seven years, but their new album, Third, will put them back in the spotlight— much to their discontent. By Luke Crisell. Photographed by Benoît Peverelli It’s an unusually clear day in Bristol, England, and from his upstairs windows Adrian Utley, one of the three members of Portishead, can almost see the bright, sand-colored buildings of Bath, the next nearest city, almost 20 miles away. Although deep in England’s West Country, Bristol shares little of the charm of its more pastoral neighbors. Utley’s street, cobblestoned and well-trod, is in one of the city’s more prepossessing neighborhoods, but for all its history Bristol is predominantly a bleak, gnarled milieu where concrete tower blocks twist out of the ground like weeds between paving stones, casting long shadows over the once-quaint streets beneath them. “Quite a lot of the time it’s the grayest of grimness; the concrete buildings look shitty and oppressive,” says Utley, with a yawn that belies the sleepless night (on account of his new baby daughter) he just spent. “They’re building a new city center and there’s no creativity, no good new art space or decent concert hall. But we’ve got a casino! We’ve got loads of fucking shit here that we don’t want. It’s so fucking frustrating.” Portishead’s new album, Third, is born from this, and a more overriding, disaffection (“over the last few years the government has gotten us into situations we don’t want to be in”). Dark, oppressive, and, at moments, savagely unforgiving, the record was started in 2004, seven years after their last studio album, Portishead, and a full decade after the release of the band’s debut, Dummy, the masterpiece that brought trip-hop THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD (pioneered, also in Bristol, by Tricky) to America and introduced a new style of music—a coalescence of vocals with live instrumentation and, thanks in part to Atari computers, electronic samples—that would come to define a generation. The scale of Dummy’s achievement spread slowly at first and then, when the single “Glory Box” charted with no radio play whatsoever, and following an appearance on seminal British TV music show Later With Jools Holland, more quickly. The members of Portishead remained elusive, however, and although they appeared before crowds of tens of thousands they shied from the spotlight, and the press, and it’s been that way ever since. Beth Gibbons, the singer whose voice lingers over the band’s music— sometimes lightly, sometimes deliberately oppressively—has not done an interview in eight years. “We found ourselves playing to crowds of 40,000 people,” says Utley, of the world tour that followed the release of their second album. “The Verve had split up that year so we got shifted up to headline a lot of festivals. It was never something we wanted to do, or considered we would do; it was pretty stressful. Beth was pretty ill—she was exhausted and Geoff [Barrow] and
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