30 Years of Portishead’s ‘Dummy’

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Dummy

Portishead

2017

Downtempo, Trip Hop

Vinyl, LP, Reissue, Repress

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Dusty drum loops, turntablist gymnastics, tremolo-adorned electric pianos, washes of wah-pedal guitar, cinematic string sections bound for the boldest of Bond themes: three decades after its release, the sonic signifiers of Portishead’s debut album Dummy somehow still manage to exist outside of time.

At once ominous and elegant, it remains an opening statement best saved for nocturnal hours. It’s too unnerving to be filed alongside the quintessential quiet storm canon — a famous critic once dismissed it as “Sade for androids.” Still, it’s not without an unquestionable sense of groove. On top of Geoff Barrow’s slow-burning breakbeats and Adrian Utley’s languorous guitar lies the captivating voice of Beth Gibbons: a confidently frail confessional songwriter lost in a loungey landscape, shrouded in stage fog. Upon the album’s unveiling, the Bristol-based trio ushered in the birth of the trip-hop genre and would eventually leave several sonic strains in its wake.

Portishead’s origin story begins in 1991 with a chance meeting between Barrow and Gibbons during a coffee break during an Enterprise Allowance training day. This Thatcher-era initiative guaranteed income to unemployed people who set up small businesses. Despite their differences, the teenage hip-hop head and the twenty-something pub singer musically met halfway.

“I went to his house and played him some of my stuff,” Gibbons recalled in a 2014 Guardian interview. “He came round to my house and played me some of his. He was obviously good.”

The young beatmaker had just started working for Neneh Cherry’s husband to contribute production to her next album, and the group recorded the initial sketches for Dummy in the Swedish singer’s kitchen in London. 

These sessions would eventually be finished at Coach House Studios at home in Bristol, where the pair came across the older jazz guitarist Adrian Utley and would finish the first track cut, “It Could Be Sweet.” “There was this amalgamation of ideas and a lifetime of separate discovery with all of us,” the guitarist admitted in another Guardian interview.

The three quickly established a creative rapport: while Barrow introduced Utley to sampling, the latter would pull sample sources from spy films taped from television broadcasts. Plenty of other crate-digging happened — the album contains fragments of Weather Report, Johnnie Ray, and Issac Hayes — but in many cases, they recorded original passages of music. With the help of future Radiohead sideman Clive Deamer and engineer Dave McDonald, Barrow and Utley would track instrumentals later pressed onto vinyl and distressed to dollar-bin condition, effectively creating samples of their devising. 

Only after this arduous process did Gibbons tackle toplines and lyrics at home. For the dominance of the record’s dense production, Beth’s strength as a lyricist is underappreciated compared to her voice. Across the album’s eleven tracks, the narrator takes an effortlessly existential stance and constantly poses questions that often counter the instrumentals:

“Did you really want?”

“Did you realize no one can see inside your view?”

“How can I believe this miracle?”

“Can anybody see we’ve got a war to fight?”

Nowhere is this impulse of inquiry more potent than album closer,“Glory Box,” a trip-hop torch song calling for sexual equality that Gibbons has claimed is often misinterpreted as a call to return to traditional gender roles. “Give me a reason to love you,” she beckons over a wall of distorted guitar — it is less an ask than a demand. 

When Dummy arrived in August 1994 — the same summer as Dookie and The Downward Spiral — the response was unanimously and overwhelmingly positive. The standout single “Sour Times,” centered around a shimmering, slowed-down sample from Lalo Shifrin’s Mission: Impossible television series score, landed on the Billboard Hot 100 and received generous airtime on MTV. The following year, the record would take home the Mercury Prize and earn a reputation as a luxury soundtrack.

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Roseland NYC Live

Portishead

2024

Downtempo, Acid Jazz, Trip Hop

2 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Deluxe, Reissue, Remastered

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“Those people bought the record and made the band big. But it’s a double edge-sword, isn’t it?” Barrow reflected years later in The New York Times. “In the sense of people actually having a dinner party and putting our music on, I would want to go in with a baseball bat and smash the [expletive] out of their fondue set.”

Perhaps these cultural misinterpretations were what informed the band’s trajectory to follow. After a 1997 self-titled sophomore album that saw the band almost entirely evade sample sources altogether, and an astounding live album released the following year recorded at NYC’s Roseland Ballroom alongside a string section, the band went on an indefinite decade-long hiatus. When the trio reemerged in 2008 with the aptly-titled Third, it was not so much a comeback as it was a bold reinvention, fusing a crate-digger’s range of influence spanning psychedelia, krautrock, and doo-wop.

Since then, the three members have largely made moves separately. Utley would evolve into a producer-for-hire behind the boards on albums for Algiers and Perfume Genius; Barrow would take on sci-fi soundtrack work for films such as Ex Machina and Annihilation; Beth Gibbons appeared on recordings as diverse as Henryck Gorecki’s third symphony and Kendrick Lamar’s “Mother I Sober.”

Despite a reluctance to repeat themselves, there’s no doubt that Portishead’s debut paved the way for generations of mood-music purveyors to follow. It’s hard not to hear flashes of their draconian downtempo aura in the recent works of Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey, let alone a laundry list of lo-fi beatmakers all over the internet. Dummy‘s impact on the industry can only be summed up by the last lines Gibbons sings on the record before its final fade: “This is the beginning of forever and ever.”