Portishead with Rob Fitzpatrick

Yasi and writer Rob Fitzpatrick head back to Bristol to tell the story of Portishead. They discuss the band’s unique and highly detail-oriented approach to crafting music, the uneasy relationship with fame that followed their success, and how music can be both super popular and wholly misunderstood. Listen to the Portishead playlist here. Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalekGuest: Rob Fitzpatrick @rob_fitzpatrickProducer: Rob SundermannEditor: Adrian BridgesAdditional Production Supervision: Justin SaylesTheme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:59Yasi Salek?

  Hi guys, it's Yasi. Just wanted to pop on here real quick for the episode to tell you in case you haven't heard yet that Bandsplain is doing a live show in Boston. We are joining the incredible Something in the Way Festival. Chris Ryan and I will be joined by Patrick Flynn of the god tier band Fiddlehead at the Sinclair in Cambridge on Friday, January 30th at 8:00 PM. Tickets are on sale right now. And there's a little bit more, babe. There's a little more because we're also doing a late night movie screening of one of our favorite movies of all time, Repo Man. Ciara and I will be doing a gorgeous little intro of that film at the Coolidge Corner Theater on Saturday, January 31st.

• 1:42Yasi Salek?

  All the information and where to buy tickets, you can find that at the ringer.com/events. So please, if you're in the Boston general area, come out and join us. It's going to be really fun. Friday, January 30th for Bandsplain Live at the Sinclair in Cambridge. And Saturday, January 31st for the screening of Repo Man at the Coolidge Corner Theater. And the tickets again are at the ringer.com/events. Hope to see you there.

• 2:52Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bandsplain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode is about Portishead. My guest today, you guys, my guest today is a journalist, a stamed podcaster, host of the States of Independence podcast, and my former colleague,

• 3:12Speaker 03

  True.

• 3:13Yasi Salek?

  Rob Fitzpatrick. Welcome to the program.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Thank you, Yasi.

• 3:15Yasi Salek?

  An actual British person.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  An actual British person.

• 3:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me. It's a delight to be here. It's lovely to see you.

• 3:20Yasi Salek?

  It's lovely to see you as well.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Genuine years.

• 3:22Yasi Salek?

  You know, I had to do it to them, get a real British person to talk about Portishead.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 3:27Yasi Salek?

  I mean, you're not from Bristol.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  No, but my son went to university in Bristol, so.

• 3:31Yasi Salek?

  Counts.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it counts.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:33Yasi Salek?

  Before we like dive in to the history, the rich history of Portishead, do you want to talk to me a little bit about your personal relationship with this band?

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Yes. I mean, I've got a lot of personal relationship with this band.

• 3:46Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  In the sense that.

• 3:48Yasi Salek?

  Not creepy.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, not in a creepy way. In the sense that in 1994, I was working in a record shop in Putney. And Portishead, rather like Oasis, landed like a bomb.

• 4:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Everywhere. And, but I also remember, and I can't really remember this about anybody else, but I literally remember the first person who ever spoke to me about Portishead. Like before any of the records had come in, they're like, have you heard this?

• 4:20Yasi Salek?

  Who was that?

• 4:21Speaker 03

  That was Colleen Maloney.

• 4:22Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Who is now the head of press at Domino Records. And she was working at 4AD at the time. And we were really good mates. And she said to me, have you heard Portishead? Like.

• 4:31Yasi Salek?

  Right, like a hushed tone.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, because it wasn't out yet.

• 4:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  But it would, there was a, a growing thing, you know, and then when it, when they landed, it was like, wow. And also then a couple of months later, they were on TV, their first TV when they did, yeah, when they did later. And that was like. It was a bit like a sort of, it was not exactly Ed Sullivan doing the Beatles, but it was people, we literally stayed in to watch it.

• 5:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  And that was, it was unusual to stay in and it was, I mean, it was less unusual to stay in and watch TV than it is now. But people did literally stay in to watch it because it was like, wow, Portishead are gonna be on telly.

• 5:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  It was, it was a thing. So I remember that as well. So I've got deep roots.

• 5:19Yasi Salek?

  Okay, amazing. Yeah. And you can, you can really talk to me about like, what it felt like, particularly here in the UK, when that phenomenon sort of swept.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 5:30Yasi Salek?

  All right. Well, let's take it from the top.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Let's go from the top.

• 5:32Yasi Salek?

  Jeffrey Paul Barrow, born ninth of December nineteen seventy one. My guys, is it Sagittarius? That kind of makes sense.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 5:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, really marches to the beat of their own drum, free spirit. He was born in Walton in Gardeno and moved with his mother after the divorce of his parents to the town of Portishead when he was like ten or eleven.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  The story is that Jeff and his family moved there because his grandfather was the village handyman. So he got them sort of cheap housing.

• 6:05Yasi Salek?

  You guys, we, we used to have village handymen.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  We used to be a real country.

• 6:09Yasi Salek?

  We used to be a proper society. And now you have to use fiver and exploit the like, the labor of some person who's just trying to scrape together seventeen jobs to make a living.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, sadly.

• 6:23Yasi Salek?

  The gig economy has spread worldwide.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:26Yasi Salek?

  Another one of America's gorgeous inventions.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  The race to the bottom has reached us too.

• 6:33Yasi Salek?

  Well, yeah. So then, thank you, grandpa, because we've, thank you, grandpa, for many reasons. Um, lineage DNA, but also for, uh, bringing us to the town of Portishead, which obviously will become, um, extremely important in terms of band names and such. His father was a lorry driver. I use the parlance of your people and his mother was a supermarket cashier. He started learning drums at the age of eight years old. Um, it's a seaside suburb, Portishead, about ten miles from Bristol. Um, Jeff R. said to spin in nineteen ninety-five, I really don't like the place. It's a place you go to die.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:10Yasi Salek?

  There's actually a really great French documentary. Have you seen this about Portishead?

• 7:16Speaker 03

  I think I've seen bits of it.

• 7:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it came out in like ninety-eight, I wanna say. Documentary is kind of an overstatement, but it's like an hour long piece about them. There's this like incredible part near the end where it's Jeff and I think is his name Andy Smith, who was their DJ.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:31Yasi Salek?

  And for like his, his like high school mate and they're like sitting in like, I don't know, it's a bus stop or something. In Portishead and just talking about what it was like to grow up in Portishead and he's like, yeah, we had one cafe. It was closed in the winter. We would just get ciders and sit here. And there was all these like, I think ducks going around. He's like, we've known those ducks their whole lives.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:49Yasi Salek?

  The guy goes like, I knew your dad.

• 7:53Yasi Salek?

  It's like there was nothing to fucking do.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  That's a lot of places in England.

• 7:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Maybe not now, right?

• 7:59Speaker 03

  I think maybe even more so now.

• 8:00Yasi Salek?

  Well, they have TikTok now. There's plenty of them.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, it's just you sit in the bus stop and look at TikTok.

• 8:04Yasi Salek?

  TikTok and drink cider, I guess.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:06Yasi Salek?

  But so he said, Portishead probably only influenced me in that I was really pissed off, living down there, feeling bleak. It was the usual teenage thing. The only shows there would be some local young farmer's trad band from Cleveland. I wasn't the type of teen.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  And not even the good Cleveland.

• 8:21Yasi Salek?

  Not even, well, I don't know. It's a, it's bold statement. It's a good Cleveland. I wasn't the type of teenager who'd go out and get smashed. Unfortunately, I was more the type would stay in and worry about world affairs.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  This is a theme, isn't it? It's gonna develop over time.

• 8:33Yasi Salek?

  One thing I was quite impressed by, which I should just say it now, cause it's a very funny story. I've been in London or I've been in the UK for a couple of weeks now. My family and I came for the holidays. I, I somehow tricked them into doing that. And we went to the Cotswolds for Christmas. Cause I was like living my best, the holiday life.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:51Yasi Salek?

  Except I don't know any of the Cotswolds and I booked, you know, via home from the internet with no information. And so we absolutely booked into this like, lovely, but like. An inn full of um ninety year old people.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Welcome to the Cotswolds. I mean, that's literally what it is.

• 9:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but like not posh, like pretty like just standard, like ninety five year olds from an hour away. There was like eight wheelchairs.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  For a special lunch.

• 9:17Yasi Salek?

  It was wonderful.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:19Yasi Salek?

  And but my dad, God bless him, by like the third day, which was Boxing Day, was so bored out of his mind. And we don't have a car or anything, so he looked at a map and he was like, we're going to Bristol today.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:30Yasi Salek?

  And I was like, because it was the closest city. And I was like, okay. And so I posted on my Instagram story. I was like, do I want in Bristol? Because I was just trying to get a lay of the land. What do I do with my family? And my mate, Stuart from Mogwai, messaged and was like, what do you need? And I was like, I need to take my family.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Show them something exciting.

• 9:51Yasi Salek?

  And he goes, okay. And then he puts me on a three way DM with Jeff Barrow. Because Jeff Barrow is meant to be, I suppose, my tour guide to Bristol.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  I mean, who better?

• 10:03Yasi Salek?

  I wanted to die. I was like, I'm sorry, is this Jeff Barrow from Portishead? That you asked what I should do with my family? I know, just what a coincidence. This man also lives in Bristol. But anyways, it did, because I'm cheeky and impudent, um it did lead to me. And I just happened, it was just coincidental. I just happened to be researching this episode. So I was like, thanks for the tourist tips. It's Boxing Day, so everything's closed.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  BTW.

• 10:30Yasi Salek?

  Can I ask you a few questions? And he was so generous and kind and like, so for the past week, I've just been bothering this man on WhatsApp with questions about things he did thirty years ago. And he has been answering me, so.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Excellent. All right, good. I'm looking forward to hear what he has to say.

• 10:48Yasi Salek?

  I'll have some, I didn't, you know, I wasn't pushing it, but I did, just so I was trying to get some clarifications here and there. A little background, yeah. I mean, there's plenty out there, obviously, so. His first introduction to music, and now I hate that I know this because I'm haunted by it, was a song called The Laughing Policeman. Do you know this song?

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 11:07Yasi Salek?

  What in the fuck is this shit, babe? It's what nightmares are made of.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  I mean, there's a great tradition of Britain, British entertainers from the seventies, where they, something ends up being awful about them, some worse than others.

• 11:27Yasi Salek?

  Hmm.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  But, you know.

• 11:29Yasi Salek?

  A lot of pedophilia.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of pedophilia. Not always, but you know, more than, perhaps more than might be.

• 11:37Yasi Salek?

  In the general population.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, more than whatever the percentage is.

• 11:40Yasi Salek?

  More than's considered acceptable.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, more than, yeah.

• 11:42Yasi Salek?

  More than the acceptable.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  And not all of it's, anyway, let's leave that, let's leave that thought there. But, I mean, actually, this really relates to Portishead as well.

• 11:51Yasi Salek?

  The laughing policeman.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Well, just the sense that this is, that's a very specifically English thing.

• 11:57Yasi Salek?

  Hmm.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  I mean, you know, people, there occurs in other culture, other cultures have very specific things to, there's that kind of thing where it's like TV, but it's also like music hall, it's also like holiday camps.

• 12:09Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  It's like comedy and it's like, but stick it out as a single.

• 12:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  You know, and it's like, oh yeah, and it'll, you know, that sort of mainstream, the idea of a sort of grown up mainstream entertainment.

• 12:20Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Which sort of, you could argue, doesn't really exist anymore.

• 12:24Yasi Salek?

  No, because there's no, there's no avenue for it really anymore, right?

• 12:28Speaker 03

  No.

• 12:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  But it's also too narrow.

• 12:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I don't know what impact that had besides, like, it was like, wow, music.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 12:36Yasi Salek?

  Hmm.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  Music, but in a odd way, yeah.

• 12:39Yasi Salek?

  But this was more relevant to my interests. This is his, from his Pitchfork, five, ten, fifteen, twenty.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Love it.

• 12:44Yasi Salek?

  He said at ten, he got super into the Grease soundtrack.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:47Yasi Salek?

  I know that's fucking right.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, me too, actually. I mean, me and Jeff, he's like a year older than me.

• 12:51Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  A year younger than me, sorry.

• 12:53Yasi Salek?

  So you're in the same sort of demographic generation.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  The first record I literally ever bought was, uh, You're The One That I Want. So I get that.

• 13:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Grease was everywhere.

• 13:03Yasi Salek?

  Incredibly formative for me too, as a young child, like watching the film, listening to the soundtrack. I mean, it must have been much later after it came out.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:11Yasi Salek?

  Because I was, I'm younger than you guys, but here's what he said. The Grease soundtrack was massive. I don't know how big it was in America, it was big bit. Um, but it was unbelievable here. When I got into hip hop, I realized that Grease, the title track, had a break in it, a break beat. So when I was a DJ, I got two copies of it and started cutting it up.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Beautiful.

• 13:27Yasi Salek?

  It was just mental to be cutting up two copies of the track you know so well when you were eight or something. I think De La Soul sampled it on a roller skating jam named Saturdays.

• 13:43Yasi Salek?

  And he said, "The first time I heard the song would have been at the Village Disco."

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:48Yasi Salek?

  Disco hooked on really late in England. I would have been with my family. When you live in a really small community, you have a harvest festival or something like that. And there was a guy who lived in the village called Uncle Brian.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:57Yasi Salek?

  He was a DJ.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:59Yasi Salek?

  And he used to do parties and weddings and engagement parties.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 14:02Yasi Salek?

  He had

• 14:03Speaker 03

  And the rest.

• 14:04Yasi Salek?

  decks and stuff.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:05Yasi Salek?

  He used to do puppet shows and film shows. Listen, Uncle Brian, we don't know. We don't want to besmirch the name of Uncle Brian, but it's not looking good.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  Well, it's not so much that it's not looking good, as he's displaying all the traits

• 14:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  of people who do bad things, which is not to say he ever did.

• 14:22Yasi Salek?

  I was fine until I got to puppet shows and then I was like, the hair on the back of my neck.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:27Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, Uncle Brian introduced Jeff Barrow to the Grease soundtrack.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Right. I wondered where that sentence was going, but yeah, okay.

• 14:34Yasi Salek?

  Um, and then after Grease, as a young teen, Jeff Barrow gets super into hip hop, as many young teenagers, yeah. I'm not gonna do it here because I did it on the Massive Attack episode, but I did do a brief history of hip hop, me on the Wikipedia page for hip hop.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:51Yasi Salek?

  It is interesting and you should go listen to it, but this would have been like the early eighties.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  I would suggest that maybe it was more like the mid eight, because if he was born in seventy-one, in the early eighties, he's only eleven or twelve. And also in the early eighties, yeah, I mean, you could, there was the sort of electro.

• 15:07Yasi Salek?

  That's what he said. So he got, so he got put onto electro via like a friend from school, these like compilations.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's exactly what he said to me when I asked him. So yeah, I think he was a little bit, he was a little precocious, I guess, a little ahead of it. And he was playing drums in rock bands, I guess. He said, "When hip hop first hit suburban England, it kind of took over and was massively exciting. It was a real thing you could get into. It's difficult to describe, but to a younger generation of sixteen-year-olds, it was that you wouldn't go out and have a fight, you'd go out and dance against each other." Jeff Barrow also a breakdancer.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Were you a breakdancer?

• 15:40Speaker 03

  No.

• 15:41Yasi Salek?

  Is it just because you don't have good rhythm?

• 15:43Speaker 03

  I just, I'm at my knees.

• 15:45Yasi Salek?

  Even at sixteen.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  Even at sixteen, you know, even at sixteen, you know, if he's saying fifteen, sixteen, so we've, we've now placed ourselves in like the mid eighties.

• 15:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  And so the, I think it's also worth thinking that in, if you, if you look at hip hop and you go to sort of eighty six, then it starts to be like, oh, what you really understand as the sort of early sampling era of hip hop.

• 16:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, because when we're talking earlier, it's like Africa Mombada, the very early, very earliest tracks, the Sugar Hill Gang and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. So sampling is sort of making its way through the ears of

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:19Yasi Salek?

  young Jeffrey Barrow, but also he's playing drums in soft rock hair metal bands at this time.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Who isn't? I was very much into hair metal.

• 16:27Yasi Salek?

  Were you?

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was.

• 16:28Yasi Salek?

  While he's breakdancing, he said he got really into the MC Shan song Marley Marl, Marley Marl Scratch.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:37Yasi Salek?

  He said he first heard it when some kid stuck it on the blaster, the ghetto blaster. Yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  Love the way he just drops in blaster.

• 16:43Yasi Salek?

  The blaster.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:44Yasi Salek?

  There was in eighty five, um, in Bristol, there was the first graffiti exhibition in the UK, obviously with three D from Massive Attack at its center. Um, and Jeff Barrow was there, he was fourteen.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  Right. The stars align.

• 17:00Yasi Salek?

  I know.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:01Yasi Salek?

  Then he, as you do, you're getting into hoppy, so it's like eighty six, he gets some decks, starts messing around, tape loops.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, though, and he had Andy, his mate.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Andy Smith.

• 17:14Yasi Salek?

  Who was collecting records and doing DJing. At eighteen, he moved to Bristol. He said in interviews, which I thought was very funny, and that he was colorblind and dyslexic.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:24Yasi Salek?

  So he tried to do like the other thing he was interested in was like graphic design and he was like, surely can't do this.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:30Yasi Salek?

  And then

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Can't see colors and I can't read words.

• 17:32Yasi Salek?

  And in that French documentary, they like, because he didn't pass his exam or he didn't pass any, again, one thing I'm never gonna understand. Is the school system of the UK in the eighties.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  In the eighties, you had your O levels, then you had your A levels.

• 17:47Yasi Salek?

  Well, what he said in the French talk is he didn't pass any of them.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:50Yasi Salek?

  I don't know if that's true, but.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Could be a little bit of myth making.

• 17:53Yasi Salek?

  They pointed him at the factory that's down the street from the school and said you could work there. It's like an electric factory or something. And he was like, I don't really wanna go from the school to like a block down to work at the electric factory the rest of my life.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  Could be cool though.

• 18:05Yasi Salek?

  Could, well, could it?

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, who knows?

• 18:08Yasi Salek?

  He could have been the next Uncle Brian, Uncle Jeff. That's a different sliding doors moment that could have happened. But instead, what he did was called up every studio.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:18Yasi Salek?

  That's number he could find in Bristol to ask if he could please work there.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:23Yasi Salek?

  And the one that he got a hold of was actually not yet open. Um, he had left a message on Andy Allen's phone. And the guy, that studio had closed, but he was building a new studio called The Coach House.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:40Yasi Salek?

  And he was like, you can build it with me. And if you do an okay job, I'll give you a job. And it's, it was another one of those like programs that you guys have for like youth training, employment or whatever. I don't remember the name of it.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  YTS maybe.

• 18:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, exactly. YTS. So he gets a job building the Coach House studio. Legendary.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Good gig.

• 18:59Yasi Salek?

  Pretty good gig.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  A bit of drywall.

• 19:01Yasi Salek?

  Put up a bit of drywall.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:02Yasi Salek?

  Um, I think.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Paint a bit.

• 19:03Yasi Salek?

  Um, made a bunch of tea.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of tea. Tea comes into this a lot, doesn't it?

• 19:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Still British.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  I was really good at making tea.

• 19:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. But he got to me, in his words, uh, after it was built, it was the first time I had met local legends, Hip Hop Crew, Three P M and Smith and Mighty.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Smith and Mighty, amazing.

• 19:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, sort of like, in a sense, like the godfathers of that scene, like with the Wild Bunch.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:29Yasi Salek?

  They didn't put out music until a bit later due to like a few kind of boring bureaucratic reasons. So their actual output was a bit later, but without, I think their help and their, uh, studio and their like production, we wouldn't really be talking much about these scenes. I don't know.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  It's a very small discography, really, from the time, but the ones that they did put out. I remember them coming out and they they were like just monstrous like records. They didn't sound like anybody else.

• 20:01Yasi Salek?

  They produced a track for the guy from the pop group, Mark Stewart.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  Stewart, yeah.

• 20:08Yasi Salek?

  And that was kind of an early, I'm gonna use a bad word here, you guys, I'm sorry, I just want you to know it's just.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  You're not gonna use that word.

• 20:15Yasi Salek?

  Trip hop.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  Right. Right.

• 20:17Yasi Salek?

  Trip hop. I think it's very fine to hate a fake genre title that people voiced upon you. Okay, so he's working as a tape op and tea boy and now it's eighty nine and Bristol music scene's kind of popping. The Wild Bunch.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 20:34Yasi Salek?

  Was splintered off at this point. Nelly Hooper and DJ Milo had moved to London. They were signed to a major label.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  But Nelly was working with Soul to Soul.

• 20:45Yasi Salek?

  Soul to Soul. They had put out two singles, The Wild Bunch, tearing down the avenue with The Look of Love as the B-side, which was again another early trip hop. You hear it though, it's like has a bit of the DNA of what we're talking about that's coming forward, which like the sampling, the female vocalist, like this one was a cover of the Burt Bacharach song.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:08Yasi Salek?

  That Dusty Springfield did from Casino Royale, but it was Sharon Nelson who ends up being the vocalist on the first Massive Attack album. Then Stranger Than Love came out. That's that's the one I was thinking of.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 21:19Yasi Salek?

  The Smith and Mighty Mark Stewart.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 21:21Yasi Salek?

  Thing. Dave McDonald, who we're gonna talk about soon, early, I would say, member of Portishead.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 21:29Yasi Salek?

  Was roommates with Rob Smith of Smith and Mighty. So it's a it's a, as Adrian Utley said later, also a member of Portishead.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:37Yasi Salek?

  He's like, we weren't like the way they made it sound like we hung out and had tea with each other every day was not the vibe. And I was like, no, but they did obviously know each other.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:45Yasi Salek?

  Bristol had a very rich music scene. Again, I talked about the Massive Attack episode, but we go back to the seventies. You had the Cortinas, which was like a punk band that came out of the kind of loving the Clash.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:53Yasi Salek?

  Pop group, Rip, Rig and Panic, also came out of the pop group, had a teenage Nana Cherry as a singer for a while, which we'll get into. And then Maximum Joy, which was the post-punk band that Nelly Hooper was in. And then obviously Massive Attack. I'll do a TLDR if you didn't listen to the Massive Attack episode, but again, I think you should listen to the Massive Attack episode. I know I'm biased, but it's good. So Nana Cherry and her husband Cameron McVeigh were like a great reason, right? That. Massive Attack sort of even started making music because post Wild Bunch, they really like encouraged 3D Daddy G and Mushroom to like get on it, like gave them studio time, you know.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:35Yasi Salek?

  Let them use their house, like all this stuff.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, very much in a kind of funding, a way to actually do it and to sort of fund it and also to facilitate it.

• 22:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  It's sort of worth remembering though that at the time,

• 22:51Speaker 03

  like that Nana Cherry album, that first Nana Cherry album came out. Raw Like Sushi.

• 22:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, which 3D and Mushroom mucked on.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Right, and was absolutely massive.

• 22:59Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 23:01Speaker 03

  But things moved so fast, because I remember when that Raw Like Sushi album came out, and then I also remember when, obviously when Massive Attack's album came out, which wasn't that, maybe it was a year later.

• 23:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it was ninety one, I think.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  But it felt like different worlds. They didn't feel connected.

• 23:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  At the time. It wasn't like, at the time, it wasn't like, oh, and you remember them from that? Because things just went, you know, like that.

• 23:23Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:24Yasi Salek?

  I can see that. And also, there's something about, like, it just feels like Nana Cherry, even in my memory of it, lived in, it's almost like an eighties album, even though it wasn't, you know, like,

• 23:35Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 23:35Yasi Salek?

  Just the like look and the style and like, you know.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, that very glam kind of, uh, yeah.

• 23:41Yasi Salek?

  It was such early nineties, you know.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, yeah, it was the nineties before the nineties sort of existed.

• 23:46Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. Um, but they had that, like, big The Face scene and the Buffalo scene and the whole thing. So they were very cool and connected.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:54Yasi Salek?

  After Massive Attack was done making some demos and songs in their house, Nana Cherry and Cameron McVeigh's house, um, they moved them to the Coach House studio, with this guy called Johnny Dollar,

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:07Yasi Salek?

  who Cameron McVeigh had gotten to help them produce. And that's where very kind of slowly over time, they made Blue Line's seminal, seminal album.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:16Yasi Salek?

  And all the while, who's there in the background?

• 24:18Speaker 03

  It's not GP, is it?

• 24:19Yasi Salek?

  Making tea. And doing whatever tape ops do.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  Thank you, Jeffrey.

• 24:23Yasi Salek?

  Thank you, Jeffrey. He, he said, I was making the tea and getting the sandwiches. I started getting on with G, Daddy G. They were all really friendly and Johnny Dollar was a really nice bloke. But I was a terrible tape op. I couldn't clean the heads of the tape machine. I couldn't set anything up or plug anything in. The only thing I was really good at was constantly making tea.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Right. That's interesting. He says they're very friendly. Side note, I interviewed.

• 24:45Yasi Salek?

  Why? Because are they not friendly?

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Well, no, but I was gonna say, I interviewed Robert Del Naga about ten years ago. And I, and it was just on the phone and I thought, oh, he's gonna be a bit like, because it was about, I can't even remember what it was about. But it was, I thought, oh, he might be a bit different. He was literally the nicest man ever. Just lovely. Just to do a fifteen minute phone. He was like a lovely, lovely guy. So it's like, I'm sure he was even more lovely.

• 25:09Yasi Salek?

  People got a bad rap and it's like.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  It was not even like, but you just sort of think after that amount of time, someone's gonna be like, I can't be bothered with this. And he was like, oh, hey, yeah.

• 25:17Yasi Salek?

  Totally. I don't want to talk about forty years ago. Did Jeff Barrow suck at being a tape op? Sure. But he was learning a lot and that's what's important. This was university, University of Making Music.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  University of Breaks.

• 25:30Yasi Salek?

  Of Breaks. He told the BBC in twenty ten, I remember using this kind of Casio keyboard, which actually had a sampler and a little Neve. Is that Neve desk outside? So I used to just spend all my time on that with a pair of headphones, sampling bits and bobs. And more messing around on my own stuff than really working, you know? Whatever he was doing caught the attention of Cameron McVeigh. He was like, what's this kid doing over here? Like, this sounds kind of good.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  That's interesting.

• 25:56Yasi Salek?

  This is where the timeline gets a little hazy and I couldn't totally get it straight, but it doesn't really matter, I guess. But Cameron McVeigh buys Jeff Barrow a sampler, a Kai sampler.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:06Yasi Salek?

  Maybe like sees some talent there and is like, here, why don't you?

• 26:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:10Yasi Salek?

  And sometime around this, I think, I might be wrong, I might be off by like a year and I'm really sorry if I am. I don't know if it ultimately matters that much. But around this time that Jeff and Adrian Utley meet at the coach house. Do you, do you feel like that's about right?

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:24Yasi Salek?

  I think he was also.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  Because he's coming in to do sessions and stuff.

• 26:26Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. Adrian Francis Utley, born April twenty seventh nineteen seventy five, a tourist like myself in Northampton.

• 26:33Speaker 03

  I don't think he was born, it was nineteen fifty seven, not nineteen seventy five.

• 26:36Yasi Salek?

  I'm sorry, fifty seven. Me and Jeff Barrow.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  But he would be delighted to.

• 26:40Yasi Salek?

  Me and Jeff Barrow are both dyslexic.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Are you familiar with the Adrian Utley Bauhaus connection?

• 26:48Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Okay, let me explain it to you.

• 26:50Yasi Salek?

  Please.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Okay, Adrian Utley and David J. Haskins.

• 26:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  From literally Bauhaus.

• 26:56Yasi Salek?

  Very famously David.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Born three days apart in Northampton. And they went to art school together. And they were also in, they're sort of in like a couple of little bands together.

• 27:08Yasi Salek?

  I didn't know that.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Just at the, the sort of like punk bands at the end of the seventies. And, and who was also in that milieu was author and comics legend Alan Moore, of course. Who was very much.

• 27:20Yasi Salek?

  The Watchmen?

• 27:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Watchmen, Alan Moore. So he's in that, that whole world.

• 27:25Yasi Salek?

  Wow.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  And actually Adrian and a guy, oh, I can't remember, Alex Green. Alex Green was like a real mover and shaker in the, in the sort of Northampton music scene of the end of the seventies. And he was very much friends with Alan Moore. And he was putting a band together and he wanted, because obviously in Northampton, there's another small town, right? There's not a lot of people.

• 27:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  There's only ten people that are cool, right? And that's like Alan Moore, Alex Green, Adrian Utley, David Haskins, Kevin Haskins, Daniel Ash.

• 27:52Yasi Salek?

  Right, sure.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, like probably Natasha Atlas is also in and out of there. And that's basically, that's, that's only seven. I can only get to seven.

• 28:00Yasi Salek?

  It's a pretty good amount, pretty good seven people.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  Pretty good seven people, right? And so Alex and Alan are going to form this new band and they want David to join. Bring him in and he's like, well, I could do, but I've just formed, you know, I've just joined this new band Bauhaus nineteen nineteen. In like nineteen seventy eight, so, um, but yeah, but they have played together.

• 28:17Yasi Salek?

  I didn't know that. So interesting. Adrian Utley, a very interesting person, I have to say.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  Very, very interesting guy.

• 28:22Yasi Salek?

  Fascinating guy. Really, really, uh, has done some really cool stuff in his career. Well, after his dalliance with the members of Bauhaus, Northampton and the guy who wrote The Watchmen. Um, I got, he was like a big jazz guitar player, right? That was his whole thing. So he played with John Patton's touring band and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Um, he had moved to Bristol in the mid nineteen eighties. And he said, it's true that I played jazz for a long time with all sorts of people, but I stopped. Because I can never equal my heroes, John Coltrane and Miles Davis. I'll never be as good or as spiritual as they were thirty years ago. That's why I thought, he said that's in the nineties.

• 29:03Yasi Salek?

  That's why I thought it more useful to contribute something to the present day music to start something new. And what present day music was there? It was Mushroom showing him Low End Theory by Tribe Called Quest.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Right, nice.

• 29:16Yasi Salek?

  That was sort of how he was introduced to hip hop. And he said he liked it, obviously, because of all the jazz samples.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Tim Saul, who was a mate of Jeff Barrow's and was kind of early in there with him, helping make beats and songs and stuff. And he remembers Jeff Barrow and Adrian bonding over cups of tea and biscuits and listening to Low End Theory. And here's what Adrian Ellie said. He said, "At that time, I was sharing a room at the coach house. And I was really interested in the fusion of hip hop and jazz, but I couldn't really do it, although I had hundreds of beats. That's how Jeff and I got together. I was making loads of trippy beats and playing jazz over them, but I never recorded it. I would just sit there playing it incredibly loudly. Jeff was upstairs and I was downstairs and we'd go into each other's rooms and talk and we'd work on stuff, just arsing about with a tape with a break on it, getting to know each other, smoking millions of fags."

• 30:07Speaker 03

  I think, do you know what the key phrase in there is?

• 30:10Yasi Salek?

  Arsing about, yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  Because that's where, that's where all the beauty in the world comes from.

• 30:15Yasi Salek?

  That's where creativity lives.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, arsing about.

• 30:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  There's no, there's no rhyme or reason to it. There's no point to it.

• 30:20Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  It's arsing about. And then out of that arsing about is where the beauty and the genius.

• 30:26Yasi Salek?

  Also, just FYI, scrolling your phone is not arsing about.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  No, that's the opposite of arsing about.

• 30:32Yasi Salek?

  Arsing about needs a blank and bored spaces.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. You need to be bored.

• 30:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  And that is the death of creativity.

• 30:40Yasi Salek?

  No. So I love that. I love this little romantic origin story, this bromance.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Beautiful.

• 30:45Yasi Salek?

  Adrian Ellie also said, "I had got a sampler and I was trying to learn how to do all this stuff. I was really interested in it and it was my complete passion. I played guitar and other things since I was 15 and for a very brief time in my life, I kind of fell out of love with the guitar and was really obsessed with hip hop. I didn't know about the history of it. I learned that from Jeff and Andy Smith later. But for me, it was super exciting to hear what Jeff was doing upstairs. I was working with samples. It was like 91, 92 or something. Era suddenly switched and things become really interesting again when they've been really stale. This new thing was exciting." And I guess Jeff asked, there's, he said two different stories, but it doesn't really matter. They ended up wanting to work together.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  And why not, right?

• 31:23Yasi Salek?

  Why not? Apparently when Jeff. Asked Adrian to be involved or by Thorsa, um, he came back and was like, I'm really glad you're involved. It's been absolute chaos up until now. It's been like food fights and God knows what. Cause I think maybe, okay, then this makes more sense about the, the timeframe. I think actually what happened is that Jeff and a couple of people had been tasked by Cameron McVeigh to work on the next Nana Cherry album.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 31:51Yasi Salek?

  And those were the frat house guys that he's talking about. Um, and they had gone to London to do that.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  That would have been homebrew, right?

• 31:59Yasi Salek?

  That would have been homebrew, yeah. And Jeff Barrows said, I can remember doing three beats for Nana and getting paid a grand in cash. I was like, I'll give you 50 beats.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. A grand in cash. I mean, that's like.

• 32:08Yasi Salek?

  I know.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, right?

• 32:10Yasi Salek?

  Um.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  That's serious.

• 32:11Yasi Salek?

  It was like Richard Newell, he said, who was doing programming, Mark Besant, who was doing vocals and songwriting, and Helen White, who was a singer. So this is interesting. So he's helping Nana Cherry, but he's also, this is the beginnings of working on Portishead, right?

• 32:24Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 32:25Yasi Salek?

  It's not called Portishead yet.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:26Yasi Salek?

  It's just Untitled Music Project. And the beginning, wh- what it sounds like to me, it was like sort of taking more of a massive attack form.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:33Yasi Salek?

  Where it was like multiple contributors instead of.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  Guest vocalists.

• 32:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, exactly. And he had like, in some article I saw, he had like an Australian singer and just like different people.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:45Yasi Salek?

  And when I asked him like, what happened, you know, um, he said, it just sort of naturally fell away. And I'm going to get into meeting Beth Gibbons, but ultimately like it just made, he just said it was just naturally moved towards having one singer.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. I remember reading something where he was going, and this is absolutely redolent of the time, but working with a bunch of singers and it was all like, I'm gonna take you higher.

• 33:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. He hated, he hated the words.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Everyone was doing.

• 33:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. He hated the words they were using because they were like really boring.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Just boring bullshit.

• 33:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I have it. I have that quoted in somewhere. If I find it, I'll read it.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Blah, blah, blah.

• 33:22Yasi Salek?

  The song that ended up on Nana Cherry's Homebrew is called Some Days. I feel like you can hear Portishead janning on there, right? There's like tape crackle, there's minor key, like chord sequence, like it is like, like you're like, oh.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is, and this is what I do.

• 33:43Yasi Salek?

  This is what I do. Like this is what I'm working on.

• 33:45Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 33:52Yasi Salek?

  He also produced Tricky's first recorded solo single, Nothing's Clear, which was on a charity compilation called The Hard Sell.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:59Yasi Salek?

  Which is cool. That sampled a soundtrack, which is gonna be a recurring theme in Portishead. The soundtrack to Betty Blue, the French film.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 34:10Yasi Salek?

  So, pieces are starting to fall in place, right? Like Cameron McVeigh has given you a nice sampler.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:15Yasi Salek?

  You're getting some work that is not fetching tea.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:19Yasi Salek?

  You're working with Tricky, you're working with Nana Cherry. Andy Smith has now like collected a great deal of records.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:26Yasi Salek?

  And he said he would basically come over to Jeff Barrow's house with his crates of records and they would go through them together.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 34:33Yasi Salek?

  And so now he's starting to be like, oh, I could sample this, I could sample this. Andy Smith actually said a lot of the original demos for Dummy came out of those, like them hanging out, going through record sessions. And then the magical thing happens. I mean, it's all magical, but... And I think it's February of 91, maybe?

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:49Yasi Salek?

  Again, dates are hard to pin down. Jeff Barrow goes down to sign up for the enterprise allowance scheme. If you listen to this podcast regularly, you will know what that is, but I will entertain you again. Margaret Thatcher's conservative UK government, she didn't give us a lot, except really good protest music.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, that feels like a, um, episode in itself, but...

• 35:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but this, this produced-

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Do you know what?

• 35:17Yasi Salek?

  A lot of great art.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  And as a lot, as has been said a few times recently, though the small investment in things like that has been repaid millions of times. And not by everybody, because not everybody-

• 35:31Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  But the people who were invested in, some of the people who were invested in, have ended up repaying, you know, covering any cost in taxes.

• 35:39Yasi Salek?

  Oasis came out of this because Alan McGee started Creation Records through this.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:44Yasi Salek?

  I feel like I remember the Happy Mondays also used this.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I'm not sure how much tax they ended up paying, but yeah.

• 35:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Tracy Emin used this.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:54Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, what it was is basically like, you would say, I'm starting a business.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:59Yasi Salek?

  I think you had, I think you had to have a thousand pounds.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Do you know who's got a thousand pounds? Jeff Barrett.

• 36:05Yasi Salek?

  Because he just got it from Nana Cherry, from Cameron McVeigh.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:08Yasi Salek?

  And then you would get an income.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:10Yasi Salek?

  Like forty pounds a week or something. Anyways, I guess you have to take some sort of class, something business class to do this. And Jeff Barrett takes his little business class and that's where he meets one Beth Gibbons, who is also there, I guess, to set up a business as a singer. I'm not really, that part was a bit ugly.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  Good luck. Yeah.

• 36:30Yasi Salek?

  Beth Gibbons, born January fourth, nineteen sixty five.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:33Yasi Salek?

  So she is nearly ten years older.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's like six years older than, six years older than Jeff, eight years younger than Adrian.

• 36:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay. She's a Capricorn.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:44Yasi Salek?

  Um, she was raised on a farm.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 36:46Yasi Salek?

  Farm girl with three sisters. She's done very few interviews, very famously, right?

• 36:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:51Yasi Salek?

  She has done some.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:52Yasi Salek?

  She said in an early interview, we all had an enormous amount of work to do on the farm. Everybody had to roll up their sleeves. It wasn't really the time for moods.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. Nobody cares what you, what you're feeling, just muck out the pigs.

• 37:03Yasi Salek?

  Get on with it, exactly. And then she did do one pretty extensive interview in the hot press one.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:09Yasi Salek?

  In ninety five. And also, when you read that, you realize that it's like, it's so stupid, the mythology around her of this like, extremely like reticent, mysterious.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Oh my god, it's ridiculous.

• 37:21Yasi Salek?

  It's ridiculous. I'm like, she's just like, clearly like a normal person is just like, I just don't want to do this. That's all, like, I just, I'm not interested in talking about myself.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  We're, I'm sure we will get into this, but the press is unbelie, and I know, I mean, I know a lot of these people.

• 37:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  But the, the, the, the way that they've written about.

• 37:37Yasi Salek?

  It's like, you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't, though, because if you participate, then one thing's gonna happen. And if you don't, then they're gonna paint you as this like difficult genius or whatever.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  It's so mysterious.

• 37:46Yasi Salek?

  So mysterious. So she said to the hot press in ninety five, I feel almost guilty sometimes when I think of people like Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf, who are heroes of mine, because I wasn't a victim of child abuse. I didn't have a dysfunctional family. And apart from one thing, which, sorry, I'm not going to tell you about.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:02Yasi Salek?

  The worst teenage trauma I suffered was trying to get my homework done on time.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:06Yasi Salek?

  No, the pressures on me were more subtle. Coming as I did from a fairly isolated rural community, the expectation was that I'd meet someone locally, get married and have kids. It was all very rustic and cozy, but there weren't that many people at home I got on with. And that caused me to feel rather detached. You know, whatever destiny had in store for me, it wasn't becoming a farmer's wife. Relatable content.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:25Yasi Salek?

  And I was like, okay, again, this all sounds very sensible and normal.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:30Yasi Salek?

  It's, I think, particularly through the lens of twenty twenty six, the idea that someone wouldn't want attention is like unfathomable.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, but on the other hand, she's also a singer who emotes incredibly powerfully and writes incredibly powerful lyrics and fronts a band. So like, that's quite a lot of attention.

• 39:00Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  You know, but yeah, but the idea that you wouldn't want to be interviewed.

• 39:04Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  But actually, I think it's, you know, done her the world of good to just withdraw from that because it's like you don't. Well, nowadays, nobody, nobody does proper interviews anymore anyway.

• 39:14Yasi Salek?

  No, no.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  They like that that game's over. But I think you can see from the press that they are like, that they then build this this image for this kind of personality for her. And it's like.

• 39:26Yasi Salek?

  But that also dies out, though. It's like actually so smart because if you.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:30Yasi Salek?

  It stops having oxygen after a while. You can only like go on about this mysterious person for so long.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:34Yasi Salek?

  And it's like, you see, like Elizabeth Fraser kind of had the same thing. And it's like, it's cool, you know, like, I respect it. I do think there's like a kind of a difference between wanting to do your art, which just happens to include performing, which they didn't even really want to perform live. And writing lyrics or whatever. It's like, and wanting attention, right?

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 39:56Yasi Salek?

  Because like, they didn't go on TV, they didn't, you know, like, as much as I mean, the jewels home, but they kind of kept stopping after that, like, turning things down. So anyways, Beth Givens. So her parents divorced when she was young. At twenty two, she moved to Bath to pursue her singing career. And then she moved to Bristol. And she said, I've never been much of a party person, which is probably explained by the fact that I didn't escape from the country until I was twenty two. Most of the friends I did have locally had gone off to university, but not being much of an academic, I'd remained behind.

• 40:22Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 40:23Yasi Salek?

  It was funny because even though I was frustrated and wanted to get out, leaving home was quite scary. Wasn't necessarily the reality I wanted, but it was one I felt reasonably capable of dealing with. Anyway, the bright lights of Bath beckoned and I answered the call, going on the dole and generally living the life of a hippie chick from the sticks. It was quite an eye opener. For instance, until going out with a certain bloke, I had no idea that big lips, long legs and small anchor ankles are supposedly what every man dreams of. That revelation would probably have caused my world to cave in if I had been younger, but as it was, I found it rather funny.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:55Yasi Salek?

  She is really interesting because she goes on kind of to be like, I feel sorry now for kids who are told they have, they can't be happy without looking like Tom Cruise or Cindy Crawford. She like, there's some interviews where they're like, well, don't you feel like you're so much like PJ Harvin? She's like, I don't really know who that is.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:10Yasi Salek?

  Like she's just not really tapped in, you know, like she's not trying to like check for what's happening.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  No.

• 41:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  That's the thing that happens to so many people and it's it's definitely part of their story is this idea that particularly in this era where it's so driven by press and by particularly by press, but you know, radio as well.

• 41:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  That you will, you'll do this thing and then you'll put out and we'll come to this, we'll come put out in front of the world and they go, oh, you sound like this and you sound like this and you sound like this.

• 41:37Yasi Salek?

  Which I'm guilty of doing too.

• 41:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course, we all do it. I mean, I've done it a hundred times, but that's your perception.

• 41:42Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  And that doesn't, they would go, well, I've never even heard can, I don't know what you're talking about.

• 41:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  And she, I think is a great example of that and everyone's going, oh, she's, it's like Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday.

• 41:52Yasi Salek?

  Well, she did say she liked it.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, she likes that. But the idea that she is, you know, that it's like, oh, it's like, let's just tick the boxes and it's like, that's what she's like.

• 42:01Yasi Salek?

  I might have a little recency bias because the Jeff Buckley episode was the last like kind of big media episode we did. But I feel a few parallels, just like in terms of like, one thing that's really striking about Beth Gibbons is that she can sing in multiple different ways and sort of like, almost like she's multiple different people, you know, which is also something that Jeff Buckley could do. And I, I just like, it made me think of it because I was like, oh, I just learned about that. I was like, that's very cool. And I think people don't talk about that that much and they talk about her like haunting voice or whatever. I'm like, no, but she had like crazy, interesting range of what she would do with that voice.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:35Yasi Salek?

  Um.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  Side note, I saw Jeff Buckley a few times and I saw him and I've gonna, I'm just gonna come out and admit this right now. I saw him once, I think it was at the garage.

• 42:43Yasi Salek?

  And you thought it was, you were like, this is bollocks.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  It's just got a bit boring. I mean, it's just got, honestly got a bit boring. After about forty five minutes, you're just like, you're like, okay, Jeff, enough already, you know? That was my review at the time.

• 42:55Yasi Salek?

  Incredible.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like.

• 42:56Yasi Salek?

  They should not admit that publicly.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Well, this is my lived experience.

• 43:00Yasi Salek?

  You're living your truth. Okay, I love that. I love that for you.

• 43:05Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so before, before walking into the class at the Enterprise Alliance game, she had played with some pub bands. And she had also connected with the bassist for Talk Talk, Paul Webb.

• 43:21Speaker 03

  Paul Webb.

• 43:22Yasi Salek?

  I guess she had met him when he was conducting sessions for the band that was going to become O-Ring.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 43:28Yasi Salek?

  And she's actually on the first track of that band's nineteen ninety-four album, Hers of Instinct. And obviously later they collaborate on an album that comes out in two thousand and two. In an interview in nineteen ninety-five, she described Webb as her biggest influence.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:43Yasi Salek?

  Which is interesting.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  I can see that.

• 43:44Yasi Salek?

  Love Talk Talk.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, literally the greatest band of all time.

• 43:48Yasi Salek?

  They're really up there.

• 43:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

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• 44:54Yasi Salek?

  So now, we're getting, we're taking our class. We're having a bit of a chat. Actually, it was really funny. In a later interview in 2019, Jeff Barrow was like trying to describe what this was. And then the day you have to go to the class and Adrian was like, "Personal humiliation day," I think it's called. And he's like, "That's right. Personal humiliation day for the government." It was really awkward. We were sat around this big kind of table in this hotel in Clifton, and there was a mobile hairdresser. There was a guy wanting to sell chocolates at the back of a van, like a sheep shearer. Then Beth kind of said she wanted to quit and just do singing as a career. And she wanted to concentrate on a song and so on. And it was like, "Oh, she's a professional singer." And she's looking at us going out there like they're a music production company. He keeps saying us, so I don't know if it was him and Andy Smith.

• 45:36Yasi Salek?

  This is amazing. We could have been, well, absolutely terrible, but we were just like, "Let's work together." Like, they had no idea what either one sounded like. Like, it was just like, "Oh, we're both here and you're producing music and I'm singing." Like, let's make it happen.

• 45:47Speaker 03

  Let's form a genre-defining band.

• 45:49Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:50Yasi Salek?

  Jeff Barrow also said, he said this in 94, "She approached me after that meeting to write a backing track for her, to which she added a really strange vocal screaming. It really shocked us." But when it came to doing the album, we thought of Beth because her voice suited our vibe perfectly. It was obvious that what she did came from personal experience. She wasn't just singing about an imaginary boyfriend. It was honest, which was so important. What makes these artists in bands special is almost always the alchemy of several different people. And here, I find it really interesting because Jeff Barrow is like pretty clinical in the way he approaches music. Like, he said, he's like, "I don't listen to lyrics. I don't care about them. I listen like with an ear that's like..."

• 46:34Speaker 03

  It's like sonics, isn't it?

• 46:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he's just breaking it down all the time.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  And the sonics and how, yeah. It doesn't matter what you're saying. It matters how you're saying it.

• 46:42Yasi Salek?

  But to make it resonant, you need someone who's...

• 46:47Yasi Salek?

  Being honest and emotionally expressive.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:50Yasi Salek?

  Otherwise, it doesn't really land, right?

• 46:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And so. Otherwise, it just sounds like crap that other people do.

• 46:55Yasi Salek?

  Right, or it could still be good. But it's not gonna be like world moving. Yeah. The way like, the way people connected.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:02Yasi Salek?

  With Borishead, you know? Here's the quote that you were saying from Jeff Barrow about, he's like, he's like, all I've gotten from vocalists up till then was stuff like, get higher. Can you feel the heat or move to the beat? And she was singing about Gandhi and stuff like that. It was pretty bizarre.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:18Yasi Salek?

  Obsessed with her singing about Gandhi.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:19Yasi Salek?

  She was a hippie chick.

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. He said, when I first heard her voice, I didn't know what to make of it because being into hip hop or soul music, she had a strange voice compared to that. She had come from folk and Janis Ian and Janis Joplin. I just didn't think it was gonna work. But then there was this realness in what she was singing. She recorded this track called It Could Be Sweet.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:37Yasi Salek?

  Which is really kind of an early track. It wasn't soul, but then it was. And it wasn't overtly jazzy and it wasn't folk, but she brought this adultness to the track. All of a sudden, it was real.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  Adulthood is interesting, isn't it? Because if you think, you know, in nineteen ninety-three or whatever, Jeff is only twenty-one, twenty-two.

• 47:54Yasi Salek?

  I know. And she's nearly thirty, right? And so she's had lived experience.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:01Yasi Salek?

  And she's, yeah, she is an adult, you know?

• 48:03Speaker 03

  She is an adult and he's still a boy, really.

• 48:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Also really liked the story about when, I guess Beth Gibbons came over to Jeff Barrow's house to talk about making music together. And I guess it was his parents' house. And he said, and she sang for him. And he said, she was just deafening. I thought my mom was gonna have a right go. I was worried about the neighbors.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  I mean, you can imagine.

• 48:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  If she came, if Beth Gibbons came over.

• 48:29Yasi Salek?

  And just belted it.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  She's not Beth Gibbons, she's just like.

• 48:32Yasi Salek?

  She's Beth.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  From the employment center, right? And she comes over and she gives it lungs, right? You're gonna go, okay, now, all right.

• 48:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay.

• 48:41Speaker 03

  Calm down. Like, your mom's trying to watch, you know, Wogan and just like have a nice evening. She doesn't need that, does she? Beth giving it big one over there.

• 48:49Yasi Salek?

  So funny. Apparently also, I thought this was interesting, Annie Smith knew Beth from before. This because he had done gigs with her, he said.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 49:00Yasi Salek?

  Like she would sing and he would cut breaks for her.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  She's on the circuit.

• 49:02Yasi Salek?

  She was on the circuit, on the Bristol. Singing.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  Just live singer songwriter, folky jazzy.

• 49:09Yasi Salek?

  So monument, two monumentous things have happened, three, I guess, if you count the gifting, the Cameron McVeigh entrants, that is important. He also funds the portrait demos, I think.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  Without whom?

• 49:19Yasi Salek?

  Without him, it was forty thousand pounds is what I read, I don't know.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  It's a lot of money.

• 49:23Yasi Salek?

  It's a lot of money.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:24Yasi Salek?

  And the Adrian Nutley connection.

• 49:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:27Yasi Salek?

  And now Beth Gibbons. Now, he gets introduced to Dave McDonald, who's an engineer at State of the Art. Again, I don't know, timeline wise, I don't know what was first, or it doesn't really matter.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  Doesn't really matter.

• 49:39Yasi Salek?

  But he was an engineer, um, the owner of State of the Art, Julian Hill introduced him, and Dave said, he came in and we got on like a house on fire. So we started, me and Jeff, every bit of spare time I had, evenings or whatever, I started to push more and more for time and we were getting more and more involved in this, making this interesting music. Jeff had an amazing ear for samples. I was very intrigued with it, because I was more from the old school of recording instruments, but I was very interested in all this new technology. He had acquired some of it from Cameron, I think it was like an S nine hundred sampler and a little digital mixer, real high end stuff, you know.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:11Yasi Salek?

  And a little drum machine. So that's important too, because from what I gathered, Dave McDonald was kind of instrumental in how they recorded. Cause they, I mean, you'll know more about this, because we didn't mention, Rob's also a musician and you've made.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  I was making music not a million miles from this at the time.

• 50:28Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. So you know, and I'm, as you guys know, I'm stupid. And when I say things like chord progression, we're doing theater. Cause I don't know what I'm talking about. That's arpeggio. Um, but there was a lot of just interesting stuff about how they would constantly, uh, record stuff back to tape. So that would have that kind of sound, or like how they were obsessed with old instruments and they had like some guy that would come around and like gather up their broken instruments, go home. It was two brothers, I think.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  Brothers. Yeah, yeah, like the Gibson brother. I can't remember, something like.

• 51:00Yasi Salek?

  I love that. I was like, of course you did. It was like a fucking Saffy Brothers movie.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  It wouldn't really work, but it would, it would not work in an interesting way, which is perfect.

• 51:08Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. So now.

• 51:11Yasi Salek?

  We're fucking, we're cooking with gas, babe. We have four people, um, we have all the pieces. Um, Cameron McVeigh said, I just refused to produce for Jeff Barrow. I just kept telling him to fuck off and carry on in the same direction he was already going by himself. I also told him to stick with the one singer.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  You said something very interesting earlier, a quote from Jeff, which was, when it came to the album, we thought again, we thought about Beth. And I thought that's actually really important because that tells you that him and Adrian, Jeff and Adrian were going, there's gonna be an album.

• 51:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  And but then they go, oh, and so it's not like the three of them go, let's do an album. It's like him and Adrian go, right, we're gonna make an album.

• 51:54Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Oh, her.

• 51:56Yasi Salek?

  And we'll get.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  Weird one that came around to my mom's house and blew the windows out. Yeah.

• 51:59Yasi Salek?

  We'll also get into like how they, like real early postal service corps, if you will, of how they end up making the album with her. Like it is very much that, right?

• 52:09Speaker 03

  Stuff going back and forward and her.

• 52:11Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. Now the name. The name basically came from when Jeff and whoever were helping with the Nana Cherry album. They kept calling them the lads from Portishead. Oh, those lads from Portishead. And finally that just like, I get, I think Cameron McVeigh said it was, he suggested it like, that he, he said, I pointed out that he'd be hard pressed to find a better name than his hometowns. So I don't really know. It's actually shocking that that's the name he chose, given Jeff Barrow's like, lack of fondness for the place.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  But also perfect. I mean, it is, you can't imagine.

• 52:44Yasi Salek?

  What great revenge to take on your hometown by being like, now my band's way more famous than this. No one even knows this town exists.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  And now it's like one of the most famous towns imaginable.

• 52:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  But also, yeah, but also the sort of blankness of it. It doesn't tell you anything.

• 52:58Yasi Salek?

  Doesn't tell you anything.

• 52:59Speaker 03

  Which is great.

• 52:59Yasi Salek?

  I thought it was like a marine animal.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:03Yasi Salek?

  So they're they're fucking sampling, they're looping. Uh Dave McDonald said Jeff would just uh sample stuff and he'd be looping and they would just have a loop bubbling all day.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:15Yasi Salek?

  And just like different ideas going to like you said.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  Well, that's what you did.

• 53:19Yasi Salek?

  Artsy about.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  That's what you did at the time as well, though, because although, you know, it's come up a few times, but this idea of like, there's this sort of technology. But the technology really was an AKIS nine fifty sampler. And a pair of decks.

• 53:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  And their technology was like, get a loop and go and just.

• 53:36Yasi Salek?

  Well, and they were.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  Because that was kind of it. And you'd have like an Atari.

• 53:39Yasi Salek?

  They had sampling, but they also had Adrian.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:41Yasi Salek?

  They had a secret weapon and they're like, can you play something?

• 53:43Speaker 03

  But the but it was loops and loops is the most important thing, right? Because that's where you're coming from, from hip hop and stuff like that. And it's just, and to find really sweet loops that you could listen to for like three hours.

• 53:55Yasi Salek?

  Tasty loops.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, was that was the that was the key to everything.

• 53:58Yasi Salek?

  Totally. That's how it sounds like what they're doing. Okay, this is so interesting. This is where you're like, man, these people were on some other shit, fucking precocious twenty two year old.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:08Yasi Salek?

  So Dave McDonald said, once you find loops or find an idea, there's an idea of creating this loop yourself and modifying it.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 54:14Yasi Salek?

  And doing what you need to do. So we would create the loop. Adrian and Jeff would come in and Jeff would play some drums. Adrian would be doing his guitars and bass on it and stuff and I'd be recording it. We'd get this loop, we'd get loads of them, loads of them onto DAT and then we would get them all pressed up on vinyl. And so you'd end up with like a twelve inch with like thirty samples on it. So they're now making their own samples

• 54:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:33Yasi Salek?

  to get exactly what they want.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:34Yasi Salek?

  And they're pressing them on to like, what are those things called?

• 54:36Speaker 03

  The acetates.

• 54:37Yasi Salek?

  Acetates, yeah, the cheap ones that came from like old reggae, like where it was like. Dub plates, exactly. And Jeff Barrow said, yeah, what we started to do and we did on seventy percent of dummy was we actually played ourselves and sampled it back.

• 54:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:50Yasi Salek?

  This is an interview with um Addicted to Noise and they were like, why did you go to all this trouble? And Jeff said, what happened was with within hip hop, if you sample a beat, that record's out there. So what happens is a week after, somebody else might use it.

• 55:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:03Yasi Salek?

  And that takes away your fresh sound.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:05Yasi Salek?

  So we prefer doing it our way because then you end up with an original sound.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:08Yasi Salek?

  And if somebody ends up with the same sound as you, you know they've taken it from you.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:12Yasi Salek?

  Which is really interesting and we're gonna talk about it, where they do have the one sample. Yeah, they do. That does end up. Someone thinks, I'll have a bit of that. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna point fingers. I wasn't there. I don't know what the timelines were. But we will say that within a short period of time, Mr. Isaac Hayes is famously sampled on two songs. He is. Geographically and. Payday. Genre. Isaac pays. Isaac pays. Yeah. Um, also very interesting how obsessed these people were. It wasn't just enough to sample from yourself. Hmm. From the vinyl that you made of yourself. Vinyl didn't sound old enough yet. So Jeff would spend days cutting. Yeah, yeah. Back and forth. So it sounded like an old record when they sampled it. Yeah. Like the level of like attention to detail. Yeah.

• 55:57Yasi Salek?

  Really, really cool, you know? Okay, so by the end of like maybe ninety two, they have a shit ton of material. Apparently they ran out of money. And they have to go set up camp at State of the Art, State of Art. Is this State of Art? Don't you think there should be a though? Anyways, no, it doesn't matter. Um, because of Dave McDonald's connections, they're able to go there. Mm hmm. And that's where they produce, I think, a demo tape, which has versions of It Could Be Sweet. Yeah. It's a Fire, Sour Times. And according to Dave McDonald, a lot of stuff that's never been released, which I did confirm with Jeff Barrett and he was like, yeah, it wasn't good enough. Right. And I was like, can I hear it? No, I didn't say that. I was too scared.

• 56:35Yasi Salek?

  Box set. Yeah. Surely never gonna happen. Never gonna happen. Also, Jeff Barrett's doing tons of remixes at this time to make money. Yep. We need to talk about these real quick. Yeah. Iconic. Yeah. The Depeche Mode in Your Room remix. Right. Also Walking in My Shoes, he remixed that. So good. Um, Paul Wellers Wildwood. Right. Primal Screams, Give Out But Don't. Yep. Get, give out but don't give up. Yep. Um, which is so great. It's like chopped and screwed. It's like so menacing. And then my personal favorite, the Gravediggers remix of Nowhere to Run. In addition to these, which are all fucking extremely cool. Yeah. He did a remix of a song by a singer that I've actually never heard of called Gabrielle. Yeah, Gabrielle. She had an eye patch.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  And she was a very.

• 57:20Yasi Salek?

  She's an R and B singer.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, and again, this is a bit like what we were talking about earlier. Gabrielle is a good example of when you could be an English pop star. And you didn't have to necessarily try and sell records anywhere else because there was enough of an ecosystem in the UK. You could be on Radio One.

• 57:37Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  You could be on the telly.

• 57:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 57:39Speaker 03

  Da, da, da, you'd be in the magazines and it was like you could be Gabrielle. And then, but when there's the flattening of culture and you you're up against everybody.

• 57:46Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 57:46Speaker 03

  People like that naturally just sort of fall away.

• 57:49Yasi Salek?

  But you guys still have people like that, like there's still people who are like so and so's and I'm like, I don't know who the fuck that is.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, to an extent, but if you if you look at the, you know, the chart from the time, we will, we'll come to this, but if you, you know, they, it was all full of English artists.

• 58:04Yasi Salek?

  Right, right.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  There was an ecosystem to support English artists and that's, those days are gone.

• 58:09Yasi Salek?

  It was a great time, honestly. Globalization does have some downsides. Well, the important thing about Gabrielle, besides the eye patch that I didn't know about.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:15Yasi Salek?

  Is that she was signed to Go Beat.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  Yes, she was.

• 58:18Yasi Salek?

  And so the remix that Jeff Barrow did of Going Nowhere in conjunction with the demo tape has the attention of Ferdy Unger Hamilton.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  Yes, indeed.

• 58:29Yasi Salek?

  A and R at Go Beat.

• 58:30Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 58:31Yasi Salek?

  Subsidiary of Go Discs.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 58:33Yasi Salek?

  And that's how they get signed.

• 58:45Yasi Salek?

  Only Jeff Barrow and Beth Givens are signed to this deal.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:48Yasi Salek?

  I didn't ask because I was like, this feels touchy, but also it didn't seem like anyone cared. Like, you never heard any, like, I did a lot of research and no one's ever said a bad thing about it. No one's bitter, like, no one had a, you know, so I'm sure it was fine.

• 59:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:02Yasi Salek?

  I mean, Jeff Barrow is quite political and seems quite socialist, so I don't, you know, I doubt he was like.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  Oh, no, I wouldn't, not for a minute would I suggest that it was it was his doing that, you know, that Adrian wasn't signed. I think you probably, it's more like.

• 59:17Yasi Salek?

  You think it's like optics, like this guy's too old?

• 59:20Speaker 03

  I would think that maybe Adrian went, I don't want to be signed.

• 59:24Yasi Salek?

  Oh, interesting.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  There's a lot of this lore that I would like to know about and I haven't managed to find out.

• 59:33Yasi Salek?

  She should have told me I could have WhatsApp Jeff Barrow. He could have refused to answer. There's a couple of questions that I absolutely respected because he was like, I'm not answering that. And I was like. Fair enough, sir.

• 59:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:41Yasi Salek?

  Hat tip.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:42Yasi Salek?

  You don't have to. And also, this is not a tabloid or a gotcha podcast. I don't really, I'm not really here to like, I don't care about that kind of stuff. Um.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  But things like that, I think are interesting, you know, not in a, in a sort of like.

• 59:53Yasi Salek?

  Not a salacious.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  So, no, not at all, but just in a kind of, I, the older I get, the more interested I am in process. And how do these things, why did you make those decisions?

• 1:00:01Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that, those are, those are fascinating to me.

• 1:00:04Yasi Salek?

  Especially given how different the landscape was.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:00:08Yasi Salek?

  It's just, everything was so different in the nineties.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. But the fact that Jeff and Adrian, not to bang on about this endlessly, but the fact that Jeff and Adrian, it's basically their band, right?

• 1:00:19Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  If you go back to that quote earlier, when we went in to make the album, we thought about Beth. Beth ends up, well, you've got to sign Beth because she's writing the lyrics and the songs and she's the singer.

• 1:00:29Yasi Salek?

  And the melodies, top line melodies, those are just as much as the song.

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  Adrian's band.

• 1:00:33Yasi Salek?

  Okay. But shoot, that's, top line melody is a huge part of the writing, you know?

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  But yeah.

• 1:00:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I, I do.

• 1:00:39Speaker 03

  That leads me to, to think that perhaps Adrian just went, I don't want to.

• 1:00:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe he wanted to be free to do other things.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:46Yasi Salek?

  You know?

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  Like, why, why hitch my life to this wagon? It's ne- never going to sell a record in their lives, are they?

• 1:00:51Yasi Salek?

  I doubt that's what he was thinking. So now Portishead is signed, as Portishead, to go Beat Records. The first single that comes out, June of nineteen ninety-four.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:01:02Yasi Salek?

  Numb is the first single that I thought was really interesting. Also, just to like, quickly zoom out. Nineteen ninety-four, June, that's two months after the death of Grunge, which you can kind of, you know, symbolically place around the death of Kurt Cobain in April.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:01:19Yasi Salek?

  There is like a fatigue for that kind of music, I think, very clearly in nineteen ninety-four. I mean, in America, something different happens, right? We have like sort of po- more poppy alt-rock comes up, like Weezer and Green Day thrive.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:33Yasi Salek?

  So, but I could see maybe here, it leaves a vacuum for obviously Britpop and this other thing, right?

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  Well, I. I remember exactly where I was when I read read literally read in the newspaper that Kurt Cobain had died.

• 1:01:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I saw it on MTV.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:50Yasi Salek?

  Kurt Loder.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  But at the same time, Nirvana already felt in the past, right?

• 1:01:55Yasi Salek?

  Right, because it's it's two and a half years after they've topped the charts.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, but but when even when In Utero came out, I vividly remember it when it came out. And it sort of felt a bit like, yeah, yeah, I mean, we'd sort of move, yeah, we'd kind of, things had moved on.

• 1:02:11Yasi Salek?

  In the UK, because like swayed and stuff.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, but there were so many things. It was swayed and yes, of course, there was all that.

• 1:02:17Yasi Salek?

  And there was massive attack.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  There was massive attack and there was.

• 1:02:19Yasi Salek?

  Primal scream.

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  But also there was so much stuff like kind of the sort of post-rock stuff and jungle and hip-hop was really firing. There was a load, there was tons of what what I think is important to remember at this moment is that at this point in the nineties, new music was the most exciting thing and it was going in tons of different directions at the same time. And you could be into hip-hop and post-rock and math rock and dub and jungle and indie and all these things. And they all fed into each other, which is where Portishead comes from.

• 1:02:55Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  And now it feels like the weight of old music is almost like a, like you can't get rid of it. You know, it's like it's everywhere all the time. It's saturated and you know, AI. But at the time.

• 1:03:09Yasi Salek?

  Just because of that, I mean, it's because of the death of the monoculture.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, right.

• 1:03:13Yasi Salek?

  With the the shadows of the great heights that these other art, these old artists reached have just not been matched. So there's nothing to take its place.

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  Also, like, how can they be matched? Because they, because they, because they, we build a kind of golden glow around them, which means.

• 1:03:29Yasi Salek?

  But we did that with the Beatles, but Nirvana still broke through. It's, we don't have, we don't have a system to raise them up as high. We don't have MTV the way we used to. We don't have the music magazines the way we used to. It's just impossible to get that big unless you're a straight-up pop star, unless you're Taylor Swift.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  But yeah, but then also you can be a massive pop star and literally no one, no one outside of your silo knows what any of those songs are anyway. Right? So you don't, there's still no cultural impact.

• 1:03:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  People know that you're famous. Everyone's heard of you, but if you said, sing me five songs, it's like, well, I don't know. I mean, I literally wouldn't know.

• 1:04:01Yasi Salek?

  I can sing five Taylor Swift songs.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  But most people can't, right?

• 1:04:05Yasi Salek?

  I don't know if that's true, but.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. I think I think most people. Anyway, it doesn't matter. That's a sort of rabbit hole. But I think that it is worth remembering that how how fast music was moving at the time and definitely in the UK. Before the death, plenty of time before the death of Kurt Cobain.

• 1:04:24Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  Nirvana were like, yeah, but you know, yeah, good. But it's like, you know, they're sort of big mainstream rock stars now and there's much more other, there's much more exciting things happening elsewhere.

• 1:04:35Yasi Salek?

  I guess I'm maybe more setting it up for, because Portishead breaks in America. So like, I think, I mean, I'm more setting up for how they broke in America. But I hear you. And also, I think it's more interesting to talk about ninety four. Even in the UK landscape is like a lot has happened.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, hell yeah.

• 1:04:54Yasi Salek?

  Blue Lines was a huge deal, right? You know, like.

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Yasi Salek?

  And that obviously kind of primed the pump for people checking for this particular. I know it's not exactly the same and I'm so sorry, I'm not trying to genrefy it, but you know, it's from the same area and it has definitely similarities. In terms of how the music expands. And you just said it, like Massive Attack is very explicitly and obviously rooted in the intersection of reggae, hip hop, punk, you know, and Portishead. Similarly, but a little like one step removed. It's a little more coalesced, I think.

• 1:05:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Yasi Salek?

  Do you think, do you agree with that?

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  I would say that one of my theories about this record that's in, that I think is important to consider is that Massive Attack, Smith and Mighty, Soul to Soul, even though, you know, they're all different things.

• 1:05:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  They come out of sound system culture. They're DJs, right? Now, Portishead don't come out of sound system culture. It's a different thing. Yes, they are, you know, they are a part of it, but they have, they're not, they're not. When you listen to Dummy, it's not like, oh, these are gonna bang. Like, they ain't gonna, they're not built to bang. They do bang sonically, but they're not built. This is not, these are not like DJs making records for the dance.

• 1:06:16Yasi Salek?

  Because Jeff Beal was a bedroom DJ by and large, right?

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:19Yasi Salek?

  And his approach was completely different.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  George.

• 1:06:22Yasi Salek?

  Was that, what was his name?

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  Oh, no, Uncle Brian. Sorry, yeah.

• 1:06:25Yasi Salek?

  He's not Uncle Brian. Not yet. It's not too late. He's still in Bristol. He couldn't, he could. It makes a lot of sense to me why Portishead is the one that took off.

• 1:06:36Yasi Salek?

  In sort of even a different echelon than the people that they were lumped in with rightly or wrongly. Yeah. Tricky and Massive Attack, it's having the one singer. Yeah. You know, it feels more like a band. Yeah. It's consist, it's a consistent through line, right? Yeah. Whereas like I think with Massive Attack, who's incredible and Blue Eyes is incredible, Protection is incredible, the constant changing of vocalist. Yeah. I think as a music fan, your, your first point of connection is the vocalist. Yeah. And you wanna know what, what are they singing? What are they thinking about? This is my, they get me. Yeah, yeah. You know, as a fan, that's kind of what it is. You couldn't do that with Massive Attack per se, right? Yeah. And Tricky is a whole different story.

• 1:07:18Yasi Salek?

  I mean, Tricky is incredible, but just making less, uh, easily, and we're gonna end this, I don't think Portishead is, is, it's been made out to be, uh, easily digestible music, but it's not. Yeah. Um, but it is. That's, that's the trick of Portishead, right? It isn't, it isn't. And to, to, I think Jeff Burrows, great chagrin and eternal, uh, shame that this is what it- Where he goes with it, but yeah. Yeah. All right. So I thought Numb was an interesting choice as the first single, cause it wouldn't have been my choice. Yeah. It's a great song. Yeah. This was first distributed to DJs as a white label. Mm-hmm. Um, the sleeve is a still. All of the sleeves from this era are stills. I love this so much.

• 1:07:59Yasi Salek?

  So Portishead is given forty grand to make a music video. And Jeff Burrows is like, I thought forty grand was a lot of money to making a slick three-minute promo video. For the same budget, you can make a film and do a soundtrack for it. Yeah. And we really like the idea of a Riz or Talani Italian-style soundtrack. Yeah, it's all Talani. Backwards instruments up. And so they make a ten-minute-long film. Yes, they do. It's so good. Yeah. I, I love it. And it's weird and it's like Beth Gibbons, there's no idea what's going on. Like Beth Gibbons is wearing, she looks like a foreign princess or something coming out of a- Of a some sort of government building and Jeff Barrows assassin, but he seems like he shoots the wrong person, which I think that's Adrian.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44Yasi Salek?

  Um, but then it turns out that she's then she's in the hospital and then it wasn't the right, it's a whole thing.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Yasi Salek?

  But it's, it's wonderful. Anyways, all of the, all of the art for the releases are stills from that.

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:54Yasi Salek?

  It's really great. It's called To Kill a Dead Man.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  To Kill a Dead Man.

• 1:08:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So numb doesn't chart in Europe. It gets a small write up in Melody Maker and a singles roundup by a guy called Andrew Smith. And he said, eerie, slow burning and cinematic, the spiritual love child of Billie Holiday and Jazzy B. Absoluto.

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:11Yasi Salek?

  Scary stuff. The rumors about Portishead are obviously true.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Yasi Salek?

  I don't know what the rumors were.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  Well, the rumors are there's this great band.

• 1:09:19Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  Right. Those are the rumors.

• 1:09:21Yasi Salek?

  Like, like how you experienced it.

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, like people are talking about them. Yeah, people, you know, some people have heard them.

• 1:09:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:28Speaker 03

  And like, oh, you're gonna like this. Cause they're, it's like they're next, right? That is, is that kind of thing.

• 1:09:34Yasi Salek?

  Do you think that if Massive Attack's blue lines hadn't broken through the way it did, it would have been the same for Portishead to break through?

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  My grand overarching theory about this is that Bristol and Massive Attack are sort of irrelevant to this story.

• 1:09:54Yasi Salek?

  Interesting. Okay. I'd love to hear that.

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  Because I think that you could sort of say Massive Attack in a way is proof of concept, but in another way you go, they're totally different. You know, they're absolutely a hundred percent different. I mean, like Massive Attack, like.

• 1:10:08Yasi Salek?

  I kind of mean it. And even though this is not the same comp, because of the music journalist thing and respectfully, I was one.

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Yasi Salek?

  It's so lazy.

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Yasi Salek?

  It's so much easier to place something in context. Something came out of Seattle and you're, you know, like.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:23Yasi Salek?

  So I wonder if that made it.

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  I think, yeah, I mean, it certainly makes it smooth the ground, right? But I think if you take it back a step before that, you go, if you're Pippa Hall, who was running Go Discs Promotions and marketing at the time. This is this is almost like a kind of fundamental. You can absolutely see why Go Discs, Go Beat did it. But it also creates the, an incredible amount of. It sort of brings a wave of problems into the band in a way.

• 1:10:56Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  Because, which is to go, they're from Bristol and they've worked with Massive Attack.

• 1:11:00Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  And it's like, that's of course, because you want people to go, oh, Bristol Massive Attack, they're cool.

• 1:11:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  We'll do a hundred page down, we'll do a hundred word down page feature on them next week.

• 1:11:09Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  But then it creates this wave where it's like, they're Bristolians with the.

• 1:11:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they're from this trip hop scene that like.

• 1:11:17Speaker 03

  My other theory is that trip hop doesn't even exist.

• 1:11:20Yasi Salek?

  No, it's not real.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  It's not a real thing.

• 1:11:21Yasi Salek?

  It's not a real, this is not a real.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  It's not a real.

• 1:11:23Yasi Salek?

  We've litigated this with grunge where it's like, grunge is not real, like Nirvana and Pearl Jam are not, do not make the same kind of music.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  Nobody ever came into a record shop and said to me, where's your grunge records?

• 1:11:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it is interesting because we were, I was talking with a friend about this. Yeah.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  They would say where's your house records?

• 1:11:41Yasi Salek?

  Even hip hop.

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  Hip hop records, nobody ever, ever, they would never say, where's your Britpop records? They've never said, where's your grunge records? They never, nobody ever said, have you got any trip hop?

• 1:11:49Yasi Salek?

  If younger people do now though, because they don't have the language, like I wonder if they are like, I love Britpop, you know?

• 1:11:56Speaker 03

  Totally, yeah. I think because it's a thing, but Britpop wasn't a thing at the time.

• 1:12:00Yasi Salek?

  No, it was, I mean, this is all sort of manufactured by journalists.

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  But you could certainly see like a, a record shop now with a trip hop section.

• 1:12:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, we can pin this, I have it down here, the guy who coined the, the mix, Andy Pemberton, I think was his name. Talking about DJ Shadow.

• 1:12:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:15Yasi Salek?

  He did a great disservice.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  Well, but.

• 1:12:18Yasi Salek?

  He was doing his best. He was doing his best.

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  I mean, look, the thing about trip hop is that it's a beautiful phrase, right? And it makes perfect sense and you go trippy hip hop.

• 1:12:30Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  But actually, if you listen to Massive Attack, there's nothing trippy hip hop about, I mean, maybe Five Man Army is maybe a little bit.

• 1:12:39Yasi Salek?

  I mean, there's rapping.

• 1:12:40Speaker 03

  Basically, it's just a hip hop, it's just hip hop, it's just got dub techniques in it.

• 1:12:43Yasi Salek?

  Well, I did, yeah, it has dub things, it's, it's the BPM.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:47Yasi Salek?

  Like the BPM is like, I think I read in the Massive Attack, it's like exactly in between like reggae and hip hop or something, I can't remember.

• 1:12:54Speaker 03

  It's like ninety.

• 1:12:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, so I think that is the, the interesting.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  But then, but then if you listen to Dummy.

• 1:13:00Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  Because trip hop suggests that it's hip hop with a kind of, and it's like. That's not really what Dummy is about.

• 1:13:07Yasi Salek?

  Just because it's using similar approaches in terms of like sampling and breakbeats, that's really it. But it's not hip hop, it's not a hip hop album in any sense.

• 1:13:15Speaker 03

  And there's not really breakbeats, there's not breakbeats on Dummy.

• 1:13:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  They're not looping, there's no, they're very unsincopated, the drums are very, they're played very straight.

• 1:13:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  They, they, they, it feels like they're almost completely throughout the whole album, they deliberately avoid, go, just drop in a little.

• 1:13:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Speaker 03

  They don't do that at all, it's absolutely straight. But if you actually look at some of the B-sides from the first singles, things like sort of Toy Box and stuff like that. Then you go, well, that's, if, if you're gonna say, if, if trip hop's a thing, then it's like this, but that's where they've just done these remixes, which are just like, this is like for, for DJs, basically. They're just, they're just straight up, you know, banging beats with a vocal pasted on, you know, they sound great, they would sound great in a club.

• 1:13:59Yasi Salek?

  It's a bit of a disservice, right, to be like, we just, we talked about it a bit, it's like you painstakingly made this.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:07Yasi Salek?

  From scratch, you know, and then, no, they're just, and it's like, okay. So Numb does get quite a few write-ups, like it gets a single of the week from Melody Maker after that small one.

• 1:14:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Yasi Salek?

  It gets an enemy write-up.

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Yasi Salek?

  They just already call, talk about their scene mates, and once again, it's like, I don't, we don't have scene mates.

• 1:14:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:31Yasi Salek?

  Sour Times is the next single, August 1st.

• 1:14:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:14:36Yasi Salek?

  Initially, it hit fifty-seven in the UK singles chart, but then later, after Glory Box was released as a single in ninety-five, they re-released Sour Times and it peaked at number thirteen.

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  Also worth remembering that it actually mattered at the time, in a sense that fifty-seven is like, actually, you know what, that's not bad.

• 1:14:56Yasi Salek?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:14:57Speaker 03

  That's pretty good, because people actually bought records and they actually, people cared about what was in the chart.

• 1:15:02Yasi Salek?

  Go Disc is a major?

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, Go Disc would be, yeah, would have been aligned with a major, probably like Polidors, I can't remember actually. But it was, that was perfectly acceptable, you know.

• 1:15:13Yasi Salek?

  And well, it even charted in the US Billboard Hot One Hundred, because Sour Times was on MTV.

• 1:15:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:19Yasi Salek?

  It was on the radio, like, it was on K-Rock.

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  What's interesting, and I'm sure you've read the same Billboard features from nineteen ninety-four as I have, just in our, you know, when we're relaxing at night.

• 1:15:29Yasi Salek?

  As we do in our free time and our downtime.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  In our free time and our downtime. You almost go, well, look, these people have got it. They've got the idea more than the UK sort of music press have, which is like, because the other thing that's happening at the same time is, of course, is Oasis, right? And they're going, pointy head, yeah, they're great. Oasis, no one's talking about trip hop, no one's talking about massive attack. They're going, here's this band and they're doing quite well and they're on the radio. And there's this other new band that are called Oasis, so we're also doing quite well and on the radio. And it's like, the take is totally different and much more straightforward and going, this is a band with some quite good records. This is a band with some quite good records. And they're both sort of doing it. And no one's going, well, of course, you know that in nineteen eighty nine.

• 1:16:06Yasi Salek?

  No, but an American knows where Bristol is.

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  No, I know, exactly. But actually, it's a much cleaner way of looking at it.

• 1:16:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  And it sort of ages better.

• 1:16:13Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  It's it's less colourful. It's not much to talk about, but it's it's.

• 1:16:17Yasi Salek?

  I mean, people do like, they love an idea of a scene and and, you know, a cinematic universe that they can link people together.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  Journalists do.

• 1:16:25Yasi Salek?

  Journalists, one, and and readers.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  I've done it.

• 1:16:27Yasi Salek?

  And readers. And that's why they do it. They do it because readers like it too.

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it it explains a lot in a short space of time.

• 1:16:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  Sour Sour Times is another really good one, which go, that basically is trip hop, right? You know, you go, these, the the it's worth, you know, I would be the first to go, trip hop doesn't exist. The album's not trip hop. But then you go, but those, some of those remixes, they, that is deliberately, they, that really is. I mean, they're not going, oh, we must do a trip hop remix, because that was not a thing. But if you wanted to nail something to the sort of trip hop mast, you go, those early remixes on those singles are like, that's, that that sets the template for what people then thought, oh, that's trip hop.

• 1:17:02Yasi Salek?

  You're like, this is a fake genre, however, if it was a real one.

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  If it was, yeah, it's a fake genre, but if it was a real one, those would be the defining texts of that genre.

• 1:17:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. One important point about the release of Sour Times as a single is John Peel played it.

• 1:17:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:16Yasi Salek?

  Which is a big deal, right? Jeff Barrow said, what I loved about him is he didn't play it again because it became too popular.

• 1:17:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 1:17:22Yasi Salek?

  And he just wanted to make room for other stuff that people hadn't heard.

• 1:17:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Things happen very fast.

• 1:17:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

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• 1:19:01Yasi Salek?

  Okay, let's talk about Dummy. August 22nd, 1994. So obviously, we've talked about a lot of the inspiration. One thing that that guy, Tim Saul, who was early friend and helper, went on to make that band Earthling. He remembers them listening a lot to an album called Sweet London, like a hotel suite, by The Peddlers. The Peddlers. 1972. Yep, it's a classic. I went and listened to it, did not know it was a classic, never heard of it. As he describes it, and you can tell me if you agree, it's a very strange mixture of working man's club crooning over really interesting arrangements by the London Philharmonic. Yeah.

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  So The Peddlers were a three-piece band who, you know, they're like a working club band. They do covers and all that. They got, you know, it's like bass player, keyboard player, drummer. London Suite, Sweet London was like their kind of, you know, like, if you think like the Bee Gees, Odessa is like their madness on thing. Well, this is as close as The Peddlers got to doing their madness. Oh, no, you know, nobody bought it, but it's now like a hundred pound record, you know. It is beautiful record and it's odd and it's an odd and beautiful thing. And another one of my theories about this album, about Portishead, is that actually what they are is the greatest ever working man's club band.

• 1:20:31Yasi Salek?

  Lounge band.

• 1:20:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, the greatest ever lounge band, right? And they would just, you know, play at Butlins. They got a weird over the winter booking at Butlins. And they just, every night, they're just out there playing these things and they're, you go and see them by chance. And it's like, I'm like, what the fuck? They're amazing.

• 1:20:47Yasi Salek?

  Okay, let me ask you a question. Why do you think Portishead's Dummy was so easily popular? Like, why did it become popular so quickly and so easily?

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  Because it was exactly the right record at exactly the right time. It was very cool. It had all the cool elements. It had hip hop and scratching and this crap. Oh, yeah. So you've only got to look at the press, right? Which is like, everybody, literally across the board, right, goes, oh, fuck, this is amazing, right? And because it was, but also at the time, if you were like a nerd like me in a record shop, you also saw that what Jeff and Beth and Adrian were doing, it was really cool. That was a cool record. And they had taken all these elements of things that you liked,

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  like from, you know, hip hop and from jazz and from dub and from not funk. There was no, they're resolutely unfunky, which of course makes them funky as hell, right? But they're, but all those cool things, and they put it into these things with these amazing songs. And that is basically all about the songs, right? And but also this really unusual, incredible voice. This was like a real thing.

• 1:22:05Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  No, because you couldn't put this together. Like, no one would, like, it's really odd. But as soon as you hear it, you go. And this is the curse, right? Because as soon as they released it, it was massive. Everyone was talking about it, everyone. People were talking about it beforehand. It comes out. Yeah, they're not hit singles, but no one expected them to be hit singles. That's not how it works. But then the album comes out and it's like, everyone loves it and you could, it was also, as you talk about like the monoculture. It was that era where everywhere you went, you heard it, right? In the same way that you would hear like Bjork's first album or, you know, leftism or sort of things like that. They were just albums that just everybody bought and everybody bought, dummy.

• 1:22:50Yasi Salek?

  I think what's so interesting is like, it's, it has such a magic trick of like how the greatest things are really accessible because they seem simple.

• 1:23:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:04Yasi Salek?

  But you could never recreate it.

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:23:07Yasi Salek?

  The levels of trap doors and sonic tricks and, and little games being played. And actually, what I think is really interesting, like you just pointed out, it's like, it was played everywhere to this day, right? It, you'll hear it in a hotel lobby or a coffee shop, which is again, much to Jeff Bro's chagrin, that it's coffee shop music. It's shocking that it kind of is because if you actually listen closely to it, it's quite challenging.

• 1:23:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:33Yasi Salek?

  It's, it's a little aggressive, right? It's a little prickly. It's thorny.

• 1:23:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:37Yasi Salek?

  But if you don't, if you're kind of smooth brained about it and you're just like, oh, I'm getting a latte, it's eighteen dollars.

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Yasi Salek?

  You're gonna be like vibes, you know, like it can easily, if you don't pay attention, it could just be vibe music.

• 1:23:48Speaker 03

  The blessing and the curse of the record is that you, you can, you, if you want to engage with it, if you want to put your headphones on and engage with it, you will hear a different record.

• 1:23:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's ultimately a bit transgressive.

• 1:23:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. But also, if you just wanna stick it on, it won't upset your mum.

• 1:24:04Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:24:04Speaker 03

  You know, you can tap a toe to it. It's fine. It's great. It's lovely.

• 1:24:07Yasi Salek?

  As everyone likes to say, it's shagging music, which I've seen nothing more make Jeff Bro wanna die. And they ask him, they're like, they're like, would you? And he's like, in what universe would I put my own album on? And then I know this woman and I have to think about her laughing at me while I'm having sex.

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, you see that a lot with people talking and you go, I don't know, that seems a bit weird to me.

• 1:24:30Yasi Salek?

  It, it, it did soundtrack one of the greatest, like sexiest scenes of TV of my lifetime, which is from the L word.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  Right, I don't.

• 1:24:38Yasi Salek?

  They use Rhodes in it. Which is actually very interesting because they don't license the music very often. They're quite tight about it, which is great. Not tight, cheap, but like tight, like.

• 1:24:47Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, yeah, like they want to protect it.

• 1:24:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  They are not driven by money.

• 1:24:52Yasi Salek?

  This could have been forty Apple commercials, babe.

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Like, you should do, look, I would do an episode just on the stories behind all the things they've turned down.

• 1:25:03Yasi Salek?

  I know.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  Which would be absolutely. If you wanna come on and do an episode.

• 1:25:08Yasi Salek?

  Question, party people, that was one of the questions. It was like, what was the biggest amount of money you ever turned down?

• 1:25:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, just imagine the stuff that they've turned, that they've said no to over the years.

• 1:25:17Yasi Salek?

  I think real estate in Bristol was pretty affordable at the time and everyone's.

• 1:25:20Speaker 03

  But they're not driven by money.

• 1:25:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they're not driven by money, as most of the best.

• 1:25:24Speaker 03

  They're not, yeah. One quick thought, actually, about it was that the other thing that's happening at the time, right? And I'm not suggesting for a moment that Jeff Barrow or Adrian Nutley are listening to this. But ninety-four is also, there's like slow core is happening, right? So the band that cannot be named Red House Painters, who were my absolute favorite band in the world at the time. Because you're not allowed to talk about them anymore.

• 1:25:47Yasi Salek?

  Were they cancelled?

• 1:25:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, Mark very much.

• 1:25:50Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yes. No, but I just, I talked about him on our, on our recent podcast. No, nobody, nobody's ever cancelled.

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  No, okay, but he, anyway, I love them dearly and.

• 1:26:00Yasi Salek?

  His Christmas album, babe, one of the best.

• 1:26:02Speaker 03

  I mean, one of the greatest bands of all time, top five greatest bands of all time.

• 1:26:05Yasi Salek?

  American music. I, I write, I love Red House Painters.

• 1:26:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love Red House.

• 1:26:09Yasi Salek?

  What, what you did in your.

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  Those are socials, Cliff.

• 1:26:11Yasi Salek?

  What you did in your personal life, and I'm a real art from the artist person, especially when that shit came out forty years ago. It's like, you're not, I'm not buying a ticket to the, who cares?

• 1:26:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, who cares? Like, cause if, if we're gonna start.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  They're all, basically, everyone's gone.

• 1:26:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, unfortunately, and I know it all. So if you wanna tell me your favorite band, I'll tell you why they're fucked up.

• 1:26:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:33Yasi Salek?

  Nine, nine times out of ten.

• 1:26:34Speaker 03

  You know, but if you look at, but, but it is, I think it's interesting that there is this thing where, you know, you've got Low and Spain and Red House Painters and Galaxy Five Hundred and stuff like that. They're doing this thing, Poet's Head are doing this thing, I'm sure they've never heard of each other. But the, but there is also this reaction to music that has been getting louder and faster and harder. And you know, and it's like, well, actually, let's go, and because also the other thing that's happening is this, this, this kind of, um. This embrace of sort of lounge core and you know, like Martin, people getting into like Martin Denny and stuff like that. And it's like, so there's this thing, this is why I think dummy lands at just the right time.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  Because people are open to this thing where it's a bit like, oh, you know, there is a retro element to it. There is a bit like, oh, it's a bit like, you know, early seventies kind of thing, which is hip.

• 1:27:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:25Speaker 03

  There's a hipness.

• 1:27:25Yasi Salek?

  That's another, you know, you, you make a great point because I think people who didn't live through the nineties, especially if you weren't like a teen like I was. You forget how much it was referencing the seventies all the time. I mean, you only need to watch like a Quentin Tarantino film. Like, it's like, yeah, the, like, I, I've talked about it on here and I, I will try to find a photo, but my eighth grade class picture cursed because I absolutely am wearing a polyester seventies, big collar button down with like an insane print, like, because that was cool back then.

• 1:28:00Speaker 03

  Right. What you mean it isn't now, it still is.

• 1:28:03Yasi Salek?

  Should I bust it back out?

• 1:28:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Yasi Salek?

  I think you make a great point. That's, that is a good point. Okay. You guys for the dorks, for my guitar centerheads, the microphone that they used, AKG four one four.

• 1:28:17Speaker 03

  Sweet.

• 1:28:18Yasi Salek?

  According to Dave McDonald, I mean, you'll know more than I do, it had a C twelve capsule in it, the C twelve capsule.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  Not just any old C twelve capsule, the C twelve capsule.

• 1:28:27Yasi Salek?

  And when you see those old pictures of someone like Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra, they're using an AKG C twelve microphone and it's the same capsule. So you kind of get that old sound and Dave McDonald said, that's something I was deliberately seeking. I've always liked the sound of old vocals. I like the intimacy. I'm going to talk about the intimacy really quick.

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  Quick sidebar.

• 1:28:48Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 1:28:49Speaker 03

  Album comes out August twenty second.

• 1:28:51Yasi Salek?

  Correct.

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  Right. Do you know what pop culture moment happens day after? Big English pop culture moment that people still talk about.

• 1:28:59Yasi Salek?

  Oh, was it the Blur and Oasis?

• 1:29:01Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:29:01Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:29:02Speaker 03

  The KLF burned a million quid.

• 1:29:03Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  That was the day after. So what a week that was.

• 1:29:06Yasi Salek?

  The way we used to be a proper society.

• 1:29:09Speaker 03

  Right, stuff used to happen.

• 1:29:10Yasi Salek?

  Talk about not caring about money.

• 1:29:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know, right?

• 1:29:12Yasi Salek?

  A million quid.

• 1:29:13Speaker 03

  A million quid. I went to Dura where they burnt a million quid a few years later with an ex-girlfriend.

• 1:29:17Yasi Salek?

  To pay pilgrimage.

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  Who drove them to that, to the place where they burnt the million quid. And because at the time, it was still a bit like they didn't really do it. And this guy was like.

• 1:29:25Yasi Salek?

  He's like, yeah, they did.

• 1:29:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I drove him there. And took like.

• 1:29:28Yasi Salek?

  They don't make them like that anymore.

• 1:29:29Speaker 03

  Anyway.

• 1:29:30Yasi Salek?

  No one's a real one like the K. No, but I love that.

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  But stuff used to happen, right? And now look at us.

• 1:29:35Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so I want to talk about the intimacy of the vocals. Cause I, I do think this is a huge, another thing where like, again, if you're gonna lobotomy listen to it, you're not, you're not gonna notice or care.

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:46Yasi Salek?

  But the vocals are mixed very high on the track, right? Way out front. And that really does create this like incredible sense of intimacy to the point that it's kind of uncomfortable at times.

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:59Yasi Salek?

  Which like, I just gave myself the chills.

• 1:30:02Yasi Salek?

  That's how you know I love music. But like, you can hear her swallowing at different points, you know? And because, again, because of the range of styles of her voice, because of the, I don't want to use the word haunting, because it's so fucking hack, but like, because of the unexpected ways that she sings that you're kind of not used to hearing, it really creates this like bit of discomfort, which is why it's so weird to me that they're like, throw it on the fucking Maru coffee, babe.

• 1:30:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:29Yasi Salek?

  Let people tap, tap, tap at their email jobs while they, while they listen to Dummy. Yeah.

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  Oh, me too, sweetie.

• 1:30:36Yasi Salek?

  Me too, honey. Love it.

• 1:30:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. You go, girl.

• 1:30:39Yasi Salek?

  Actually, I, I'm a big proponent of vocals being high in the mix. I think it always sounds, almost always sounds better.

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:46Yasi Salek?

  So we, we hinted this earlier, the way it's made. Beth is at home. The lads are in the studio.

• 1:30:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:52Yasi Salek?

  She adds her melody and vocals when they send her the track. So she said, I have to add something to his music, Jeff's music, not distract from it. It has to stay equal. And sometimes that takes a great deal of effort. It's almost maths. You feel like the music needs something, but you don't know what. So you start searching, fitting, measuring, testing over and over again, choosing another angle. And sometimes that's a frustrating process. I say this to be like, she very much was a member. You know, like she's, not only is she thinking about it really deeply, she is holding back.

• 1:31:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:27Yasi Salek?

  She could have taken these songs over. I mean, I I trust that she could have given like what she was capable of.

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:32Yasi Salek?

  And I think like that reservedness is really interesting, like.

• 1:31:36Speaker 03

  Because it's all on display and nothing's on display.

• 1:31:39Yasi Salek?

  And nothing's on display. Yeah. So in an early interview in November of ninety four, Jeff Barrett said, we don't really know each other.

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:45Yasi Salek?

  Beth works at home while we're in the studio and we never socialize, but we're not a social band anyways.

• 1:31:51Speaker 03

  But that's lovely. That's great as well because, you know, some of the great bands, they're barely bands, right? They barely know each other.

• 1:31:59Yasi Salek?

  But you either want them to be like the best friends of all time.

• 1:32:01Speaker 03

  They've either got to be the Ramones or they don't talk to, well, the Ramones didn't talk to each other, but you know.

• 1:32:05Yasi Salek?

  By the end, no one talks to each other, but.

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  But, you know, but it's it is a lovely idea that they're kind of, they're very separate.

• 1:32:12Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah. And six years when you're twenty two and twenty nine is a fucking lifetime. What am I talking to this child about?

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:19Yasi Salek?

  Also, Beth didn't just do her vocal part. She would sometimes manipulate the track as well. So Jeff Barrett said she'll re-sample it, slow it down or speed it up and re-loop it.

• 1:32:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:29Yasi Salek?

  And send it back with a song on it.

• 1:32:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:32:31Yasi Salek?

  And she said, you're thinking, where's, where's one? Where does it drop? And it's because she's got it looped in between the first bass drum and the first hi-hat.

• 1:32:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:39Yasi Salek?

  She was doing some cool fucking shit in there, too.

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  Producer shit.

• 1:32:42Yasi Salek?

  Producer shit.

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:43Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I want to talk, speaking of them not being friends, but their relationship. So here's Jeff on Beth in nineteen ninety five.

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  Love this.

• 1:32:50Yasi Salek?

  A good laugh. When I first met her, I thought she was.

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  A good laugh.

• 1:32:53Yasi Salek?

  A good laugh. When I first met her, I thought she was pretty strange. She's shy. It took me three years to get to know her. She's very sincere about what she does, immensely talented.

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:33:03Yasi Salek?

  We have a lot of trust in each other. I don't know how to describe her. Five foot two. She always seemed really tall to me, but I think five foot two. There's no bullshit there at all. She won't hold back to be polite, but she's not extreme either. She's very positive. She doesn't have reference points like everyone else, which is brilliant. This interviewer interjects that in conversation with the photographer, she revealed she doesn't know who Courtney Love or Burt Rackerack are.

• 1:33:25Speaker 03

  Did you read that interview where Everett True says, oh, apparently she's related to Dionne Warwick?

• 1:33:32Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  And you go, and she goes, she hasn't even, she's never even heard of Burt Bacharach.

• 1:33:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, what are you talking about?

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, this is, but these are the levels of stupidity there were in Nigel's press.

• 1:33:40Yasi Salek?

  Did be, be saying shit all the time.

• 1:33:42Speaker 03

  He did be saying shit all the time, yeah. But that was a particularly.

• 1:33:45Yasi Salek?

  That's the same interview, actually. I just skipped saying it.

• 1:33:47Speaker 03

  Right, okay. Yeah, I can see why.

• 1:33:50Yasi Salek?

  I like the honesty thing Jeff Barrett said in a different interview. I think it was a podcast I was in that he was like, she'll just straight up tell someone. I like, they'll be like, I loved your album. And she'll be like, I didn't like yours very much.

• 1:34:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, good. Like that.

• 1:34:01Yasi Salek?

  And she was like, I think it's better to tell, to, it helps them more if you're.

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, why not?

• 1:34:06Yasi Salek?

  A bit German of her, but um, yeah. I don't know why not. I try to.

• 1:34:11Speaker 03

  Well, you know.

• 1:34:12Yasi Salek?

  Can't say something nice, keep it.

• 1:34:13Speaker 03

  You know, well, Jeff's.

• 1:34:15Yasi Salek?

  Sure, there, that makes sense that they would. Um, Jeff said, we had nothing particularly in common and we wouldn't really talk. I had mates and we all seemed really young to her. You know what I mean? And to us, she seemed, I don't know, hippie-ish. And we didn't know where she was coming from.

• 1:34:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Yasi Salek?

  And then here's what Beth said about Jeff in ninety five. Jeff's a bit of a contradiction. On one hand, he's a rather staid, meat and two veg, and I don't like garlic Englishman.

• 1:34:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:41Yasi Salek?

  Incredible description.

• 1:34:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:42Yasi Salek?

  And on the other, he's the sort of bloke who'll almost go out of his way to break the rules. He was all right personality wise, but what really made me.

• 1:34:49Speaker 03

  I love that. He was all right.

• 1:34:51Yasi Salek?

  She's being honest. She's like, he was fine. Um, made me click with him is that I thought he was incredibly talented.

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:57Yasi Salek?

  We don't socialize much because our taste in friends is different.

• 1:34:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:59Yasi Salek?

  But we do get on in a brotherly, sisterly way. And although he keeps saying, I don't understand you, Beth, he's got a better idea of what makes me tick than he thinks.

• 1:35:07Speaker 03

  Very interesting, isn't it?

• 1:35:09Yasi Salek?

  I like, I really liked.

• 1:35:10Speaker 03

  I love that.

• 1:35:11Yasi Salek?

  This bit is my favorite. It's about.

• 1:35:13Speaker 03

  Because it's not like people trying to, there's no myth making.

• 1:35:18Yasi Salek?

  Right, they're not presenting any sort of.

• 1:35:19Speaker 03

  They're on a kind of a chat, like they're on a dating show.

• 1:35:22Yasi Salek?

  It's almost as if they met in the employment class.

• 1:35:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there's no emotional attachment to each other. This guy, this is just what he's really like. And this is what I really think of him. It's great.

• 1:35:32Yasi Salek?

  And we make, um, so she talks about-

• 1:35:34Speaker 03

  This is why it's such a shame that there's people don't do real interviews anymore.

• 1:35:37Yasi Salek?

  I know, because you don't get any of this.

• 1:35:38Speaker 03

  You don't get any.

• 1:35:38Yasi Salek?

  Sometimes, every once in a while, you do. I remember this was like a random loose cannon.

• 1:35:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:42Yasi Salek?

  Like chapel ron.

• 1:35:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:44Yasi Salek?

  Just say something and you're like, fuck yeah, I love it.

• 1:35:45Speaker 03

  But there's, but there's such a weight of these.

• 1:35:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  And they're getting, you know, anyway.

• 1:35:50Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so she talked about their age gap partnership. So we just, she said, when you're younger, you have this romantic ideal that you're gonna grow up and everything's gonna be all right. You know, you'll find this wonderful boyfriend or girlfriend, get married, have kids and live happily ever after. Nothing, absolutely nothing has turned out the way I imagined it would. Amen, sister.

• 1:36:08Speaker 03

  Also, but she's literally only like twenty seven at the time, right?

• 1:36:11Yasi Salek?

  She was like twenty nine, but at that time, that's like an old maid bit.

• 1:36:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:14Yasi Salek?

  She said, have you ever been out with someone who's younger than you? She's asking the interviewer. And the guy goes, so classic, babe, tales all this time. Oh dear, it's usually me who asks the questions. Yes. And she goes, she goes, now or in the past? And he goes, um, now, of course. And she goes, how much older are you? And he goes, eleven years, but I'm remarkably well-preserved.

• 1:36:36Speaker 03

  Who's this?

• 1:36:37Yasi Salek?

  Stuart Clark.

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:36:38Yasi Salek?

  And she doesn't even say anything about that, but she's like, right, you'll know then that however unintentional it might be, there are times when you feed off their youth to curb your own cynicism.

• 1:36:48Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:36:48Yasi Salek?

  You've no right to do that, of course, but when I meet people like Jeff and other men his age, their perspective seems nicer. They're of a slightly different generation, so they've had different influences and seem more aware of them. You've got to watch it because remember, they haven't lived the extra ten years that you have. You can't do their growing up for them.

• 1:37:06Speaker 03

  Wow. Yikes.

• 1:37:09Yasi Salek?

  That's my bitch. I love that. I was like, wow, that's a interesting, she, now you, now, again, I totally respect that she didn't do interviews, but from just the little I have gotten to read, it really contextualizes for me why I love her lyrics so much. I'm like, this is a really intelligent and like, sort of like, deeply thoughtful person.

• 1:37:30Speaker 03

  Funny as fuck.

• 1:37:31Yasi Salek?

  Super funny.

• 1:37:32Speaker 03

  And very intelligent, very smart, very funny, very talented.

• 1:37:35Yasi Salek?

  Very honest.

• 1:37:36Speaker 03

  I think it's also- Probably brilliant that she just stopped doing interviews because after a while she's gonna be doing interviews about interviews and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But actually, this is like the few interviews she did, one of them particularly was like Jeff was ill.

• 1:37:49Yasi Salek?

  That, and that was the hot press one, he like, he was too sick to come.

• 1:37:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was too sick to do it, it was like, you're gonna, and it was back in the time when the label would have had enough sway over them to go, you're gonna have to do it, this is a big thing, right? But the fact that she did that, and then that time ends really early on is brilliant because you get a very pure image of who this person was aged twenty eight, twenty nine, right? And that's not gonna last forever because people get very used to interviews, they get used to the cycle, they get these blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:38:16Yasi Salek?

  It's interesting you say that because now that I'm a Jeff Barrow expert.

• 1:38:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:21Yasi Salek?

  Which happens with every episode, it's like I read ten years of interviews with you, you know, from the beginning to the end. And then speaking to him in real time, I was like, it's incredible, you're exactly this.

• 1:38:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:32Yasi Salek?

  I mean, I don't know, I'm sure you're mature, that's not what I mean, but like, your opinions are the same.

• 1:38:37Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:38:38Yasi Salek?

  Your stance towards what the journalists think about this, exactly the same. Like, you're saying this thing I did was shit, the same. But I was really respected, I was like, oh, that's, that's like, you really are that person.

• 1:38:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:51Yasi Salek?

  You know, there was no, like you said, there was no myth making, no one was lying.

• 1:38:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right, yeah.

• 1:38:56Yasi Salek?

  And this is just a bit on the blackness, darkness forever, if you will. Jeff said, I can't stand the light stuff.

• 1:39:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Yasi Salek?

  I can't stand it, I'm not into it. In a sense, all the hip hop I liked was very, very dark hip hop.

• 1:39:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:39:09Yasi Salek?

  And when I was sampling, I was always looking for something that had a strange emotional content to it. So this is Jeff Barrow's, in my opinion, emotional expression, right? This is how he emotionally expresses through music, is his taste.

• 1:39:22Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:39:23Yasi Salek?

  Right? Like his discretion, like what he's choosing. And he said, so I'm looking for something with strange emotional content to it, something that sparks some kind of emotion or theme or atmosphere. That's always my problem when we're working, I always think it's not enough, it's not dark enough, it's not emotionally hooked enough. But if I can get some emotion musically before Beth begins to write and sing over the tracks, then there's something for her to hook into, a thread she can follow. So I think this is also really interesting because I think a lot is made of like, oh, Beth is so depressed and she's this dark, morose figure bringing her depression to the music.

• 1:39:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:54Yasi Salek?

  And it's like, no, this is a collaboration, like, and also, nobody's depressed, you're just, this is what the music is. Nobody wants to hear a song about the best day of your life.

• 1:40:03Speaker 03

  No, no, no.

• 1:40:04Yasi Salek?

  Maybe once in a while.

• 1:40:06Speaker 03

  No, but there's uh in the review of Dummy.

• 1:40:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:10Speaker 03

  Stephen Dalton reviews it in New Music.

• 1:40:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:12Speaker 03

  And there's a sentence in that that sort of haunts me. And he says, this is from August nineteen ninety four, and he says, both Barrow and Gibbons are products of lonely, loveless childhoods.

• 1:40:24Yasi Salek?

  It's like.

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

  And you go, get lost, dude.

• 1:40:26Yasi Salek?

  Literally get fucked. How do you know? You didn't grow up in my house.

• 1:40:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, and also, nothing they've said suggests that.

• 1:40:32Yasi Salek?

  Literally never.

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  Nothing they've written suggests that. And okay, this is, this is.

• 1:40:35Yasi Salek?

  You can say they're.

• 1:40:36Speaker 03

  This is the summer of nineteen ninety four.

• 1:40:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:37Speaker 03

  There's not a lot out there.

• 1:40:38Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:40:38Speaker 03

  But to go to, and this is like such classic music journalist bullshit, right? But to go, they are products of lonely, loveless childhoods. Who the fuck told you that? Where do you get that information from?

• 1:40:50Yasi Salek?

  The factor.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  Who's the, well, yeah, there were no factors.

• 1:40:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  But.

• 1:40:53Yasi Salek?

  Imagine reading that about yourself and you're like, did I then?

• 1:40:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. And then you go.

• 1:40:57Yasi Salek?

  I don't remember that.

• 1:40:58Speaker 03

  I don't remember that.

• 1:40:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:59Speaker 03

  I just remember having my tea and watching telly and it was all right.

• 1:41:01Yasi Salek?

  Drinking cider with the ducks. Yeah, maybe, maybe I grew up in a town talking to ducks for my teenage years.

• 1:41:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:08Yasi Salek?

  You could write that.

• 1:41:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, and sometimes I was a bit bored.

• 1:41:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:10Speaker 03

  But lonely, loveless childhoods, like, it's like, get the fuck out of here, dude.

• 1:41:15Yasi Salek?

  Okay, Tolstoy, calm down. You know what I mean?

• 1:41:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right.

• 1:41:17Yasi Salek?

  Take it down a notch.

• 1:41:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Ah, the nineties.

• 1:41:20Yasi Salek?

  I do like Stephen Dalton as a writer, I will say.

• 1:41:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I mean.

• 1:41:23Yasi Salek?

  I'm not gonna slag him off, but I think it's.

• 1:41:24Speaker 03

  Not at all, not at all. I mean, he's a, he's a nice dude.

• 1:41:26Yasi Salek?

  It is just very funny.

• 1:41:27Speaker 03

  Listen, we've all done it.

• 1:41:28Yasi Salek?

  I do it all the time on this show. I write absolute fanfiction.

• 1:41:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:31Yasi Salek?

  Although I do try to say that I am specu- every time I say it, I'm like, I don't know, I wasn't there, you know, like.

• 1:41:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:37Yasi Salek?

  You kind of, it's, it's very dangerous to purport to know about someone's.

• 1:41:43Speaker 03

  I have done it a million times.

• 1:41:44Yasi Salek?

  Inner work.

• 1:41:44Speaker 03

  I'm doing it now.

• 1:41:45Yasi Salek?

  Well.

• 1:41:46Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:41:46Yasi Salek?

  We're, we're writing fanfiction. We're speculating.

• 1:41:48Speaker 03

  We are.

• 1:41:48Yasi Salek?

  We're being fans. It's just different.

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  Speculation.

• 1:41:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Okay, now about the lyrics.

• 1:41:52Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:41:53Yasi Salek?

  Jeff, I don't get involved. Lyrically, I trust her. She is being honest. She's not writing a song just to make money or sound distressed.

• 1:42:02Yasi Salek?

  That's actually a great, that same Addicted to Noise interview, I think it was Jan Uleski, so it was like, is Beth really that depressed? And he was like, no.

• 1:42:09Speaker 03

  I know, it's such a weird thing, isn't it? Like, is she depressed?

• 1:42:12Yasi Salek?

  And then he goes on, he's like, well, neither of, he's like, we're not really happy people.

• 1:42:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like, what artists are happy? Like, show me a good artist.

• 1:42:18Yasi Salek?

  Liam Gallagher seems quite happy.

• 1:42:20Speaker 03

  Nah, he's now.

• 1:42:21Yasi Salek?

  He seemed pretty happy then, too.

• 1:42:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, but then again, he's not writing the songs, is he?

• 1:42:26Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:42:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:27Yasi Salek?

  Miserable cut.

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:28Yasi Salek?

  Um, Beth said, I don't actually think the songs are that desperate.

• 1:42:33Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:42:33Yasi Salek?

  I do have an emptiness, but then everyone has to a lesser or greater degree. True.

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:39Yasi Salek?

  I tend to dwell in mind more than other people do, which I'm sure manifests itself in my lyrics. Suffering for your art is most definitely overrated, but I do get a certain, I don't know, satisfaction from being able to deal with my paranoia and insecurity. I wake up sometimes and think, no way am I going to be able to get through the day. But you do, and at the end of it, you feel a tiny bit stronger. When I'm that up, I'm too busy enjoying myself to write about it.

• 1:43:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:03Yasi Salek?

  I'm naturally pessimistic, but what motivates me isn't so much depression as a sense of helplessness. And that is, just that line unlocked a lot of Portishead for me, because I was like, what I'm relating to in the music of Portishead isn't depression, right? It's not inertia, it's frustration.

• 1:43:20Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:43:20Yasi Salek?

  Right? There's a friction.

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:22Yasi Salek?

  That makes it, that's the challenge of listening to it.

• 1:43:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:25Yasi Salek?

  And of course, like, there is like a, you know, maudlin thing going through, but the sadness comes from the frustration of like,

• 1:43:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:33Yasi Salek?

  I want something different, right? It's, it's a bitter.

• 1:43:36Speaker 03

  Or you're not recognizing this thing that's here. And also, I think that, you know, I say this as someone who, like, largely only listens to very sad music, right?

• 1:43:47Yasi Salek?

  Amen, my brother.

• 1:43:48Speaker 03

  But, you know, but the, but not so much, it's not like, oh, I must listen to stuff, it's like, that's just the music I like. But also, there is nothing more uplifting than melancholia, right? So when I listen to any Portishead record, you know, Dummy was something that I listened to too much.

• 1:44:05Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:44:05Speaker 03

  You know, you heard it too much, and it was like, I probably took a good twenty years.

• 1:44:08Yasi Salek?

  I need to go to institution.

• 1:44:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I need to hear that ever again. But then, you know, I've listened to it recently, it's not my favorite of their three, but it's.

• 1:44:16Yasi Salek?

  And you're a third guy, I can tell.

• 1:44:18Speaker 03

  Well, hmm.

• 1:44:19Yasi Salek?

  Oh.

• 1:44:19Speaker 03

  No, but, uh. It is a weird thing. And also, as you, I'm sure you noticed in there, when people start talking about this in the press, the thing that gets mentioned a couple of times is like, they're a bit goth. But it's weird because I know, and this is, this is a thing that's really weird.

• 1:44:34Yasi Salek?

  Why could she wear a black turtleneck on television?

• 1:44:36Speaker 03

  But this is a weird thing that like, at the time, and goth was used pejoratively, right? And now, of course, goth would never be used pejoratively because goth is cool, right? But in nineteen ninety four, nineteen ninety five, it wasn't seen as being cool. And she is so clear in what she's saying on how she's, and I'm not saying that she's, you know, this is like a hundred percent autobiographical. No song is a hundred percent autobiographical. But this sort of relates also to that thing about going, she doesn't do interviews. It's like, how much more do you want this woman to tell you about herself? Than the way she sings and how she sings and what she says and the way she says it and the voice and the voices.

• 1:45:11Yasi Salek?

  They want everything. They'll eat you alive, babe.

• 1:45:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's like, it's like, you don't need to know anything else about her.

• 1:45:16Yasi Salek?

  It would detract from it.

• 1:45:18Speaker 03

  It would detract from it a hundred percent because it is not going to be as interesting as that. And it can't be because why would it be? Otherwise, you'd make an album about what she had for tea.

• 1:45:27Yasi Salek?

  To quote Kevin Lee Harris of my favorite current band, Realise, all the best music sounds like longing.

• 1:45:35Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:45:36Yasi Salek?

  It's longing, right?

• 1:45:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:37Yasi Salek?

  It's not depression.

• 1:45:38Speaker 03

  No, I know.

• 1:45:39Yasi Salek?

  Depression is giving up. Depression is, is like, it doesn't have a charge to it. That's the whole thing of depression. That's why you lay in bed all day.

• 1:45:48Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a blankness and a, and a sort of, it's weird as well. I think this is another thing that is of its time, right? Which is people talking about depression.

• 1:45:58Yasi Salek?

  Right, and mental health.

• 1:45:59Speaker 03

  Oh, you're depressed, because people didn't talk about mental health and depression and stuff like that. It was, you'd go, oh, your music's a bit depressing. It's like, you wouldn't make it. You wouldn't, it's like, do you imagine the amount of work that went into this stuff? And the amount of work that goes into her vocals and her lyrics and all those kind of things? You're not going to do, if you're depressed, you're just not going to get it together to do that, and nor should you.

• 1:46:18Yasi Salek?

  Especially in a climate like Bristol.

• 1:46:20Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 1:46:21Yasi Salek?

  Sun comes out. Thrice yearly.

• 1:46:23Speaker 03

  You get two days a year of sunshine and it's like, yeah, no, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's an odd thing. And I think it's a thing that thankfully has been sort of left in the past.

• 1:46:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Speaker 03

  That idea that melancholic music is somehow the product of someone unable to deal with depression. You know, it's a crazy sort of concept.

• 1:46:41Yasi Salek?

  Um, well, to wrap that up, the last thing she said was, I'm not trying to save on psychiatrist bills. It's more me asking, does anyone else feel this way?

• 1:46:49Speaker 03

  Beautiful.

• 1:46:50Yasi Salek?

  And if it does reach the point where it gets uncomfortably personal, I tend to disguise what I'm saying and phrasing.

• 1:46:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Welcome to songwriting.

• 1:46:57Yasi Salek?

  But I love it. Does anyone else feel this way? That's what music is, right?

• 1:46:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:00Yasi Salek?

  It reaches out a hand and then you reach out your hand and you're like, oh, I'm, I connected with this because they did reach out to see, does anyone else feel the way I do? And you're like, I do, I do.

• 1:47:10Speaker 03

  But also that is a classic portishead in a nutshell, right? You've got, you know, if you think of them as this, the world's greatest working men's club band, like in cabaret, you've got the, the, the young, you know, the little, the sort of young guy at the back.

• 1:47:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:26Speaker 03

  Like you've got his uncle sitting there on a chair playing jazz and then you've got his mad auntie singing. And they are, they are like a family who, who somehow found each other and they found each other because they related to what, something in each other. There was no, they didn't grow up at school and we got in a gang and then we were like inspired by the jam and started playing. You know what I mean? It's not that. They've got, there's something very unique about their personalities that attracted each other. And I think that's the real, that's the point of them as a band is that they, Beth saying, you know, maybe there's other people that will feel like I do. It's like, yeah, and some of them are in your band, right?

• 1:48:02Yasi Salek?

  Band, right. Okay. We already talked about creating their own samples to sample. There are a handful of actual samples on this.

• 1:48:11Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:48:11Yasi Salek?

  Um, record, the Isaac Hayes string for phrase from.

• 1:48:15Speaker 03

  Uh, Ix Rap.

• 1:48:16Yasi Salek?

  Ix Rap two.

• 1:48:17Speaker 03

  Ix Rap two, yeah.

• 1:48:18Yasi Salek?

  Um, and then Sour Times very famously has the Laloshrifrin.

• 1:48:22Speaker 03

  Laloshrifrin, Danube Incident.

• 1:48:24Yasi Salek?

  Yes, from Mission Impossible.

• 1:48:26Speaker 03

  Impossible. Yeah.

• 1:48:27Yasi Salek?

  Yep.

• 1:48:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:29Yasi Salek?

  I think there's several other uh film score samples.

• 1:48:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:33Yasi Salek?

  Jeff said, I like soundtrack music because of the kind of sounds they use to create suspense. But I'm not an anorak about it.

• 1:48:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:39Yasi Salek?

  I love that phrase.

• 1:48:40Speaker 03

  I'm not an anorak. I mean, Andy Smith, you've got to think, he's the anorak, right? And then he, and thank God for him, and he was a brilliant DJ, and he used that. When Portishead really hit, Andy Smith would then, these sort of Andy Smith, The Sound of Portishead. Compilation CDs came out. This is like later in the nineties, right? And they did really well because they were absolutely brilliant, you know, obviously. Streaming has killed that business. But they were, you know, there was a good business in there for a while for people doing these sort of compilation CDs.

• 1:49:07Yasi Salek?

  This is sort of a sidebar, just because I'm interesting. Anorak is a pejorative.

• 1:49:12Speaker 03

  Well, it sort of isn't. It's one of those ones that isn't.

• 1:49:14Yasi Salek?

  It's like a nerd.

• 1:49:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like a nerd.

• 1:49:16Yasi Salek?

  Okay, did it not come from like the pastels and like that? Or is it not, not where it came from?

• 1:49:22Speaker 03

  Well, I think anorak is, I think.

• 1:49:25Yasi Salek?

  So anorak is that specific kind of jacket?

• 1:49:27Speaker 03

  Zip up, kind of thin sort of jacket.

• 1:49:30Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:49:31Yasi Salek?

  It was my understanding that it came from like, kind of like those kinds of twee bands wore them.

• 1:49:37Speaker 03

  I think that actually, that probably the, their sort of etymology of anorak actually would come from kind of like train spotters. Right? So people who would stand on train platforms all day in all weathers with anorak on.

• 1:49:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:52Speaker 03

  Looking for train numbers.

• 1:49:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:53Speaker 03

  Right? Because that's the ultimate anorak, right? But then, of course, that, as soon as you make something uncool, it becomes very cool.

• 1:50:01Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:50:01Speaker 03

  And if you're in the pastels, or if you're, you know, and all those kind of C86 people who would deliberately twee, deliberately sort of anti that. And then, yeah, we are anoraks. We will wear anoraks because they're like undertones. You know, the undertones it wears like snorkel parkas because they're like the uncoolest thing you could possibly wear.

• 1:50:19Yasi Salek?

  Oh, I did find it was interesting. So talking about the samples. Jeff was like, I just, I really liked it because hip hop records did it.

• 1:50:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:26Yasi Salek?

  You know, and he was like, I haven't seen them with.

• 1:50:29Speaker 03

  No, no, it's not about the movies.

• 1:50:31Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:50:32Speaker 03

  The movies are irrelevant in this situation. It's just what's the sound of it.

• 1:50:35Yasi Salek?

  Because now he makes films and he's like does swearing of films and stuff.

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  It's just the point about, the point about a good sample is it doesn't matter where it, literally irrelevant where it comes from.

• 1:50:45Yasi Salek?

  It's about how it serves the song.

• 1:50:46Speaker 03

  It's about how it serves, or does it, is it unusual? Are you the first person to have noticed it? Is it unusual? Can you squeeze it in there? You know, like when people say, uh, what's her name? Who did the sort of clear out your house?

• 1:50:58Yasi Salek?

  Uh, Marie Kondo?

• 1:50:59Speaker 03

  Marie, Marie Kondo is like, if you're gonna keep something in your house, it has to be because it sparks joy, right? That's like with, with the three second sample, it's like, does it spark joy in you? And there was something Simon Reynolds wrote about them at the end of ninety-four in Melody Maker. And I think this again is a sort of slightly, this, this sort of, this is like a misselling, I think, a bit anyway. And he's sort of like, imagine a cross between ambient and hip hop, right?

• 1:51:22Yasi Salek?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:23Speaker 03

  Like, I can imagine it, but that's not, that's literally not what they're doing, right? Imagine a Brit version of Cypress Hill or Gravediggers spooky Gothic hop.

• 1:51:31Yasi Salek?

  A British version of Cypress Hill?

• 1:51:33Speaker 03

  A Brit version of Cypress Hill or Gravediggers spooky, I know, like.

• 1:51:38Yasi Salek?

  Respectfully, Cypress Hill is so like upbeat and like.

• 1:51:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then imagine the sound of bombs exploding in slow motion. That's not bad. We've got no rapping. This is, I think this is Jeff, we've got no rapping, so I'm sure we'll be marketed in the States as an indie band. Yeah, fine. But this, this idea, this comes in quite early, this idea that they're sort of ambient. And there's these new words that people are starting to use as music journalists in there, ambient comes in.

• 1:52:01Yasi Salek?

  It's literally not ambient.

• 1:52:03Speaker 03

  There's nothing, like, do you know what ambient music is? Because it ain't that. It's not someone, for start, it's got vocals all over it and there are drums in it and it's rhythmic and it has choruses and verses. It's like, that's the opposite of ambient, but ambient's coming in as being kind of cool, so it's like, oh.

• 1:52:19Yasi Salek?

  Right, vibey, budabah.

• 1:52:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, yeah, oh, oh yes, ambient hip hop. It's like, no, it's not hip hop and it ain't ambient, but go off.

• 1:52:27Yasi Salek?

  Ambient hip hop?

• 1:52:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:28Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so there's four of them at this time, just to be clear. Dave McDonald's very involved, Adrian, Beth and Jeff. As Adrian put it, Portishead is a team that works together, but Jeff is the boss and we all contribute what we contribute.

• 1:52:41Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:52:41Yasi Salek?

  Also, just a fun fact, this album was powered by Siggs. Jeff Farah said, "We worked in the studio in another part of Bristol, which is called State of Art, and it wasn't State of Art by any means. It was like a budget studio." It didn't matter though, because you couldn't really see through most of it, because it was just smoke. And Adrian said, "We smoked at least two packs a day." Apparently, once they opened the door, because there's no fresh air, and so much smoke came out, the fire brigade came, because they thought it was on fire.

• 1:53:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love that.

• 1:53:04Yasi Salek?

  It's a cartoon. Again, I didn't experience this, and so you can talk more to it, but the marketing of this album, specifically in London, seemed really cool.

• 1:53:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there was the whole-

• 1:53:16Yasi Salek?

  With the mannequins, the blue mannequins.

• 1:53:19Speaker 03

  And everything.

• 1:53:20Yasi Salek?

  That was Tony Krian, I think, who was at the time doing marketing for Go Disc.

• 1:53:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:24Yasi Salek?

  Although Jeff told me the actual logo, they came up with it.

• 1:53:28Speaker 03

  Right, the P.

• 1:53:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, the P, which I didn't realize was the parking symbol.

• 1:53:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:32Yasi Salek?

  And he said, "That's not why they did it," but I was like, "But it's the parking symbol."

• 1:53:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:36Yasi Salek?

  It's genius either way. It's like the name. You can like, project, it's so generic, that it's like, kind of cool.

• 1:53:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. You know what? I was thinking about that, because at the time, it's not like, "Oh, yeah, and everywhere, and swinging London," and we were all, every time we turned the corner, you saw a blue mannequin. I don't remember ever seeing any of it.

• 1:53:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:53:53Speaker 03

  But at the same time, I was also working in a record shop and playing the album every day. So I was conscious of it, but I do remember people talking about it at the time, like it was a thing.

• 1:54:03Yasi Salek?

  The mannequins.

• 1:54:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't, I don't remember actually ever seeing any of it in real life.

• 1:54:09Yasi Salek?

  Obviously, but, okay, let's talk about the performance of it.

• 1:54:12Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:54:13Yasi Salek?

  By 2019, it was triple platinum, so it's done well. It won the Mercury Prize.

• 1:54:20Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:54:21Yasi Salek?

  September of 1995. This is pretty interesting. What are we on now? Like, the fourth Mercury Prize, right? Because 91 was the first one. Beat out Elastica, self-titled.

• 1:54:33Speaker 03

  An amazing record.

• 1:54:34Yasi Salek?

  PJ Harvey, To Bring You My Love.

• 1:54:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:37Yasi Salek?

  And Oasis is definitely a maybe.

• 1:54:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:39Yasi Salek?

  And Tricky's Mexican.

• 1:54:40Speaker 03

  A big year.

• 1:54:41Yasi Salek?

  Big year.

• 1:54:42Speaker 03

  Also, yeah, leftism as well.

• 1:54:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I thought this was very interesting.

• 1:54:45Speaker 03

  And Supercross.

• 1:54:46Yasi Salek?

  And I should cook it, yeah.

• 1:54:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:48Yasi Salek?

  Jeff liked Oasis.

• 1:54:49Speaker 03

  That doesn't surprise me at all.

• 1:54:51Yasi Salek?

  He said, they asked him in a question, what do you think about Oasis?

• 1:54:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:54Yasi Salek?

  Who actually admit, he was talking about stealing stuff.

• 1:54:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:56Yasi Salek?

  To actually admit that they put on Beatles songs that are right over the top of them.

• 1:54:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:59Yasi Salek?

  And Jeff says, they're the exception to the rule. I rate them. I can't help but rate them. Because the thing of it is, they just know where they're going.

• 1:55:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:06Yasi Salek?

  And they know what they're doing.

• 1:55:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:07Yasi Salek?

  I think they're out to conquer the world any which way they can. And it comes.

• 1:55:11Speaker 03

  When was that from?

• 1:55:12Yasi Salek?

  Ninety five.

• 1:55:13Speaker 03

  No, I mean, that's very, he's absolutely a hundred percent on the money.

• 1:55:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's, I think, but it makes sense because it goes back to the respect of honesty, right? He's like, they're not pretending. Noel Gallagher's not like, I reinvented the wheel. Noel Gallagher was like, I love the Beatles, we're gonna be the biggest band in the world, here you go.

• 1:55:29Speaker 03

  I love the Beatles and I love the Jam and I love the Sex Pistols.

• 1:55:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:33Speaker 03

  And here's Oasis.

• 1:55:33Yasi Salek?

  I love the Stone Roses.

• 1:55:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:35Yasi Salek?

  So I thought that was interesting. Because you would think that like they would be like temperamentally opposed or whatever.

• 1:55:42Speaker 03

  You know, but what's interesting about that from, from looking at it from a twenty twenty six perspective is that at the time, Oasis was such a kind of juggernaut.

• 1:55:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:51Speaker 03

  That just sort of wiped everything else out. But also the thing about, the thing about Oasis that you have to remember that at the time is that they were selling to hundreds of thousands of people that weren't, couldn't give a flying fuck about all the other, anything on the Mercury Prize list.

• 1:56:09Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:56:09Speaker 03

  You know, they didn't give a shit about PJ Harvey or Chickie or whatever. What Jeff says there that's really interesting, especially from the perspective of nineteen ninety five, is that there was also an element of Oasis where they were sort of uncool because they were so big so quickly.

• 1:56:24Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:56:24Speaker 03

  It was a bit like, hmm, yeah, but you know, for him, and he's so on it, because it's almost like he's, that's a perspective from now of going, they know what they want, they know how to get there, they know what they're doing. Yeah. Absolute respect and doing it. And it's interesting from my perspective now, having talked to a lot of people of my era.

• 1:56:43Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:56:43Speaker 03

  Who went to see Oasis last summer, every single one of them went, and these are lots of the, plenty of these people who would have been at the time going, oh, I'm freaking bored shitless with Oasis. Absolutely without exception, every single one of them came back and went, that is one of the best things I've ever seen in my life. So Jeff's point there is absolutely on point and it wasn't necessarily a popular, cool opinion at the time.

• 1:57:07Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:57:07Speaker 03

  To go, yeah, Oasis, fair play.

• 1:57:09Yasi Salek?

  That's so interesting. Have you ever listened to the acceptance speech of Portishead for the Mercury Prize?

• 1:57:15Speaker 03

  Actually, no, I haven't. I probably saw it at the time because with the Mercury Prize at the time was like you would stay. It was another thing. You would like stay in and watch it.

• 1:57:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:24Speaker 03

  I mean, those days are over. But no, I haven't heard it. Not since nineteen ninety five.

• 1:57:29Yasi Salek?

  It's phenomenal. Again, I don't, I never have watched this on television, but they're seated at like a more like a press conference type table and they all three of them have giant beers in front of them. I think Adrian's like, I tried to leave, but then they told me to stay.

• 1:57:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:47Yasi Salek?

  Beth seems, and this is not to bismerch at all, her character, I don't know if she drinks or not, but she seemed a little tipsy, which was very cool.

• 1:57:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:57:55Yasi Salek?

  Jeff Barrow is trying to be like very serious and make like a real statement in what I've gleaned to be his fashion of we don't deserve this. There's no point in picking one artist. This is stupid. Like there's many artists that are better than us that probably weren't even thought of or nominated. And, you know, there shouldn't even be a best album of the year. And somebody in the crowd immediately begins thinking, nobody loves me. And Jeff Barrow's like, yes, yes, yes. And then Beth keeps interjecting and being like, he works fucking hard, like over it. It's so chaotic. It's kind of amazing.

• 1:58:38Speaker 06

  He's getting pissed off at me as a normal.

• 1:58:42Speaker 03

  She just had too much to drink again.

• 1:58:47Speaker 06

  That's all you can tell me. He works really fucking hard, right? He works fucking hard.

• 1:58:53Speaker 03

  That is beautiful.

• 1:58:54Yasi Salek?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:58:54Speaker 03

  You've got to love that for Jeff, who is twenty three.

• 1:58:58Yasi Salek?

  It does kind of make sense, though, when you put it that way because then it's like, oh, yeah, it's like incredibly idealistic, the way a twenty three year old or twenty two year old would be, whereas like Beth is like thirty and she's just like pissed and like laughing and being like, this is fun. He did a good job and Adrianly doesn't even.

• 1:59:17Speaker 03

  Enjoy our night out.

• 1:59:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I want to read you a quote from the Enemy review of this album by Stephen Dalton.

• 1:59:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:26Yasi Salek?

  Nine out of 10, pretty high.

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 1:59:29Yasi Salek?

  Enemy was not in the, in the fashion of giving out 10s all the time, right? That wasn't a thing.

• 1:59:35Speaker 03

  No, famously, I think the last time they gave a 10, well, in like this sort of era.

• 1:59:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:42Speaker 03

  Was the editor, who was then Steve Sutherland, gave a 10 to the debut album by Eve.

• 1:59:50Yasi Salek?

  Honestly, can't argue with that.

• 1:59:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. 10 though.

• 1:59:54Yasi Salek?

  Okay, in, in the harsh light of time.

• 1:59:58Yasi Salek?

  Portishead dummy nine, debut album by Eve, 10. One line just really jumped out at me was Portishead's post ambient, timeless post ambient. So in, in fairness, not ambient, it's after ambient, whatever the fuck that means.

• 2:00:14Speaker 03

  Whatever that is, yeah.

• 2:00:15Yasi Salek?

  Timelessly organic blues are probably too left field, introspective and downright Bristolian, not a thing, um, to grab short term glory as some kind of next big thing.

• 2:00:31Yasi Salek?

  Spoiler.

• 2:00:33Speaker 03

  Paging Mr. Dalton.

• 2:00:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, actually.

• 2:00:35Speaker 03

  Can you rewrite that line?

• 2:00:36Yasi Salek?

  It did.

• 2:00:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, actually it did.

• 2:00:37Yasi Salek?

  It did do.

• 2:00:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but, but basically it was glowingly reviewed, right? I'm sure you remember at the time, it's pretty universally acclaimed.

• 2:00:45Speaker 03

  No one gave it a kicking.

• 2:00:47Yasi Salek?

  No, I'm, I mean, beyond not giving it a kicking, it was like, Melody Maker said, they're undeniably the classiest, coolest thing to have appeared in this country for years. Perhaps the year's most stunning debut is what Q said.

• 2:00:59Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:00:59Yasi Salek?

  They were like heaped praise upon, which again.

• 2:01:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:04Yasi Salek?

  Does sort of make me understand Jeff Barrows.

• 2:01:10Yasi Salek?

  Mercury Prize speech a little more, you know, like, or his just general stance where he's like, come on. Like, it's not that good. I mean, it is that good, but I I can see like being, right? You're like one of two people, right? You're either Noel Gallagher, where you're like, yeah, it is the best thing that sun sliced bread.

• 2:01:27Speaker 03

  I am the best, I am the best person that's ever lived. Yeah.

• 2:01:29Yasi Salek?

  And thank you. Not even thank you for noticing. Quite right.

• 2:01:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:33Yasi Salek?

  Quite you've noticed.

• 2:01:34Speaker 03

  Because everyone else is shit.

• 2:01:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Or you're Jeff Barrett, who's like, this is just, you guys are being hysterical.

• 2:01:41Speaker 03

  Well, I think that there was Jeff speaking to Q in nineteen ninety four.

• 2:01:45Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 2:01:45Speaker 03

  To Martin Aston. And he says, this is music that isn't made to sell. And you think, yeah, you could, I think this, this speaks to everything that, in a way, went beautifully wrong and right at the same time for Poet's Head, which is they didn't want it or expect it to be anything like as massive as it became. They controlled everything that came out. So every press release that was written, every piece of artwork, although I think that they would say that the artwork was very low down on their list of priorities and it was all about the music. And, you know, that's why a lot of the artwork is extremely plain.

• 2:02:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:30Speaker 03

  You know, because they were, they're not one of those artists where it's like, well, the artwork is as important as the music. Like, we don't care about anything else. And I, that sense of, we sort of spoke about this a bit earlier, but there is that thing with Poet's Head where it's like, this is odd music that isn't made for everyone. But it just happened to land at a time where the sort of critical cognoscenti who still had a lot of clout in nineteen ninety five, loved it. And also, it just fitted in, you know, people could, people could take it on two different levels. You could dig into it and go, this is an amazing blend of all these incredible musics that I'm cool and I know about. And also, you could just whistle the tunes because and the songs are amazing.

• 2:03:14Speaker 03

  And that's the thing that that's been that was their blessing and their curse. Because it it pushed them over into an audience that they certainly weren't looking for.

• 2:03:23Yasi Salek?

  I I just kept wondering, like, if another reason for the warm welcome.

• 2:03:30Yasi Salek?

  Was, you know, we had had this, we, I'm British now, soon to be dropping Madonna-esque accent to watch this space.

• 2:03:39Speaker 03

  Lovely, I look forward to it.

• 2:03:40Yasi Salek?

  Lovely. Um, anyways, that there had been this whole Happy Mondays, Hacienda, dance music sort of surge in the late eighties, early nineties, you know, also cresting sort of with a, with Scream and Delica and stuff. And then Britpop swept in, right? And sort of the, the conversation shifted and obviously Britpop being in many ways a reaction to American grunge, like there was just a whole thing. And then I was wondering if maybe it was just this hunger for, and again, we've been

• 2:04:16Yasi Salek?

  very clear, dummy is not dance music, but it, it lives more in the space of the club or post-club or whatever than it does in like anthemic rock music. Do you feel that played a part in it being, people being so happy to hear music like this at this exact time?

• 2:04:40Speaker 03

  Absolutely, because what it did is it brought together lots of strands of dance music and ambient music and film music and jazz and definitely not funk, but soul. And so there was a lot, there was a lot of music in there that people could relate to and it didn't sound, they, they didn't sound like a rock and roll band.

• 2:05:04Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:05:05Speaker 03

  And they weren't trying to be like a rock and roll band. And so there was definitely, it wasn't, yeah, there was definitely a feeling that this was, it was sort of chill out in a way.

• 2:05:15Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:05:15Speaker 03

  But it was, you know, very spiky chill out. But it, it, it sort of, I think the, the best way of thinking about it is that. There was a slot waiting for Portishead and it hadn't been identified. But when they landed, it was like, oh, we needed that.

• 2:05:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:33Speaker 03

  You know, we want that. We didn't even know we wanted it. But that's, it just fit.

• 2:05:38Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:05:38Speaker 03

  You know, and it fit everywhere. And so it fit on the radio, it fit in. It was one of those, it was a bit like when Eminem arrived. And he could be on the cover of Kerrang and NME and Rolling Stone and Billboard and everything.

• 2:05:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:56Speaker 03

  You know, he could be everywhere. He could be on Smash Hits.

• 2:05:59Yasi Salek?

  He played the Warped Tour here.

• 2:06:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. So, yeah, he could be, he could be sort of everywhere, you know. And in a way, Portishead were like that, certainly not through their own volition.

• 2:06:08Yasi Salek?

  Machinations.

• 2:06:09Speaker 03

  But they could be like that. Yeah, they don't want to say, oh, we want to hit every market. But just in the sense that there was a thirst for what they were doing that would just exploded immediately.

• 2:06:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I think that's really, that's one of the coolest things about Portishead to me. And again, we've, we've sort of touched on this a bunch of times. But the idea that they really set out to do exactly what they wanted to do with no thought or feeling that this was going to be popular, that anyone wanted it, that it was fitting in with any sort of cultural movement or trend. In fact, like, you would, you could imagine thinking like, we're getting away with something. Because like, how did this label give us money to make this? Like, this is not a thing that is going on right now. Like, I'm scratching over some hauntingly beautiful lounge singing with these like

• 2:07:03Yasi Salek?

  really intricate song structures put together, like all the samples. Just the way that it was so painstakingly made to be exactly what they wanted it to be and fuck everyone else. It's incredible, but also like really heartening, right? Because then you're like, wow, finally like a win for what we all hope to be the truth, which is that when you make something that is so purely authentic to, to your vision and what you want to make and not taking into consideration what other people want or think, then that is going to be the best possible thing. And that's kind of what happened here.

• 2:07:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. And it's certainly true to say that there wasn't anything happening.

• 2:07:48Speaker 03

  Like them at the time.

• 2:07:49Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:07:50Speaker 03

  There is this sort of wave of slowcore.

• 2:07:53Yasi Salek?

  Hmm.

• 2:07:53Speaker 03

  Spain and Red House Painters and Galaxy 500 and Low and people like that. And those were certainly bands that Jeff and Adrian were aware of and listening to. So there is a touch of that in there, but there wasn't any.

• 2:08:08Yasi Salek?

  They don't have the groove, right? That's like the like a stark difference between those.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  No, absolutely. But that's what I mean in the sense that nobody else, nobody else is doing this, right? So there's all these things that are coming in and you can sense the influences and the colors and the flavors of all this other stuff. But nobody was doing, it doesn't say, it didn't sound like anybody else. And I think that's, that in its, in its essence is the thing that sort of blows something like this up in the sense that it's like, everybody goes, I literally haven't heard that before.

• 2:08:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:40Speaker 03

  You know, that is, that's a whole new thing, you know, that's, and it's, so that adds an excitement to it as well because it's, you, you recognize some of it, you know, you recognize the emotion and the feeling behind some of it. You recognize the sort of vibe of some of it, but it's not been put together like that before. And so that's the thing I think that's really exciting for that time. And also the thing that's just pushed them over into this sort of huge audience.

• 2:09:04Yasi Salek?

  Let's talk about the tracks and then I want to talk about the legacy briefly because I think it's interesting.

• 2:09:10Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:09:10Yasi Salek?

  We start off strong, Mr. Ons. In my mind, it was always Mr. Ons, but it's, it's not Mr. Ons.

• 2:09:17Speaker 03

  Mr. Ons.

• 2:09:18Yasi Salek?

  Mr. Ons.

• 2:09:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:19Yasi Salek?

  It's derived from the Mr. Ons, which was a species from Mars, who are the antagonists in the classic nineteen sixty seven to nineteen sixty eight British television program Captain Scarlet and the Mr. Ons. I never watched this show.

• 2:09:34Speaker 03

  I mean, this was like, you know, even I wasn't born in when that first came out, but it was the sort of thing you would see on. Saturday morning TV.

• 2:09:42Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:09:42Speaker 03

  You know, they were, so it ran for, you know, a year, but it was, it was shown forever. It was classic Saturday morning, summer, summer holiday, sort of 10 o'clock in the morning. Let's just put this old thing on. So yeah, Captain Scarlet, you would have heard this music and you would have seen these characters throughout the sort of seventies.

• 2:10:01Yasi Salek?

  And the music was a good, great influence on the song. Jeff and Adrian spoke to KEXP in 2019 and Jeff said Barry Gray and his orchestra wrote and recorded the music for Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet. They were puppets, but they had the most amazing spacecrafts and dark music and they had a full massive orchestral score. And Adrian said, I think the Barry Gray had the biggest orchestra. He always demanded the biggest orchestra and it was really weird because it wasn't for a big program. It was for a sci-fi puppet show. The music is awesome.

• 2:10:42Speaker 03

  What Adrian said there is such a great point is, you know, and it speaks to a real golden era.

• 2:10:46Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:10:47Speaker 03

  Of TV when it's like, you know, go, I want a massive orchestra for this, for this mad kids TV show. And it's like, okay.

• 2:10:56Yasi Salek?

  All right. Sour Times, babe. Let's fucking go.

• 2:10:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well.

• 2:11:00Yasi Salek?

  You can't ever hear it for the first time again, which sucks, but like.

• 2:11:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:06Yasi Salek?

  What a fucking tune to hear for the first time.

• 2:11:09Speaker 03

  What a fucking tune. You could probably add that to every one of the tracks on this album, couldn't you? What a fucking tune. But yeah, Sour Times. And then also the remixes that came out Sour, Sour Times. You know, it's funny with those remixes as well, actually. A lot of them were sort of cobbled together very quickly because the label demanded, we need, you know, four new tracks by Saturday because they had, because it was the era of putting out two different CD singles.

• 2:11:33Yasi Salek?

  Right. Well, you had to. That's how you chart.

• 2:11:36Speaker 03

  And so you'd have to bash out these singles. And this is, again, this is something we sort of touched on earlier. But if there is any actual trip hop in Portishead's catalogue, it's definitely in those remixes because they are just sort of functional DJ tools. Ultimately, you know, it's like stick a break on, paste the vocals over the top, leave it running for four minutes and send it to the label and say, that's the, that's the remix. There you go.

• 2:11:58Yasi Salek?

  Which does show you that obviously Jeff Barrett was more than capable of making an entire album of that kind of music, but that wasn't what interested him.

• 2:12:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, because it's incredibly easy. You know, it's just a couple of loops. Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, you, listen, if you can make a podcast, you can make a fairly decent trip hop track in about 10 minutes. I can absolutely guarantee it.

• 2:12:18Yasi Salek?

  We'll see about that.

• 2:12:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:19Yasi Salek?

  I just, I love this song. I think this song, and this, this ties into what we're going to talk about with like the twisted legacy of this album. But like, I think this song is so poorly interpreted in culture over time. Like, this is a fucking, like, aggressive and scary song, you know, like.

• 2:12:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:41Yasi Salek?

  There's no more better way to hear that than, there's like some really great live footage of Beth singing this song. Where she, the way she's like growling and shrieking the nobody loves me part in this like fucked up but cool way. That's the heart of the song, you know, it's not this sort of like mournful Norah Jones lament or whatever. Respect to Norah Jones. This is not a diss to this person. Norah Jones made some great music, but you know what I'm saying?

• 2:13:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:19Speaker 03

  It's such a powerful piece. And that's why I think it's, it's almost like emblematic of their entire early career. You know, it's, it's the sort of thing that people remember. When you sort of say Portishead, it's like they will remember Sour Times.

• 2:13:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:34Speaker 03

  They remember those, you know, the lyrics and Beth's sort of, Beth's delivery of all of that. I do remember these coming out and each one did feel like, like a step on from the last one in the sense that like, this is getting really exciting. Because you'd had, you know, obviously you hadn't heard the album at this point.

• 2:13:52Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:13:52Speaker 03

  But that sense that this is going somewhere really exciting. This is going somewhere new.

• 2:13:58Yasi Salek?

  It's pretty special. The next song is Strangers. Here's what Jeff Barrow said about it. It's got really like a knocky bass drum. I came up with that. And then from a session, I took a chord of an organ or something like that. I put it in the beat and then I used really heavy compression to make it sound really exciting. Where you hear kick drum, everything else goes quiet. And when you don't hear the kick drum and the snare drum and all the rest of the noise in between sucks up. It was so important to Dummy.

• 2:14:35Speaker 03

  I mean, classic Jeff. Bass drum talk.

• 2:14:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It's called Guitar Center Hours with Jeff Barrow. I respect it. The most interviews, he just wants to talk about the process, which.

• 2:14:49Speaker 03

  I mean, but that's, you know, that's, that's his thing, isn't it? That's, you know, he's not, he's not writing the lyrics or singing or, you know? He's like, he's all about the aesthetic of the audio. You know, that's the sonics are everything to him.

• 2:15:04Yasi Salek?

  Which we talked about earlier. I think it's, it's less technical. I mean, it's not, it's very technical, but it's not just technical. I mean, he spoke to how important the effect emotionally was of the technical execution of what he is doing. And I think that's like, that's what I'm most interested in. It could be sweet. Let's fucking go.

• 2:15:25Speaker 03

  This, you know, Could Be Sweet is sort of two or three years old by this point.

• 2:15:29Yasi Salek?

  It was the first, very first song.

• 2:15:31Speaker 03

  The first ever thing they did, right?

• 2:15:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:15:33Yasi Salek?

  Beth Gibbons brought this in. It was like something she had worked on, on her own when she was, you know, making her own music. This is what Adrian and Jeff said about it. Adrian said, it's really kind of soulful. And Jeff said, her tone is really strange as well. It's also the Devonshire accent. The way that she pronounces words on listening back to it, it's really odd. Then they go into like kind of making fun of her accent. Not making fun, but Jeff Barrow was like, you want a pint? I, I don't know what Devonshire people talk like, but Adrian said, when I first heard this song, I could not believe it. I mean, the sound of it, but also Beth's voice just completely blew me away. It was a massive moment in life for me that I still remember.

• 2:16:15Yasi Salek?

  As the door opened into the main studio, I heard this voice and I thought, wow, that's amazing. This is a great example. I mean, they all are, but I feel like this is a really good one where you can hear what we were talking about earlier about how forward in the mix the vocals are and how you really feel like this person is like standing next to you. And there's such an intimacy.

• 2:16:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:44Speaker 03

  And this is again, this is a bit like what we were saying earlier when she hasn't done many interviews and it's go and you think, well, that's, she doesn't need to do many interviews because when you listen to these songs, it's this is what, this is who she is. This is the, you know, she's right there telling you everything.

• 2:17:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. You don't get something for nothing.

• 2:17:04Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:17:04Yasi Salek?

  Turn now. Gotta try a little harder. This one also is really like, I can hear the folk influence, you know, the, with the way, the cadence of the singing and stuff.

• 2:17:16Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:17:26Yasi Salek?

  I'm gonna make a bold and controversial statement. I think Wandering Star is my favorite Portisone song.

• 2:17:32Speaker 03

  Wow. Okay.

• 2:17:33Yasi Salek?

  I just fucking love it. And it worms into my brain for sure. It is a wormy song.

• 2:17:40Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:17:40Yasi Salek?

  I love the like marching drum, sort of, it's like, like propelling you forward.

• 2:17:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:47Yasi Salek?

  Please, could you stay a while to share my grief? This bitch snapped with these lyrics.

• 2:17:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:00Yasi Salek?

  I didn't know this at the time, and it makes total sense for me, a person sort of weirdly and deeply interested in God, that the chorus is a reference to a Bible verse, the King James translation of the Epistle of Jude. This is how the chorus is wandering stars for whom it is reserved, the blackness, the darkness forever. And this is what

• 2:18:23Yasi Salek?

  The Bible passage says, it's Jude 112 to 113, where God is speaking of the consequences ungodly people face. And it says, "These people are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm, shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind, autumn trees without fruit and uprooted, twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame, wandering stars for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever."

• 2:18:53Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:18:53Yasi Salek?

  Once again, also,

• 2:18:54Speaker 03

  Okay, Beth.

• 2:18:55Yasi Salek?

  God snapped when he was writing that, babe, because...

• 2:19:00Speaker 03

  Just, he's done it again.

• 2:19:01Yasi Salek?

  Pure poetry, right here.

• 2:19:03Speaker 03

  Bang a tweet from the big guy, Beth.

• 2:19:05Yasi Salek?

  Bang a tweet from the big person, the big entity. We don't gender God here. God is beyond gender. Anyways, I thought that was really cool. Cause it is a really, the chorus is so powerful. The, for whom it is reserved, the blackness, the darkness forever. And a wandering star is such a lonely, sad image.

• 2:19:26Speaker 03

  But it's also such a beautiful, you know, literally a light in the darkness as well, though, isn't it? You know, just that, again, with them, this is something that works on both levels. It's incredibly lonely, thinking of this wandering star. But at the same time, that wandering star could bring sucker to those that view it from the earth.

• 2:19:47Yasi Salek?

  Bit of light. Beth Gimmins absolutely said, "Robert Smith, fucking hold my beer, bitch, because you thought that you were goth? Try to outgoth this."

• 2:19:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. It would be hard to outgoth that chorus, actually. The darkness forever.

• 2:20:13Speaker 03

  Jeff really nails it on this as well. He's a king, king of decks on this.

• 2:20:18Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah. And you know, I was thinking about it a lot when I was listening to this. And I was like, I wonder, I should have asked, because it's impossible for us to know, again, of people of a certain age. It's like the Banksy of it all, right? At some point, scratching over non hip hop music became so unbearably corny. You know, like when we get into the later nineties and early two thousands and it's like, you can't fucking throw a rock without hitting like a new metal band that has a DJ or whatever.

• 2:20:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:52Yasi Salek?

  And so I wonder if to the ears of young people who have sort of like associated or do they associate like scratching over music with being lame? I don't know. I mean, I don't hear it that way, you know, because this is it's perfect here. But I was curious.

• 2:21:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a really good point because as a sort of sonic aesthetic, it basically doesn't really exist anymore. And every now and again on TikTok, because I am a man of a certain age with the certain, you know, proclivities.

• 2:21:22Yasi Salek?

  And certain algorithms.

• 2:21:24Speaker 03

  Algorithms. They go, I know what you like, you stupid old bastard. And I do get a lot of content of people going.

• 2:21:33Speaker 03

  And it's like, even my tolerance for it is is pretty low as someone who used to love it. But when you go back into this album, that is one of the most striking if you've not if you've let it lie fallow for a number of years.

• 2:21:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:48Speaker 03

  Potentially decades. That's the thing that's really leaps out is this sort of.

• 2:21:54Speaker 03

  You know, and all like that. And it's it's a bit like I was having this thought the other day of thinking. I think it was probably after watching Beatles Anthology is going, I wonder who the last band ever were who bowed after each song, you know, when did it? What was the what was the last date? Where someone they finished their song is the new one and finished it and went everybody went. They were bowed like no one's ever going to do that again. And I think you could probably put that in the same category. It's like.

• 2:22:20Yasi Salek?

  Babe, don't threaten, don't threaten the loops of time with a good time over here.

• 2:22:25Speaker 03

  You think they're gonna start bowing?

• 2:22:27Yasi Salek?

  I think they're gonna start bowing and they're gonna bring back scratching. We're we are we are stuck in the the time stopped when the internet came around. And we are we're cursed like Sisyphus to continuously push the rock up and down the hill where everything it just keeps coming back. So I wouldn't put it past.

• 2:22:45Speaker 03

  So you don't think nothing's nothing's finished.

• 2:22:48Yasi Salek?

  Nothing's finished. I do wonder if anyone will ever do it as well as Jeff Barrett did. Because to your point, like, my God, this man is the Mozart of scratching over music like it is. It's so subtle. It's so exquisite in the way that it adds exactly what it needs to add. It does. It is an instrument. It's not a flourish, you know?

• 2:23:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's not like, he would, I'm sure he would be the first to say it. And it's not like Jeff Barrow is the most technically accomplished DJ.

• 2:23:21Yasi Salek?

  Well, he loves DJ Premier, babe. He's a, he would say, there's a few people ahead of him in line.

• 2:23:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And there's Cubert doing his business. But the thing about what Jeff is doing is it feels, you never forget that there's a human being on there. So it's not like some technical wizardry. It's like, this is a real human being cutting a real piece of plastic on a real turntable. And in real time, you know, they're not comping it in later. And that, it really works on this. And I think that's why it's sort of so affecting because you can feel that it's always on, there's an edge of chaos to a lot of Portishead, which is the thing that is very appealing about them, you know, because it could fall apart at any moment.

• 2:24:07Yasi Salek?

  I have a good quote about the scratching, particularly on Wondering Star. Jeff Barrow said, Wondering Star kind of needed a solo, so I just kind of scratched the start of Magic Mountain. I wasn't really ever a scratch DJ as such, but I was always madly into DJ Premier. You don't need loads of notes to make it sound cool. And that's what Premier did with his scratching. He didn't have to do anything. It was an incredible technique, but still it would just be so cool. He's the most soulful scratch DJ that's ever been. And that's a good distinction, right? That's kind of what Jeff seems to have been trying to do is be a soulful scratch DJ.

• 2:24:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 2:24:41Yasi Salek?

  There are absolutely 24 year olds listening to this and being like, what in the fuck are you talking about? Soulful scratch DJs?

• 2:24:47Speaker 03

  Well, they're probably just fast forwarding through this bit.

• 2:24:49Yasi Salek?

  Who is DJ Premier?

• 2:24:50Speaker 03

  Who's DJ Premier? Who's Jeff Barrow? What's scratching?

• 2:24:54Yasi Salek?

  And I respect you guys, the 14, 24 year olds that are still listening to hour seven of this Portishead podcast.

• 2:25:01Speaker 03

  God love you.

• 2:25:02Yasi Salek?

  Okay, the next song is It's a Fire. I think, besides it could be sweet, this is the, maybe even more than it could be sweet. This is the most Beth Gibbons folk musician song on the album.

• 2:25:17Yasi Salek?

  This was, again, one of her own early songs. I have to note that this "It's a Fire" was not included on the UK release of Dummy. It was a B-side to Sour Times. I wonder why? Do you think because it was tonally sort of, didn't fit in with the rest of the album?

• 2:25:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think probably. Maybe there was also, maybe there's a thing about wanting to have a different version for the US. Maybe there'd been some albums sold on import and they wanted to sell them again to people, so they put a different track on the album. I don't know. Hard to, you know, hard to say the machinations.

• 2:25:47Yasi Salek?

  Things no one can understand these days, except for Taylor Swift.

• 2:25:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:49Yasi Salek?

  "Breathe On, Sister." "Breathe On" is real Joni Mitchell hours. So I get it. Jeff said, "Beth wrote it entirely." I think she got a beat tape off Andy Smith, DJ Andy Smith, that had just some loops on it, and she just sampled it up and looped it in a really weird place. "It's great. I wish I had done that." "You played the really wobbly bass stuff," which is the majority of it. He's talking to Adrian. "You've worked out the weird kind of chords that she had." I can remember the session really well, too. They have an organist on here, Gary Baldwin. He said, "Gary Baldwin is an East Ender, a proper kind of Cockney." And Adrian said, "I had a tune in a band that had the word 'sneaky' in it, but I can't remember what it was." So I would say something like, "Okay,

• 2:26:30Yasi Salek?

  a bit more sneaky." And Jeff goes, then he goes, "What, like this?" And you could hear these two old cod going at it. What Gary had was just amazing expression. He could make his organ just go from barely audible to absolutely take your head off.

• 2:26:44Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:26:45Yasi Salek?

  Cockney organist, saving the day.

• 2:26:47Speaker 03

  Cockney organist. Where would we be without them? Right?

• 2:27:01Yasi Salek?

  We talked a little bit about "Num," but it's, it really is a great song. Again, unclear to me why it would be the first single, because I don't think it's like the most grabbing song, but it's an incredible song. The way it ends, the outro is just so, like, I, I thought about it for a long time after these rounds of listening to it. And, you know, back then... We didn't have lyric sheets and I'm pretty positive Porter said definitely didn't include lyric sheets. Like that wasn't their thing. So like, I never knew what she was saying at the end. She's saying, "A lady of woe." A lady of woe.

• 2:27:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:27:43Yasi Salek?

  A lady of woe.

• 2:27:45Speaker 03

  Lady of woe. God love her.

• 2:27:47Yasi Salek?

  The Yasi Selig story.

• 2:27:57Speaker 03

  I think the thing about numb is it's, as you say, it's not meant to, I mean, it's very Porter's head, isn't it? To put out your first single and it's a bit like, what even is this? Do I even like it? It's sort of absolutely emblematic of who they are as people to drop something odd and quite difficult.

• 2:28:15Yasi Salek?

  Right, challenging.

• 2:28:16Speaker 03

  As the first, yeah, it's the first thing, you know, that's, that's what they want. That's what they want to be. That's what has been forgotten largely about this record is that it is an odd and challenging and dark and mysterious and weird record. But it also has incredible tunes and sort of swing and life to it. Which means you can largely ignore all the oddness and the darkness.

• 2:28:44Yasi Salek?

  It's a real, it's a real airplane medicine situation.

• 2:28:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It's a wrist slasher and a toe tapper.

• 2:28:52Yasi Salek?

  It's a wrist slasher and a toe tapper. That's what they should have stuck on the sticker for dummy and just slapped it right on the front.

• 2:28:59Speaker 03

  I'd have had that on the hype sticker of the first pressing.

• 2:29:02Yasi Salek?

  Doing marketing there.

• 2:29:04Speaker 03

  If they'd asked me.

• 2:29:04Yasi Salek?

  Go Beat Records.

• 2:29:05Speaker 03

  I'd go beat, yeah.

• 2:29:07Yasi Salek?

  Roads.

• 2:29:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:29:10Yasi Salek?

  Fuck me all the way up fam.

• 2:29:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, roads. I mean, fuck. I mean, roads, Fender roads.

• 2:29:18Yasi Salek?

  Fender roads. The title is a reference to the Fender roads. Clever.

• 2:29:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, very clever. I like, I see what you did, guys. And, uh, yeah, that was the one, that's always been the one for me that just like, in a way, it's very different than the other tracks. In a way, it's sort of almost more, it's kind of more simple in a way. It's more like a, just a sort of simple little three-piece band playing.

• 2:29:49Speaker 03

  It's a sort of devastating piece of music. And I remember that seeing that on TV was I can literally picture myself in the room watching it going, fuck, this is like really something.

• 2:30:02Yasi Salek?

  Again, what a testament to this band that they understand so well. As much as Jeff Barrow lives and dies to be like wiki wiki and add a little

• 2:30:13Yasi Salek?

  like

• 2:30:16Yasi Salek?

  this song came in and they were like, no, this is like a showcase of Beth's just incredible mastery of her voice, of her ability to communicate despair and longing and pain and what everything else that's wrapped up in this song with just the exact right, like the restraint shown in putting the exact right musical backing to it that didn't overpower that is just like chef's kiss.

• 2:30:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, no tricks, no embellishments, just raw shit from top to bottom.

• 2:31:04Yasi Salek?

  Because I don't want to, I'm going to restrain myself from doing any speculation about Beth Gibbons the person because obviously nobody wants that.

• 2:31:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:31:13Yasi Salek?

  But there is some, there's some interesting talk between Jeff Barrow and Adrian Utley from that KEXP thing. Jeff said it was kind of based on when the little girl gets shot in Assault on Precinct 13 by the Ice Cream Band. And there's a theme that goes with it. So that was his musical inspiration. Incredible. Well, just as if the like lyrical content isn't dark enough. He's like, also, this is inspired by a murder, a child murder scene.

• 2:31:40Speaker 03

  A child murder. Yeah.

• 2:31:42Yasi Salek?

  Adrian said, that's John Carpenter. He was like, super switched on to just emotion and not any musicality, really. All his music was made because he's a director. There's something about that. It's pitched perfectly in terms of emotion. This could also be set of roads, right? It's like what he's saying about John Carpenter. It's kind of sad, but it's not like throw your guts up, which is something we've always tried to avoid. I don't know, sis. This song is a little throw your guts up, in the best way possible. Again, it's Phil Mick, you know, Jeff Barrett goes, you've said it in the past that you don't really want to go to bat to say what a song is about, because they are deeply personal things. She doesn't write in third person. It's all her stuff. So it's really personal. I'm just gonna interject between the quotes to note that like, there's never any he or she on Dummy.

• 2:32:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:32:28Yasi Salek?

  There might be one, but I think by and large, like, almost exclusively, second person.

• 2:32:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32:35Yasi Salek?

  You. Which I find so interesting, and also like, Beth Gibbons, you genius, you know, like, you're like, oh, I won't, I'm not gonna let you, you, oh, you think you know me, bitch? You don't know me.

• 2:32:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right.

• 2:32:47Yasi Salek?

  And then Adrian said, she's always quoting from Braveheart. I'm not gonna say that's what it was, but sometimes it could be a bit surprising that she's massively moved by something. Of course, there is a moving thing, but I always kind of see Braveheart as a little cheesy. It speaks to her.

• 2:33:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's interesting, Braveheart.

• 2:33:06Yasi Salek?

  That she's Beth Gibbons, the world's preeminent Braveheart fan?

• 2:33:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess maybe that week, that the, you know, that the interview is happening, or the piece was written. But it also speaks to someone who can be incredibly moved by perhaps almost anything.

• 2:33:22Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:33:22Speaker 03

  You know, could be something caught out of the corner of your eye, could move you to tears, or some, something deliberate in a film that's meant to poke your emotions, and it's like, it actually does. And it just happened to be Braveheart at that time.

• 2:33:37Yasi Salek?

  This is like me crying from the moment Paddington Bear took the stage in the West End, to the minute that the curtain went up.

• 2:33:45Speaker 03

  Racking sobs.

• 2:33:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:46Speaker 03

  Just, because you're not even crying about him, you're crying about yourself.

• 2:33:50Yasi Salek?

  That's exactly right, babe.

• 2:33:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's like, he didn't, he barely needed, he could have just walked on.

• 2:33:56Yasi Salek?

  He absolutely could have just walked on.

• 2:33:58Speaker 03

  And had to sit down.

• 2:33:59Yasi Salek?

  Done a little wave.

• 2:34:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:00Yasi Salek?

  Tipped his hat, and I would have just-

• 2:34:02Speaker 03

  Imagine if he tipped his hat to you.

• 2:34:04Yasi Salek?

  I would have never have survived. I wouldn't have made it.

• 2:34:08Speaker 03

  You'd have never made it out of the theatre. They've had to carry you out in a stretcher. Broken. She's broke. Broken woman coming through. Yeah.

• 2:34:16Yasi Salek?

  What happened to Yasi? She had to be put in the looney bin after Paddington tipped his hat.

• 2:34:22Speaker 03

  That was it. It was the final straw. Well.

• 2:34:25Yasi Salek?

  She was very repressed.

• 2:34:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:27Yasi Salek?

  Beth Gibbons, I'm obsessed with you. Never tell us anything more about yourself. I don't want to know. This is exactly all I want to know is that you found Braveheart very moving. These are your lyrics and the one or two interviews you did 25 years ago.

• 2:34:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:39Yasi Salek?

  All right. What about Pedestal?

• 2:34:41Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:34:42Yasi Salek?

  Jeff Barrow said, well, when I first came to Bristol, I didn't have any money. I was a musician. I had nothing but a bass guitar. Cause I'd been playing bass with people making money. Somebody offered me a session in that time in 1986 when I came there. The guy asked if I had a fretless bass, so I pulled all the frets out my bass because I needed the money. I basically ruined my bass just to get this session because it was quite well paid and I could pay the rent then. I was just going to think about it afterwards and see if I could put the frets back on. That's the only bass I had. That's the kind of Jaco Pistorius kind of riff with all the harmonics. It's very much that and it was the basis of the track. So basically the bassline of this was created because Jeff Barrow was broke and needed to pull the frets off of his bass one day.

• 2:35:24Yasi Salek?

  And that's what he was stuck with. And then we got Pedestal. A lovely song.

• 2:35:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:35:38Speaker 03

  There's a sort of a thing where there's such a strong aesthetic to this album. It can get to the point where it's a bit like one bleeds into another.

• 2:35:48Yasi Salek?

  To- totally. Yeah.

• 2:35:50Speaker 03

  I mean, sure, if you played me the first two bars, I'd go, oh shit, yeah, Pedestal.

• 2:35:53Yasi Salek?

  For sure.

• 2:35:54Speaker 03

  But also there's just a thing where it's like, it's one of those albums that you consume the whole thing. It's not like I'm just going to drop in and do Wandering Star and be on my way.

• 2:36:03Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:36:04Speaker 03

  You know, it's like, no, I'm, I'm committed. It's like, I'm.

• 2:36:07Yasi Salek?

  It's a.

• 2:36:07Speaker 03

  Forty-eight minutes.

• 2:36:08Yasi Salek?

  It's a piece. But obviously there are some songs that like can stand alone, like Rose.

• 2:36:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, no, they're probably all standalone, but it's they all, you know, it's the, the, the fitting of them all together is the thing that.

• 2:36:23Speaker 03

  Is really attractive about it, you know, that it's it's in it's an entirely sort of closed world in a way.

• 2:36:30Yasi Salek?

  I really like Biscuit.

• 2:36:31Speaker 03

  Biscuit, I think leans into that into my slowcore theory.

• 2:36:36Yasi Salek?

  Hmm.

• 2:36:36Speaker 03

  Cause it's very pitched down. Those drums are very pitched down.

• 2:36:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:40Speaker 03

  And it's got those sort of big, it's got those big chords, those big sort of striking chords, very pitched down drums. It's a very strong piece.

• 2:36:48Yasi Salek?

  I guess like the main difference to me between Portishead and Slowcore, besides the obvious ones we stated, is that Slowcore is not libidinal music. There is no sexuality. I love Galaxy 500, but that is not sexual music.

• 2:37:06Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:37:06Yasi Salek?

  And I'm not even talking about, I know many times people have talked about, you know, this being fucking music and Jeff Barbe being like, I'd love to kill myself.

• 2:37:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:37:14Yasi Salek?

  When you say that, but it's not even that. I'm not talking about like, this is like, you know, Al Green. Like it's more, it's like, really, it's there is a libidinal quality to the music. Like it's, it's.

• 2:37:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:37:26Yasi Salek?

  It's vibian sexual in a way that, you know.

• 2:37:29Speaker 03

  You could argue that it's quite clear that the people who made Dummy have had actual sex with human beings. Where it's not always the case with perhaps some of the other bands that we've mentioned.

• 2:37:42Yasi Salek?

  Listen.

• 2:37:43Speaker 03

  No, I think that's very true. And for me, yeah.

• 2:37:45Yasi Salek?

  Dean Wareham has obviously had tons of sex. He's a gorgeous man.

• 2:37:48Speaker 03

  Dean Wareham's never off the job, but God love him. Absolute legendary swordsman. But he is, but I think the point here is, is absolutely just this sort of, just the sonics of it. Just that because there's this idea at the time, you know, ninety four, ninety five.

• 2:38:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:07Speaker 03

  Sl- slowing everything down, pitching everything down. What does it sound like pitched down? What does it feel like to play much more slowly than music has, music had been at quite a frenetic romp.

• 2:38:20Speaker 03

  And Dean Weyerham knows all about frenetic romp, I'm sure, but they are, you know, but there is this, there is this sort of just a slowing down.

• 2:38:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:28Speaker 03

  You know.

• 2:38:29Yasi Salek?

  They actually talk about that. So Jeff Barrow said, we had the song, we had the beats, we had the parts, but we just didn't have any, we didn't have the thing that was the other instrument on top. There were always records everywhere and I had a box of like sixties pop. It could be anything, just rubbish that I might be able to take a snare drum for, or whatever. I had Johnny Ray, I'll Never Fall in Love Again, and it just worked. I had to slow it down a bit with my hands to make it fit. He said, I really liked the idea of slowing it down and feeling it could be really rough over the top because it's a rough sounding track.

• 2:38:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:39:00Yasi Salek?

  So literally physically slowed down what he was putting on top of the song.

• 2:39:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, because that is such a sort of iconic part of that track as well, that Johnny Ray sample. And I think that was also, again, I mean, they do it in Wandering Star as well, but that was the thing that I don't think that that had been used. I'm trying to sort of think of, think back to that time, but if that felt like a new way to sort of think about vocals and to think about vocal samples and things like that. Which, you know, we definitely touched on this earlier, but you know, Jeff's hatred and of the kind of, take me higher. And this is the, you know, to, this is the absolute opposite of that, isn't it? These sort of examples are going in entirely the opposite direction.

• 2:39:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:49Speaker 03

  And be, you know, having sort of deep, sort of melancholic longing to take you out of that, to take you into a completely different sort of emotional environment, rather than sort of, you know, it's definitely not uplifting.

• 2:40:03Yasi Salek?

  No, no, it's soulful in a different way.

• 2:40:05Speaker 03

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 2:40:06Yasi Salek?

  All right, then we're going to close out with a little ditty you might have heard of called Glory Box.

• 2:40:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:40:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:40:13Yasi Salek?

  Why do you think this song took off in such a crazy way?

• 2:40:17Speaker 03

  I think that it took off because, well, one thing is brilliant song.

• 2:40:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:21Speaker 03

  But also I think that we are back to Beth. And that's so, I'm so tired of playing, playing with this bow and arrow. I think that also that just the, the nature of her voice in this, that the sound of her voice is, I'm so tired, you know, there's, you probably thought she was in the room then, but that was actually me doing it.

• 2:40:41Yasi Salek?

  I didn't, it was really stunning how much you captured.

• 2:40:44Speaker 03

  I just, yeah, see, you've either got it or you haven't. But the sonic feel of her voice is really unique and it really comes through on this track. And I think that's why it became such a sort of, and you know, if you can, if such a thing as a portershead anthem exists, then Rhodes and Glory Box would be the two sort of anthemic moments, I think probably from this record.

• 2:41:10Yasi Salek?

  Totally. I think you could definitely see that in less honest and vulnerable hands, this sort of singing could feel like mimicry.

• 2:41:19Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:41:19Yasi Salek?

  You know what I mean?

• 2:41:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:41:21Yasi Salek?

  Where it doesn't at all, like it doesn't feel, it doesn't strike the wrong tone. It doesn't, it doesn't feel wrong. It feels perfect for the song, but like you just did, there is like a manipulation, there is like a styles, stylization of her voice that is, I don't want to say unnatural, but it is something she's doing, she's manipulating her voice, but it works so perfect within the constructs of this song because it is clearly genuinely serving the emotional need of the song.

• 2:41:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, which I, I think that would be true of all her pieces.

• 2:41:57Yasi Salek?

  I agree.

• 2:41:57Speaker 03

  I mean, there's, you know, there's quite a lot of emotional, uh, quite a lot of sort of vocal manipulation, I think, across the record.

• 2:42:03Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:42:03Speaker 03

  She's not shy of trying out different ways of singing and different ways of presenting her voice.

• 2:42:10Yasi Salek?

  I think that's one of her greatest strengths as a vocalist, that she's able to like embody sort of all these different styles of singing that all still sound very much like herself.

• 2:42:27Yasi Salek?

  I think another reason this song is so powerful is the lyrics are incredible. They're, they're simple, but like so striking. I've been a temptress too long. Give me a reason to love you is like, take me higher bitch? Get, get fucked. Like, give me a reason to love you.

• 2:42:54Speaker 03

  Give me a reason to love you is such a great lyric because it's like, again, we are back to the Wandering Star. But it's like, you could be someone who is absolutely broken by your relationship with someone else. And go, give me a reason to love you in, you know, rather like your relationship with Paddington. Uh, you know, you're crying in Row, I'm gonna say Row 12, you're probably in Row 2, but um.

• 2:43:22Yasi Salek?

  That was me in Row 12 singing quietly under my breath to Paddington there.

• 2:43:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. But also on the other.

• 2:43:29Yasi Salek?

  So disgusting, so terrible and disgusting, Rob, how dare you?

• 2:43:33Speaker 03

  Not in a disgusting way, you know, you want to care for the bear, but.

• 2:43:38Yasi Salek?

  Please look after the bear.

• 2:43:39Speaker 03

  On the other hand, there's also, you could be a super powerful person who's going, looking at someone, looking down at someone going, well, give me a reason to love you.

• 2:43:51Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:43:51Speaker 03

  You know, so what is it about you that should get this prize of me?

• 2:43:55Yasi Salek?

  It, yeah, it does feel like that, right? That that's sort of the implication in the song?

• 2:44:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's really just what a fucking.

• 2:44:04Speaker 03

  What a fucking tune.

• 2:44:05Yasi Salek?

  What a fucking tune, babe, just like way to close out with a goddamn bang on this.

• 2:44:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, right?

• 2:44:11Yasi Salek?

  Arguably perfect album. Okay, let's talk real quick though about the Iks Rap 2 sample that is one of, it's probably the most prominent sample, I think, on all of Dummy, right? Cause there's only a handful, like we talked about.

• 2:44:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:23Yasi Salek?

  It's off Black Moses from 1971. And then just coincidentally.

• 2:44:30Yasi Salek?

  Was also used on a song called Hell Is Around The Corner by Tricky on Maxine K.

• 2:44:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:38Yasi Salek?

  What do you think happened there?

• 2:44:39Speaker 03

  Well, the legend is that someone played it to Tricky in a car and he heard it and he, someone played.

• 2:44:48Yasi Salek?

  The demos of.

• 2:44:49Speaker 03

  The demos, yeah, of the Portishead track of Glory Box to, to Tricky in a car and he went, I love that in that voice.

• 2:44:58Yasi Salek?

  That's his, that's his accent.

• 2:44:59Speaker 03

  That's his accent.

• 2:45:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:45:01Speaker 03

  And that was then, he then went, well, I'd quite like to, you know, spit over that too. Which in a way you go, well, you know what? Fair enough. I mean, it's not, it's like a sample's a sample. It's not like.

• 2:45:18Yasi Salek?

  No, you don't own it.

• 2:45:19Speaker 03

  You don't own it and not only that, but Isaac Hayes is like.

• 2:45:22Yasi Salek?

  Said somewhere that like this was, I couldn't find it. There, you know, there's the website who sampled, which I use quite a bit.

• 2:45:30Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:45:30Yasi Salek?

  But I think because it's only around this time that they start clocking that shit that like. The, all those prior hip hop samplings of this, they're not listed.

• 2:45:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:45:45Yasi Salek?

  But Jeff Barrow said like, this was used quite a bit in hip hop music. So it's not like it was.

• 2:45:51Speaker 03

  He didn't invent it.

• 2:45:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And I didn't ever see anything of anyone, you know, dragging the other to say fuck them for using this. Like, and if that's out there, I didn't, you know, none of my business, but I just thought it was, it's just so interesting that it's like such a prominent sample that came out on two of the biggest albums back to back in a year from the same city.

• 2:46:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. If Isaac and his publisher must have just been like, this is the greatest year of my life since nineteen seventy three, since nineteen seventy three. Yeah.

• 2:46:19Yasi Salek?

  And then maybe less prominently, Alyssia Cara used it on her song here in two thousand and fifteen, but you know, it's still, still out there.

• 2:46:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Twenty years later.

• 2:46:27Yasi Salek?

  She's holding the torch, carrying it along.

• 2:46:29Speaker 03

  Jumping on that beat. But, uh, yeah, I think, you know, fair enough. It's, but you can also see why the band. Then went into the whole process of let's create our own stuff. Well, there's actually two reasons, of course, why they went into let's create our own samples.

• 2:46:43Yasi Salek?

  Hmm.

• 2:46:44Speaker 03

  And one of them being, nobody else can use them.

• 2:46:47Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:46:47Speaker 03

  Or nobody else can use them before us, anyway. But also, secondly, then they're not tied to a loop, you know, so if you can, it can do this for a bit, but then it can also do this.

• 2:46:58Yasi Salek?

  That's right. I think that was the main reason. It's like they wanted to make it do exactly what they wanted it to do.

• 2:47:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47:05Yasi Salek?

  I did think one interesting thing that was noted about this sample on here was that the record that they used, the, the actual Isaac Hayes record that they used to sample off of was like warped.

• 2:47:18Yasi Salek?

  Like it was fucked up and Jeff, I was like, someone had left it out in the sun or something. Um, and I'm sure they loved that. Uh.

• 2:47:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47:24Yasi Salek?

  Cause it.

• 2:47:25Speaker 03

  Just, just that extra, it had some Bristol dust on it.

• 2:47:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:28Speaker 03

  You know?

• 2:47:29Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so we've gone through one of the best albums of all time. So interesting to me. I said I wanted to talk about the legacy a bit. And we've, we've, you know, we've talked about it, touched on it here and there, but like, it does feel like it so quickly went from like, this is the next thing. This is so new. This is the rebirth of cool, quote unquote, to being like coffee shop and hotel lobby music.

• 2:47:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47:55Yasi Salek?

  What happened there?

• 2:47:57Yasi Salek?

  What, what happened?

• 2:47:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is the, that is the curse of the record they made. Because as we've said, it works completely on two different levels.

• 2:48:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:06Speaker 03

  You can completely turn your brain off and there's literally nothing wrong with turning your brain off and just listening to a piece of music and enjoying it. Whatever, you know, whatever, however you want to enjoy a piece of music is entirely up to you. Well, he might, I mean, he might do, he might not, I think he might do now. I mean, maybe, I think at the time, it would be fair to say that they were astonished by how quickly it was subsumed into the mainstream.

• 2:48:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:36Speaker 03

  And how, you know, but, but you know, at the same time, they're controlling everything. They can say yes or no, right, to whatever they want. So some stuff does get through. It ends up in, you know, certain TV shows and it ends up in certain films and stuff like that.

• 2:48:51Yasi Salek?

  The things that it ended up in are not like, like, it's like Rhodes is in Tank Girl. Not a chill out movie.

• 2:48:58Speaker 03

  Not, not, not a good movie.

• 2:49:00Yasi Salek?

  Excuse me. I will fucking stop you right there.

• 2:49:05Speaker 03

  Play Comic.

• 2:49:05Yasi Salek?

  Thirteen year old Yasi would like a word. How, first of all.

• 2:49:09Speaker 03

  Tank Girl, the comic.

• 2:49:10Yasi Salek?

  You came on here to besmirch Jamie Hewlett?

• 2:49:13Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm not besmirching Jamie Hewlett at all.

• 2:49:15Yasi Salek?

  Laurie Petty then?

• 2:49:17Speaker 03

  Well, Laurie, I have no emotional attachment to.

• 2:49:21Yasi Salek?

  Okay, well, if you were a thirteen year old girl and you saw that movie, you would have been fucking blown away and thought it was the coolest thing ever.

• 2:49:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true. That's true. I've missed out on that. That's a crucial part of my development that I missed out on, but it just, it never happened.

• 2:49:33Yasi Salek?

  We, I think we said, there are also two of the songs, I don't know if we've said or not, but they were in a vampire movie called Nadia.

• 2:49:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:49:39Yasi Salek?

  Here's what Jeff Barrow said in 2010, so still, still maybe not super happy about it. He said, "The strangest thing and the most annoying thing is that quote chill out thing that's come out of it. For me, dummy is chill out, yuppie, shagging music. It wasn't supposed to be about that. It wasn't like something to kind of chill to. It was supposed to be quite harsh and alternative and noisy."

• 2:50:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:50:05Yasi Salek?

  And here's what Beth Gibbons said, "You write songs and you hope you're going to communicate with people. Half the reason you write them in the first place is that you're feeling misunderstood and frustrated with life in general. Then it's sort of successful and you think you've communicated with people, but then you start to think you haven't communicated with them at all. You've turned the whole thing into a product, so then you're even more lonely than when you started. But when you think about something like the mannequins in Blade Runner, the only reason they think they're human is the pictures they hold."

• 2:50:34Speaker 03

  God, that woman.

• 2:50:35Yasi Salek?

  I know, her mind.

• 2:50:37Speaker 03

  I mean, look, it's a nice problem to have, right?

• 2:50:41Yasi Salek?

  I mean, it isn't, isn't it, right? They only made three, they only made three albums and they went away. So is it a nice problem to have? I mean, I can imagine this feeling, yes, in, in a financial sense, it's a great problem to have. As an artist, I don't know, you know, like, and just taking in what Beth Gibbons said there, like, I can start to see the seeds of like, I don't want to do this anymore.

• 2:51:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, absolutely. And, you know, and also I would come right out and say that I don't think the, the financial element of it has ever been.

• 2:51:13Yasi Salek?

  Was a consideration.

• 2:51:14Speaker 03

  Was not a consideration for them. They're not, that's not who they are. At the same time, you can't control how people feel about your music.

• 2:51:22Yasi Salek?

  Or your podcast.

• 2:51:23Speaker 03

  To go back to a point earlier, yeah, exactly. But to go back to a point earlier, they controlled everything that came out about them. Right. So earlier on, when we were talking before, I was talking about Pippa, who was running the Go Beat press department.

• 2:51:43Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:51:43Speaker 03

  But she would have been under the guidance of Portishead themselves as to what she said and what she told the press about them and how she presented them to the world. Here are these people from Bristol. They've worked, one of them's worked with Massive Attack, you know, one of them's a, you know, they met in a YTS game, one of them's a jazz guy, you know, it's like, these are things, they, they built this world. They made this record and it connected with people in a way they didn't imagine, nobody imagined it would work. And so you could go, I think it really surprised them and really, it was probably also kind of terrifying.

• 2:52:26Speaker 03

  Like they didn't want this and then everyone's talking about it. And I think it's probably, it probably is a bit odd if literally everybody suddenly loves the thing you do.

• 2:52:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:36Speaker 03

  Right. It's like, you want someone to go, this is too noisy and weird for me, you know, because that's sort of what you want.

• 2:52:42Yasi Salek?

  Also, because it rings false, right? Because you're like.

• 2:52:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, good point.

• 2:52:45Yasi Salek?

  I don't want to be like, I get it, Portishead, because I don't, but like, I mean, I, in our own ways, I think we can all get it. Like when I come across people who love this podcast and God bless, thank God, I love that there's people that love this podcast. It's why I do it. But then you get the sense where you're like, oh my God, like you have a relationship with something that has nothing to do with me. And but it's transposed upon me in a way. And that is also, I can't speak for either any of Portishead, but like, just reading that one quote from Beth Gibbons, I was like, oh, that, that, I feel what you're feeling. It feels like maybe that was like. The chilling part for Beth Givens.

• 2:53:28Yasi Salek?

  Jeff Barrett just seems to be a little bit. And again, I respect this being like, this wasn't for you.

• 2:53:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh, totally.

• 2:53:36Yasi Salek?

  He like, this wasn't for you lot. Like, I don't like these, like, his use of the word yuppie.

• 2:53:41Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 2:53:42Yasi Salek?

  I don't respect you. And why do you like my music? Fuck off. He didn't say that. This is not a quote. I'm just like.

• 2:53:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't want you to like my music.

• 2:53:49Yasi Salek?

  Again, you can't, you can't choose your fans, you know?

• 2:53:52Speaker 03

  No, exactly. You can't choose your fans. You can't choose how people are gonna listen to it or appreciate it. You could wish it was different.

• 2:54:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but it's, I mean, it's the classic Kurt Cobain of it all, right? It's like, I made this music out of my alienation and anger. And now all the people that I was alienated by and angry at are like at my shows cheering me on. And it's like.

• 2:54:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:54:12Yasi Salek?

  Fucking dystopian, you know?

• 2:54:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm this week's entertainment. I'm this, I'm the, I'm the hot, cool guy this week. Well, I mean, you've only got to look at what comes next to go how much they went, well, we're not gonna do that again.

• 2:54:24Yasi Salek?

  It's almost like you're a professional podcaster, the way you fucking slammed that segue, babe.

• 2:54:29Speaker 03

  Love a segue. Absolutely. I think, yeah, love a segue. But when they played on Jules's show, one of the other bands that was on the show that night was in excess. And Michael Hutchins starts turning up to shows and, you know, and they're not, they're not doing that. I was thinking about this. I was thinking.

• 2:54:47Yasi Salek?

  It's very Bono attending the Geese concert 2025 with a plus six.

• 2:54:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Yeah. You know, Michael Hutchins turns up with a sort of bevy of, uh, you know, supermodels to the show at probably Eves or something that holds like a hundred and fifty people. But you're immediately, they're just immediately pushed into this different world that they didn't think they were gonna be in. And I don't think Go Beat thought they were gonna be in.

• 2:55:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I don't think anyone was prepared. Yeah.

• 2:55:13Speaker 03

  No one was prepared. No one think, no one saw this coming.

• 2:55:16Yasi Salek?

  We're gonna take a quick sidebar. I want, because as much as we've said the T H word multiple times, and again, I do humbly and deeply apologize, there's just really no way to discuss this without.

• 2:55:28Speaker 03

  You have to. It's the elephant in the room. We've got to mention it.

• 2:55:31Yasi Salek?

  But it's only just now, June 94, that the word is even.

• 2:55:37Yasi Salek?

  Coined into like, you know, the parlance of music writers by Andy Pemberton in Mix Mag magazine. He's speaking about the DJ Shadow track in slash Flux and he calls it, quote, "a deft fusion of head nodding beats, supa fat," I'm so sorry that I had to say that out loud.

• 2:55:55Speaker 03

  P H A T.

• 2:55:56Yasi Salek?

  That's right.

• 2:55:56Speaker 03

  P H A T.

• 2:55:57Yasi Salek?

  P H A.

• 2:55:58Speaker 03

  Oh, S U P A.

• 2:56:00Yasi Salek?

  Correct.

• 2:56:00Speaker 03

  P H A T.

• 2:56:01Yasi Salek?

  With a hyphen.

• 2:56:01Speaker 03

  Love it.

• 2:56:02Yasi Salek?

  "supa fat bass and an obsessive attention to the kind of otherworldly sounds usually found on acid house records. It comes from the suburbs, not the streets, and with no vocals, you don't need to be an American to make it sound convincing." Already, like, everything about this is not Portishead. Like you said, there are vocals. I'm not really sure there's a supa fat bass in my understanding of what supa fat bass means.

• 2:56:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:56:26Yasi Salek?

  "All you need are crazy beats and fucked up sounds and you've got the most exciting thing to happen to hip hop in a long time."

• 2:56:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:56:33Yasi Salek?

  Which makes sense, speaking of DJ Shadow.

• 2:56:36Speaker 03

  It does. It does. And, you know, and, listen, I've got a white label promo of DJ Shadows in Flux downstairs that I cherish and I love it.

• 2:56:46Yasi Salek?

  Introducing was ma- massive and major to Young Gossi. Okay, I have that whole thing memorized. Like, that was like formative.

• 2:56:55Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Brilliant record. Brilliant, brilliant record. Mo Wax, if anybody could be said to have put out a lot of trip hop records, all of which I own, is Mo Wax, you know, and they are, there's some brilliant stuff, absolutely brilliant stuff in there. And Influx was a fantastic amount. I don't know, does it have a supa fat bass? I don't remember. But it does sort of have sort of vocals in it, sample vocals in it. But it's not the same thing. You know, DJ Shadow is coming from, he literally made hip hop records.

• 2:57:28Yasi Salek?

  He is happening to hip hop, for sure.

• 2:57:30Speaker 03

  He's happening to hip hop. Yeah. He's, he's, you know, he's had records out on Hollywood, he's had records out with rappers, he's done a lot of, you know, he's done-

• 2:57:36Yasi Salek?

  Portishead is like glancing at hip hop while doing something totally different.

• 2:57:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, Portishead is drawing from the glorious work that hip hop- Does, but it's also drawing from a ton of other things.

• 2:57:48Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:57:48Speaker 03

  DJ Shadow is reconfiguring instrumental hip hop. But that's not, those are two completely different types of music.

• 2:57:57Yasi Salek?

  Well, here's an interview in January of nineteen ninety five with Simon Reynolds. The title of the interview, it's in Melody Maker, it's called Trip Hop Don't Stop. Massive Attack and Portishead.

• 2:58:11Speaker 03

  Well done, Melody Maker.

• 2:58:13Yasi Salek?

  And Simon Reynolds says, trip hop or ambient pop? Which do you prefer? Incredibly argumentative.

• 2:58:19Speaker 03

  Incredibly offensive to Jeff.

• 2:58:21Yasi Salek?

  Jeff Barrow says, music.

• 2:58:23Speaker 03

  Don't listen to this bit, Jeff.

• 2:58:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Earmuffs, Jeff Barrow.

• 2:58:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:58:27Yasi Salek?

  Jeff says, music rather than any of them, or neither. To me, trip hop is experimental music that can go on quite long and is almost like house music, but hippie. It's people in their studios doing what they want to, smoking spliffs, drinking red stripe, going off on one for a couple of hours. Ambient music has never particularly appealed to me. Push go on a synthesizer, make some noise, put some delay on it and put a couple of sheep noises on it. I'm not into it. Portishead is songs with an alternative backing track. That's it. Songs we've tried to create with real emotion and not just a bog standard pop beat. Pop means popular to me and I would hate to be put in the same field as PJ and Duncan. Pause. Who is PJ and Duncan?

• 2:59:07Yasi Salek?

  I purposely didn't Google this because I was like, I'm just going to ask Rob to explain it to me.

• 2:59:13Speaker 03

  Okay, so PJ and Duncan were characters from a TV show. I'm a bit too old for it, so I never watched it. But I believe that they are from a TV show called Biker Grove. I believe it was Biker Grove, anyway, and it was set in the northeast of England.

• 2:59:28Yasi Salek?

  Okay, is it like a soap opera teen show?

• 2:59:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, like a sort of kid soap opera. You know, sort of come home from school.

• 2:59:34Yasi Salek?

  Like Dawson's Creek.

• 2:59:35Speaker 03

  Watch it before tea time.

• 2:59:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:59:37Speaker 03

  But PJ and Duncan have gone on to be Ant and Dec. And if you are not familiar with Ant and Dec, Ant and Dec are the absolute titans of British. Tea time, commercial television, like unparalleled years of co-hosting success in all sorts of things. And they haven't made any more records of any kind. But they, you know, regular winners of all sorts of TV awards. They do ma- you know, do proper, if there's a big shiny floor Saturday night TV show to be made, they are getting the first call, you know, they are gods of commercial television.

• 3:00:20Yasi Salek?

  Nothing could have prepared me for what these men look like. Um, okay. Okay, great. And we've cleared something up. Beth also sort of addressed this a little bit in that one hot press interview. She said not, she did not address Ant and Dec, the trip hop and massive attack thing. She said, to tell you the truth, I've never thought of us as being in the same court as massive attack. I know on their second album, they've got Tracy Thorne, but on Blue Lines, Sharon Nelson did most of the vocals and her voice is far more soulful in the traditional sense of the word than mine will ever be. The lads know them, but the only person I've met out of massive is Tricky, and that's because we share the same manager. The notion of a Bristol scene makes wonderful copy for you guys, but I'm afraid we don't go down the pub together in a big gang or drop around each other's houses for cups of tea.

• 3:01:04Speaker 03

  Yes, she nails it there, doesn't she? It's like they're, they're different people living in different worlds. They do appreciate what each other's doing, but they're not, it's not like, they're not the Beatles in Hard Day's Night or, you know, knocking through walls.

• 3:01:18Yasi Salek?

  Well, they're, yeah, or maybe a better, they're not the good mixer, you know, where it's like.

• 3:01:22Speaker 03

  They're not the good mixer. Yeah, exactly.

• 3:01:24Yasi Salek?

  Like that scene was very much like, we all hang out and like party and go to clubs and date each other and whatever. And like,

• 3:01:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:01:30Yasi Salek?

  They're just really living non-parallel lives.

• 3:01:34Speaker 03

  They're not, they're not slow dive and lush at Smashed, you know, nineteen ninety one. No, they're not.

• 3:01:41Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I wanna talk a little bit more about, I'm just gonna pull some quotes from the Beth Gibbons, another Beth Gibbons interview.

• 3:01:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:01:49Yasi Salek?

  So there's two, I think, that are from this time.

• 3:01:52Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:01:53Yasi Salek?

  This one's from The Independent. The Independent is the one where Jeff Barrow was sick. Hot press, I don't know how it got through the cracks, but Jeff was sick for The Independent and they were like, "Okay, well, she's just gonna do it."

• 3:02:05Speaker 03

  Which is also a great, a great pointer of the time where they couldn't just, they weren't quite ready to just go, "Well, we're not doing it then."

• 3:02:12Yasi Salek?

  She won't do it, yeah.

• 3:02:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, you've gotta do it. The, the, having press still meant something.

• 3:02:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And it was very early, right? It's, you know, December 94, so.

• 3:02:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:02:21Yasi Salek?

  This is about them playing live, because we haven't really talked about that, and we're, I think it's a good jumping off point. This music wasn't constructed to perform live, and so they kind of had to like, uh, surmount that to do it. So, this is the quote from the writer, "For a band whose music wasn't, as both Jeff and now Beth have made clear, designed for live, Portishead seemed to make a big impression on everyone who sees them. Does she enjoy singing for a crowd?" And Beth says, "I get very nervous, but I like the idea that people who are listening to us can see us." She doesn't mind admitting that nerves have made two vital contributions to her stage persona, chain smoking and hanging on to the mic stand as if the floor was being pulled away. She looks so cool in those videos.

• 3:03:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, she does.

• 3:03:03Yasi Salek?

  She said, "We're not there to be a dominating force. I don't like it when bands go, 'Look at us, enjoy it.' You might not wanna enjoy it. You might be feeling ill."

• 3:03:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's such a great insight into Beth's, where thinking, "You might be ill, like I am, whenever I go to the band."

• 3:03:19Yasi Salek?

  Whenever I go onstage.

• 3:03:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, whenever I go out.

• 3:03:22Yasi Salek?

  This was my favorite quote, though, from this Independent interview. He says, "Beth Gibbons' current attitude, quote, 'Music is a spiritual thing and it should be treated that way,' end quote, seems at odds with such a pessimistic view." No, obviously. It's obviously that, and it's, that's why her music, or their music, but also her contribution to the music, is so resonant and transcendent. It's that Brian Wilson quote, which I always butcher, but when, when music resonates with you, that's you feeling spirituality, you know?

• 3:03:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. Also, I think it's deeply misguided to look at what they're doing and call it pessimistic.

• 3:04:02Yasi Salek?

  I agree.

• 3:04:02Speaker 03

  You know? It's like, there's nothing pessimistic about, I mean, we did, you know.

• 3:04:07Yasi Salek?

  We did the depression talk earlier.

• 3:04:08Speaker 03

  We had a bite on this before, but it's like, that's just not how music and creativity works. You know, to say it's pessimistic is just such a, and I think this is a really good piece, and I think Ben Thompson's a good writer, and there's another piece in this, which I think, from the same interview, when he says, "If Portishead have a problem at the moment, it's an excess of mystique. This is partly their own fault for doing everything so stylishly. But it would be a shame if their drama and complexity got washed away in a tidal wave of noir hyperbole, or smoky rooms and small hours drinking." Which is absolutely true, you know, he nails it. There's like, there's more to this than, don't just look at it on this one level, and then to go pessimistic views, like, you know,

• 3:04:50Speaker 03

  he nails it and then drops the next nail on the floor and treads on it.

• 3:04:54Yasi Salek?

  Right, well, listen, nobody's perfect.

• 3:04:56Speaker 03

  Nobody's perfect. God almighty, ain't that true? That's true.

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• 3:06:04Yasi Salek?

  So now it's in 1995, Portishead is hot and reluctant. Jeff says we might-

• 3:06:11Speaker 03

  Hot and reluctant.

• 3:06:12Yasi Salek?

  Hot and reluctant.

• 3:06:13Speaker 03

  That's a new podcast coming.

• 3:06:17Yasi Salek?

  The Aussie Solid Story again, just kidding. Jeff Farah says, "We might even destroy our own careers because of the things we don't want to do, but I'd prefer that than be a prat for the rest of my life. We'll carry on making music whether it's popular or not. The album is the whole experience. It doesn't require any backup of image."

• 3:06:34Yasi Salek?

  They tour North America-

• 3:06:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:06:38Yasi Salek?

  -as part of this. And again, like, The Sour Times is performing well on alternative rock radio. Like, they are making definitely an impact.

• 3:06:45Speaker 03

  They're up there with Oasis. That's who they're being, yeah.

• 3:06:48Yasi Salek?

  This is crazy. They're outperforming Oasis.

• 3:06:51Speaker 03

  Outperforming, yeah.

• 3:06:51Yasi Salek?

  By, in July of 95, Vox said that Portishead's dummy had, this is actually only in Canada, but I assume that it probably mapped on to America, had racked up sales of 50,000, and Oasis had hit 25,000. They were like doubly outperforming. Again, I don't want to, maybe that's wrong. Maybe Canada's not map on to America, but-

• 3:07:15Speaker 03

  But as a kind of, as a sign of the way things are going.

• 3:07:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:18Speaker 03

  But, because in that same piece, Craig McLean wrote that piece for Vox.

• 3:07:21Yasi Salek?

  Right, right.

• 3:07:22Speaker 03

  And it's the first mention of the internet. In this story, it says, "The internet, the internet, where fans have set up a Portishead notice board on the Acid Jazz site has been buzzing with reviews of earlier shows." And you go-

• 3:07:37Yasi Salek?

  The internet.

• 3:07:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, the internet. Well, it's 1995.

• 3:07:40Yasi Salek?

  No, I know.

• 3:07:41Speaker 03

  Plenty of people had never seen the internet, including me, I think, probably, in 1995.

• 3:07:45Yasi Salek?

  We had a little, we had a little dial-up at the school. Squawk.

• 3:07:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:07:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:49Speaker 03

  But also interesting that it was on, Acid Jazz has their own site. Because, you know, again, that's like, that's another part of this because that's, you know, at the time, you had Acid Jazz, you also had Talking Loud, sort of, and Dorado, just to name three of labels who were consistently putting out bands who were not like Portishead and not like DJ Shadow, but adjacent to all of them. And there was, there was this, you know, scene that had come out of sort of Rare Groove and sort of Record Collectors and Jazz Funk, and, you know, were bands trying to recreate these sounds from the sort of late 60s and early 70s, sort of jazz and funk records.

• 3:08:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:27Speaker 03

  That's definitely not what Portishead doing. But it's interesting that that's where they're- Where their music is getting sort of shared and talked about is on fans of this. Cause all these things are adjacent, you know, they you can you can tap into all sorts of these things.

• 3:08:42Yasi Salek?

  Well, anyways, they're touring. Dave McDonald talks about how they had to like rejigger the PAs so that because all of the American shows, classic, people were just at the bar talking and she's like not a loud singer. And they would make her even more like shy. So they had to like have this like insane PA setup so that her vocals were blasting. Meanwhile, Jeff hated touring, absolutely hated it, despised it. He said, I just hate leaving everything, leaving my girlfriend, my flat, my cat, security, basically. And actually being somewhere I don't want to be. I'm not interested in seeing the rest of the world, to be quite honest. I really don't want to see the rest of the world. I'm quite happy where I am. Incredible take from Jeff Barrow. Early anti-globalist, anti-travel, anti-tourism.

• 3:09:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:09:28Yasi Salek?

  He said, the thing is, I like everything controllable. Everything that we put out is controlled. And when you're playing live, there isn't that feeling. It's totally uncontrollable. And that makes that makes a lot of sense.

• 3:09:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, that makes total sense.

• 3:09:40Yasi Salek?

  Were you at the Glastonbury where they performed after?

• 3:09:43Speaker 03

  No, you know what? I've ne- I never saw them. I've been thinking about this recently and I think I can't believe I never saw them live. But um, yeah, no, I wasn't.

• 3:09:52Yasi Salek?

  Interesting. Well, let's talk about it a little bit. It's actually very interesting to me because I, the Lemonheads episode talked at length about the shambolic and insane Lemonheads performance in which basically what happened was they're in the acoustic tent, which is not, I don't even think where the Lemonheads were meant to play. Lemonhead, Evan Dando was so late that they completely missed their normal slot. And then somehow we're just like got on stage before Portishead. Where he's like, Dando was like totally hammered and he's like booed off the stage.

• 3:10:32Yasi Salek?

  By an angry mob who's like waiting to see Portishead. And I believe he called them a bunch of limey hippies. And then the Portishead set was pushed back a little. Basically, it's just chaos. It's like they're first class in Barry and like they're dealing with just like Evan Dan, Hurricane Evan Dando. Um, they're also playing up against Pulp, which this was like Pulp's very legendary massive pyramid stage performance.

• 3:10:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:10:57Yasi Salek?

  However, this by all accounts was just like an absolutely legendary and transcendent set like the acoustic tent was packed to the fucking gills. I'll read what Paul Trinka said in Mojo about it. The band took the stage to a sudden hush, silhouetted against a backdrop that simulated twinkling stars against a midnight sky. Within seconds, the effects box that processed their drum sound gave up the ghost, as did their complex digital mixing setup. Then Beth started singing and a soft sigh rippled through the packed audience. As her voice modulated into the Billie Holiday croak of Glory Box's second verse. Everyone spontaneously hollered like a gospel congregation, gleefully boarding the emotional roller coaster.

• 3:11:37Yasi Salek?

  With half their gear down, the band were forced to improvise, with Barrow juggling his vinyl, sometimes using it as a mere percussive noise source. In the packed tent, with the band only occasionally visible, it was impossible to tell from where some of the noises were being conjured. The supposedly shy, psychically frail Beth Givens was a masterful hypnotic presence, spearheading the band's brutal emotional assault, which culminated in a crazed extended attack on Glory Box for the encore.

• 3:12:05Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 3:12:06Yasi Salek?

  Oh.

• 3:12:07Speaker 03

  Right?

• 3:12:08Yasi Salek?

  Credit to Paul Trinka, by the way, the way you described that, just like I felt like I was there and it was really sounds like.

• 3:12:13Speaker 03

  Shivers.

• 3:12:13Yasi Salek?

  Shivers, yeah.

• 3:12:15Speaker 03

  Have you watched that Paris gig that's on YouTube?

• 3:12:18Yasi Salek?

  It's around this time.

• 3:12:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. April nineteen ninety five.

• 3:12:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:22Speaker 03

  It is very much like, what, how are we going to get them out on the road? And it's like double bass, drums, Jeff.

• 3:12:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:31Speaker 03

  And what's fantastic about it is they sort of sound like a different band, but also they don't say a single word between any of the songs.

• 3:12:41Yasi Salek?

  No banter.

• 3:12:41Speaker 03

  Apart from right at the end, like Beth will be like, thanks, or something like that. And they go, but people want it so much. They want to be in that room. You can feel the sort of heat and the fervor of people who just want to be there and want already, this is only March nineteen ninety, this is April nineteen ninety five, right? And they're already absolutely nuts for this thing and like screaming. It's crazy, really.

• 3:13:07Yasi Salek?

  It's crazy. I didn't get to see them during that time. I would have been a little young anyways, but I did get to see them in twenty ten and it was

• 3:13:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:13:14Yasi Salek?

  truly incredible. And the same kind of thing, it was at the shrine, like just packed, like

• 3:13:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:13:20Yasi Salek?

  phenomenal. Beth Gibbons would, uh, doesn't use lighting. So she's just in the shadows, but the rest of the band was lit. It was really interesting.

• 3:13:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:13:29Yasi Salek?

  They're not maybe massively enjoying this period of time. Jeff Barrow said, the thing I hate at the moment, and this is like in real time in ninety five, is that I don't know where I stand. I don't know where Portishead stand and whether we've turned into an ugly money making monster without us knowing it. Hopefully it hasn't because some people say that because we've sold records. And I don't like it because for me, making the next record is more important than anything. Personally, I make records to drop the tunes that people are going to be into, people who are similarly minded to myself. And when it goes across the world and you've got little kids asking for your autograph, what's it turned into?

• 3:14:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, uh, there's a sort of element of heartbreak, isn't there? When it's like, he's done this thing and people love it, but lots of the long, wrong people love it. And now he's got to go out and sell it.

• 3:14:15Yasi Salek?

  And sign autographs.

• 3:14:16Speaker 03

  And, and sign autographs and travel all the time and stay in probably not that great hotels.

• 3:14:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, be in a van.

• 3:14:24Speaker 03

  The sort of, and also trying to, trying to make this, you know, they're not, they didn't come up playing, you know, three hundred shows a year and then it broke. And it's like, well, we can just come and do, it's like they didn't play any shows. They weren't meant to play shows.

• 3:14:36Yasi Salek?

  Right. This was, this was a project, a studio project.

• 3:14:40Speaker 03

  Absolutely a hundred percent a studio project. And then it's like, no, you've now got to go out and, and flog this record that you sort of, not that you don't like, but you know, I've got to go and flog this record to people. And also everybody.

• 3:14:53Speaker 03

  You're not gonna win, you're not even gonna get the joy of sort of turning an audience around, like they've already been turned around.

• 3:14:59Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:15:00Speaker 03

  Like they're already salivating.

• 3:15:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:02Speaker 03

  At the idea of you being there.

• 3:15:04Yasi Salek?

  Except in America where they're chatting at the bar.

• 3:15:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, but they're, yeah, but they're still probably into it. They're just like booze, you know?

• 3:15:10Yasi Salek?

  In that same interview that I just read the quote, the interviewer asked, what five words would you pick to describe Portishead? Toss, wank, bollocks, shandy, lightweight. And she goes, not the.

• 3:15:22Speaker 03

  Classic Jeff.

• 3:15:22Yasi Salek?

  She's like, the band, not you. And he goes, um, I don't know, paranoid, wary at the moment. And she goes, wary? And he goes, weary? Which I thought was really funny. It's like trying to play, did I say the right word? And she goes, wary as in unsure and distrustful. And he goes, yeah, wary of people. Um, what would be held back? And she goes, constrained. And he says, yeah, constrained. And worried, most probably worried.

• 3:15:48Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:15:48Yasi Salek?

  And that's sort of the sentiment that they're like stewing in when they finish touring. And over the next period where they're making the next album, I would say.

• 3:15:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Jeff talking to Melody Maker in January nineteen ninety five, and he says, it's just that they don't tell you about all the bullshit, being mobbed on the street.

• 3:16:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:08Speaker 03

  That's just nonsense. Appearing on Top of the Pops, turning up at the right parties, doing the right lines of white material. We might even destroy our own careers because of the things we don't want to do.

• 3:16:17Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:16:18Speaker 03

  But I'd prefer that than to be a prat for the rest of my life.

• 3:16:21Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. Beautiful, gorgeous, beautiful. Well, let's talk about the second Portishead album.

• 3:16:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:16:28Yasi Salek?

  Self titled. I say this every time, but I think it's worth noting, like, the difference between nineteen ninety five and nineteen ninety seven is pretty astronomical.

• 3:16:36Speaker 03

  It is huge.

• 3:16:37Yasi Salek?

  Like, it's, it's hard to overstate how much changed. I mean, we, we talk about it a lot in the Britpop episodes, but like Britpop died a very famous and croaking death with Be Here Now and the Spice Girls and Noel Gallagher wearing his fuck ass blazer to Ten Downing and the whole thing.

• 3:16:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:16:52Yasi Salek?

  Um, but yeah, I mean, the top selling albums of ninety seven are like Spice, Spice Girls, Jewel, Pieces of You, Puff Daddy, Hanson, um, Notorious B I G, Celine Dion, the soundtrack to Space Jam. But then, within the world of Portishead or alternative music, you know, Bjork's Homogenic comes out in ninety seven, probably really importantly, OK Computer by Radiohead comes out in ninety seven.

• 3:17:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:17:20Yasi Salek?

  The Verve's Urban Hymns.

• 3:17:21Speaker 03

  Urban Hymns, yeah.

• 3:17:22Yasi Salek?

  Chemical Brothers, Dig Your Own Hole. So obviously, there's an alternative music thing still happening that's, I'm not saying that, but it's just like, wouldn't you agree, like, kind of a vastly different musical landscape?

• 3:17:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. I, I, I think that it's, if you look at the, across the kind of the spread of the nineties.

• 3:17:41Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:17:42Speaker 03

  Every year is, is a very, very different prospect from the year before it. But for me, it sort of runs aground in like nineteen ninety seven, like the wheel sort of come off in like ninety six, ninety seven. And I think, you know, you could definitely see that, like, ninety four, ninety five were like the last year of sort of really good hip hop albums. And then it sort of went to, largely went downhill after that. That's what, that's what I like to call a sweeping statement. But I think that's.

• 3:18:10Yasi Salek?

  Broad.

• 3:18:10Speaker 03

  You know, if you, it's fairly broad. So this album comes out, you know, end of September nineteen ninety seven. And if you look at the chart, the UK chart that it lands in, so it goes in behind Verve, it goes in number two, it went in number two, just behind the Verve.

• 3:18:24Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:18:25Speaker 03

  But the, the UK album chart, there's six UK bands in that album chart. Three UK solo artists and good old Bob Dylan hanging in there at number ten, right? Young Bob Dylan, probably was only in his, what, he would have been mid fifties at the time, fairly, you know.

• 3:18:44Yasi Salek?

  Young buck, baby.

• 3:18:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the young, just a young buck, really. And then I looked, I looked at what the UK album chart was this week. And I looked, and in the top one hundred of the UK chart, there's not a single British band whose new album is in the, is in the chart, right? You know, there's, there's some old albums. There's sort of Fontaine D C, not an English band, Irish band.

• 3:19:07Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:19:08Speaker 03

  But that's what basically, and that's at like, you know, ninety six or something. The top UK band in the UK chart at the time, at, at the moment is Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, which is slightly upsetting as it's forty nine years old. And then. So it's a very different world.

• 3:19:24Yasi Salek?

  It is a good album.

• 3:19:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's a good album, but Jesus Christ, it came out in nineteen seventy seven, you know, so it's like, get over it, guys. But, um, yeah, nineteen ninety seven is a vastly different world from nineteen ninety five. And, um, and I think particularly hip hop has changed radically. And you mentioned his name, um, Puff Daddy, you know, and if you look at some of the sort of big, uh, big sort of hip hop albums. And also the other one that nobody talks about anymore, um, unlike Puffy sadly, is like Master P, who was sort of nailing their sort of hip hop track. And all that stuff's just sort of like, nobody listens, it's died. It, I think there's a sort of, that sort of world has just disappeared. That sort of blingy hip hop thing.

• 3:20:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it did change.

• 3:20:10Speaker 03

  Very much like it was, yeah, it just, it's, I mean, it became something else, but you know, all this sort of like mystical and, uh, and Master P and, um, you know.

• 3:20:19Yasi Salek?

  Shake your ass.

• 3:20:20Speaker 03

  And, you know, well, it's just like.

• 3:20:22Yasi Salek?

  Mason's the one that'll pay for your phone, babe. Mason's the one that'll take you home. It's so cra- I have like, like, it's just like pressing a button in my mind. I can't not come up with, that's actually one of my favorites. Mason's the one that'll pay for your phone.

• 3:20:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:20:38Yasi Salek?

  Be the one that'll take you home, even though, is that from one twelve? What a fucking song. Only you one twelve remix. Let's fucking go. That song goes so crazy. That song came out when I was in middle school, still cherish it with all of my heart and soul.

• 3:20:51Speaker 03

  Of course, of course.

• 3:20:53Yasi Salek?

  I mean, I think the law, the point we're making in a very long winded way is what we think of of the nineties is actually only like four years. And the rest of it is something totally different. Like the very early nineties is all Garth Brooks and Life is a Highway. It's the middle chunk and then you get to ninety seven and it becomes sort of like the beginnings of like new metal and Spice Girls and Britney Spears and, and boy bands and stuff.

• 3:21:15Speaker 03

  And all of that, yeah. And it's, yeah.

• 3:21:17Yasi Salek?

  And pop rap or whatever. I don't know how, what you would describe that as, but.

• 3:21:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So new metal and pop rap and that sort of comes to take over.

• 3:21:25Yasi Salek?

  And Robbie Williams, if you're in, in the UK.

• 3:21:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And this world that had been, that, that put its head to sort of. Come out of, not that it's, you know, it's certainly not like swept away, it's still, still there, it's still going on. It feels like a sort of more rapacious world has come in.

• 3:21:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:43Speaker 03

  At this point, you know, and that's reflected in the sort of the puffies and the Britneys and the, these sort of superstar acts come in and they, they changed the landscape a lot.

• 3:21:53Yasi Salek?

  Well, Portishead, Portishead, September twenty ninth nineteen ninety seven comes into this world. This was a difficult album to make. I don't think I would be overstating to say that. Jeff said, people used to say to me, God, it must be really hard coming up with a follow up to Dummy. The main point is, I don't know why Dummy was so successful, although I know Beth's vocal is eighty, ninety or a hundred percent of it. I just made that record the way I thought it should be. I don't know how to make something that's going to be a success. And even though it's been three years since Dummy, we've pretty much worked every week in the studio trying to get stuff together. I had a holiday in mid ninety five and I've been in there ever since. Even through all this time when nothing worked, a year or whatever, I was still going to the studio every day and working and it was hell.

• 3:22:36Yasi Salek?

  Okay, people have to lay tarmac for a living or whatever, but for me personally and mentally, it was hell. It's not working. There's like a year of just like banging their heads against the wall is what it sounds like.

• 3:22:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Unlike a lot of bands, it's, we can't make another one like that one.

• 3:22:52Yasi Salek?

  Right. We don't wanna, we don't wanna retread.

• 3:22:55Speaker 03

  We don't wanna retread, you know, and we would also quite like to maybe throw off a lot of people that have, that are currently clinging to our spaceship.

• 3:23:03Yasi Salek?

  We don't wanna give them another like lounge, lounge music for the hotel lobby part two or whatever.

• 3:23:09Speaker 03

  Ain't no lounge.

• 3:23:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:10Speaker 03

  No lounge coming. I mean, there sort of is, but you know.

• 3:23:13Yasi Salek?

  It's, I do think that in a subtle way, this album is even more prickly and challenging than Dummy for sure.

• 3:23:22Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:23:23Yasi Salek?

  In fact, I think that they got the balance maybe exactly right to where they wanted it because it wasn't as popular.

• 3:23:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:23:30Yasi Salek?

  It wasn't as gen pop approved.

• 3:23:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:23:34Yasi Salek?

  Adrian said, "We were hearing a lot of these kinds of sounds that we had made and we needed to move on," to your point. "But there's obvious reference points that we have as a band, an identity, a sound, and we couldn't totally change everything just for the sake of not doing what we did last time. It was intensely difficult at times. We decided to use all our own samples and that was difficult too, because we actually did get bored of the sounds we were making. And it's really unwieldy, the way we make records, like walking with one Wellington boot full of concrete a lot of the time." This, I thought, was really funny. And then Jeff Barrow said, "I never realized that I was personally putting other people through hell too. My head just bombed right out, completely and totally. I overanalyzed everything. Nothing was good enough for the second record. I couldn't face sitting at my computer and the sampler.

• 3:24:16Yasi Salek?

  The only thing I enjoyed was when Aid turned up his guitar and I got on the drums and basically we just smashed the hell out of everything."

• 3:24:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, the pressure, obviously.

• 3:24:25Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. Everyone said, "You made the world's best and most perfect record." And now they're like, "Okay, now we'll make another one."

• 3:24:31Speaker 03

  You know, you've built up your whole life to make this your one thing. And then, within like a year, six months, two years, whatever, you've got to find that again to release another record. Yeah, now make another one. And you don't want to use any of those sounds, but those sounds are the things that you love. You know, and that's where, you know, the whole sort of arguments about, "Should we use a theremin or not?"

• 3:24:54Yasi Salek?

  Right. There is a whole, there's a whole talk about back and forth about, "Should we use a theremin?"

• 3:25:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you go, well, and obviously they come to the sensible conclusion, which is, "Yes, of course you should, because we love the sound of it and why should, why should we?"

• 3:25:08Yasi Salek?

  Right. And you can make it sound different, which I think they did.

• 3:25:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:25:11Yasi Salek?

  I enjoyed that at the very end of this, what basically happened was Jeff Barrow said that Adrian kind of saved the day. He said, "I basically needed a kicking up the ass and to be told, 'We can make a Portishead record and we can enjoy this.'" And that's what Adrian did.

• 3:25:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can make a Portishead record, just not, you know, just don't make another dummy.

• 3:25:29Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. Like, let's stop overthinking this.

• 3:25:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:25:32Yasi Salek?

  So he used no samples at all on this record, except for on Only You, they have the Far Side sample, and then there's another sample on there as well.

• 3:25:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's, uh, In the Alleyways, Ken Thorne, 1968. That is from the Inspector Clouseau soundtrack.

• 3:25:48Yasi Salek?

  The Pink Panther.

• 3:25:49Speaker 03

  Pink Panther, yeah, but interestingly, it's the, um, it's Alan Arkin as Inspector Clouseau, not Peter Sellers, not Blake Edwards directing it, and not Henry Mancini doing the music. This was like the total flop of the.

• 3:26:02Yasi Salek?

  Maybe that's why they use it, because they're like, no one will remember this one.

• 3:26:05Speaker 03

  Exactly. No one remembers, get away with it. Yeah.

• 3:26:07Yasi Salek?

  There's just a lot of quotes here about how it was torturous and they analyzed everything. And I'm not gonna like, I guess if I read them all, it's gonna re-invoke the feeling of probably what they experienced making the album, so we don't have to do that. I did notice that Jeff Barrett talked a lot about like, that they're trying to create an atmosphere and that like, it's a lot about the sound between the hi-hat and the snare that you can't hear. I do feel like this album, I don't know how to say it, but it is more of like, an atmosphere, not a more palpable atmosphere, it's just more of like a, like

• 3:26:47Yasi Salek?

  a walking into a cloud than maybe where Dummy feels like, I can see and feel all the contours of Dummy, or this feels a little bit nebulous to me.

• 3:26:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're walking into a cold cloud, I think, yeah, for sure. Dummy feels like all sort of different rooms in a house with some sort of lowlights and colors and reds and blues and blacks.

• 3:27:12Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:27:13Speaker 03

  And this feels much more like you're in a sort of cold compressed air of a spaceship somewhere and you just, you don't know where it's going. It's very recognizably them. I mean, that's, that's the thing, you know, it's a bit like the, going back to the first album, just very briefly, just one of those remixes, that Airbus remix, which is just their mates from a band at school, which is just wonderful that Jeff gave them that thing. But it's like, they, he didn't play them the track, he gave them Beth's vocal and then they, you know, they did the, the version of it. But it still just sounds like a Portishead record because it's Beth singing. And this, you know, however much they wanted to try and change and tried to try and change and did change. It's unmistakably Portishead.

• 3:27:58Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 3:27:58Speaker 03

  You know, for right from the rip, you know, I mean, all mine is like, I mean, all of them, you know.

• 3:28:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:03Speaker 03

  They're all, you know, this is, you can't, they can't stop themselves being themselves, you know, however much they might try and mess with the, mess with the program.

• 3:28:12Yasi Salek?

  I think all mine is probably the most pop moment on the album in my, in my estimation.

• 3:28:27Yasi Salek?

  I do feel like, like I said earlier, and I just want to say it again, it is more challenging, this record.

• 3:28:32Speaker 03

  Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 3:28:34Yasi Salek?

  I've noticed it even vocally, like, it feels like everyone contributed to like, let's fuck this up a little bit even more, because even Beth Gibbons vocals are like, shrill is not the right word, but do you know what I'm saying? It's almost, they're like, they are less pretty.

• 3:28:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:28:48Yasi Salek?

  And it feels like that was very intentional.

• 3:28:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, they can be not, I mean, abrasive feels a bit strong, maybe.

• 3:28:55Yasi Salek?

  I know what you mean, though.

• 3:28:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're deliberately, not pretty, as you say, they did, they deliberately challenging and in your face in a way that the other one was in your ear and this one's in your face.

• 3:29:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's, it's almost like walking through like a rose bush, right? You're like, oh my God, it's so beautiful, roses smell so good, ouch, ouch, thorn, thorn.

• 3:29:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's also incredibly painful. Yeah.

• 3:29:20Yasi Salek?

  But I, I think this album's kind of underrated. I mean, again, it charted well, but I think that was the classic thing of like, it's charting on the back of Dummy. It's not charting on the back of its own, its own thing, but you know, people don't talk about this album much.

• 3:29:34Speaker 03

  No, and I mean, I can remember at the time, you'd sort of that, I mean, that, you know, this is a great curse for bands as well, but it's, you know, nineteen ninety seven, you're listening to something totally different, and that's not to say this isn't a great record, but also this. Classic kind of because the music press was still such a big thing at the time. But it's like when you're when you're hot and new, you're everywhere. But if you're coming back on album two, it's very hard, especially if you don't want to.

• 3:30:02Yasi Salek?

  Especially if you're not playing the game.

• 3:30:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're not playing the game, right? You're yeah, you're very deliberately not playing the game. So but also, I think within the band themselves, they want to go somewhere else. They want to change what they're doing and change who they are, you know? I hadn't listened to it that much. I've got to be honest at the time, but I've listened to it a lot recently, obviously. And I just think it's a fantastic record. I mean, they haven't made any bad records, but this is a. I listen to this more than I would listen to this more than Dummy for my own personal enjoyment. Maybe just because it just has that element more of a sort of freshness for me.

• 3:30:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I get what you're saying like it is like I can sing every word to Dummy. But maybe not so much on this one, you know?

• 3:30:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:30:44Yasi Salek?

  Man, Half Day Closing is such a cool and weird song.

• 3:30:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:30:50Yasi Salek?

  Dave McDonald, because Dave McDonald produced this album, he remembered, he said, right at the end, Beth starts singing a high note and it goes right off the scale. It was the most amazing sound I've ever heard. It went past distortion to somewhere else I haven't got a name for.

• 3:31:11Speaker 03

  You know, Morning Air, which is beautiful. I love that kind of morning M O U R and morning M O R N.

• 3:31:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:17Speaker 03

  Morning and Over, they've been playing live for like two, three years by this point. There's a real sense of this is a band that have, you know, they've really fucking been through it.

• 3:31:28Yasi Salek?

  Right. They've been through the wringer for sure.

• 3:31:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, they've really been through the wringer. I think the fact that they actually managed to make it is a great testament to them as, you know, the human beings. Because it was not an easy task to come back and do another one after that.

• 3:31:44Yasi Salek?

  I wouldn't put anything past Jeff Barrow's will, you know?

• 3:31:48Speaker 03

  No, I wouldn't.

• 3:31:49Yasi Salek?

  I have great faith in the will and and steely reserve of Jeff Barrow to accomplish what he is setting out to accomplish, you know?

• 3:31:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

• 3:31:59Yasi Salek?

  And then again, like, it's something that he said when I was chatting with him, but also that like, I think is true of all great bands is that like, it is an alchemy of three people bringing.

• 3:32:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:32:11Yasi Salek?

  And without the alchemy, like, there is this, there is the engine, that's Jeff Barrow, but like, even what I said above about Adrian having to come and just kick him in the ass and be like, okay, let's fucking get on with it, like, let's stop overthinking it, and Beth bringing her, like, special thing to the table, like, it wouldn't be what it is, you know?

• 3:32:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:32:27Yasi Salek?

  One person couldn't have just done this.

• 3:32:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:32:30Yasi Salek?

  I love over, I think this is my favorite one on here.

• 3:32:34Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:32:34Yasi Salek?

  I'm sorry to say the word filmic, even though that probably applies to most of Porter's head, but like, this one, I just also love the way she says uncertain tay.

• 3:32:42Speaker 03

  Uncertain tay.

• 3:32:43Yasi Salek?

  Tay.

• 3:32:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love that.

• 3:32:52Speaker 03

  That's like a throwback to what Adrian was saying earlier, isn't it, with the way she will pronounce certain words, but then you, because every time I hear that, fantasay, uncertain tay, because that's not an accent thing.

• 3:33:04Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 3:33:04Speaker 03

  That's not like, you know, it's not like, oh, well, there you go with the Devonshire accent again, that's like, a thing, that's like, one of her things.

• 3:33:11Yasi Salek?

  That's like her version of putting along

• 3:33:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:33:15Yasi Salek?

  In the exact right place, you know, it's the exact right sound to add to the song.

• 3:33:21Speaker 03

  But it's a sort of also like a genius way of, of turning the end of a word into like a hook.

• 3:33:28Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:33:28Speaker 03

  You remember it.

• 3:33:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:30Speaker 03

  You go, uncertain tay, our tay, you know, it's like, fantasay, it's just like,

• 3:33:35Yasi Salek?

  You sounded just like it.

• 3:33:36Speaker 03

  Where does that even come from? Yeah.

• 3:33:38Yasi Salek?

  Humming is the song that we were alluding to earlier that has the theremin on it.

• 3:33:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:33:42Yasi Salek?

  Adrian said there was a moment where we questioned if we could use that sound, the theremin, and the decision was ultimately up to Jeff, if he'd said, no, we can't, we would have dropped it, then we thought, so we shouldn't use it because on the first album? Does that mean we shouldn't have Beth singing because she was singing on the first album?

• 3:33:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:33:57Yasi Salek?

  Or guitar, because we had guitar on the first album? The theremin is a sound I love, and I got really pissed off with people going, oh, everybody's using theremins, it's a voice we have, and we all finally decided, fuck it, this is one of our sounds and we're gonna use it, fuck it.

• 3:34:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 3:34:11Yasi Salek?

  And thank God.

• 3:34:11Speaker 03

  A hundred percent the right decision.

• 3:34:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:34:13Speaker 03

  And I'm glad they did, because why shouldn't they? You know?

• 3:34:17Yasi Salek?

  I agree.

• 3:34:18Speaker 03

  It they completely sort of brought that voice into music.

• 3:34:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:34:24Speaker 03

  Again, like it would have been a shame to not to have not had that in there.

• 3:34:34Yasi Salek?

  Another note about humming is that those um pizzicato strings that are on there that cost a great deal of money to record with a full orchestra at the studio where that was then copied on to a cheap cassette so that they could sound lofi. Could just could you imagine that like you're a member of this orchestra and you show up for work and you're like, yes, beautiful, I'm gonna shine. My pizzicato strings are gonna be on this Porzal album. And they're like, yes, thank you so much. And then they take your recording of your crisp and clear and beautiful strings and they put them on to a cheap tape and be like, we wanted to sound like this.

• 3:35:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we're gonna chuck this tape in the back of the car for a week and let it kind of warm up a bit and the tape to get a bit stretchy. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's the beauty of what they're doing.

• 3:35:24Yasi Salek?

  We've said the DNA of Porzal is still all over this from the theremin, from the sound.

• 3:35:28Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 3:35:28Yasi Salek?

  Even the far side sample is like, listen, we haven't forgotten like who we are, where we came from. It's the song she said, and I love it because it's a vocal. It's like using the vocal sample as sort of.

• 3:35:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:35:38Yasi Salek?

  It's very cool. Uh, only use it. I think only is the biggest song on here, actually. I think I don't know if it was the single, but we suffer every day. What is it for? Amen. Amen.

• 3:35:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:35:49Yasi Salek?

  Beth Gibbons.

• 3:35:58Yasi Salek?

  I also enjoyed that Western Eyes, which is the last song on here, is listed as having a sample of a song by the Sean Atkins Experience called Hookers and Gin. Whereas Sean Atkins was just their mate, who was a singer. And they recorded this song with a cocktail band and slowed it down for the sample. So it's not really sampling anything, something they made themselves, but they gave it a little credit.

• 3:36:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, but also it's it it sort of highlights the the brilliance of doing that. And you can creating your own thing to then sample it. And that, you know, it's obviously it's a very sort of obvious thing when it's a voice like that and Sean, who obviously sadly died in twenty twenty three, but. It's such a brilliant little moment to have created that thing just for that, just to have that hook. You know, it's a, it's a wonderful way. I think it's such a, Western Ice is such a great track. It's a powerful moment, actually.

• 3:36:55Yasi Salek?

  I think if you're a Portishead head, if you'll forgive.

• 3:36:57Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:36:58Yasi Salek?

  You have a relationship with all three albums, all four if you count the Roseland Live, because I think that does have a life of its own as well.

• 3:37:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 3:37:05Yasi Salek?

  But if you're sort of like a Portishead layperson and you just know Dummy and like, you're not really familiar.

• 3:37:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's fine, you know? If you are someone who's never ventured further than Dummy, you could definitely get some enjoyment from the other two-stroke-three albums. There'll definitely be things in there for you, maybe not the whole thing of all of them. But then again, also, I wouldn't be at all surprised if people who are really into Dummy, who've invested emotionally in Dummy, would really get a lot out of where these same people want to take you with this other music they've made. Because if you trust them enough with that, then trust them on this as well, because they're, they're not going to take you anywhere that isn't great. There are no terrible moments on any of these records, you know, they don't, there's no duffers on them.

• 3:37:52Yasi Salek?

  No, and I can't wait to talk about Third because talk about like, talk about challenging, talk about like.

• 3:37:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:37:59Yasi Salek?

  Oh, you wanted another, you waited all these years for another Portis album, here's this bitch, you know?

• 3:38:05Speaker 03

  But I know there's, you know, when we were talking about how people, this sort of idea of pessimism and depression and stuff like that. And there's a review of this, that Caroline Sullivan review in The Guardian of this record, when she, when she says, "The lack of printed lyrics is probably just as well, since seeing Gibbon's soul bared on paper might cause even the most sympathetic soul to wish he'd get a grip."

• 3:38:26Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:38:26Speaker 03

  And then you go, I mean, okay, let's. But like, the idea, again, such a wrong-headed thing, but the idea that someone should get a grip is such a sort of ridiculous way to think about music. Like, the whole point of it is this person doesn't get a grip. That's why it's good. You know, because people with a grip, it's like, they're not going to be making great art, you know? It's the people without, that more people with no grip is what I want. Bring it in for twenty twenty six.

• 3:39:02Yasi Salek?

  Gripless people, twenty twenty six.

• 3:39:03Speaker 03

  Gripless people.

• 3:39:04Yasi Salek?

  I'm here, babe.

• 3:39:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:39:05Yasi Salek?

  I'm right here at your service.

• 3:39:07Speaker 03

  No grip.

• 3:39:07Yasi Salek?

  No, zero grip.

• 3:39:09Speaker 03

  Zero grip.

• 3:39:10Yasi Salek?

  Failing grip on reality.

• 3:39:12Speaker 03

  Never had a grip. Yeah, never had a grip.

• 3:39:14Yasi Salek?

  While I did say it wasn't as like, popular an album, which I think is a fair estimation, it was very critically well-reviewed. So I don't want to like, misspeak about that, like.

• 3:39:27Speaker 03

  No.

• 3:39:28Yasi Salek?

  Like, kind of across the board, it was like, Guardian gave it five stars, you know, Entertainment Weekly gave it an A, Enemy gave it an eight, which is not a nine, but it's still a pretty high score from Enemy.

• 3:39:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:39:38Yasi Salek?

  Pitchfork, eight point two. That's old Pitchfork.

• 3:39:42Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a great record, you know?

• 3:39:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's a great record, deservedly so. I'm just, I just didn't want, I didn't want to like, be misleading to say when I was saying it wasn't as popular, that it wasn't as critically popular, because absolutely it was.

• 3:39:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's not a billion miles from the first record, really.

• 3:39:59Yasi Salek?

  No, I think it's deeply in the wheelhouse of the second, of the first record. Yeah.

• 3:40:05Speaker 03

  Everyone's still doing kind of what they did on the first record, just in a slightly more bleak atmosphere.

• 3:40:10Yasi Salek?

  But I do, I think they, they hit their goal of not making the same record again, so.

• 3:40:15Speaker 03

  Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's not like, it's not a radical reinvention.

• 3:40:20Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:40:20Speaker 03

  But it's definitely a step on. It's definitely not Dummy Part Two, because you couldn't, Dummy Part Two would be, that's an awful idea. You know, you can't improve on it.

• 3:40:28Yasi Salek?

  No, and trying to reinvent it would be, it would, it would just, I think it would flop sonically.

• 3:40:34Speaker 03

  It would be a fool's errand.

• 3:40:37Yasi Salek?

  So they do these three live shows at the Roseland Ballroom in New York spaced out. It was like, I think, July 24th, 1997, April 1st, 1998, and July 3rd, 1998. And they play with members of the New York Philharmonic to play the orchestral arrangements there. And this is recorded and then culled together for the Roseland NYC Live album. What's your, what's your feeling about this live album?

• 3:41:08Speaker 03

  I hadn't ever really spent any time with it, and actually listened to it for this. And I think it's fantastic. I know that there are people associated with the band who aren't that keen on it.

• 3:41:21Yasi Salek?

  Like Jeff Barrow, associated with the band, the main person of the band, who said, "I didn't like what we did that day. It was overblown and pompous."

• 3:41:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically Jeff. And, yeah, and that was sort of, it's funny, really, but I suppose, I mean, that's just one of the great differences between being in a band and listening to a band, right? Because you can go,

• 3:41:43Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 3:41:44Speaker 03

  "I didn't like this, and this didn't work, and the recording wasn't great, and we had to remix it quickly, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," all these kind of things. But when you, I think, as a sort of document of a band, perhaps you could say at the height of their live powers, who knows, right? I mean, they, you know, they changed so much as a live band, as we've been saying, you know, they, when they started out as a live band, it was a very, very different prospect from what this is. But I just think it's a fantastic record. But it's got a lot of odd moments on it.

• 3:42:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:14Speaker 03

  And, you know, the, the sort of clapping along moment is, that's one that blows me away every time when they sort of clap along on the beat and then sort of kind of give up halfway through.

• 3:42:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love it. I love it.

• 3:42:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:37Speaker 03

  I think it's a great record.

• 3:42:38Yasi Salek?

  I do too. I think especially given the fact that like pre there being like these, the YouTube uploads of live shows from this era like, you know, if you didn't get to see them play in this sort of like concise, tight timeline in which they played most of their shows. It's such a nice historical artifact to have, to be able to go back and be like, okay, these two albums exist with like a massive amount of studio care and perfection applied by the band. And then here's the living, breathing sort of organic expression of it. And I think that's a really cool thing to have. I mean,

• 3:43:23Yasi Salek?

  I respect Jeff Barrow's opinion. And he is entitled to it. And I'm not in Port Said. I didn't make these songs. And for example, I can't listen to one single fucking minute of this podcast without wanting to put rocks in my pockets and walk into the ocean. So I understand.

• 3:43:39Speaker 03

  I recognize that feeling. Who is this idiot?

• 3:43:42Yasi Salek?

  Who is this fucking dumb bitch? Why does she talk like that? Why are those her thoughts? You know? And then just galaxy brain, who cares?

• 3:43:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:43:52Yasi Salek?

  As the myth goes, and the myth as cemented in the New York Times article around 2008 was that after they toured, they mixed this live album, Jeff and Adrian. And then Jeff said, I have not listened to it one single time since. And then after that, they were like, bye. And they all scattered.

• 3:44:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:44:14Yasi Salek?

  The three of them were like, bye bye.

• 3:44:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:44:16Yasi Salek?

  See you later.

• 3:44:16Speaker 03

  I think there was also, it was also an era when labels wanted a really massive kind of event to launch something. And so they think they played in in Berlin at a funk house, or was that around this time? But then this, this was, you know, this was like a big. What was still considered like a big press moment.

• 3:44:35Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:44:36Speaker 03

  Like, this is a thing that will get us press all over the world and it'll be.

• 3:44:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they were capitalizing on the momentum that, you know, was still going from dummy in the second album and they were like, let's make sure.

• 3:44:47Speaker 03

  Crucially, we'll be able to flog some CDs and some DVDs off the back of it.

• 3:44:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:51Speaker 03

  And I think that some of the band's displeasure with it is that apparently they didn't get much time to actually mix it and record it. You know, mix it and work on the recordings.

• 3:45:03Yasi Salek?

  Would have wanted two to six years.

• 3:45:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, two to six years would have been, five to six years would have been the sweet spot. And it was like, you know, you've got a week.

• 3:45:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:15Speaker 03

  And then, you know, and then also just these songs and the things that came before, the albums that came before this were the product of thousands of hours of head scratching studio tomfoolery. And here it's like, this is what you've got. And some of, you know, they might not like what they got to play and there's, there's nothing you can do. It's like, well, this is it. This is what you've got. But I think leaving all that aside, just as a sort of raw document, as raw as, you know, something that's been mixed for a major label releases ever. This is a sort of pretty pure document of what was clearly a sort of pretty magical night, I think, or a series of magical nights.

• 3:45:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, the Melody Maker review of the July show, which was the first one in ninety seven, said, no one in this room will ever forget tonight. And that's crucial because that's where Portishead are right now. It's a place where everything culminates, where everything works, where every detail matters and every detail is perfect. Jeff Barrow would beg to differ.

• 3:46:10Speaker 03

  I think that really nails it. Again, you know, because I'm sure it feels like one of those things where it's going to have a very strong kind of emotional impact on people. But in a way, a bit like where people want the emotional impact, you know, they're ready for it, they're open to it. But it's still, I think there's some startling moments on this record.

• 3:46:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I agree. I, I, I really love it. So after this, and also the, at the end of the world tour that they had gone on, the wheels fall off, as we said, like they, they scatter. Both Jeff and Adrian get divorced.

• 3:46:44Yasi Salek?

  Adrian said, "We were drinking lots to get the adrenaline going and it all got a bit rock and roll, really, which I'm not averse to, but it took its toll in the end on us. Both Jeff and I, our home lives became messed up. We were divorced." So it's like a pretty harrowing time. Jeff said, "We seemed to be okay, all getting on, but then what happens is I get divorced, Ada gets divorced, and Beth is not very well because she doesn't really travel that well. So we cancel the tour of Japan, then literally we just come home. And because I was going through a divorce, I just kind of gave up on music."

• 3:47:14Speaker 03

  Side note, they were also £300,000 in debt when they got back.

• 3:47:20Yasi Salek?

  Oh, I didn't know. There were £300,000 in debt? Is that a known fact?

• 3:47:24Speaker 03

  Apparently.

• 3:47:25Yasi Salek?

  Allegedly.

• 3:47:26Speaker 03

  Apparently a fact. Oh, yeah. Allegedly, that is a fact.

• 3:47:28Yasi Salek?

  Because of studio time or tour costs or?

• 3:47:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think tour costs.

• 3:47:34Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:47:35Speaker 03

  That's what I've heard on the Portishead Grapevine.

• 3:47:39Yasi Salek?

  Well, that is gonna, that's gonna put a damper on spirits.

• 3:47:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, when you've done this thing to the point where you are broken individuals with broken home lives, and guess what, guys? You're also £300,000 in debt. I mean, you sort of think that that wouldn't happen now. If, if Portishead were to go out on the road and do a whole bunch of shows, there ain't no way they're gonna come back in debt.

• 3:48:06Yasi Salek?

  Nobody would allow it.

• 3:48:07Speaker 03

  With a tremendous amount of money. Well, yeah, nobody would allow it, right?

• 3:48:11Yasi Salek?

  Although at this point, I believe they're managing themselves. I'm pretty sure, like, fairly early on, they parted ways with Cameron McVeigh and, and took everything on themselves.

• 3:48:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:48:22Yasi Salek?

  Well, okay, so the vibes are bad, is what I'm saying. The vibes are bad.

• 3:48:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, the vibes are definitely bad.

• 3:48:27Yasi Salek?

  Beth retreats back to Devon to sort of recuperate. Adrian gets into some side projects. And Jeff Barrow, I'm just gonna say it, it got so bad that the man moved to Australia. That's how bad it got. I don't think he would say that, by the way. He didn't say that. I just wanna, I wanna be clear that I'm not, I'm not disparaging Australia on his part. That's just my, my own interpretation.

• 3:48:50Speaker 03

  That's your own anti-Australian rant.

• 3:48:52Yasi Salek?

  My own anti-Australian rant.

• 3:48:55Speaker 03

  The worst thing to come out.

• 3:48:56Yasi Salek?

  However, I totally understand it as it's like an absolutely gorgeous place with like beautiful beaches and wonderful food and I listen, I'll give it, you gotta hand it to them, as they say.

• 3:49:06Speaker 03

  Doesn't really work out though, does it?

• 3:49:07Yasi Salek?

  I think it works out in the sense that it sounds like, again, this is nothing from any horse's mouth, but from piecing together the timeline and the quotes and stuff. It sounds like it did its job in the sense that it was like healing, restorative. Jeff said basically like, I just decided I was gonna go live my life. People usually have to decide what they're gonna do from their late teens to their mid to late twenties. When I had been a musician, I was like some ginormous child in the outside world. So it sounds like he goes and has this like youth that he didn't really get to have because he was like

• 3:49:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:49:41Yasi Salek?

  a working musician, starting at eighteen and sort of, you know, by twenty-two, signed and doing important things. And he set up a little record label with a friend. Three years in Australia, didn't write one note of music. And in the meantime, Beth worked on music with Paul Webb of Talk Talk and put out that album. He goes under Rustin Man. It's called Out of Season. Yeah. It's a good, it's a good album.

• 3:50:09Speaker 03

  Yes, great record.

• 3:50:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Adrian worked on it. He played a bunch of, a bunch of instruments, organ, acoustic guitar, bass, guitar, electric guitar, mooks and the sizer. Jeff and Adrian also worked on some stuff together. They produced a Baxter Dury album, who's the son of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Ian Dury. And also the band Coral from Liverpool. And then in two thousand and three, the band kind of regrouped in Bristol. And I think a big part of what happened that reinvigorated Jeff Barrow is that he got really into drone metal.

• 3:50:48Yasi Salek?

  Which is such an interesting turn of events. I mean, I get it. It's like, for someone that's so clearly tapped in and interested in

• 3:50:59Yasi Salek?

  New and unusual forms of music and sonics. It makes total sense to me that he would hear drone metal and be like, oh, fuck, yeah. You know, like, this, this is something appealing and interesting to me.

• 3:51:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, and also something that's totally, feels totally apart from everything I've done.

• 3:51:16Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:51:17Speaker 03

  Right?

• 3:51:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:17Speaker 03

  So it's like, it's, it's a total palate cleanser.

• 3:51:20Yasi Salek?

  Totally. Um, so he, when he got back, he set up another label in his hometown and signed bands like Gongga. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. And Cribbled Black Phoenix, which is a side project of the Mogwai bassist Dominic H. Son.

• 3:51:34Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:51:35Yasi Salek?

  Jeff said, "It was music that I never thought I'd get into. We all went to see bands like Ohm, and I started to have the same kind of experience as when I heard Public Enemy. Just relentless fucking heaviness. And I thought, yes, this is what it's about. I've got to get back out there." So, thank you, drone metal, for your work here. And they began writing music again. And a mere five years later.

• 3:52:00Speaker 03

  In a blink of an eye.

• 3:52:01Yasi Salek?

  A blink of an eye.

• 3:52:02Speaker 03

  In geological time.

• 3:52:04Yasi Salek?

  They were able to put out, really able to put out some music.

• 3:52:09Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:52:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, sorry, by the way, I just don't wanna, I don't wanna be disrespectful to the, the label's called Invada. It's a cool label. His partner goes by the name Fat Paul, his words, not mine.

• 3:52:19Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:52:19Yasi Salek?

  And they were putting on gigs and stuff. And it was like Ohm, and like Sunno, and Earth, and Black Mountain, and going to Altamar's parties. That like kind of changed his view. He also later, we'll get into it, but he also later makes his own sort of drone metal-y band, Beak.

• 3:52:35Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:52:35Yasi Salek?

  Okay, in these five years, though, they're working on music. I just wanted to point out one thing that I found absolutely hilarious. And I did, I was able to excavate a bit of it. Jeff was blogging, babe. Jeff be blogging during this time.

• 3:52:50Speaker 03

  Ah. And not microblogging, like full blogging?

• 3:52:53Yasi Salek?

  Well, I, just like, kind of, this, I mean, this is like that weird internet no man's land. I think, right? Like, like, I feel like. The two thousand.

• 3:53:03Speaker 03

  Took over.

• 3:53:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, pre-social media platforms ish. I mean, we had like MySpace, right? It was like early sort of.

• 3:53:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:53:11Yasi Salek?

  And Facebook, I can't remember when I got on Facebook. It was around this time. Facebook was also like, maybe just college, but starting to pop off. There was some of my fellow old heads will remember Friendster. But anyways, Portishead and MySpace, they also had a website with like a blog function. It's just charming because there was just like little updates and this and that. And there was also just a gorgeous little moment where Jeff Barrow decided that he does not like Mark Ronson's music. And he's gonna talk about it on the blog.

• 3:53:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:53:40Yasi Salek?

  And he calls it shit funky supermarket music.

• 3:53:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:53:45Yasi Salek?

  I'm sorry.

• 3:53:46Speaker 03

  Yep, well.

• 3:53:48Yasi Salek?

  In an interview later, they're like, do you have a feud with Mark Ronson? He was like, there's no feud. I just don't like his music. I wrote some fairly nasty things about his music, but then I write nasty things about a lot of people's music. And I can't take the criticism back either. I get really annoyed when people don't like my music. There's lots of music I don't dig. His just happens to be the most odious.

• 3:54:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, most odious is very, it's very powerful. I love the fact in that quote where he goes, I can, I dish it out. I can't take it.

• 3:54:18Yasi Salek?

  I can't take it though. Yeah, I don't like it when they do it to me. Well, I mean, I guess he can take it. Maybe he just doesn't prefer to.

• 3:54:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:54:25Yasi Salek?

  And apparently Mark Ronson like said something to the effect of Portishead's no longer popular enough to play in supermarkets.

• 3:54:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, that felt a bit like, let's, let's run this past the PR team so you can come up with a good line. It feels a bit like a sort of prime minister's thing at question time when they say, someone's got his zinger for you.

• 3:54:43Yasi Salek?

  Hired a few copywriters to get it on that some copywriters. Um, then this was my favorite part. And then Jeff Barrow's like, yeah, but then he sent me a MySpace message asking for a remix. I'm thinking, what fucking planet do you live on, man? We don't get this kind of mess and drums anymore. So I just like, I wanted to hearken back to a purer time. Where people were sending MySpace barbs and, and talking shit about each other on the internet.

• 3:55:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's happy days, wasn't it really? When people could unleash their claws a little. I mean, the idea of a sort of Portishead versus Mark Ronson is, I mean, fair play to Mark Ronson. He's made some great records. But you know, you, you just wouldn't go near Portishead. It's like. Leave those guys alone.

• 3:55:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:55:25Speaker 03

  You know, it's like they they're too weird and too dark to be fucking with. You know, they're they're not going to hold back, you know?

• 3:55:34Yasi Salek?

  All right. And then finally, like I said, a mere five years later, two thousand eight into an absolutely wildly different world, not just musical landscape, literal world emerges the third Portishead studio album titled Third on April twenty fifth. They had also at this, they were no longer with Go Disc, Go Beat. They had renegotiated a major label deal with Island.

• 3:56:01Speaker 03

  Uh, yes. Well, the thing about this is I wondered, why did you end up on Ireland? Go Beat was a subsidiary of Go Discs.

• 3:56:11Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:56:11Speaker 03

  They were subsumed in Polidore, who were then subsumed into Universal. And so by the time album three is due, because I was there, I was thinking, why? I wonder why they went with Ireland when they've, you know, they've often had a thing to say about, you know, major labels and, you know, not being keen on them. Why not go with a sort of XL or with like a Domino or with something like that? And it turns out that, of course, actually, they'd signed a three album deal. And so they could, they couldn't have gone anywhere else. It was you had, they had to go somewhere within, under the, uh.

• 3:56:46Yasi Salek?

  So this was somehow under the umbrella of the like multiple.

• 3:56:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:56:50Yasi Salek?

  The multiple acquisitions that had.

• 3:56:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, basically, you can go anywhere within Universal, but it's going to have to be Universal. So it was like, okay, Ireland.

• 3:56:57Yasi Salek?

  And the and the live album didn't count.

• 3:56:59Speaker 03

  That's why I ended up there.

• 3:56:59Yasi Salek?

  Didn't count towards the third album.

• 3:57:01Speaker 03

  The live album didn't count, was it? Yeah.

• 3:57:02Yasi Salek?

  Okay. I don't want to like hold a funeral for rock music per se, but and not that Portishead is rock music, but two thousand eight's a weird time.

• 3:57:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's one way of putting it.

• 3:57:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, we're we're post the last, I feel.

• 3:57:18Speaker 03

  It's not the glory days, yes, see?

• 3:57:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends who you ask. I mean, not if you ask us, who are old men yelling at the clouds. But I mean, maybe if you ask a young person, because this is, when did Arctic Monkeys come out?

• 3:57:31Speaker 03

  I suppose that's around about two thousand and six, two thousand and seven.

• 3:57:36Yasi Salek?

  So there's like a, there's like.

• 3:57:37Speaker 03

  Maybe a little bit earlier.

• 3:57:38Yasi Salek?

  So there's a nice swell of Arctic Monkeys fervor and people love that band. And that's a really good rock band that I always say, and I might be wrong, but this is just in my estimation, like the last. Big, great big.

• 3:57:52Speaker 03

  That's great rock band.

• 3:57:54Yasi Salek?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I don't even, and I don't even mean like judging by the quality of their music, which is great, but the last rock band that was able to get big, that was, that's massive and can play like stadiums or arenas or whatever.

• 3:58:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:58:08Yasi Salek?

  I mean, I'm sure someone will be like, well, actually, blah, blah, blah. And that's fine. I'd love to hear it. But that's just how it felt like it shook out to me. And then, yeah, there was the whole Strokes, yeah, yeah, yeah, as burst in the early 2000s.

• 3:58:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:58:23Yasi Salek?

  And then, like, again, I have a real blind spot for this whole decade. So like, I don't know what was going on. It was, it feels like it was like.

• 3:58:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was comatose for a lot this decade.

• 3:58:33Yasi Salek?

  There was indie, there was Bloghouse, Bloghouse is happening, Witch House is happening, Seapunk is happening. You guys were not there. I mean, I might be getting the dates a bit wrong.

• 3:58:47Speaker 03

  Bloghouse is not gonna, is never gonna light my candle. But Witch House, slightly more up my street. So I would have been writing for like NME and People at this point, and Q and people like that.

• 3:58:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Who were you writing about?

• 3:59:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. Who was I writing about? Well, I did write about Arctic Monkeys and Last Shadow Puppets.

• 3:59:04Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 3:59:04Speaker 03

  And TV on the radio, they'd have been in there.

• 3:59:08Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah, for MGMT.

• 3:59:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. White Stripes, Empire of the Sun, lots of people like that.

• 3:59:14Yasi Salek?

  Empire of the Sun, totally. I'm just, I'm looking through this list of like top alternative albums of like 2008. And a lot of it is just legacy acts, like it's Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. There's a Smiths album, The Sound of the Smiths. I'm like, okay, that was not.

• 3:59:27Speaker 03

  Don't count.

• 3:59:28Yasi Salek?

  The Gutter Twins, which is the Afghan Wigs and Mark Lanigan. But anyways, yeah, it doesn't, it just doesn't feel like a lot of big things were, Beach House got pretty big, I guess. Anyways, I don't know what point I'm making here. I'm just, the point I'm just trying to make is that like wildly different musical, M83. Yeah, this was a different time. I forgot about M83.

• 3:59:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think without, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think the thing you're trying to say here is, and saying it really, is that this lands in a world which is entirely different from the world of the first and the second record. And in all sorts of ways, bands barely exist anymore.

• 4:00:07Yasi Salek?

  Oasis put out their last album, I believe this year, right? Dig Out Your Soul was that's the last Oasis album. Yeah, bands barely exist. There is a swell of, like we just said, MGMT, M eighty three, CSS, like

• 4:00:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:00:20Yasi Salek?

  Of like interesting electronic music that's coming out.

• 4:00:26Speaker 03

  It doesn't sound like this, though, does it?

• 4:00:27Yasi Salek?

  It doesn't sound like this. Nothing sounds like this.

• 4:00:30Speaker 03

  That's very true.

• 4:00:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So anyways, whatever. I don't want to belabor the point. You get what I'm saying.

• 4:00:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think there's a thing, though. I think it's just before this album comes out, isn't it? When they do the um, the Nightmare Before Christmas, the All Tomorrow's Parties.

• 4:00:43Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 4:00:44Speaker 03

  Minehead.

• 4:00:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:00:45Speaker 03

  And that is, I think, absolutely crucial to understanding who they are

• 4:00:51Yasi Salek?

  Hmm.

• 4:00:51Speaker 03

  and where they are and what they want to say. Because then you've got like, Sun are playing it, Arm are playing it, Black Mountain are playing it.

• 4:01:00Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 4:01:00Speaker 03

  Julian Cope's there. Does someone from Silver Apples play? Or is that another one?

• 4:01:05Yasi Salek?

  I don't know, but they were super into Silver Apples. Yeah. Silver Apples was a big influence.

• 4:01:10Speaker 03

  As we will hear.

• 4:01:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:01:11Speaker 03

  Yes. Uh, almost actionable influence. But the thing about, that's crucial here about the All Tomorrow's Parties thing is it says, to the outside world, this is the sort of band that Portishead are now. These are our contemporaries. These are the people that we admire, the people who we like, the people we've been inspired by. And also, it says, and this is sort of crucial into where they're going forward, because they are signed to a major label. When you're signed to a major label, major label want major label shit happening. I.e. they want you on the radio. They want you to have hits. And it's like, good fucking luck, guys, because this is the record we've delivered. And there may not be any massive radio hits on it. But what they've done is they've aligned themselves with a proper, real underground.

• 4:01:55Yasi Salek?

  Again, there was barely accidentally a radio hit on the first album.

• 4:02:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:02:01Yasi Salek?

  So let alone.

• 4:02:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, exactly.

• 4:02:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah, with the, they've aligned themselves with the underground. But then again, I, I like, once again, I was checked out. She was at Smith's night. She was listening to Dipset. She was busy. But I, I don't remember this album coming into the world feeling a part of like a scene or something, right? It was just like

• 4:02:22Speaker 03

  Not at all.

• 4:02:22Yasi Salek?

  A huge moment because it had been over a decade since the last album. And there was just like a large anticipation. They played Coachella.

• 4:02:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:02:33Yasi Salek?

  It was, you know, and they hadn't played for years. It wa- it was It was like a big deal in that regard.

• 4:02:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it was a big deal, but you know, thinking back on it, I don't remember at the time being like, shit, they're back.

• 4:02:46Yasi Salek?

  Hmm.

• 4:02:47Speaker 03

  But then when you listen, obviously, the reviews are fantastic. It's very, it's hard to remember because it's such a sort of odd time in music. But the reviews are, the reviews are great, I think, aren't they on this one?

• 4:02:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:02:58Speaker 03

  People and people, I think there's, you know, people, they've never, they've very rarely had, I don't think they've ever had a bad review, really. Has anyone ever gone, well, this is a load of old crap, isn't it?

• 4:03:07Yasi Salek?

  They'd be wrong.

• 4:03:08Speaker 03

  They'd be wrong, but that doesn't stop people before.

• 4:03:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:03:12Speaker 03

  Going, well, this is a load of old crap. No, I think that, you know, when you see it coming out of the automotives thing, this is, this is who we are now. And then this record lands and it, you know, it opens with this sort of heavy kind of drone. It's, this is like, okay, off we go.

• 4:03:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it opens with that, with the sample of a capoeira master named Claudio Campos, reading, reciting an adaptation of the Wiccan precept of the threefold law, which is translated to beware of the rule of three. What you give will get back at you. This lesson you must learn. You only get what you deserve. Ominous.

• 4:03:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:03:55Yasi Salek?

  Fits in. Rule of three, third album.

• 4:03:58Speaker 03

  Three people in the band.

• 4:04:00Yasi Salek?

  Three people in the band. You did it, bitch. You fucking opened it perfectly.

• 4:04:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:04:06Speaker 06

  Deslata para las regas dos tres. O que você dá retornará para você.

• 4:04:12Yasi Salek?

  This album is not going to be played in the hotel lobby.

• 4:04:16Speaker 03

  No, I don't think there's much chance that Silence is going to be welcoming you to Royal Marriott.

• 4:04:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:04:22Speaker 03

  Anytime soon.

• 4:04:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, not even the standard, babe, not even the standard.

• 4:04:27Speaker 03

  Not even the standard, even the standard wouldn't turn their nose up at that one, you know. Yeah, it's not gonna happen. You know, when you go through the albums, Dummy, It's a Surprise, wow, that's quite weird, but it's also, it's very listenable and great. Portishead. You understand it because what they did before is not, it's not a huge lift up. This is, I mean, it's definitely not, it's not like, oh, this is a totally different band. This is like, everything turned up to its possible limit. And I think it's just brilliant.

• 4:04:57Yasi Salek?

  It's brilliant.

• 4:04:58Speaker 03

  Absolutely brilliant.

• 4:04:59Yasi Salek?

  It's incredible. It's really incredible. It's so textured. There's like way more crags and nooks and crannies in this record, right? Do you know what I'm saying? Like, it's like, you kind of are tossed about more than you are and put into like a holistic listening experience. I'm not saying it's not an album.

• 4:05:17Speaker 03

  There's a lot more sonic shocks.

• 4:05:18Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. Sonic shocks, which is really cool. The way that you, once you hear that drone metal was an impetus and inspiration. And it's not sonically exactly there, but it is.

• 4:05:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:05:34Yasi Salek?

  It is spiritually very much there. Like, you can feel like, oh, I get how, how he transmuted this input into this output.

• 4:05:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, the heaviness is there. It's a heavy record without being heavy metal record.

• 4:05:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:05:50Speaker 03

  You know, it's, I mean, there are definitely, there are moments of big, like, droney happenings. But yeah, that's sort of the intensity and that sense of sort of pressure coming off, coming out of the wave, waving out of the speakers at you. That's, that's definitely, that feels like it comes from that drone metal experience.

• 4:06:11Yasi Salek?

  I genuinely think Machine Gun is one of the greatest songs of all time.

• 4:06:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:06:17Yasi Salek?

  It's so fucking cool.

• 4:06:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:06:19Yasi Salek?

  Like, you kind of forget about it, then you put it on, and you're like, wow, like, what a, what a visceral experience listening to this song is.

• 4:06:35Speaker 03

  With those sort of, that kind of drum machine, that's relentless drum.

• 4:06:38Yasi Salek?

  Relentless, exactly.

• 4:06:39Speaker 03

  There's a lot of relentlessness on this, but that's a relentless drum machine kind of grind. Yeah, it's, that's a good single as well, isn't it?

• 4:06:46Yasi Salek?

  I think so, yeah.

• 4:06:47Speaker 03

  Machine Gun?

• 4:06:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:06:48Speaker 03

  I think, yeah.

• 4:06:48Yasi Salek?

  Makes sense, it's like, kind of like, I don't wanna say the catch, one of the catchier songs on the album, but it kind of is, you know?

• 4:06:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, Weekend certainly fits, eh? But that's another great, another great Jeff moment. But it takes such kind of very wild, sharp handbrake turns, this record.

• 4:07:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:07:09Speaker 03

  You know, there's, you know, things like Deep Water just come out of absolute nowhere with just like a ukulele vibe. And you're like, okay.

• 4:07:17Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 4:07:17Speaker 03

  You know?

• 4:07:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, sure.

• 4:07:29Speaker 03

  This is the thing about them that you keep coming back to is it's like, whatever they do, you go, oh fuck, yeah, that's Portishead.

• 4:07:36Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 4:07:36Speaker 03

  It's like.

• 4:07:37Yasi Salek?

  Exactly.

• 4:07:38Speaker 03

  Because even though this is a huge leap on, in, in all sorts of ways, that, I mean, that sounds like it's that much better. It's not about it being better, it's just very different. But it's still unmistakably that band that you loved, you know, 15 years before, beforehand. But they're just, you know, they're grown up.

• 4:08:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:08:00Speaker 03

  They're grown up, but like you say, you know, what Jeff was doing, he was a very, you know, he was a 21, 22 year old guy. And now they're, you know, this is like a guy in his 40s who's making some heavy stuff with his heavy mates.

• 4:08:12Yasi Salek?

  I believe he's 36, but we don't have to prematurely age him.

• 4:08:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. You could prematurely age from there, you know, he's been through a lot.

• 4:08:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he's been, no, exactly. I think it's exactly what you want from a band that you love is to be able to completely recognize them, but also feel how much they've evolved.

• 4:08:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:08:32Yasi Salek?

  You know, like.

• 4:08:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:08:33Yasi Salek?

  It's just such an incredible, and you know, Beth's vocals are, have also evolved, but are still so very much Beth Gibbons, her lyrics, obviously, still really, really incredible. The Rip is a really beautiful song. I think that is, I think it was a single, I'm not really sure, but it is the most.

• 4:08:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it was.

• 4:08:51Yasi Salek?

  The most streamed song on the album by a fivefold.

• 4:08:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:08:55Yasi Salek?

  Which it is the most palatable. Yeah, it's got nearly sixty thousand streams, whereas the next closest one is Machine Gun, which has about eleven thou-, oh, sorry, not eleven thousand, fifty-nine million streams, sixty million.

• 4:09:06Speaker 03

  Right, I was gonna say.

• 4:09:07Yasi Salek?

  No, sorry. Nobody liked this record, you guys don't listen to it. Uh, no, no, sixty million streams, and then Machine Gun's around eleven million.

• 4:09:13Speaker 03

  But yeah, The Rip, The Rip is an amazing one, you know, and that, uh, that, As I Take On Myself and the bitterness I felt, it's just.

• 4:09:21Yasi Salek?

  She did it again.

• 4:09:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:09:23Yasi Salek?

  There she go.

• 4:09:32Speaker 03

  That's one of my absolute favorites on the album, where it's, you've just got this sort of simple guitar arpeggio, which, you know, like, kind of two minutes twenty, just sort of turns into this synth arpeggio that sort of threatens to blow up into something enormous, and then it just, it doesn't, it just holds itself, it holds itself in. And it feels like it could go, they could have gone bananas.

• 4:10:04Speaker 03

  You know, there is that relentlessness to this album, and there's that pressure and that heaviness to this album, but it's also got this sort of quiet power, where it's sort of in control of its emotions a lot, you know, a lot of the time.

• 4:10:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's a really, that's a really good way to put it. And again, with zero, uh, knowledge or insight, like, you kind of do get the sense, and maybe I get the sense after studying Portishead for weeks, that this was always gonna be the last album. Like, it was almost like, we came, like, it took us five years, like, we came to the table. I mean, even just, like, putting the facts in place, like, they were, they owed one last album, contractually.

• 4:10:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:10:53Yasi Salek?

  They were clearly very fucking over it. Who knows, you know, no one can know, obviously, and rightfully so, they won't talk about it, which I think is smart.

• 4:11:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:11:02Yasi Salek?

  But.

• 4:11:03Speaker 03

  You could argue that it's a miracle this record actually exists. You know, because I would think that, you know, they, yes, they were contractually obliged to deliver another, doesn't, doesn't mean to say that they.

• 4:11:13Yasi Salek?

  No, many, many such cases of that just never happening.

• 4:11:17Speaker 03

  Of course, of course, never happened. And the fact that they had literally broken themselves in the pursuit of whatever it was they were pursuing over albums one and two, the fact that they could 10 years later come back and do this is, we should acknowledge a kind of a miracle and a, you know, the record is a gift.

• 4:11:37Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 4:11:37Speaker 03

  And whether they could ever do that again does feel kind of unlikely. Uh, but you know, I mean, who knows, right? And maybe in five years' time, they'll, another one will pop, will pop out.

• 4:11:51Yasi Salek?

  Anything could happen. Jeff Barrow very publicly retired from music, so.

• 4:11:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:11:55Yasi Salek?

  Uh, last year, I believe, he sort of publicly declared that he, he isn't, he is no longer making records or albums. He's, he is exclusively focused. He even like quit his own band, Beak, or dismantled it or whatever.

• 4:12:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:12:08Yasi Salek?

  And he's focusing pretty exclusively on scoring films.

• 4:12:13Speaker 03

  Scoring films, yeah. You know, he had stopped making music for three years when he was in Australia. I mean, look, who knows? Absolutely. I think it's, it's very unlikely that they were.

• 4:12:22Yasi Salek?

  We're going on 17 years now from this album.

• 4:12:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's true.

• 4:12:27Yasi Salek?

  Six, eighteen, actually.

• 4:12:29Speaker 03

  Eight, eighteen this year. Yeah, that's right. It is, yeah. But then, but you know, there is also that thing of when people get, I mean, the thing is, there's such wildly varying ages in this group.

• 4:12:40Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 4:12:41Speaker 03

  It doesn't quite sort of always hold up. But there is that thing, you know, when people hit their sort of 50s, I mean, obviously, some of them are already in their 50s, in their 60s, in fact. But you can sort of go, should we? Like, because there's obviously an itch that can only be scratched with these three people in the room, right? And they are, and it's not like they've ever gone, we don't get on, you know.

• 4:13:03Yasi Salek?

  No, no, yeah, there was no like fallout.

• 4:13:05Speaker 03

  Where it's like no fallout or, and also they've also hit that sweet spot where it's like, we don't owe anybody anything we can do. If we wanted to do something, we could do exactly what we want, you know, we're not under any pressure to do anything. Yes, it's all massively unlikely, but you know, never say never.

• 4:13:20Yasi Salek?

  Never say never.

• 4:13:21Speaker 03

  Except when they've said never.

• 4:13:22Yasi Salek?

  When they said never. Well, it's a, it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful album. We mentioned the influences, there's also some other ones like Mad Lib, Jeff Barrow's a big Mad Lib fan, rightfully so, absolute genius. Black Sabbath, Sonic Youth, Kraftwerk.

• 4:13:36Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 4:13:37Yasi Salek?

  And then even though it was very difficult to make, like we said, actually Jeff Barrow said on the Portishead blog, this album has been like watching Lost, a never ending journey with very few answers. This really places it in time, doesn't it? Lost was really in the cultural conversation.

• 4:13:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:13:52Yasi Salek?

  Ultimately, for the very least, Jeff Barrow said that he loves, or he likes the outcome. He said, it's all good. I don't know if Beth's happy, but she seems to be happy. So yeah, I definitely think we're stronger now as a band. I don't know if we're going to get on better, if it's just me getting older and understanding a bit more of what Beth sings about, but I think we've got a stronger voice now. This was press around the time of the album. There is something to be said for going out on a high note and, you know, not sullying your legacy. They play what seems to be about seven years of mostly festival shows. Clearly they did not want to tour anymore. They did do a brief tour in America, which that's the time I got to see them at the shrine here, and it was incredible.

• 4:14:36Yasi Salek?

  And I actually really distinctly remember Machine Gun.

• 4:14:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:14:39Yasi Salek?

  In 2010, Jeff Barrow was the music supervisor for the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which sort of kickstarted his long enduring and fruitful career as a film score. I actually like wasn't really aware, I just want to like read a couple of these because might surprise people. He did Ex Machina.

• 4:15:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 4:15:04Yasi Salek?

  He did a bunch, I think, or one episode of Black Mirror, the film Annihilation, the film Hannah, which I really liked, Civil War recently, which was last year.

• 4:15:14Speaker 03

  Civil War, yeah, yeah.

• 4:15:16Yasi Salek?

  Good choosy projects, but also all really incredible scores. The last real Portishead, from what I could gather from my setlist.fm poking around, uh, was in Spain, at a festival in Spain in July of 2015. Then in 2022, they played a benefit show for War Child, which I believe Tony Krian, he was very involved in that project, who was the old marketing director of Kobe. And then in 2024, Beth Gibbons put out another solo album, oh, a solo album, because the other one was in a solo album, called Lives Outgrown in May. That's actually also really good.

• 4:15:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's good, isn't she?

• 4:15:53Yasi Salek?

  She's so good. I didn't see it talked about a lot, honestly, but.

• 4:15:56Speaker 03

  No, it didn't, actually. It sort of came and went at that one.

• 4:15:59Yasi Salek?

  I mean, you could kind of see her not wanting to do promo repress and, you know.

• 4:16:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's not dancing on TikTok. Not yet.

• 4:16:09Yasi Salek?

  Never say never, babe. Late-stage capitalism will find us all dancing on TikTok. And then last year, they filmed a special one-off performance of Rhodes at the Cube Microplex in Bristol in September for Brian Eno's Palestine benefit concert. They're pretty politically involved, at least definitely Jeff Barrow, as I, I know from his, you know, he's, he's never been silent about his political views and, and sort of fighting for what he believes in. And that's kind of the end of the Portishead story, babe.

• 4:16:40Speaker 03

  You know, and there is a beauty in having, you know, three records, or, I mean, if we, three studio albums, you know, Nick Drake, Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix. You know, there's three reasonable people to sort of align yourself with, aren't they? I was doing this thing recently and Elton John was part of it.

• 4:16:59Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 4:16:59Speaker 03

  I was doing this thing of nineteen eighty six is involved, right? And I was something about Elton John came into this story about nineteen eighty six. And in nineteen eighty six, he was, he did this album and it sort of flopped. And it was his nineteenth studio album. That's nineteen eighty six. And you go, nobody needs that many albums, right? Nobody needs fifteen, twenty, ten.

• 4:17:21Yasi Salek?

  You know, you know where I land on this. Or maybe you don't, but I'll say it again. I'll reiterate for myself. I think ultimately for the legacy of a band, it's much better to brevity is the soul of wit. You know, like economize. However, I have nothing but respect and understanding for artists who's like the principle that animates their life is making music to keep making music. Whether or not it's gonna hit the levels of their, you know, imperial phase peaks, which it almost never is.

• 4:18:00Speaker 03

  No, sure.

• 4:18:00Yasi Salek?

  And being okay with that and just continuing to explore and make interesting and cool or whatever, weird or not, who cares? You know, like I, I completely understand that impulse and, and absolutely respect it. You know, like.

• 4:18:15Speaker 03

  Look, I mean, whatever someone wants to do.

• 4:18:17Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 4:18:18Speaker 03

  It's just.

• 4:18:18Yasi Salek?

  It's a free country.

• 4:18:20Speaker 03

  It is a free country. Listen, if you wanna make forty, forty, for now, well, is it free? That's a good question. Uh huh. Free, free is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But I suppose it's not absurd that someone would want to make that many records. It's absurd to think that, of course, you should do it. But it's absurd to sort of try and take in that much information, right? If you were as a listener.

• 4:18:43Yasi Salek?

  You mean, as a listener, right?

• 4:18:45Speaker 03

  You know, obviously, if you, for instance, if you host a long running, successful and marvelous podcast about people's entire careers, then, you know, you get used to that. You get, you know, if it's like album twenty, it's like, great.

• 4:18:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you get used to it the way you get used to Stockholm syndrome.

• 4:19:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And you go, you know what? These are great.

• 4:19:04Yasi Salek?

  This is great. Fourteenth album in this alternative rock band's career is actually, you know what? It's kind of hitting.

• 4:19:10Speaker 03

  But you know what? You, like me, have read an awful lot of rock memoirs.

• 4:19:15Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 4:19:15Speaker 03

  And what is striking about almost all of them is that. It's like they want to tell you they'll go nuts on like the first sort of two or three years and then without fail it's like and then we went back into for album six.

• 4:19:29Yasi Salek?

  It becomes a bit of a yada yada for sure.

• 4:19:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's good. It's yada yada even for them, right? It's become yada yada, you know? And I think that it would the thing about the the portishead, I suppose in a nutshell, right? The thing about the portishead story is they were never meant to be big. They got big.

• 4:19:44Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 4:19:45Speaker 03

  They changed, then they really changed and they went, that's enough. And there is a beauty in that. Do we need ten portishead albums? No. Would it be nice to have another one of these because?

• 4:19:56Yasi Salek?

  I guess it depends. What does it sound like?

• 4:19:59Speaker 03

  Exactly. What does it sound like? Well, yeah, exactly. It would probably it probably sound very, very different. But it feels like each one is sort of age appropriate. And I suppose that's the thing that's that's the sort of sweetness in the melancholy is it's like, imagine what would they sound like now? You know, where would they be now as people? And that's maybe we'll never know. We'll probably almost certainly never know.

• 4:20:21Yasi Salek?

  I think part of the like alchemical idea of these three people bringing each something to the table that like has a chemical reaction that creates this like incredible thing is also temporal. So it's like

• 4:20:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 4:20:37Yasi Salek?

  That alchemy might not happen 20 years later. They're different people, you know, like

• 4:20:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:20:41Yasi Salek?

  It's the intersection often of both the people and the timing.

• 4:20:47Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 4:20:47Yasi Salek?

  So

• 4:20:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:20:48Yasi Salek?

  Again, I don't I'm not saying I don't think another ports album could be amazing. It probably, you know, absolutely could be. It's just

• 4:20:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:20:54Yasi Salek?

  It's kind of nice. And also just for my my mental health and my time management to have an album.

• 4:21:01Speaker 03

  It's nice that they've done.

• 4:21:02Yasi Salek?

  Three album bands, you know, that's nice.

• 4:21:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, three and alive. Great.

• 4:21:05Yasi Salek?

  It's so great.

• 4:21:06Speaker 03

  Um, yeah.

• 4:21:07Yasi Salek?

  Well, Rob, this has been a real joy and pleasure to spend this time with you discussing. Portishead.

• 4:21:15Speaker 03

  It's been a real pleasure, a real genuine pleasure, Yasi, and I've been delighted to guest on your wonderful show. So, thank you. Sincere thank you.

• 4:21:25Yasi Salek?

  You guys, listen to Rob's podcast. Please plug it now so people don't forget.

• 4:21:30Speaker 03

  It's called States of Independence. It is about the history and legacy of the world's greatest independent record labels. And season one is on the mighty beggars banquet. And so there's like Gary Newman's in it, The Cult are in it.

• 4:21:47Yasi Salek?

  No Big Bill.

• 4:21:47Speaker 03

  Charlatans, The Go-Betweens, Jean Loves Jezebel.

• 4:21:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:21:51Speaker 03

  You know, they're all in, and Martin Mills, obviously, the founder.

• 4:21:56Yasi Salek?

  Give it, give it a listen, you guys.

• 4:21:58Speaker 03

  It's available now.

• 4:21:59Yasi Salek?

  It's available on all listening platforms.

• 4:22:01Speaker 03

  On all listening places.

• 4:22:04Yasi Salek?

  Thank you, Rob. Thank you for listening and come back next week for a new episode of Bandsplain.

• 4:22:16Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandsplain. Our guest today was Rob Fitzpatrick. This episode was produced by Rob Sunderland and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Video production by Bex Donnelly and Jared Harris in London. Graphics are by John Richter. Executive producers for Bandsplain are Gina Dalback and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavin and graciously recorded by Carlos Villagorda in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, producer Dylan, AKA Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Sean Fantasy, and especially Jeff Barrow. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandsplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 4:23:00Speaker 03

  I've started getting a lot of people scratching content on TikTok just today, which makes me think, wow, you really are listening. You really are listening, even on airplane mode.

• 4:23:14Yasi Salek?

  Oh, there's no way around it, honey. They're gonna get you.

• 4:23:17Speaker 03

  Suddenly, it's been a lot of wiki wiki going on.

• 4:23:23Speaker 05

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