BEAK> are only playing four US dates and URB’s giving away tix…and if you’re not near NY, SF, LA or the Borscht Belt, URB’s still got your back, with “Deserters” an ultra-scarce BEAK> MP3 which is unavailable unless you’re one of the 200 persons who buys the limited edition cassette at one of their four tour stops in the country…plus, BIG news about Portishead, and a rough video clip of their set at Coachella ‘007
Billy Fuller, Matt Williams and Geoff Barrow AKA BEAK> are not unlike Lars Von Trier’s Dogme 95; they have well-known self-imposed parameters for their production:
>The music must be played live and in one room
>No overdubs nor repair
>Only edits can create arrangements
While this could be a deadly, option-stifling approach, it’s a self-imposed challenge that works well in the service of adding a nice and palpable tension to their minimal aural glide and chugging, droning meditations. Onstage live it’s no different, albeit far more risky, as they move in and out of sound shadows for a moody evening’s worth of jamming that has more to do with finding one’s way in real-time, than delivering a tidy and predictable set. To wit, the video below which morphs into Galt McDermot’s “Let the Sun Shine” –albeit with the anguished undertakings of someone trapped in a cell — or their own mind (same diff) making the long dark journey toward that vague promise of a deliverance through light…just check them out for yourselves. Tour dates, video and bonus Portishead interview from the pages of URB magazine April ‘09…BTW, it’s official: Adrian Utley confirmed to me that Portishead are indeed gearing up for a new record; we’ll keep you posted.
BEAK>September 2010 Tour Dates
Sep. 3, 2010 New York, NY Bowery Ballroom (w/People from the North on support)
Sep. 4, 2010 Monticello, NY All Tomorrows Parties
Sep. 7, 2010 San Francisco, The Independent
Sep. 10, 2010 Los Angeles, CA Troubadour
DOWNLOAD: your copy of “Deserters”
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Extra-credit reading, by way of a Portishead interview I did in the pages of URB mag, April ‘09:
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
by Michael Vazquez
In 1994, Portishead popped their U.S. cherry, live
for the cameras of The John Stewart Show, at an
afternoon taping attended by the type of tourists
who attend television show tapings and who had no
idea what the hell a Portishead was. So when they
finished their first song with a murmur, the crowd,
unsure of the end, hesitated for an extra-long second
before clapping. Lead singer Beth Gibbon bolts (with
feline grace, actually, this is not a “Carrie” moment)
leaving Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley onstage. It’s
a little awkward—especially without a commercial
break.
But something happens when they come
out for their next song, at the talk-show’s close:
Abandoning the sedate delivery of the chorus in
“Sour Times,” Beth rips shit apart at the end, wailing
“Nobody loves meeeeeh!” stabbing on “loves” and
sobbing on “meeeeeh,” properly transporting the
newly-appreciative audience well beyond any possible
ambivalence. Guts. Louder. Applause.
Soon, the rest of the world would proclaim that
these cats were the shit. That year, I exuberantly
declared in Main Street Magazine their album “an
instant classic” and meant every word of it. Cue the
flashback theremin: “A vigorous meditation on the
groove created by 22-year-old Geoff Barrow’s ebbing
dub beats, moody iconoclastic instrumentation and
28-year-old Beth Gibbons’s willowy, wounded vocals
which glide over the arrangements like a hover car.
The vocals Beth lays down could be a capella gems,
just as Geoff’s dubscapes could be the scores to any
(worthwhile) rapper’s cadence.”
Dummy became a beloved soundtrack to countless
break-ups, make-ups, de-flowerings, one-night
stands, beginnings and ends of bartender shifts,
first hits of ecstasy… and like so many great albums
that the hater in me didn’t wanna share, Dummy
was also beloved by people who you’d swear would
just as easily have made fun of this stuff, if that’s
how it had been presented to them.
A lot’s changed and a lot’s stayed the same since
1994, when that record was presented to the world
with a viral campaign—before viral campaign was a
common term—which involved the placing of mannequins
randomly in public places around London
(get it, Dummy?), for an event which proved problematic,
as London had just received a bomb scare.
Talking to Geoff (Adrian tomorrow, Beth is
unavailable…sigh) in the present-day, it’s kind of
a painful thing, to ask about how he’s conscious of
the expectations, pressures, and image questions
surrounding a b(r)and as singular as Portishead,
14 years after a stellar debut, and 10 years after a
burn-out inducing follow-up that affirmed the law of
diminishing increased returns.
“We are kind of in a bad position, worse than we
kind of ever have been, [regarding] the perceptions of
our music for a lot of people. I’m just at that age where
I don’t hold the same kind of…it could be [that] I’ve
kind of lost my trust in the music industry, which I
maybe naively [had]. It’s been a long time since we
spoke, of course. I feel pressure to write music the
way we wanna write, to achieve the music…It’s a
different time though, other people’s perceptions of
the band are not at the forefront of my work.”
Hearing his hard-fought indifference to detractors
reminds me of our first interview in ’94, when a newto-
success Geoff mentioned, in a stung tone: “My
friends were like, ‘Oh he’s doing music now, whatever.’
And I took notice of that—I take notice of what
people say.”
Conscious of his peers but determined
to make beats, if not for a killing, then at least for a
living, he teamed up with Adrian Utley who’d been
a fixture in Bristol’s jazz scene. They went before
a British “Enterprise Grant Board” in a scene not
unlike the episode in Trainspotting, where the guy
interviews for the leisure industry job. Without the
speed, of course.
“We were both on unemployment benefit, and the
government set up a system that you could borrow
money to start a business. You had to sit at a table
in a hotel and tell people what you want to do,” tells
Geoff, looking back. “We were like: ‘We wanna do
music production.’” Mutually unemployed singer
Beth Gibbons, also attending said seminar, per
chance, “was like, ‘I wanna be a singer.’”
And thus Portishead, one of the most distinctive
bands from a distinctive time, was borne of three
self-conscious egos and talents: Adrian, who’d taken
jazz as far as he could and was hungry for adventures
in sampling; Beth, the multi-ranged femme
fatale following her muse well beyond superb Janis
Joplin cover bands; Geoff, the moody, gritty, hip-hop
producer—a hungry auto-didactic who’d worked as
a tape op/tea-dude in Massive Attack’s studio and
had been getting down around Bristol.
Whether it was Geoff chasing a singing Beth
through tunnels with a tape recorder and creating
sticky beats quickly or Adrian’s self-described “unhip”
tremolo guitar, Portishead’s greater-than-thesum-
of-its-parts mystique was infused with the feel
of gramophones come to life under cobwebs and, on
their newest record Third, like a post-battle anthem
sung at dawn atop a scrap heap deep in the heart of
some dystopia (“Machine Gun”) or a high-tech glide
tough a medieval forest (“The Rip”) or an alternately
delirious and frantic narcoleptic odyssey (“Hunter”).
Then as now, when at their best, Portishead deliver
music with an old soul to it—sweet and gritty with
an arty, inelegant hypnotism and wistful sense of
melody.
So what the fuck’s been going on over these 14
years? Like the British documentary 7UP, which
keeps tabs on its subjects in seven-year intervals,
I’m flashing back to 1994. Over several pints of
Guinness, I asked Geoff about making concessions:
“If we need to carry on and make records then we
need to see it as slightly business-oriented. To be
quite honest, you have to concede some things. I
mean, basically, what happens if we don’t concede
the things we don’t want to do? If we didn’t concede
some things we wouldn’t be able to make another
record, we wouldn’t have had the first record.”
As a follow-up, I asked if he was sure he’d want to
be doing this for a decade or more, and he stated sincerely
(sounding quite hip-hop): “In England, there
isn’t shit all else for me to do. I was told I was gonna
work in a glass factory. So it’s not like I’m saying I
got a sob story here. But what I’m saying is it’s sort
of like you get to this point where it’s the only thing
I can do and really enjoy. I get paid for it, you know
what I mean?”
But that didn’t make runaway success
nor the subsequent anti-climax, any easier.
Fast forward to March 2008 and he reflects, 14
years since that afternoon in a pub off Tompkins
Square Park: “I fell out of love with music around
‘98 and I quit for about three years. In the past I was
always obsessed by music, and I am now, but there
was this period when I couldn’t care.” But, he adds
with the same sense of commitment as back then,
“We never were really apart. The perception is ‘You
haven’t made a record in 10 years’ but we never kind
of disappeared. We just figured, ‘Don’t say anything
unless you have something to say.’”
Geoff explains that there had been battles
with their labels, Go! Beat (early home to Beats
International, which gained weight later as FatBoy
Slim) and FFRR Records (early home to The Rolling
Stones), who definitely wanted Portishead to say
more. More gigs, more remixes. While he’d made
an early name remixing Depeche Mode and Primal
Scream, the harsh self-critic admits that for some
work he didn’t always feel he had much to say.
“I though most of them were shit, really,” he says
of Portishead’s re-rubs. He rates the original mix of
“Sour Times” as “kind of interesting, and the Pete
Rock rip-off remix of ‘Numb,’” he laughs, confessing
that he would “use remixes as a way to copy the hiphop
guys I was into, whether it be RZA or Pete Rock
or Primo.”
Then things went from gradual to sudden. “We did
a long tour…I was in a long relationship that ended
in divorce. And then when music meant very little to
me, I didn’t know what the fuck I was supposed to
be doing outside of music. I was like I gotta go and
find myself,” he quickly re-edits this utterance, “not
as dramatic as that. I just kind of like, stopped. I’d
done music since I was teenager. I couldn’t actually
believe it.”
While Geoff had been slowly arriving at a point of
alienation that became crippling by ’98, Adrian was
living through the seventh of an at-times maddening
seven years of anonymity amidst the media frenzy for
the duo-packaging of Beth and Geoff. While he and
the band were vitally and contractually conscious
of how critical he was—from composing to arranging
to performing—the public was only conscious of
Beth and Geoff. Call the movie Being Adrian Utley
or, better yet, The Utley Identity, because like Jason
Bourne, Adriane Utley’s head-fuck experience in
Portishead has been an odyssey of self-revelation.
As any band member will attest, Adrian was as
important to the band as anyone, yet he remained
deep under cover, like the secret agents appearing
in the band’s spy-themed videos.
“Adrian has been the maddest thing; this has been
the hardest thing relationship-wise—the reality that
Adrianne’s always been there and [the audience]
doesn’t know who he is. If everyone understood
what his role…” Geoff trails off, before starting up
again sharply. “We sat down with this journalist who
didn’t even know him—and this is the most embarrassing
thing.” I mention that in the DJ-centric ‘90s
(also hard-working) Portishead touring DJ Andy
Smith got more press than Adrian, and we laugh.
Then stop.
If you think this is where you’ll find a sage comment
from Adrian about adjusting and living with it,
well, fuck that. Dude was understandably, straightup,
Jan Brady-bitter. “It was really fucking difficult.
I felt frustrated by talking to media at the time; we
were having success; I’d put so much of my life into
it and my whole life was focused, and I found it
incredibly interesting, how people can be misled.”
Irrespective of who and what the media focus on and
audiences are conscious of, the fact is, two of the
most beguiling breakout bands of the last decadeplus—
Portishead and Goldfrapp—have a very big
and important secret weapon between them, in this
man, Utley. Adrian, Utley.
Dude set out to be a jazz-man-forever from early
on, paying dues and honing chops at summer resorts
throughout his 20s. He played “quick-steps, foxtrots,
tangos and disco for about three years,” saving
money to move to Bristol, where he played “mainly
hard bop” with John Patton, who’d played on the
Blue Note label Utley revered. Progress. Before long,
he got into hip-hop. “I’d started with Hendrix and
Black Sabbath, Public Enemy had the same energy,
[but] A Tribe Called Quest was a turning point for
me. I was starting to lose interest in jazz because I
didn’t feel I had anything to say that hadn’t already
been said. I had to change something—a radical
change. I was playing with Jeff Beck as a session
man so that I could get a sampler and record.” [Ed
Note: Dude jammed with Jeff Beck, just to get money
for a sampler? That’s epic.] It’s like, in a roundabout
way, Adriane got exactly what he might just have
wished for at least once when he was very young and
romantic: to become a pioneering but torturously
overlooked artist.
Nonetheless, Adrian Utley and his guitar really
get around. “I played on all the Goldfrapp albums.”
(Dude let Alison crash on his couch during the first
Goldfrapp album—again, epic.) He’s also played
with “Sparklehorse on his Bones record—I’m really
into that world. Marianne Faithful, PJ Harvey, probably
some French people—and I’ve written some film
soundtracks.” A recent highlight was the filmfest
and six-guitar jam session he curated and played in
at ATP. Yes, he was fully an equal third of that lineup
selection.
For the upcoming dates, Geoff describes Utley’s
onstage role as unchanged since day one: “[He’s] the
conductor of the entire live mash-up.”
“I really like being onstage. Adrian says animatedly.
“I’m nervous because we have two days
of production rehearsals, and we’ve got to get the
sound and visuals together. I’m also really excited.”
He’s come a long way from doing the cha-cha in a
summer bungalow. They’ve all come a long way.
They’ve come a long way from foxtrots and tangos
for tourists, and cover bands and mercenary remixes
just to keep their music dreams alive. Now, Adrian
Utley and Portishead are returning to the spotlight,
whatever that means.
*** Read the full 1994 interview at URB.com
Portishead give you a reason to love them at Coachie ‘007
Beak let the sun shine in…
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