Dummy – Portishead – Released August 22nd, 1994, Go! Beat / London
Dummy is the 1994 debut album by British group Portishead.
Consisting of DJ/producer Geoff Barrow, multi-instrumentalist Adrian Utley and singer Beth Gibbons, Portishead were one of the breakout successes of that year, swiftly becoming one most influential groups of the 90s.
The group’s use of hiphop beats, along with other elements, namely sampling and scratching, frequently led to them being mislabelled as triphop.
A more accurate label would be “Bristol sound”, despite the fact that none of the members are actually from Bristol.
The closest to Bristol is Barrow, hailing from the coastal town of – you guessed it – Portishead, some 30-odd minutes away.
That said, while none of them are from Bristol, they did meet in Bristol where Barrow was working in studios and already very much embedded in the local scene.
It’s here that he met Beth Gibbons, who’d moved to Bristol hoping to build her singing career. Later, he also met Adrian Utley, a multi-instrumentalist and session musician with ties to the jazz scene.
It was typical pre-digital era serendipity, in other words, three people meeting at precisely the right time in exactly the right place.
Bristol was home to a thriving music scene, comparative to its size, with a strong tradition which included punk bands, reggae soundsystems and hiphop collectives, such as the Wild Bunch crew, the group who would eventually morph into Massive Attack.
It’s also worth mentioning that Barrow was working in the studio (as a tape op if memory serves) during the making of Massive Attack’s debut, Blue Lines, and clearly drew on that inspiration and experience three years later.
Hence the reason Portishead are considered part of the Bristol sound, along with Massive Attack and former member Tricky. An umbrella term which also includes pioneering groups like Smith and Mighty and is often stretched further to include people like drum and bass pioneer (and fellow Mercury Prize winner) Roni Size.
Portishead, however, didn’t just differ from Bristol geographically, they were also slightly distant musically. Drizzly Bristol may world’s apart from the sunny Caribbean, but the town always kept its soundsystem roots front and centre.
Portishead, however, while retaining the hiphop, soul, jazz and other elements of Bristol, brought more of a retro cinematic vibe distinct from anything else at the time.
With Dummy’s often-laborious recording process, meanwhile, Portishead also practically invented the lofi aesthetic.
Barrow would bring real musicians into the studio and record them, before mangling their performances sounds through samplers and/or vintage audio effects gear.
On some tracks, studio recordings were pressed to acetate or dub plates so that Barrow could then scratch those recordings over the top of his beats, while new live recordings from Utley and other musicians were overdubbed on top.
Before Dummy nobody had ever dreamed of such studio blasphemy.
In other words, Portishead were the originators of lofi a term which has since become so bastardised we now associate it with kids making generic beats with their laptops.
In 1994, however, the idea of making complete tracks on a laptop was still science fiction, and I was a young, moody, spotty teenager who had just recently discovered Massive Attack’s Blue Lines.
A short review of the album was all it took to convince me I needed to hear this band, so I bought my first copy of Dummy on tape and it lived in my Walkman for months thereafter.
That was three decades ago. And I still consider this to be one of the finest albums ever made.
So, for the album’s 30th anniversary, let’s go back through it, track by track, as I pick my favourite moments.
(Incidentally, for this review I’m focussing on the original ten-track debut, i.e. excluding the track It’s A Fire which was included on subsequent (non-vinyl) North American releases.)
Dummy Run
Kicking off the Portishead Dummy run we have Mysterons, mashing up blunted hiphop beats with 50s scifi b movie vibes.
It’s the perfect choice to open the album because even today this one sounds so out there. So you can only imagine how bizarre this sounded all the way back in 1994.
I also credit Adrian Utley with helping to repopularise the theremin, one of the first ever true electronic instruments from the 1920s.
The theremin was named for its inventor, the Soviet scientist Lev Theremin, who created the instrument in the hope that it might gain recognition as a serious orchestral instrument comparable to a violin.
It’s certainly a versatile and expressive instrument and one that takes careful attention to play convincingly. Which was part of the problem, and unfortunately for Lev, the theremin was never taken seriously as was viewed more as a novelty instrument.
Its otherworldly quality (and Russian origin) meant it was used extensively in the scores of American, Cold War-era science fiction movies, hence the reason that, many decades later, its unique sound is intrinsically linked with flying saucers in our collective consciousness.
That didn’t stop Theremin from inventing more musical instruments, however, including the rhythmicon, one of the first ever sequencer/drum machines ever made.
On Mysterons, Adrian Utley brings the theremin back to its roots in a sense, it’s an eerie yet beautiful sounding instrument, full of melancholic nuance and mystery, and one that lends Beth Gibbons’ vocals even more of a brooding, ethereal edge.
Incidentally, the name of the track comes from the children’s TV series Captain Scarlett, made by the same company who made Thunderbirds.
Clearly the producers blew all their budget on the puppets and models because the show’s adversaries, the Mysterons from Mars, were little more than electric torch shapes projected onto the set walls. Scary stuff!
Jumping forward from 1950s scifi to 1960s spy noir vibes with Sour Times.
Serving as both the albums album’s second single and second track, Sour Times samples the great Lalo Schifrin from his soundtrack to the 1969 movie Mission Impossible.
The result is another classic track which sounds like Harry Palmer riding with Cypress Hill. And then there’s Beth’s incredible vocal performance, delivering unforgettable lines like, “nobody loves me, it’s true, not like you do.”
Mysterons grabbed our attention, Sour Times got us hooked. And by the time this song was over, we were all now Portishead fans for life without realising it.
Strangers features one of the few brief rays of sunshine in the album, via some jazzy guitar licks from Utley plus sporadic samples of Elegant People by Weather Report.
But, not surprisingly, the weather report for Portishead is always kinda dreary so this sunny patch doesn’t last long.
Love the head-nodding beat on this one also, reminds me a lot of Barrow’s Planet D remix for Sabres of Paradise on the Haunted Dancehall album, which came out a few months later.
Onto track four, It Could Be Sweet – no could be’s about it, this is one is as sweet as it gets. It’s without a doubt one of the most tender songs on the album, comparatively positive, but Beth’s voice ensures it’s still tinted that ever-azure shade of signature Portishead blue.
As for the keyboards, the phrase dulcet tones is a bit of a cliché but I’m struggling to think of a better term to describe Barrow’s Rhodes piano playing.
Wandering Star is Portishead pared down to its bare elements; a dope hiphop beat, slow but strident, punctuated by Barrow’s blues scratches while Beth’s delicate voice serves as the perfect counterpoint.
In theory both elements should be completely immiscible, yet they complement each other perfectly. That’s the true magic of Portishead. And when the Hammond organ is introduced towards the end of the track the effect is borderline spiritual.
Numb was the first single from the album and also has one of its dopest beats.
Consummate composition and production on display, as aways, with those chilling Hammond organ chords, that phat languid beat with its brooding sub bass, otherworldly scratching and that resonant, pealing snare.
And then Beth comes in, “I’m ever so lost, I can’t find my way”, while the wistful ghost of Nina Simone possesses her vocal performance sporadically throughout.
Onto my favourite track on the whole album and easily one of my favourite tracks of all time, Roads.
The name of this track being a play on the Fender Rhodes electric piano which Barrow plays on this and other tracks throughout the album.
Its gentle, undulating tones form the main melodic component of the album, underpinned by a crunchy yet muted beat.
Beth Gibbons gives what’s perhaps her best vocal performance on the album, her devastating delivery ensuring we feel the emotional gut-punch of every single word.
This experience is then elevated further by judicious use of strings and wah guitar to form what I personally believe to be the greatest songs ever written.
I say this because, after 30 years, it still has the power to choke me up. And I can think of no other song capable of that feat.
And here I am listening back and… I assure you I’m all man, I just got some dust in my eye is all.
Powerful stuff.
Pedestal brings back the ruffness, with more crunchy beats and loud scratching. The energy of this track rises and falls between verses. But the highlight for me is the trumpet solo from Bristol-based jazz musician Andy Hague.
The solo in itself is amazing but it’s also perhaps the most obvious example of a track where the musicians were recorded live, then stamped on vinyl before being replayed by Geoff Barrow, who adds some superlative scratch flourishes to give the solo more of a hiphop edge.
It’s a long-winded approach to sound design which, these days could be easily replicated digitally with something like Traktor or Serato, but the results wouldn’t be the same.
The analogue methodology required to achieve this back in 1994 took a lot of time, attention and love, and that’s what really shines through on this performance, giving this album additional layers of depth and authenticity.
Biscuit samples the track “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again”, a 50s hit by US jazz singer Johnnie Ray but pitches it waaay down to an unsettling degree.
Decades later, I’m still railing against how Portishead keep getting mislabelled as triphop, but I get it. This one’s especially trippy and its hazy atmospherics further bolstered Geoff Barrow’s global position as a top-tier beatmaker.
It should come as no surprise, either, to discover that Portishead’s success made waves stateside, too, grabbing the attention of producers like RZA and DJ Muggs.
Glory Box is the final track from the album and its third single. Part lovesong, part rock ballad, part feminist war cry, it mashes the staple Portishead sounds with heavier rock guitars, with those unforgettable strings sampled from Isaac Hayes.
The track in question being Ikes Rap II, which would be sampled again the following year by Tricky on his track Hell Is Round The Corner.
This is another one of Beth’s best performances on the album, but while other performances were more subdued, this one is delivered with great gusto while Adrian Utley’s guitar snarls and growls throughout.
A perfect end to what is, three decades and counting later, a perfect album.
Amazing Head
Portishead was a serendipitous meeting of three people, each with their own unique yet complementary talents, who banded together to create original new music.
While most new bands go through a teething period, Portishead arrived on the scene at just the right time, fully formed with a finely-polished debut quite unlike anything we had heard before.
With Dummy, Portishead carved out a unique niche within the musical landscape while also tapping into something in the 90s zeitgeist which, contrary to popular opinion, wasn’t all hands-in-the-air euphoria.
Dummy would go on to win the 1995 Mercury Prize, beating out another 90s classic, Leftism by Leftfield.
Portishead would then go on to release several longplays, including two more studio albums, 1997’s Portishead and 2008’s Third.
The success of Dummy resulted in a decade’s worth of copycats, a couple of half decent ones, plus a whole ton of wannabes long since forgotten.
In theory the formula is simple – female vocals over hiphop beats – but try as they might, nobody else could quite get the blend right.
Meanwhile other groups from around the same time found they were being constantly (and improperly) compared with Portishead and mislabelled as triphop.
The most notable example of this was Sneaker Pimps, who apparently resented the comparison so much that, despite the huge success of their debut album Becoming X, fired then-singer Kelli Ali, to distance themselves from the so-called triphop label.
In addition to her work with Portishead, Beth Gibbons released three collaborative albums and one true solo album, Lives Outgrown, which came out this year
Adrian Utley has also released collaborative solo works, the latest of which, once again came out this year. His enviable and eclectic resume of session work, meanwhile, includes acts as diverse as Massive Attack, Goldfrapp, David Arnold and LTJ Bukem, Jeff Beck and Tom Jones.
Geoff Barrow, on the other hand, would build on the cinematic soundscapes of Portishead by pivoting to movie scores, with his longtime collaborator Ben Salisbury.
The breakout moment came when Barrow and Salisbury recorded the 2015 score for Alex Garland’s stunning directorial debut, the scifi thriller Ex Machina.
Barrow and Salisbury would go on to score several three more of Garland’s movies including another scifi thriller Annihilation, the creepy supernatural thriller Men and this year’s Civil War.
Also worth mentioning is 2012’s Drokk: Music Inspired By Mega-City One, a synthwave-adjacent concept album inspired by the world of Judge Dredd.
The timing of this is no coincidence, since Garland served as both writer and producer of the 2012 movie Dredd (another modern classic). So it’s easy to look at the Drokk project as an audition, of sorts, for the score work which came later.
Considering the spy noir sounds of Dummy, especially on tracks like Sour Times, I’ve always thought that Portishead should have done a Bond song. As the 90s faded I gave up on that hope, thinking the moment had passed.
But now, given Barrow’s now-extensive score work, not to mention Utley’s previous work with David Arnold, perhaps a full 007 score might be more appropriate.
James Bond goes to Bristol, sure why not. I’d buy tickets to hear that.