Musical innovation begins not on the stage, but in the bedroom. Just ask Geoff Barrow, the architect of Portishead’s alluring “Dummy” (Go! Discs), one of last year’s best albums, with its merger of film-noir atmospherics, hip-hop grooves and melancholy singing.
“I was a deejay in my bedroom for years,” says Barrow, who is from the town of Portishead outside Bristol in England. “I just wasn’t confident enough to play in clubs. But I had my decks and turntables, and found myself gravitating toward dance, electro and hip-hop music. I could never pretend to understand what’s going on in Los Angeles (rap music), but I was really drawn to the sound. Some of my friends bought guitars and made a racket that way; I just went in the other direction with samplers. I think the difference is, I saw songs rather than raps as a way forward.”
Barrow initially won acclaim as a remixer for the likes of Neneh Cherry and Primal Scream but didn’t get Portishead off the ground until he met Beth Gibbons.
“We were auditioning various singers, and they all were singing in this dancy, soul-ish vein. Beth, on the other hand, was very, very odd,” he says with a laugh. “For one thing, she would come up to you singing something she wrote in this incredibly loud voice.”
It’s an amusing story, if only because Gibbons sings with such delicacy and hushed melancholy on “Dummy,” her inflections conjuring up an after-hours rendezvous with a particularly world-weary diva.
“It’s taken three years to evolve, and she did it completely on her own,” Barrow says. “My only input has been to give her backing tracks that might make her sing or feel a certain way.”
In which case Barrow must have been hiding the razor blades in the studio while “Dummy” was being created-not since Joy Division has a pop record been suffused with such a sense of despair.
“If you listen to the best songs in pop history, they’re usually not particularly happy,” Barrow says. “I don’t want to be writing dance music. It’s too jolly. I think your music should reflect something of life, and the way things are going in this country, it’s not a happy time.”
Framed by death-rattle percussion, chilly keyboards and woozy guitars, “Dummy” ripples with foreboding and tension, the soundtrack for a psychodrama. It’s an attempt to deviate from the sonic norm in a decade Barrow finds all too obsessed with technology.
“Every decade in pop since the ’50s has had a distinct sound,” he says. “But the ’90s sound so much like the ’80s, with the crisp, clean production. Technology has become a way to achieve a standard sound, instead of anything innovative. (Portishead) uses technology to take music from all over the place and make combinations of sounds that normally wouldn’t belong together. I don’t think we’re originators . . I was just desperate to get real songs with real emotions over some music I wrote.”
Portishead will perform Tuesday at the Vic as part of the group’s first North American tour.
– Mojo Nixon rocks about as hard as any hillbilly out of San Diego ever has, a fact often obscured by his penchant for the off-color novelty song. But listen to these raunchy ditties back-to-back and what emerges is a full-scale war on business as usual, a series of blistering, frequently hilarious commentaries on the music industry and its penchant for myth-making, money-grubbing and self-congratulation: “Stuffin’ Martha’s Muffin,” his homage to a former MTV veejay, “Elvis is Everywhere,” “Don Henley Must Die,” “Debbie Gibson is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child.”
The latest addition to the canon is “Bring Me the Head of David Geffen,” scheduled for Nixon’s most recent solo release, “Whereabouts Unknown” (Blutarski), then pulled at the last minute. Nixon’s manager, Scott “Bullethead” Riley, won’t discuss the subject, and Nixon will do so in only the most oblique fashion: “David Geffen has a lot more lawyers than I do.” But Nixon’s publicist says the fledgling record label’s distributor got cold feet when he saw the title, and suggested it be pulled off the album to avert any potential legal trouble. “As far as I know, David Geffen didn’t make any calls” to issue threats, the publicist says.
The song is a typically gleeful savaging of corporate rock, an oxymoron in Mojo’s world, and it will no doubt receive its due when Nixon performs Saturday at Lounge Ax.
– With his provocative collection of recently published essays, interviews and criticism, “Bomb the Suburbs” (Subway and Elevated Press), William Upski Wimsatt has thrown down the gauntlet to a new generation of hip-hop writers. What’s more, he’s organizing a free performance-workshop-discussion for aspiring writers, hip-hoppers and the media from noon to 6 p.m. Saturday at 735 W. Division St. Wimsatt is putting up $1,000 as first prize in a writing contest he will announce.
“We’ll be looking for writing that uses poetry, rap and graffiti as devices,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any award that `Bomb the Suburbs’ would qualify for, so the aim was to create one. It’s a contest about your words and how you hustle them.” If it all sounds a tad seat-of-the-pants, Wimsatt wouldn’t have it any other way: “It is going to be a little bit of chaos, but hopefully it will be well-orchestrated chaos.” For details, call 312-409-3556.
