Beth Gibbons may be the most seriously downcast pop singer since Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, whose depressing songs blurred the line between reality and fantasy to such an extent that he ended up committing suicide in 1980.
Gibbons, who sings like a world-weary chanteuse playing out the string at a smoky after-hours gin joint, places her characters in a succession of brooding scenarios that Curtis would surely understand. Their worldview is perhaps best summed up in a line from”Undenied,” on Portishead’s new self-titled album (Go!): “How can I carry on?”
The melancholy purr has struck a chord: “Portishead” has been the No. 1 record on the college music charts for weeks. Though the emotions are real, they represent only a fragment of Gibbons’ life outside the recording studio, says Portishead founder Geoff Barrow.
“She is not a near-suicidal, massively depressed person,” says the producer, who does all the interviews in place of his media-shy partner. “She’s as fiery as anyone I know, and can drink us all under the table. She just uses music to express feelings that we all have at one time or another.”
As for why Gibbons keeps returning to the same disturbing subject matter, Barrow claims he doesn’t have a clue: “I don’t know any more about the lyrics than you do. It’s just the way we work — Beth creates the lyrics in privacy and they come from a personal place. So we don’t know what she’s singing about, and I think it works better that way.”
The key to understanding the approach is viewing the band’s albums more as well-constructed movie soundtracks than as confessional statements. The liner notes on “Portishead” are even arranged like movie credits, and the sonic backdrops created by Barrow, multi-instrumentalist Adrian Utley and engineer Dave McDonald are the stuff of noir murder mysteries and shadowy spy thrillers.
Portishead’s 1994 debut, “Dummy,” was one of those albums that comes along every few years that sounds like nothing else around, a world unto itself. Like the Cowboy Junkies’ 1988 “The Trinity Session” or Nick Drake’s 1972 “Pink Moon,” it’s a soundtrack for a sleepless night, with only the shadows for company.
Though it wasn’t necessarily the first so-called “trip-hop” album, “Dummy” helped define the sound: hip-hop beats flavored by spooky atmospherics. Portishead is the name of a small seaside town 13 miles from Bristol, the epicenter of the trip-hop scene that grew up around Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead.
It took years for Portishead to forge its sound, with bedroom deejay Barrow channeling his obsession with hard-core hip-hop into something original: slow, sinister beats and heavily psychedelic textures. After auditioning countless vocalists, he met Gibbons, who shed her skin as a blues-rock shouter for a more subtle approach that suggests jazz and cabaret singing.
Barrow acknowledges that the success of “Dummy” weighed heavily on the sessions for the follow-up. Instead of lifting sounds from old records, Barrow, McDonald and Ultey spent 14 months creating their own stockpile of samples — a painstaking approach in which days of session work might produce a one-second sound byte.
“I went through six months of depression, writer’s block, and everyone went through a period where they just weren’t feeling it anymore,” Barrow says. “We started making some progress when we stopped worrying about what other people might think and just worked on what felt right.”
Despite the dire scenario, a sense of humor somehow emerged; the nonexistent Sean Atkins Experience is credited with providing a bit of the fictional 1957 song “Hookers & Gin” for the Portishead track “Western Eyes.” Atkins is actually a close friend of Barrow’s and sings on the track. And occasionally the band would hear some music that would get the creative juices flowing; the obscure, ’60s psychedelic band the United States of America gets a nod in the credits for the trippy “Half Day Closing.”
“We don’t listen to so-called `trip-hop’; we’re mostly inspired by older stuff, going back to the ’30s,” Barrow says. “What’s important is that the music conveys some sort of real experience, an emotion that cuts through everything.”
Which is why, in the Portishead arsenal, the song — and not the sound — is still king. Gibbons writes melodies and lyrics over the backing tracks, and her voice — even though it is sometimes distorted — remains the focal point of the music. On the song “Elysium,” Portishead veers from this approach with a sparse guitar elegy that bridges the vocal parts, like a respite from Gibbons’ voice of obsession: “You can’t deny how I feel/And you can’t be safe from me.”
“We didn’t go as far as we wanted to go in that one,” Barrow says. “But the idea of creating some space in the song before the storm comes in was the idea. For us, the vocal is the important thing, though right now I feel like we’re caught between taking the music somewhere else and the restriction of the lyrics. I love the way Stereolab has created this restructured, free-flowing thing with their arrangements. Eventually we’ll get somewhere between what we’re doing now and what they’re doing.”
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the facts
Portishead
7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Riviera Theatre
4746 N. Racine Ave.
$20
312-559-1212
