Up Close and Personal: Geoff Barrow

It’s been ten years since your last LP…

We finished the last tour in 1998 fairly broken people. We’re not made for the excesses of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. At that time The Verve had just split up, so were headlining all the European festivals. We were a studio band with fairly strange sound issues playing to 55,000 people. It all went down incredibly well. But there was loads of personal stuff going on behind the scenes, which was just horrible. We had all kinds of divorces and illnesses…Personally I quit music for about four years.

Hence the long break…

But what it came down to is that there’s never any point in releasing a record if you’ve got nothing to say, and at that point we were running on empty. We had to go out and live a little bit, rebuild our personal lives and get the drive to think we were doing something forward thinking. Adrian and Beth went off and did other things: Beth made her own record, of course, and Adrian did some soundtrack stuff. I escaped. I ran to Australia. In 2001 Adrian and I went to record some Portishead material in Sydney in a mate’s studio for seven weeks – but it just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like we were breaking any new ground.

So when did things start coming together for the new album?

Not until 2003, when I wrote “Magic Doors”. I wrote it, Beth sang on it, and it was the first time we thought “Oh, this is actually all right” you know what I mean? Basically, we have a policy which is one step forward, eight steps back. We’ve never felt any pressure from outside, it’s all internal – there’s a lot of self-doubt in Portishead. In 2006 we had a meeting with our record company, because our A and R guy went to run Virgin. So we thought we’d better go and meet whoever was left. So we went to meet the MD, and we played him seven tracks. We went back a year later and we had six tracks, because we’d dropped one and were just about to drop another three. If we didn’t have to work this way, we wouldn’t, believe me.

Where have the new ones come from?

Once we get on a roll, it’s OK – we wrote five or six tracks in six months. What happens is we write an idea, say a guitar and vocal, and that could sit on the shelf for three years. It gets pulled down every now and then, and I’ll have a tinker with it, and then get really depressed because I can’t come up with anything, a formula. We have this saying, “It’s all right to have a song. But where does it actually live?” Like, in what atmosphere does it live in?

There are a lot of pretty heavy jams on this album. Some krautrocky moments, the Silver Apples…

They’re not jams, though…there’s no happy mistakes. I’d love to be the sort of band that goes in, jams the hell out of something and then just chops it up, like Can. But we’re just two people. It’s me and Ade staring at each other, going, “Well, who’s going to be Damo?”. I run a label in Bristol now (Invada), and I’ve been exposed to quite a lot of heavy music over the past few years, like Om. Maybe it’s not apparent that we’re into that kind of stuff on the record, but about two or three years ago I had an experience. I’d been in the music industry since I was 19, but I went to an OM gig, and it was like seeing Public Enemy when I was a teenager. It was that uncompromising kind of sound.

Tell me a bit more about the roles in the group. When does Beth Gibbons come into the process?

It’s changed a little bit over the years, because these days Beth will come in with a whole song or a guitar riff. Obviously, we’ve worked with Beth for years so it just sounds like Beth – but with this album it sounds like a frustration with society has crept into things this time, rather than personal frustration. The main thing for us was to not repeat ourselves, but still maintain the emotional element to what we do.

Your sound has changed quite a lot…

The whole kind of…writing a big string thing, and playing a Rhodes piano is just so obvious…if you want that, then listen to the early albums. I’m not saying that there isn’t a sense of beauty on this record, because hopefully there is – but maybe you’ve got to work a little harder to hear it.

Your first LP made a huge impact – how do you feel about it now?

I’m glad people dug it, and it’s allowed us to be free of a lot of pressure because we sold enough of them to be kind of slightly more…progressive, maybe. It’s allowed us a lot of artistic freedom. It’s all very positive – how it was absorbed into the mainstream was very peculiar. The idea of people having dinner parties with it, meant that the mood of the record was overlooked a bit, really. Because that wasn’t really very nice. It was absorbed – but I’m not going to be a music police and tell people how they should listen to it.

Can you see them having dinner parties to this one?

No, I doubt it, but it’s not a reaction to that, it’s just where we are. At the time, some people took Dummy back to Woolworths because it had scratches on it – everyone thought that was odd when they first heard it. Hopefully this will be the same.

INTERVIEW: JOHN ROBINSON

taken from http://www.uncut.co.uk/music/portishead/reviews/11429