Portishead

Steve Lamacq played, not Sour Times but Sour Sour Times the remix version from the CD, on the Radio 1 Evening Session, a coupla weeks before release of the single. I can still vividly recall frantically looking for a pen to write the title down with. Weird how no-one really knew about the Massive Attack connection for quite a while, i think The Face had probably done a piece on them by then but i wasn't hip to that yet. DL of this parish did a really good piece in Q about Dummy in 2017. I'd forgotten that it all came together via the Enterprise Allowance Scheme.

I remember hearing "Sour Times" on the radio and thinking "I don't care who this group is, I am buying this immediately"

I also remember having a conversation several months later with my mom where I was gushing about the album and she said "Oh I just heard this NPR story about some similar music, I really liked it and I'll have to find some reference to it when you come to visit later" and when I was home next and saw the info, it was a story about Portishead, lol.

i thought i was such a dope hip hop producer after dropping samples of this in my buddies MPC60 and making little loop beats.

One of the few times I can distinctly remember the first time I heard something. I was at uni when it came out and don't think I was listening to the radio as much or I might have heard it there; instead I was in someone's room and they played Mysteron, very much in a This Is An Event kind of way. The theremin + drum roll sold me on it straight away.

I first heard this during a, uh, chemical episode, & "Roads" sent me into a paranoid freakout that lasted a couple of days. I bought the album soon thereafter and have stayed away from the chems ever since.

My college raver friends would always play this when we hung out in their dorm room smoking weed.

A rare perfect album.

instead I was in someone's room and they played Mysteron, very much in a This Is An Event kind of way

n.b. this person later achieved 15 minutes of minor fame by remonstrating with Russell Brand outside of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Ahh was hoping for a deluxe edition of this throwing in all remixes, versions and the 'To Kill A Dead Man' soundtrack. Maybe in another 25 years.

lol trump-esque discogs commenters

DOCTOR_DIATRIBE23 April 20, 2017
edited over 2 years ago
referencing Numb, 12", Single, Promo, GODX 114, 857 561-1
Love Numb the LP version but the other mixes just don't work!.In fact they are very crap as the music and vocals do not fit!... But they would if they were instrumentals!!!!!! Oh yes Earth Linger would be a moody banger in the vain of Hindsight by DJ Shadow!....Also A Tribute To Monk & Canatella is a nice slow hod nodder/swayer that sounds more like a tribute to Bob James ala Nautilus... 5***** for Numb + A Tribute To Monk & Canatella orig but the others left me not only numb but comatose! Shame!

Back in those weird 90s days of CD bootlegs juuuuust pre-dated CDR compilations of B-sides and EPs and things (not that I would know anything about that), I found this for reasonably cheap and was not complaining (it was almost certainly less than the cost of the actual import singles combined):

https://www.discogs.com/Portishead-Non-Album-Tracks/release/630440

YSI?

Astounding.

I heard Sour Times on the radio on a rainy day while waiting in my mom's van as she ran errands. And I was immediately super in-love with it. I was just waiting for it to come on again. But I was nervous about buying the record for some reason. Didn't think it would be as good or something, expected filler, etc.

But then a friend of mine turned it on while we were driving around getting high and I was blown away. I still didn't buy the album though, just because my friend had it and we were always together.

Skipped the self-titled, but dipped back in when Roseland NYC Live came out, and I bought the Sour Times single on that same day.

i remember seeing the video of "sour times" on mtv. it had nothing to do with the video which is on youtube these days. it was a kind of live video where you could see beth gibbons sing irc. i was totally blown away, i had never heard of the band before and nobody of my friends knew them. i was afraid to forget their name and that the band would be soon forgotten, they were totally obscure. the sadness in her voice grabbed me completely and i thought that this music was made only for me. i would have never thought that they would have so much success later on but if i remember well it took a couple of months before they really took off. of course i am very happy that they made it.

maybe it was on 120 minutes as that was more or less the only programme i folowed on mtv.

i picked up both original Sour Times cd singles (99p each) with some insane remixes/retakes, and fell hard.
still think the 'airbus reconstruction' (sounds like an early studio live version) is the best version.

KEXP is playing through the album with song-by-song commentary from Barrow and Utley: full interview audio stream and text excerpts here

https://www.kexp.org/read/2019/8/22/portisheads-geoff-barrow-and-adrian-utley-breakdown-dummy-25-years-later/

lol at automated transcription

Andy Smith, who was an old maid from Portishead,

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/arts/music/portishead-dummy-anniversary.html

Barrow would really prefer not hearing about the time(s) you fucked to Dummy.

Shouldn't have made so many slow jamz

still think the 'airbus reconstruction' (sounds like an early studio live version) is the best version.

airbus is an entirely different band! I love the hell out of that version as well.

well i never, i had no idea.
ta for the pointer.

He gave them a tape with a click track on it and Beth Gibbons’ vocal, refusing to play them the full song until they’d written and recorded the music.

Wow I never knew this either, what a great idea

I still haven't heard Airbus on their own though, to my shame.

I picked up a cheap used vinyl copy of Dummy about a week after release from the Hackney branch of Music & Video Exchange, where it was filed under Hip-Hop.

my favourite kind of "hip-hop". probably they confused hip-hop with trip-hop...

Everybody is saying "Sour Times" "Sour Times" "Sour Times". The first PH song I heard was "Glory Box", and many times over, and the contrast of Beth Gibbons's cutesy delivery on the verses and her belting out the choruses reminded me of.. Jewel. And so I ignored this band until "All Mine" came out-- again, with the cutesy delivery? but irresistible. I don't think I listened to "Dummy" in its entirety until 2000. "Glory Box" was a misleading single! It works on the album sequence but on its own there is nothing to distinguish it from like.. Sneaker Pimps or whatever.

I was in music limbo, cut off from radio and new releases, between the summer of 94 and end of 96, so only heard these guys once they had gained overexposure and kept being played in bars or student parties, which instinctively turned me off. For the longest time, I did not distinguish between 'Glory Box' and 'Hell Is Round The Corner'. It's "All Mine" and the 2nd album that brought me in.

except Sneaker Pimps came out 2 years after and were an obvious knockoff xp

i mean it's really not fair comparing them to groups that came out and copied their whole thing .

yeah, I also only really got into Portishead after hearing 'All Mine'. I'd heard some stuff before then (probably mostly Glory Box), but it wasn't enough for me to buy their album

Oh for sure! I just had no idea about the rest of the album

I actually love that Sneaker Pimps album, which doesn’t sound much like Portishead tbh

I always like Morcheeba, who similarly got tossed in as imitators but I thought sounded totally different.

The Roseland New York DVD, which you can get for a few quid, appears to come with all the films (To Kill A Dead Man etc) and a bunch of the first 2 album's videos.

https://www.discogs.com/Portishead-Roseland-New-York/release/178075

I don't remember how I first heard about Dummy (or what song I heard first, etc.) -- but I was an early adopter, and was ob-sessed with it. I made a lot of mixtapes for friends that year, with Dummy on one side and Massive Attack on the other.

I was gonna say, that Sneaker Pimps album rules.

"Spin Spin Sugar" rules (both the original and the Armand Van Helden speed garage mix)

i was huge into Dummy from the get-go. I bought it the same day along w/Definitely Maybe at a CD shop in Rockford IL.

WHINEY: People seem to like having sex to this record.

hope this was fact-checked

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/arts/music/portishead-dummy-anniversary.html

buhhh @ subs running an interview with Geoff Barrow, illustrating it with a photo of Barrow and Beth Gibbons, and captioning the photo only as showing Gibbons

Here's another (better?) one.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/aug/24/portishead-dummy-wasnt-a-chillout-album-25th-anniversary-geoff-barrow-adrian-utley-beth-gibbons?CMP=share_btn_tw

The Nils Frahm slagging is hilarious.

Seems both have a pretty big chip on their shoulder.

GB on Twitter sure is an old curmudgeon. Very off-putting.

i do agree with them that billie eilish rocks and nils frahm sucks

Utter codswallop https://t.co/ERuHEQ1GkI

— Geoff Barrow (@jetfury) August 25, 2019

Codswallop is a new one to me.

Olivia Colman has covered Portishead's brooding classic Glory Box in aid of Children In Need.

https://www.binaural.es/noticias/volveran-portishead-en-2020-con-un-nuevo-disco-bajo-el-brazo/

primavera sound's musical director claims he's heard they might have a new album next year. don't want to get my hopes up too much but...

yeah, I've been speaking to Geoff about this, off the record, and it's almost finished.

Ohwwwww

Fuck yessssssss