Move Over and Give Us Some Room: Portishead’s Dummy at 30

Beth Gibbons has only given a handful of interviews in her lifetime. I think often of one that she did in 1995, on a French talk show following the release of Dummy. The footage that exists on YouTube today is grainy and yellowed, the burning stage lights giving the effect of oxidized film strips much older than 30 years. The first question the interviewer asks her is about Geoff Barrow, about how long he and Gibbons have known each other. He pronounces the name Gy-off, like the English spelling, before translating the question into a much more concise French. Before Gibbons says even a single word, she laughs and waves her hand in front of her face—as if to say No, no, no, I am so sorry you have to translate for me.

As the camera pans to her, she puts her head in her hand, still laughing and still shielding her face from the screen. She’s trying to remember the chronology of Barrow’s career. She’s all nervous energy, bouncing and writhing in her seat, blonde hair shaking in front of her face. The interviewer asks her if she’d sung on any albums before joining Portishead, and she says no. “I sung a lot in my bedroom,” she admits. “Are there any tapes of that?” he replies. “Yeah, yeah probably.” He wonders whether or not she likes the Cocteau Twins, and she says she does. And that’s the entire interview.

The only other footage I have been able to reliably find comes from a 1995 episode of the Canadian show The New Music. Barrow and Gibbons are kind and gentle, but exclusively disagreeable. “Were you aware that it was such a unique sound, what Portishead captured?” the interviewers ask Gibbons, and she immediately says no. “Do you see it in cinematic terms, the way critics have seen it? Film noir?” Gibbons immediately starts, “Me personally, no…” It is the look on their faces when an interviewer tells them that Dummy was named one of the “greatest shagging records of 1994” that says everything they cannot. Gibbons stares incredulously ahead, arms crossed. Barrow has his shaking head in his hands. “I mean, I can’t see it, ” he says. “I could never shag to it, because I would just imagine the whole band being in the room with you. It’d be like Beth’s there laughing at you, and the rest of the band is there playing in your bedroom. It’d just be horrible.”

If Portishead can be defined by anything at all, it is pure consistency. They didn’t just avoid interviews, they shied away from taking any press photos and avoided playing their music live except for when they felt obligated to do so.

Here’s a quick history lesson for anyone who doesn’t know: Geoff Barrow was working at the Coach House Studios in Bristol and, in 1991, he became a tape operator for the legendary trip-hop act Massive Attack as they were making their debut record Blue Lines. According to the legend, Barrow was a horrible tape operator who couldn’t do anything right—in 1999 he told Mojo that the only thing he was really good at in the studio with Massive Attack was making tea.

Still, the group heard potential in some of Barrow’s tapes and connected him with Nenah Cherry; he would produce part of her 1992 album, Homebrew. Barrow met Gibbons by chance later that year at an Enterprise Allowance convention and, shortly after, ran into Adrian Utley for the first time at the Coach House. Utley was amazed by the 20-year-old Barrow’s knowledge of sampling; he had recognized a Billy Cobham beat on the Massive Attack record and wanted to know how they got it to repeat like that. According to some versions of the story, this was the beginning of a whole new approach to music. The sound was the sound of the future, and Bristol was the place where it was happening.

It’s a textbook rock ‘n’ roll fable. We have a setting, a cast of heroes, a backstory and a prize. We have all the makings of a perfect story: Portishead are our paradigmatic protagonists; the vanguards of the future; the protectors of the sound. Naturally, of all the records from their network of jazzed-out hip-hop pathfinders, it is Dummy that has aged the most gracefully and remains the most timely. It was Dummy that won the Mercury Prize in 1995, and it was Dummy that went Platinum in four countries—3x Platinum in the United Kingdom alone.

Except none of this is true, at least not really. Yes, the previously attributed honors and awards landed on Dummy, and yes, there was a group of artists living and working in Bristol in the early ’90s who were chopping up ’70’s soul themes and looping them under the pretty, lucid sound of a female soprano. But none of it is ever as easy as it seems 30 years later. Time has a tendency to blur realities, but it also has a tendency to sharpen edges of things that were never meant to be so discreet in the first place. Time takes a few names, a location and what can no better be described than as a vibe and tries its hand at telling an entire story with all of it.

Retrospect then, has a tendency to course-correct these elisions and oversimplifications. Looking back with a more critical eye often includes taking Portishead and Dummy out of their context and conceding that yes, there was a Bristol sound, but Portishead were doing something different. Usually, they were doing something better. For all the faults of that thought pattern, maybe it’s true. If I said that Dummy was the greatest trip-hop album ever recorded, who would dare argue with me? Maybe Tricky, or Robert Del Naja. Time is a finicky thing; the grand equalizer and grand exceptionalizer. Maybe if we start with the record and the people and the places within the world of Dummy, we can create our own legend.

Let’s begin with Barry Gray, the British composer who worked on Thunderbirds—a science-fiction TV series from 1965 with puppets as its cast. Gray always composed with a full orchestra. On Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, another Thunderbirds-type puppet-fantasy show that he worked on, there was a group called the Mysterons that played the captain’s main enemies. Gray composed the theme music for the Mysterons, and he used an ondes martenot, a theremin-like French instrument that was most famously utilized in Star Trek songs. Barrow eventually found a Barry Gray LP with Thunderbirds music on the A-side and the theme from Mysterons on the B-side.

Portishead kick off Dummy with their chilling “Mysterons,” a song that uses an instrument that conjures a theremin (or ondes martenot) as its main theme. “Mysterons” is one hell of an opening track. In the first 20 seconds, it arrives like a soft swaddle of a Fender Rhodes twinkling, all the grandiosity of a James Bond theme and the scratching of a needle pulled back and forth across the grooves of an worn-out LP. And then: Beth Gibbons starts singing.

Make no mistake: Portishead is not a vocal project—not primarily, at least. It isn’t primarily not a vocal project, either, but it has very little in common with, say, the vocal suave of a lounge singer at a dinner party, or even the one-woman-singer-songwriter projects that would soon pop up over in the States and define much of ‘90s femme-led alternative music. In a 2017 Guardian article, Barrow said that, if someone told him that they were playing Dummy at their dinner party, he would “want to go in with a baseball bat and smash the [expletive] out of their fondue set.” But when Beth Gibbons sings, something shifts. Something shifted in me the first time I heard her voice, wailing on “Glory Box” in the background of Greg Araki’s 1997 black comedy Nowhere. (Absolutely nothing about the Los Angeles absurdist teen romp seems, in retrospect, appropriate for the inclusion of a Portishead track, but the band said that they don’t like to limit the use of their music in film—unless it’s slated to soundtrack a sex scene.)

But Gibbons’s voice is cosmic—and I do not tend to use that word lightly. You might not know it at first, but the verses of “Mysterons” are controlled; as Gibbons’s voice goes higher, it thins out and softens to ease the arrangement’s transition back into a beat. As she nears the song’s hook, her husky soprano takes on a texture that crackles and pops just like the 12-inch wax that Barrow is spinning alongside her. Listen to how she sings this ocean, how her voice opens up on the back half of ocean. Instead of trembling in fear, her vibrato cracks in utter conviction. The classic hook, if you can even call it that, is the repeated “Did you really want?” over and over. There’s so much desire crammed into and smoldering out of her voice. The next 44 minutes of Dummy follow in the paradigm that “Mysterons” set out: Beth Gibbons wailing composed ecstasy over some of the sickest beats you or I have ever heard.

I went on a date during my sophomore year of college that was, all things considered—including my profound immaturity—deeply and utterly satisfactory. I was 19 years old and a hopeless, useless romantic. I hadn’t been on many dates by then, so when I asked a tall boy if he wanted to come to a photography MFA showcase with me and he not only agreed, but was willing to discuss with me the symbolization of different shades of blue in reference to clinical versus natural landscapes, I felt like my heart was going to explode. When he left after dinner and I set out walking back to my dorm, I stopped at a local ice cream shop to celebrate my small, geeky win. Over the speakers, “Roads” was playing. Gibbons was caroling the “How could it feel, this wrong / From this moment?” lines. It couldn’t, Beth. Nothing in this moment could feel wrong. “Roads” is not a happy song, but I couldn’t stop beaming. It was a sign—of God knows what, but it was a sign and it was for me.

Dummy’s blue cover stares at me still. It’s dark enough as not to feel clinical, but too saturated to resemble anything natural. I think of Maggie Nelson: “Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance?” I think of disturbance alongside “Roads” and alongside Dummy, this album I love. I think I may be in love with the disturbance, in love with the way that Utley and Barrow would take a sample they liked, invite a session drummer into the studio to alter some of the kicks, record the new drum track onto a 16-track tape and then press the audio from the tape onto a 12” vinyl, taking the physical record and dragging it around on the floor of the studio, making sure to scratch it up. Maybe I’m in love with the way that they would play broken instruments on purpose, including the Fender Rhodes keyboard from which the name “Roads” was taken.

It’s a strange thing—one of the reasons that Portishead put so many steps of mediation between their samples and their recordings was to prevent their samples from being taken or played out by other artists in the studio and the scene they germinated from. Novelty was always the goal, but they made something that sounded old—not old in the sense of tired or hackneyed, but in the sense of tattered, eroded and destroyed. It was music tied up in the sounds of the past becoming something new. Time, it’s a finicky thing. There’s a bleakness to Dummy that complicates things. Take “Sour Times,” the record’s highest-charting single in the US—and how it’s based around a sample from the score of the Mission Impossible television series from the 1960s. It’s jazzy and badass; that spy song jangle is immediately unmistakable. Yet whatever whimsical movement it creates becomes dust as soon as Gibbons goes “Nobody loves me / It’s true.” She follows that with “Not like you do,” but sings it as cheeky as a Bond theme, but not as believable as nobody loves me. Nobody loves me is what sticks.

“Wandering Star” leads us further into that pit of despair, opening with a staccato beat that sounds like the slower, moodier precursor to what Portishead would do on “Machine Gun” 14 years later on their aptly-titled third and final album. “Wandering stars,” Gibbons sings “For whom it is reserved? / The blackness, the darkness, forever” over drums that are so, so cold. The song is unnerving, and it’s unnerving to imagine that in the 18 months it took Portishead to recorded Dummy, the future looked so dismal. Dummy came in the wake of the recession earlier in the decade; Bristol itself was a bleak place to live. Barrow was suffering, struggling with his physical and mental health through the beginning of the ‘90s. “I thought the war was the end of the world,” he told The Guardian in 2019 about living through the Gulf War.

The scarier thing, perhaps, is that it wasn’t the end of the world but Dummy was the perfect soundtrack for an apocalypse that never happened—for a frightened and frightening world that remains committed to its own encroaching desolation. I’d say it’s even more frightening to listen to Dummy today, three decades later, and know that, seven years ago, Bristol was named the UK’s most racially segregated city. The world’s militant, imperial powers continue their unspeakable allegiance to atrocity, something captured so spiritually on Portishead’s introduction to the world.

“Glory Box” was the first Portishead song I ever heard, and “Glory Box” is the final song on Dummy. It’s also the record’s most theatrical moment—far and away the most popular song that Portishead ever released, despite their original hesitancy to put it out as a single. Barrow told Pitchfork in 2008 that he didn’t want to release the track as a teaser because he thought it sounded too commercial as a standalone piece of music. It was released again in January of 1995 and charted in seven countries, including a Top 15 appearance in the UK.

The main theme of “Glory Box” is a sample from Isaac Hayes’s 1971 “Ike’s Rap 2.” The way it sounds in Portishead’s hands is partially due to mere happenstance: Barrow found a physical copy of Hayes’s record that had been damaged and warped from the sun. He and Utley altered the sample with the same meticulousness with which they approached all else; every aspect of every sound on Dummy is designed, manipulated and perfected—perhaps the only wild card moment on Dummy. does come during “Glory Box,” when Utley starts playing his Hendrix-tinted guitar line, Barrow grabs his whammy bar and fucks with it—just a little bit at first, but enough that, by the end of the song, the bends sound completely out of whack after announcing it was “the beginning of forever and ever.”

The lyrics on Dummy at first struck me as abstract, oblique and like a vehicle for sound rather than an attempt at storytelling. But “Glory Box” came on and “Give me a reason to be a woman” came out of Gibbons’s mouth and I’ve felt something I haven’t been able to explain since. Even though Gibbons herself claimed that the operative lyric in that song was “Move over and give us some room.” Maybe what she needed was freedom. Maybe what I was looking for was justification. Both of us, though, were learning how to be a woman. And maybe it’s one of those things that you never stop learning, always looking for space to spread out and an excuse to take it. “I just want to be,” Gibbons pauses. “A woman.”

I imagine Gibbons again sitting on that couch during her New Music interview. I imagine she wants to look the interviewer in the eye and tell him to move over and give us some room. Again: maybe the love itself is the disturbance. Maybe Portishead was never meant to be a famous band or supposed to sell millions of albums or come to define an entire era and a city and a mood and a philosophy with just three meticulously tight, varying records. All I know is that it is very rare, if ever, that a debut album arrives with such certainty of what it wants to say and how it wants to say it.

Madelyn Dawson is a music and culture writer based in New York. Her work has been published in Paste, SPIN and INDUSTRY Magazine, among others. She can be found everywhere @madelyndwsn.