Beth Gibbons

You know, they would take dashes of film music and jazz and hip hop and combine them all into something chilly and haunting and really beautiful.

So you have Beth Gibbons on one hand, who just has a natural beguiling instrument of a voice, smoky and delicate.

You have Geoff Barrow, who is a hip hop head who was into looping and sampling and scratching, and then Adrian Utley was a jazz session guy who had this really amazing collection of exotic instruments.

So they combine all these things together, and they come up with an album that's musically interesting, but it's really the production techniques that make it innovative.

co-invented Philomena Conk and wrote for both Paddington movies.

He plays keyboards to Beth Gibbons out of Porter's Head.

Is there anything Jason Haisley can't do? Hi, Andrew.

Is there anything you can't do? Yeah, as we've discussed before, skateboarding.

But then, like, most of the music that we were writing were, like, deep into electronics.

And then, like, at some point I realized, like, But she sounds almost like Beth Gibbons.

Like, if we put her voice in an actual trip-hop song, she's going to...

You have a beautiful voice.

A government job scheme for unemployed people looking to start businesses.

Jeff Barrow was trying to launch a recording studio and Beth Gibbons had just moved from rural Devon searching for a musical path.

They clicked instantly.

Gibbons had this extraordinary, completely untrained voice and Barrow was an obsessed beat maker with a love for sampling.

set aside your fears and lies

Portishead was formed in Bristol, England in 1991 with Beth Gibbons on vocals, Jeff Darrow as a multi-instrumentalist and the chief producer, and Adrian Utley on guitar.

The band's audio engineer was so important to their sound that he is often considered a fourth member of the band.

His name is Dave McDonald.

There doesn't seem to be any momentum towards a fourth Portishead album, though the band insists that they haven't officially broken up.

They are all just busy with other things.

Beth Gibbons released a solo album in 2024, and Jeff Barrow is heavily involved in working on film.

while Utley works steadily as a studio musician.

Okay.

I know, right? Okay, well, tell me something else about Beth Gibbons.

I don't know.

What? We'll talk about her later.

Exactly.

I mean...

We also forgot to mention Beth Gibbons has three sisters, so she probably wrote It's a Fire for them, trying to give them inspiration in their trad wife lives as she left them behind for that Bristol life.

There were trad wives? You know this? Yes.

It is universally hailed as being one of the ultimate defining masterpieces of the trip hop genre.

It combined emotional vocals from Beth Gibbons with dark lo-fi jazz loops and turntable scratches, transformed the landscape of electronic music.

One of the most important electronic albums ever made.

Peaked at number two on the UK albums chart.

It's a bit Aaliyah.

It's a bit Beth Gibbons.

But you're like, man, she could really...

I'd love a whole album of this type of thing on more straightforward production, but then it wouldn't be Twigs.