Geoff Barrow

And Lou Piniella of the Yankees at .303.

Leaders in batting in the National League, Jeff Barrow still leads.

He plays, of course, for Atlanta at .324.

Jack Clark of San Francisco at .321.

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.

So they wanted to give the album a very uniform, dusty sound.

But my my firstborn spent the weekend there camping with his mates and had the most magical time.

And I was there hosting a soundtrack in live courtesy of Mr. Jeff Barrow from Portishead and Invader, who had invited me down to host a panel about Invader with a wonderful collection, including himself and Ben Salisbury, Elizabeth, a.k.a. Gazelle Twin, and Mark Jenkins talking about Bait and Rose of Nevada and all sorts.

So we've recorded it and we're going to hold that back and give that to you, unveil it to you in the next couple of weeks as well, which is really exciting.

So loads of exciting stuff coming up as well.

... and film scorer from the band Portishead, the record label Invada, and films such as Ex Machina, Civil War, and the upcoming Game.

The one, the only, Geoff Barrow.

[laughs]

Hello.

Here- [laughs]

[laughs]

Here is what Geoff Barrow wrote.

"I feel weird about the whole breaking stuff down.

The songs on Blue Lines run at spliff tempos from a mellow, moonwalking 90 beats per minute down to a positively torpid 67 BPM.

And speaking of Trip Hop, Blue Lines is credited with establishing the genre, as well as the broader Bristol scene, which would include Portishead, Jeff Barrow actually assisted with the programming on Blue Lines, and Tricky's trailblazing solo work.

Soon, Trip Hop would spread as far as the United States through artists like DJ Shadow.

Finally, this being an Odd Tech or podcast, we looked for connections with Mass Attack, but really couldn't find much beyond the fact that both artists signed on to an ad campaign from David Byrne's Musicians united to win without war opposing the war in Iraq.

This is quite a deep question for someone who's played with Paul Cissette because I think this is the $64 million question.

But when Jeff Barrow and the others were piecing that together, what do you think they saw as successful Portishead because many other bands would see it as record sales or playing a certain venue or today having a certain amount of followers and likes and that type of thing.

It always struck me that Portishead were kind of the opposite of that.

So what do you think their metric of feeling satisfied with whatever they produced was?

Or if you've got the sound of the strings going into something else, or think of any combination where you've got, it's called spill or bleed, where other instruments are on the wrong microphones where they're not supposed to be.

So when you're going to mix that, It can be a nightmare.

And I know it was Jeff Barrow when he had to mix the band after he had a real fight on his hands.

Adrian Utley was the guitar player.

And I thought I'd start this interview, how I finished the last interview I recorded.

I don't know which order these podcasts are going out, but I interviewed Jeff Barrow from Portishead on Sunday.

And we talked a lot about a lot of things.

We got ranting about Nigel Farage at one point, which I expected to be far more of the interview.

But Quez, when I interviewed him, the producer... and ambient musician he said that I asked this been asking this question is what do people hope music would be like in 2050 because 25 years from now and um he said I want to be able to taste music so I've been asking everyone the question and um Jeff Barrow said that Dummy tastes like Benson and Hedges.

So can you ever think about your catalogue? Yeah, he's probably right about that.

I

And I don't really know other than – so the guy at Honda that I was working with, he kind of came from club racing.

His name is Jeff Barrow, and I think he's with Radical North America now.

For some reason, he just kind of got me.

I think he got where I came from.

They've-

... founding member, Geoff Barrow, Barrow, grew up there, and he named ...

I ne- I always wondered what Portishead meant, but it's, it's just a town [laughs] Portishead.

Really?

Uh, it's a pretty famous ...

It, it's, it's a really interesting book.

It's fr- if I'm remembering it, it's the right book.

It's sort of sci-fi meets, um, dark Hogwarts, if that makes any sense.