Interview: Portishead

By Phil Udell on Wednesday, 8 July 2009One Comment | Print this post

Given the very different music industry that they emerged into, blinking in the light, did Portishead ever consider jacking in their contract and start releasing their own music themselves? Not according to Adrian.

“The record company never bothered us at all,” he notes. “It would have been mad to do that, and I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. It wouldn’t have worked and they know that. We were working hard enough on what we were doing but because we’ve sold records, we’ve never been in debt to them, so they can’t hassle the fuck out of us. If you take huge advances, then you’re immediately in debt and you know what the bank are like when you owe them money. Luckily, we’ve never had that and we’ve always had sympathetic people around us: they’ve never bombarded us.”

For such an affable person, Utley is still forthright on certain subjects. “I’m slightly delighted by the demise of MTV,” he says, before rediscovering his inner English gentleman. “I mean, I’m not happy about the demise of anything related to music, no matter what it is, but it’s great that you don’t have to make a £100,000 video with speedboats and helicopters. We’re making our videos for very little these days. I loved our Chris Cunningham video for ‘Only You’. It wasn’t cheap to make but it was imaginative. There is a lot to think about and, as we manage ourselves, there’s more every day. After three or four weeks of promo, I started thinking ‘I wouldn’t mind playing some music now’.”

Ah, the music. The third Portishead opus is with us and it’s called, ahem, Third. From the opening rumbling sub-bass of ‘Silence’ to the final, crashing chords of ‘Threads’, it’s a tough old listen. Track after track ushers in a range of disjointed, jarring sounds. In short, music for dinner parties, it isn’t. Adrian agrees: “It can be warring to get through it all in one go, there’s a lot of information coming at you.”