In the UK, a dummy isn’t just a mannequin or an idiot; it’s also what Americans would call a pacifier. Savor the irony in the title of Portishead’s debut album. The album may suggest coziness, sonic swaddling, the gentle soundtrack to a raver’s comedown—and in 1994, ravers were plenty familiar with pacifiers. But Dummy doesn’t coddle, it unsettles. It tastes not like warm milk but coppery and bitter, like blood. Despite its two-plus decades spent soundtracking makeout sessions, it cradles a terrible loneliness in its heart. Despite its reputation as dinner-party music, it is straight-up discomfort food: curl-up-and-die music, head-under-the-covers music. It’s dark, dank, and quintessentially Bristol, mingling a chilling harbor fog with the resin of a thousand spliffs left to burn down in a haze.
With the exception of two UK singles released shortly before the album, there was no advance warning of the wind blowing in from the West Country. Portishead weren’t a gigging band; they only began playing live after the album started selling the kind of numbers that no one, at least no one in the band, expected it to. They were barely a band at all, in the traditional sense of the word. Their core lineup consisted of Geoff Barrow, a 22-year-old hip-hop fan obsessed with turntable alchemy; Adrian Utley, a 37-year-old jazz guitarist looking for a way out of the 20th century; and Beth Gibbons, a 29-year-old singer who’d grown up on a farm and, prior to Portishead, had “probably done more singing in her bedroom than on stage,” Barrow reckoned. Yet there isn’t a sound or a syllable out of place on Dummy. For 50 minutes, the album sustains a single, all-enveloping mood; its tracklist is a 10-sided die where every roll comes up some variation of despair.
Today, Portishead are regarded with a certain inevitability—their sound so perfectly executed, so in tune with the tenor of its times—that belies the sheer weirdness of how it probably sounded when you first heard it. It’s true that Dummy carries echoes of many landmark albums of the preceding years: the wistful narcosis of Mazzy Star and Cocteau Twins, the skeletal hip-hop of Eric B. & Rakim, the ethereal torch songs of Julee Cruise. PJ Harvey flits through its margins; so do the Orb’s stoned swirl and Seefeel’s dubby undercurrents. By 1994, Dummy’s after-hours vibe was already familiar from dozens of albums meant primarily for horizontal consumption, such as the KLF’s Chill Out, though Barrow downplayed any link to that scene. “Ambient music has never particularly appealed to me: Push ‘Go’ on a synthesizer, make some noise, put some delay on it and put a couple of sheep noises on it,” he sniffed to Melody Maker in 1995, in a barely disguised dig at Chill Out’s wooly livestock samples.
As much as Portishead’s sound was part of electronic music’s widespread mellowing, the musicians themselves had little truck with the rave scene; their own roots were closer to the dub and breakbeat traditions that had long been cornerstones of multicultural Bristol. Dummy’s closest antecedent was Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, and not by coincidence: Barrow had worked as an errand boy and tape op in Bristol’s Coach House Studios while that record was being made.
But Dummy is too idiosyncratic to feel like a calculated response to its predecessors. Its obsessions are too specific, and too doggedly pursued: the spy-movie twang of the guitars, the ripple of the Hammond organs and Leslie cabinets—if anything, its vintage signifiers feel out of step with that era’s rush of pre-millennium tension. Bristol’s junglists were carving new routes to the future in every chopped-up breakbeat, while Portishead were drizzling on muted trumpet solos like so much curdled milk. Where most of the decade’s cutting-edge electronic music was zealous about its agenda, Dummy pledged allegiance only to a mood.
The broad outlines of Portishead’s music are not particularly hard to decipher. They like their tempos slow, their drums crisp, their keyboards velvety. Gibbons sings with a smoky intensity that’s evocative of Billie Holiday and Sandy Denny without stooping to imitation. In the midst of an all-pervasive gloom, key details—tremolo-soaked guitar licks, turntable scratches, an unexpected sample of jazz fusioners Weather Report—glisten like peacock feathers under a blacklight.
They favor sounds imprinted with a host of associations, many of them filmic. Utley’s riffs come straight from John Barry’s James Bond theme; the woozy sine waves of “Mysterons” echo sci-fi soundtracks like The Day the Earth Stood Still; and “Sour Times” loops an extended sample of Lalo Schifrin’s music for Mission: Impossible. Their cinematic inclinations are borne out in the fact that they made an actual short film, To Kill a Dead Man, before the album itself. The 10-minute, black-and-white film is not particularly consequential, but it is notable for the way it visually remixes many of the same influences that make the album feel so instantly familiar. Fortunately, they proved to be far more adept at translating those moods and devices into music.
Like film noir, with its fondness for Venetian blinds and ceiling fans, Dummy thrives on mixing light and dark, hard and soft, positive and negative space. In “Strangers,” clean-toned jazz guitar morphs into a nervous dial-tone buzz. The galumphing rhythm feels like a heavy burlap bag being dragged over railroad ties, but Gibbons’ voice—a home-recorded demo that made the final edit—is a slender thread pulled taut. The metallic rattle at the center of “Sour Times,” an extended Lalo Schifrin sample, might be an alarm clock bouncing across the surface of a trampoline. Expert diggers, they know a nugget when they find it: Flipping Eric Burdon and War’s “Magic Mountain,” they take a sample that De La Soul had put to jubilant use in “Potholes in My Lawn” and turn it seasick and queasy. Even more remarkable is how they treat Johnnie Ray’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” on “Biscuit,” slowing its refrain down to 16 RPM and turning a sticky-sweet wad of ’50s bubblegum into a druggy dirge.
Their sense of contrast is particularly noticeable in the album’s rhythms. Barrow’s lickety-split vinyl scratching helps counterbalance the uniformly sluggish tempos, but the real action is in their breakbeats. In “Mysterons,” the looped snare rolls sound like a steel trap snapping shut and being pried back open in quick succession. The “Sour Times” beat resembles James Brown’s iconic “Funky Drummer” break, but transposed for a planet with only half of Earth’s gravity. “Wandering Star” and “Numb,” on the other hand, push forward as though running underwater, every beat a struggle against an overwhelming force. Track after track, the album toggles between crisp steppers and deadweight friction, between ping-ponging ricochets and Sisyphus’ last stand.
This groove was their invention, and theirs alone. Unlike most of their peers, Portishead didn’t rely on the same hoary Ultimate Breaks and Beats bootlegs that fueled the majority of the era’s club tracks. Their music may sound like the work of a couple of obsessive vinyl connoisseurs, but the irony is that they made most of it themselves. Some musicians speak of soundtracks to imaginary films; they created an imaginary soundtrack to use as their source material. Assisted by the drummer Clive Deamer, Barrow and Utley would jam in the studio, creating their own approximations of the ’60s music that inspired them. Once they had their songs engineered on 24-track tape, they’d take the final product and feed it back into their samplers; some material they even pressed onto vinyl dubplates, to manipulate the way a hip-hop producer would cut up breakbeats. Not quite a band, hardly a strictly electronic project, they had to invent their own kind of virtuosity, one that encompassed musicianship, technology, and aura. “It’s the air around the thing,” Barrow told The Wire. “What we are trying to do is create this air, this atmosphere: It’s the stuff that’s in between the hi-hat and the snare that you can’t hear, but if it wasn’t there you would notice it, it would be wrong.”
This air was the medium through which Gibbons’ voice soared. Would Portishead have been one-tenth the band they turned out to be had Barrow and Utley contented themselves with instrumentals, or hired session singers to lend a soulful patina at freelance rates? Not on your life. Gibbons’ voice is the center of the music; she elevates the recordings from tracks to songs, from mere head-nodders to forlorn lullabies.
She follows the contours of her voice along its breathy edge, cutting sharply through the meat of a glissando, falling back on the catch in her throat. Despite her convincing air of sorrow, she’s a knowing, playful singer, capable of shifting emotional registers on a dime, cycling through moods—jazzy and coquettish, grimly resigned, wild with grief—like a housefly tracing squares in empty space. In “Wandering Star,” her tone sounds almost flirtatious, despite the overwhelming vastness of her subject matter: “Wandering stars/For whom it is reserved/The blackness, the darkness, forever.” In the closing “Glory Box,” on the other hand, she is as incendiary as Utley’s overdriven guitar riffs, and when she sings, “This is the beginning/Of forever and ever, oh,” her sigh feels like a hole torn in the fabric of the universe.
And her occasional obliqueness frequently gives way to the album's real emotional payoff: out-and-out dejection. Some lines stand out as clearly as dog-eared diary entries: “Give me a reason to love you/Give me a reason to be a woman”; “Nobody loves me, it’s true/Not like you do”; “How can it feel this wrong?” When her words are hazy, her diction tricky, it might as well be part of a grand and treacherous strategy, like a boxer’s footwork catching you off guard before the knockout punch lands.
Without a public persona to measure Gibbons’ performance against, her presence within the songs was, and remains, that much more formidable. Pop fans typically like to know who is singing to them and why, even if it's an invented character. But that central mystery only makes Dummy that much more compelling. Who is this lovelorn woman marching off to war on “Roads,” her broken pleas part sigh, part icicle? Who will she become on the far side of forever and ever—the promised land of “Glory Box,” an uncharted territory that she makes sound both liberating and terrifying? Dummy arrived at a moment when young people were craving soundtracks for the comedown—but what happens when you follow Portishead all the way down, as far as they want to take us? These questions keep you coming back, trying to puzzle out its intimidating balance between bleakness and blankness.
It’s possible to hear in Dummy a collection of gratifyingly sad-but-sexy gestures, and plenty of Portishead’s followers—Lamb, Morcheeba, Olive, Alpha, Mono, Hooverphonic, Sneaker Pimps, and dozens of other acts forever lost to the cut-out bin of history—did just that. Whole retail empires flourished and collapsed while Portishead and their ilk were piped through the in-store speakers. Is Dummy stylish? Of course it is; you don’t evoke ’60s spy flicks without some deep-seated feelings about aesthetics, panache, the proper cut of a suit. But style, stylishness, is only the beginning. None of Portishead’s imitators understood that it’s not the blue notes or the mood lighting that make it tick—it’s the pockets of emptiness inside. Like Barrow once said, it’s the air.
