Third is so radically different from the first two records, abandoning cinematic melancholy for crude synth grooves and exposed folk, that the decade of depression and doubt it represents has paid off, creatively. "We've never felt any pressure from outside, it's all internal – there's a lot of self-doubt in Portishead." "We have a policy which is one step forward, eight steps back," Barrow confessed to Uncut of these latest traumas. In the interim, Barrow and Utley both divorced, the latter quit the music business for four years, and Gibbons fell ill and returned to her native Devon (also managing a solo album, Out of Season ). It's a remarkable renaissance, begging the question of just what was so special about this scene in the first place, and where its originators have been.Įleven years later, Third is here. Size has rebooted and re-released New Forms, and Goldfrapp and Martina Topley-Bird, fellow travellers from the old Bristol days, have lauded, imaginative new records, too. The latter are also curating the London Southbank Centre's Meltdown festival. There is huge expectation around Portishead, Tricky and Massive Attack's new albums. Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead were at the vanguard of what they hated to be called trip-hop, while Roni Size won the 1997 Mercury Prize for turning jungle music into avant-garde dance-jazz with New Forms. Somehow, the early Nineties saw a series of such apparently slothful types seize control of the musical agenda. As well as being a historical reference to when Bristol's clocks struck the hour later than they did in the capital, it's a dismissive term for a city whose musicians live far enough from frenetic London to get up when they're ready and, cliché has it, smoke a spliff or two before considering their options.
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