An Ode To The Murky: Portishead's Roseland Live
A retrospective/review/personal piece
Happy new year to you all. I pitched this piece and didn’t get a response, and because it’s a little time-sensitive — you can’t talk about a 2023 anniversary in 2024 lol — I can’t really send it to other places at this point, either. So I thought of posting it here.
Portishead is one of my favorite artists. They take me back to one of my most formative moments as a music listener, sitting in the family car at the back, hearing the tape play from the Ford we no longer have. I remember the song that was playing then, the lonely guitar strings, the gently bouncing synths, the shuffling percussion, and the warbling vocals that ceded to Candan Erçetin’s lonely voice: "Dünyada ölümden başkası yalan". In the world, everything but death is a lie. You couldn’t listen to this song in broad daylight. You couldn’t listen to it with a happy mood. It has no place in a wedding, but fills up the empty space in a room all by itself when you’re alone. It makes the other people in a car disappear, leaving you to process the exhaustion from socialising. It creates a space to be sad in that doesn’t, for once, hurt.
I was introduced to Portishead by Jenni around four years ago, who sent me a link to the song “Only You” and told me I would like the music. She was right; it is one of my favorite songs, as is hers. But I remember specifically the shock that went through my body when I pressed play on the self-titled 1997 effort Portishead for the first time and heard “Cowboys”. The beat, first kicking in with a thud, then the percussion, and Beth Gibbons’ voice: “Did you sweep us far from our feet?” It wasn’t the words that caught me so: it was the voice, the singular mood evoked. To hear her say it is part admonishment, part overacting, part incantation: far becomes less a word and more a spell, feet an insult, a whiplash.
The lacerating seesaw of the guitar, the record scratching – it is enough to hurl one into a world of black and white not unlike the album cover, one where alleys of skyscrapers cave in on someone, one of darkness that is by no means meant to be beguiling but nonetheless invites someone to be there. No: the world is there, whether one likes it or not, and a cold wind blows from the north. It reminds me of my favorite spot in Vienna, my hometown — Donaucity, on the other side of the Danube, a place so starkly constructed with high-rises there is a perpetual gust in the empty streets. To its west is a sprawling park – another piece of artifice, this one for a garden fair – that is well-visited and enjoyed by tourists and locals alike. Not so much Donaucity. The idea was to once present this part of Vienna to the world at an Expo, planned for 1995; the public voted against in 1991. The idea was to not only show this part of the city off, but to make this a new metropolitan center of the centuries-old capital. In the end, Donaucity became a place where people only visited to work and sleep. Donaustadt, the district it’s in, has the same abandoned, cut-off vibe from Vienna.
Portishead’s music is a similarly metropolitan, abandoned world in which there is only Beth Gibbons’ voice to help, and even she – she with the fragile voice, the weary handle on the vocals as she purveys the world – can’t help but squeeze her voice to become a character totally equipped to handle the alienation and loneliness. And despite the character, despite the voice, despite the obfuscation of the lyrics to a degree that no meaning can be derived from it, the hurt is audible, coming through lines like: “How we fail / And I feel like I do” or “Give me a reason to make me a woman”. Oh, this uncertainty is taking her over. All for nothing – did you really want? Whenever a lyric is intelligible, it is sung with a force, and each time it is, the despair only widens: the blackness, the darkness, forever. She doesn’t even need words: listen to the ending of “It Could Be Sweet”, the exasperation that one sigh contains.
Portishead is the spearhead of trip hop, a genre that gained prominence in the late 1990s and is broadly defined by its hip hop beats and turntable scratches. It is frequently accompanied with female vocals wafting over it. Writing for Beth Gibbons’ solo venture Out of Season in music publication Pitchfork, writer Jesse Fahnestock describes Portishead as a “simulacrum”, one that worked as well as they did because they were willing to sample extensively in the search to be realer than the real thing, that is, evoke nostalgia for what never was. The desire to construct an act, coupled with the indulgence in fantasy not unlike the workmanlike precision of a director, make up the trifecta of releases from their early period: the cover of debut Dummy is a still from a movie the band created, a dressed-up Beth Gibbons at the center of the image with her eyes downcast; Portishead shows a woman at the back, positioned almost helplessly on top of a platform with no fans around, while a man with a P sewed into his suit is facing the camera.
Then there’s their best record, the 1997 live performance in Roseland Hall, its album known simply as Roseland NYC Live, which includes a 30-string orchestra. The album cover is a still from the movie, titled PNYC: Portishead – Roseland New York. Beth Gibbons, the singer, is in the frame, but is hard to make her out, blurring with the rest of the image. In the movie, too, Gibbons looks trapped in most shots: the orchestra behind her, her band next to her, the audience in front of her. The camera never centers her in these shots, instead opting to hide her. When we do see her, she is often out of focus when the conductor moves the orchestra. Alone, she’s completely alone. A woman leaning onto the microphone with her eyes closed, mouth a grimace, maybe praying, or maybe pleading. She turns away from the audience a lot, instead jamming with guitarist Adrian Utley.
The world of Roseland, when Portishead performs in it, is one in sepia tones, and this seems to make inherent sense given the soundscape: one wonders what would happen if it was actual black and white, how the visuals would be too sharp compared to this murky, uncertain music. It seems no coincidence that Beth Gibbons smokes about six cigarettes during the concert, and almost embarrassing for the viewer to realize that, when she says, “Sorry, we’re nervous as fuck,” the cigarette was a response to nerves, rather than a set piece for the music itself. Her star power is not one that makes sense in the written word. But within the movie, I wished to see her as often as possible. This woman, wearing plain clothes, not even looking at the audience, is the fragile center that holds Portishead’s music together, gives it its emotional gravity. Without her, it is competent jazz music with hip hop beats. With her, Portishead is forever on the brink of an emotional breakdown. The possibility that this vocal – one that is as reedy and thin as a violin – was disembodied unsettled me.
The movie isn’t contained to performance alone. It pauses about halfway through the performance to show the construction of the stage and Portishead working on the concert, and then intersperses the images to showcase New York City – not at night but day, shots of people walking about, minding their business, two Black men talking and laughing. In the midst of all of this bustling life, there is a slice of darkness, of alienation. It is contained within the high-rises, the cars continuously in motion, people with something to do at all times. Sometimes the movie stops to show flickering CRT screens, blue and eerie, as they continuously render ghostly images. The most unsettling one comes midway through “Undenied”, as we watch a man go about his business with his groceries with no head apparent.
Of course, such visuals would not work if the songs couldn’t contrast the image, and the songs notably darken with violins and saxophone rising around them, sometimes as coda after Portishead have finished performing, sometimes alongside the samples and the militaristic drumming. Gibbons sounds better live than she does on record – despite coming early and late to the beat here and there – by virtue of sounding so poor in her high notes that the attempt make sit admirable, vulnerable, even. More importantly, she is clearer here, no more buried in the mix with the rest of the instrumentation. For their 25th anniversary remaster, Portishead also added three songs that originally appeared in the middle of the concert: “Undenied”, “Numb”, and “Western Eyes”. “Seven Months”, which also appeared on the setlist, is missing, however, and “Sour Times” was swapped for the inferior DVD version where they inexplicably speed the song up, as though karaoke settings were tampered with.
Portishead’s best track is “Strangers”. Originally appearing on Dummy, it is also the song that ends their performance at Roseland, their second encore song. A creaking violin spirals down to synths before the best drum pattern and the low ringing of an alarm clock fill the song. Then, through that fog, Beth Gibbons’ voice: “Ohh, can anybody see the light?” In the original version, she is murky, joined by only an acoustic guitar. The impact of the synths and percussion, when they do return, is felt that much stronger, becomes entrancing. “Did you realize no one can see inside your view? / Did you realize for why this sight belongs to you?” It is an abandonment. It is thrusting the other person into the jungle of slabs of concrete. For once, Gibbons does not sound afraid. When she stops singing, there is a winding; and the beat returns on its own, a lurching beast.
In the concert, the audience is on their feet, bopping along this way and that, in tandem with Portishead themselves. An oboe features in the bridge, alongside warm brass, contrasting with the loop. The violins faintly underscore as Gibbons sings the chorus, adding a warm, jazzy quality to such an icy song, but the real whammy comes at the end, when Gibbons stops singing. The violins take over. The bass, warped and thin, trails along. The drum track, sampled by the record, is scratched over and over, adding an alien whir to it. The saxophones at the end join for the final repetition of the chorus, and the city no longer sounds uncaring and cold. This is a city that is actively hostile. The laws of the jungle apply; already there is no escape. And with this in mind, the shots of the city at daytime click. The world that Portishead sings is not so much a noir movie, it is this world – our life, in all its eerie, dark glory. It is places like Donaucity. It is places that nobody dares to go at night, nothing but emptied hives for worker bees.
The way I watched the movie was on my phone, past 9 pm, until 11pm, laying down in bed. I watched the movie with everything around me in total dark, my hips swaying to the beat. In the dark, I felt the need to reach out, dive into that world, and make my place there. Portishead is still premier sad music to escape to and come back out of as a changed woman; music that can make you feel alone, but not lonely. Portishead’s music makes puts me at ease because it is uneasy. To make sense of the world, to navigate a city as big and sprawling as Vienna, you need to feel the walls caving in, the wind coming no matter the weather. You need the confirmation that the world is exactly as dark as you think it is, so ominous that its depths are unfathomably deep.
One would think that within this current era of re-discovering sounds of the 2000s and late 1990s, the genre that was accidentally relieving, warm, and even sexy would find a new audience and popularity. So far, there has not been a “Sour Times” or “Unfinished Symphony” revival; #triphop as a hashtag has 56.8 million Tiktok views, while #shoegaze, another 90s genre, has 797.8. Billie Eilish released “Lost Cause” last year – a sneer of a track in which she drawls, “‘Cause you got no job! You ain’t nothing but a lost cause!” – and it debuted and peaked at #27 on the Billboard Hot 100. a.s.o’s debut record, released the past June, hews to the shoegaze 90s, but is not only too much of pastiche, it seems isolated with other recods this year, particularly when compared to one of the originators, Tricky, releasing a more electronic affair with Polish singer Marta on her debut record When It’s Going Wrong. The technology is too modern to bring the magic back, it seems. Or perhaps we are done with the sensual and the murky; perhaps the clear is what’s appreciated, what’s wanted, what’s needed right now. But I have hope for a return. After the sun has set can the dust rise and the roads wind towards the night, where everything but death is a lie.