“We haven’t been to Australia for a very long while,” he tells me, “and the idea of playing a big, corporate festival wasn’t really appealing to us, you know what I mean? These days, most things are sponsored by massive phone companies, to the point where you go to a gig and feel like you’re prey. That is pretty much the complete opposite of what festivals are supposed to be about. The Harvest festival, with the lineup it has, and the place it’s going to be held, seems to have a very specific thing in mind, and that suits us. I don’t want to seem elitist,” he continues, with a wry chuckle, “but would you rather be sharing a stage with Bruno Mars or The Flaming Lips? Of course you’d rather it be The Flaming Lips. You want to be playing to people who know what you’re doing.”
For many years, Portishead simply did not like to play live, but the recording of their third album helped turn that around. “On our first two records, we would play something live, then loop it and treat it and put it onto vinyl, then fuck up the vinyl and sample it for the recording,” he says. “After the second album, though, I started to find that whole process mind-numbingly boring – things needed to change.” Finding inspiration in bands like Can and Kraftwerk, the band fundamentally altered their approach for their third album, leading to a sound less intricate and vastly more immediate. “The music became about tuning and timing,” he tells me. “On our first two records, we were exploring blues through the lens of European soundtrack music, but Third was embedded in psychedelic music and Krautrock.”
Like a good many of the group’s Australian fans, Harvest will be the first chance I get to actually witness Portishead live; I’m very curious, therefore, to know what we can actually expect from the show. “It’s a bit of a machine,” Barrow says. “It’s pretty pounding, but not in a dance kind of way. We can’t just turn up and play a show on any kind of stage and with any kind of sound rig. It’s a very specific set-up. We’ve got to have two PAs – one for Beth and one for us. There’s loads of processing, but it’s all natural and organic. I mean, our show is not us opening up a computer and hitting a button marked Dance Effect 35. It’s all really old gear.”
Barrow and his band-made Adrian Utley treasure their vintage gear, but it can be difficult to keep so many old synths, mixers and pedals in line – that’s where Hugh comes in. “We’ve very lucky, in that we have a Hugh,” Barrow tells me with a laugh. “Hugh is a guy who tours with us who is able to fix absolutely anything in record time, and he spends most of the show with a torch on his head and a soldering iron. There is only one Hugh in the world, and he’s spectacular. He’s very important. I mean, if we arrived somewhere without him and something didn’t work, we’d have to send it away to a shop, and it would be a nightmare. We can’t live without him. Our gear is very temperamental as is – we have to take backups of everything in case it breaks down.”
I have trouble imaging a singer as fragile as Beth holding up in front of a festival crowd, but Barrow assures me that she has it down to a fine art. “Beth’s good,” he tells me. “She’s an incredible singer and songwriter. When it comes to playing live, she has to work really hard to remember where her cues are, but she’s always been like that, and we’ve got it down to a fine art at this point. It’s a bit difficult for all of us,” he continues. “I mean, it still feels somewhat ridiculous being up on stage in front of an audience of 30,000. We’re up there playing our old gear, putting together a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle every night, and it can be incredibly stressful, because more than anything, we really want to get it right.”
Before letting Barrow go, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask about the possibility of a new Portishead album sometime in the near future. “I’m going to go back into the studio in January,” he tells me. “What that will mean, I don’t know. I’m not sure whether Beth or Adrian will be up for it at that point, and it’s not like I would try and come up with Portishead stuff without them, but I’ve got to get myself into a place again where I can start writing. I plan to switch everything else in my brain off at that point and focus only on Portishead.”
