The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Despite a snarl up on Chiswick Roundabout rendering them late on their drive from Bristol, Portishead’s Adrian Utley and Geoff Barrow are in genial mood. They tell The Stool Pigeon that we’re allowed more than the allotted 10 minutes with each of them as they love the paper and, when I tell them that the interview will be about their experiences of travel rather than the usual “what took you so long to make Third?”, they seem genuinely pleased. But that’s not to say the things we natter about - doom metal, stone circles, camper vans and Australia - don’t inform the bleak, brilliant soundscapes of their third, and finest, album.

Portishead are far from enamoured by the tortuous process of creating music, and then rendering it live. It’s as if they’re commanded by the name of their hometown, like it’s some Stalinist dictact, to produce their music, then tour it. They do so with great sense of duty and get perfect results every time, but it’s something of a weary slog, and a trial. Indeed, Utley says that their excursions on the road in the 1990s became torrid affairs, not only from the difficulty of replicating their sound in festivals across the world when you’re replacing The Verve, but also because “within our entourage there was friction that escalated to grimness”.

It was enough to send Geoff Barrow to the other side of the world. “I turned into a drunken tit in Bristol, with absolutely no direction,” he says. “We came off the tour and I quit music for about three years. We’d been to Australia, and it was a place of much horribleness then, but I liked it, and I went there on my own. It’s sunny there, people speak English… I’m not very adventurous to be honest - I’m more Bournemouth than Borneo. It was a weird rebirth, as if I was shot out of someone’s bum looking like a demented 16-year-old child.”

What did this therapeutic defecation entail?

“I hit up with these weird dudes, who are like the Australian version of 90210 - they all come from fairly affluent backgrounds. They ran with all these girls and did loads of drugs. I was eight years older than them… I kind of sat there on the beach looking really confused, then drunk, then hungover and confused, and that went on for months.”

Barrow, in his musical wilderness years in Oz, was fascinated by how big the Sydney dance scene was, though he’s not partial to knocking back the many hues of house on offer. “I’ve never done a pill and don’t intend to do one,” he says. He became fully immersed nonetheless, setting up the Invada label to release hip hop that others wouldn’t touch. It was a nomadic existence, as he explains: “I spent three or four months a year, for four years, out there. I don’t really know why I came home sometimes. I think it was work - I kept on thinking we were going to work, and I’d set out to work, but it wouldn’t happen. I came back once, stayed in Bristol for two days and then thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ and got straight back on a plane. Would I go back? I want to. I lose a lot of my uptightness and worry - I just become a different person.”

What is it about Australia that makes that happen to you?

“I think people live their lives there. I’m not saying people don’t have stresses and problems - they do. It’s weird - it’s one of the most unracist and racist places I’ve ever been to in my life. They’re the most open-minded people about everything - ecologically or whatever… and now they’ve got rid of that twat, this new leader seems great. I still have a sense of a youthful country that can turn things around. Howard polarised the place. Now everyone’s got together to say this is what we don’t want, even though there are still millions of conservatives there. I met an Aussie guy at the Townhouse Studio in Shepherd’s Bush and told him I’d just come back from Australia. He asked whereabouts and I said Sydney and he went, ‘Fags and queers and darkies.’ He was from up north in Queensland. I said to the manager, ‘You want to sack that guy, he’s a prick.’ But, almost in a strange way, a lot of those guys are over here, so that makes Australia alright.”

Most of all, Barrow says of his travels that he “needed space, real space” from England, from music, from Portishead, from everything. It was only once he’d cleared his head in Australia and started a UK branch of Invada that he rediscovered his love of music, specifically the pioneering, intense end of metal; Sunn o))), Om, for example. Invada went on to put out Mogwai-affiliated Crippled Back Phoenix, psychedelic brain-grinders Gonga, and one-man noise expulsion Team Brick. And, in the midst of all this racket, his brain cleansed by Antipodean sun, Geoff Barrow fell back in love not with just other people’s music, but his own ability to create. And lo! Third was born.

“I came back from Australia, and realised, ‘Fuck, there’s all this music that exists.’”

While Barrow burned up the air miles dealing with his mid-twenties crisis Down Under, the more senior Adrian Utley escaped the trials and tribulations of making unnerving noise with more genteel pleasures. He has a love of the topography of the United Kingdom, and especially meandering across it in search of ancient monuments - the signs of the daily lives of our ancestors.

Utley sees history as a thread that runs through every pulsating moment of the present. He feels, as so many do, more than pessimistic about the current state of the planet: “Politically, the UK, and the whole world, is fucked - it’s desperate. Even just now, sitting there doing an interview with NME, there’s the news on the TV - bags of knives and people getting stabbed. It’s fucked up, and there’s a kind of desperation there.”

Have you seen that elsewhere on the tour?

“It’s omnipresent, I think. Just what’s happening now in Burma and China - the food shortages - it’s fucking desperate. It seems to me that everywhere you go is like that. There are McDonald’s everywhere. It’s fucking rotten.”

If we’re keen to take the post-apocalyptic feel of Third as read, Utley’s new-found fascination with the aftermath of the Medieval bubonic plague that ravaged England is telling. “I was looking into the political implications of the plague and what happened outside of that,” he says. “People became utterly decadent and started shagging each other, and fashion changed so women could just lift up their skirts and have their arses ready. You know, people just thought they were going to die. And then there’s also the idea that people felt they needed to reproduce, quickly.”

But it’s not just shagging maidens in the midden that piques Utley’s interest. In his camper van (”I had one in the eighties that was a complete dog of a thing, but the new one is very small, a Toyota, and it runs on biodiesel”) he, his partner and young daughter cruise the highways and byways of his native land.

“England is amazing,” he says, “it’s so beautiful. I’m into old stones and ancient history, so we’re going to travel around for a couple of weeks, looking at these amazing places. There are lots that I’ve been to and revisit, though I don’t have any far-out ideas about it. Dartmoor is full of hut circles where people lived 5,000 years ago. You can walk for two hours out into the middle of nowhere, and pass Bronze Age villages. There’s nothing around them - there’s no sign saying what they are. I’ll sit in one of them and have lunch with my daughter. So for me it’s historic, and visceral in a landscape way.”

When did you first get inspired by all this?

“I used to go walking in Skye and Rathay when I was a kid, but I hadn’t done any for years. Then I went walking on Dartmoor with a friend for a week, my sister and her boyfriend. They said, ‘Come down and stay with us.’ We were walking and I said, ‘What’s that?’ Like I say, it’s not mystical or magical… well, it is magical, but it’s not far-out… it’s just a sense that it’s architecture from 5,000 years ago. We made it, in some way trying to make a mark. Why did we do that? No one really knows why stone circles exist - they’re based on moon cycles or sun cycles definitely, like Callanish or Castlerigg, where the sun sets through the stones.

“There’s another amazing one called Sunken Kirk, in the Lake District. Stonehenge was the sun as well, but that was built a thousand years later. But I’m not interested in Stonehenge. It seems like some of the early ones, especially those in Dartmoor or Wales or Scotland or the Lake District were using stones that were around. They used what they had there. This whole idea of Stonehenge and dragging these massive rocks… it’s like the pyramids or something, this massive edifice. Even at Avebury, some of the stones are fucking immense, but they’re not hewn in any way - they’re just rough stones. They’re much more interesting.”

What’s the last one you visited?

“I went two weeks ago to walk through Dartmoor to White Moor Stone Circle, which is near Hound Tor. You have to walk for two hours to get there. You can’t park and just jump out of the car - you have to cross shit. It’s so small - most of the stones have been restored by the Victorians, when there was that period of Romanticism and being part of nature. They were great at restoring stone circles and getting them back to how they were.”

Geoff Barrow’s frustration with England, and Adrian Utley’s enthusiasm for its history and landscape, makes for an interesting contrast. They joke around with each other like old pals, yet these two are clearly no peas in a pod - and who knows what the elusive Beth Gibbons brings to the mix. The experiences of the three have allowed Portishead to regroup with fresh minds and a renewed sense of purpose. Whether Barrow will head back to Oz for good, or Utley will disappear on a never-ending camper van tour of Europe’s stone circles, remains to be seen. For now, we’ll leave Utley to voice what we all think about this land, a lot of the time: “England’s so brutal weather-wise. We went down to Dartmoor two weeks ago - torrential rain, the van was rocking, there was an inch of water outside the next morning. Oh please, I want to hold onto you England, I do love you, but you’re really trying me. I’ve had enough!”

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