A chat with Geoff Barrow – one third of Portishead and all-round creative dabbler – is never less than entertaining. Ask him a question and he’ll tell you what he thinks. Honestly.
He’s on the other end of a Zoom call from his home near Bristol, explaining his latest project, Game – the debut feature film from Barrow’s Invada Films off-shoot – but it’s not long before talk turns to Portishead and their accompanying musical pigeonhole, trip-hop.
“When I first heard somebody call us trip-hop, I hated it,” he says matter-of-factly. “Absolutely fuckin’ hated it. And I still do. What Portishead, Massive Attack and Tricky were doing wasn’t trip-hop; it was British soul music. Trip-hop was an invention by people from London. Yes, I understand that journalists and record shops need to put music into a particular category, but trip-hop had nothing to do with me.’
So, if we asked you whether trip-hop has a legacy?
“Yeah, it has a legacy of shit!” he laughs. “It was all those bands that heard something on the radio and said, ‘Hey, that’s what the kids are listening to. Let’s buy a sampler!’ You saw the same thing with rave a few years earlier. Last week, they were a rock band, suddenly, they’ve got a drum machine.
“The whole thing about Portishead was that we weren’t the least bit interested in what was popular. Everybody was listening to Britpop in 1994, jaunty guitar music. And we came out with Dummy!”
Despite Dummy’s huge impact on the musical landscape, Portishead’s album output in the ensuing 30-plus years has been sparse, to say the least. The follow-up, 1997’s Portishead; Third in 2008; and a live album in 1998. As for future releases...
“We meet up at the local garden centre every three months or so,” says Barrow with a straight face.
The garden centre?
“Yeah, that’s our makeshift office. It’s where we sit down, have a cup of tea and sign any legal stuff that needs to be signed. We’re still a going concern, but, unfortunately, all three of us have got tons of other stuff going on at the moment. Ade [guitarist Adrian Utley] has always got about 30 different projects on the boil. Beth [singer Beth Gibbons] has been working with a whole bunch of people and put out a brilliant album last year. I’ve been doing some soundtrack stuff and this new film.”
When Barrow says, “soundtrack stuff”, what he means is scoring several big-budget Alex Garland movies, including Civil War, Men and the Oscar-winning Ex-Machina, plus TV detours with the likes of Black Mirror and Hanna.
“I guess I’m not surprised that I’ve ended up doing soundtracks,” says Barrow. “I’m a hip-hop fan and hip-hop’s best songs are all about atmosphere. A mood, a feeling and massive beat over the top. Then, when I met Ade, he started introducing me to things like The Ipcress File, Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter.
“I’m not sure if people remember To Kill A Dead Man, but it was a bloody awful short film we made as a sort of promotional video for the single Sour Times. The only reason we made that was because we loved the idea of doing a ‘soundtrack’. Making the music for a proper film.”
“The problem was... imposter syndrome,” he adds with a shrug. “I sat back and thought, 'What are you playing at? You can’t write a movie score! You’re not even a real musician.'"
Although Barrow was disappointed, he wasn’t particularly worried and certainly wasn’t short of work: there was Portishead’s follow-up album to think about and the accompanying live shows, producing for Tom Jones and The Coral, plus various side-projects like Beak> and Quakers, plus his Invada Records label.
But chance meetings with Ben Salisbury [Bristol-based BAFTA-winning composer who’d worked on several David Attenborough natural history epics, as well as the 2013 documentary, Beyonce: Life Is But A Dream] and Alex Garland were more than enough to reawaken Barrow’s soundtrack dreams.
Barrow and Salisbury’s first project was the Garland-scripted 2012 movie, Dredd, but behind the scenes changes meant that their collection of brilliantly dark synthy moodscapes wasn’t used (it was later released as Drokk: Music Inspired by Mega-City One). Garland obviously liked what he heard and immediately signed the duo for his next movie, Ex-Machina, and has used them for every big screen release since.
The idea for Game was similarly unplanned. It all started with a simple conversation between Barrow and his actor mate, Marc Bessant: What about a British thriller set during the early-’90s rave scene that features poachers and drug dealers. The duo roped in a few more mates like Bristol filmmaker John Minton (who’s worked with everybody from Simple Minds to Beth Gibbons) and Rob Williams (comics writer for Marvel, DC and 2000AD). The final piece of the jigsaw was Jason Williamson, singer with the Sleaford Mods, who stars opposite Bessant.
As well as co-writing the script, Barrow emptied the Invada bank account to finance the film and oversaw the soundtrack.
“The music is more of a collection of songs than a traditional ‘score’”, he says. “Ben was working with his home setup, I had my mate Jamie Bird putting together a selection of rave tunes and I was at Invada Studios [Barrow’s commercial studio in Bristol] writing, producing, speeding things up, making it all fit together.
“Yes, I do have a big studio, but I’m not a gearhead. And, to be honest, I was bit worried when I was told you wanted to talk ‘tech’. Process and spec... that stuff doesn’t matter to me. All I’m interested in is the finished product. Does the song sound any good? Ask me what this mic does and how something should be EQ’d and I haven’t got a clue. I’ll fiddle about with the desk and a few Logic effects until something sounds right, and if it doesn’t sound right, I’ll try something else.
‘That’s been my approach right from the start. When Dummy was released, people were saying how we’d gone for a lo-fi sound and wanting to know what kind of reverb we were using. Nothing we did was ever that... conscious. We just created a mood, found some samples, dropped a heavy beat over the top and got Beth to add some vocals.
‘Finding the right sample and messing around in the Akai S1000 was always part of the fun back then,” remembers Barrow, “but I have no problem with modern methods. Yes, I use AI. I’m always creating mad stuff on Udio; it’s ideal for a musical magpie like me. People say AI is going to be the death of real music, but they said the same thing about synths and drum machines, Ableton and Logic. To me, they’re all just tools. What really matters are the ideas you’ve got in your brain.
“If we’re talking about problems in the music industry, that’s what we should be focussing on. There are still too many bands out there that aren’t very good, but sell a lot of records.”
I wonder if this is the moment to bring up Barrow’s long term “disagreement” with US pop-rock band Haim.
Barrow smiles. “Can I just say that I’ve got nothing anybody personally. It’s not about people, it’s about music. There are some fantastic, original musicians out there and they will never be listened to because they don’t fit in a particular box. And there are some bands that wear the right trousers and they’ve got a big marketing budget, but their music offends me physically, it really crushes my spirit.
“Nobody told Portishead or Oasis or The Coral or Tricky or Sleaford Mods how they were supposed to look or what they should sound like. They didn’t ask for permission to join the club, they just fuckin’ did it. And that’s how the best music will always be made.”
Geoff Barrow’s Game soundtrack is out now, digitally via Invada Records.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.