If you weren’t at the Portishead’s headlining slot for Harvest, you’ll be kicking yourself for the next ten years. The iconic trip-hop stars descended on Australia for the first time in a long time to bring their unique Bristol magic to the great outdoors, and with their indelible, particular sound, you can see why they wanted to take to the stage last.

We caught up with gregarious multi-instrumentalist Adrian Utley backstage at the Sydney event, to discuss Serbian summers, picking your own support bands, the power of YouTube and Radiohead.

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I saw you at EXIT Festival [in Serbia] earlier this year and it was absolutely magical. Having never seen you before it was obviously exciting for me, but how was that for you?

Yeah, well it’s [an] important [event], isn’t it? It’s politically such an amazing thing and I think that three dissident students started it. And we played in Slovakia the night before, which was also a politically charged festival. But with Serbia, a lot of people, I found out, had been playing there for years -- like The Prodigy back when it was much more difficult and you were probably mad to go there. It was cool. Apart from its history, it is just another one on the circuit. You rock up, you soundcheck, it’s fucking boiling hot...

Oh my god, I know, how hot was it?

It was ridiculous. Even at night it was about forty degrees. It was crazy. So yeah, I remember the heat but the show was really cool. And then we watched Grinderman afterwards and they were great, met Warren Ellis there for the first time.

I’ve never seen him talk, only writhe around on the floor with his violin…

[Laughs] He’s great. I’ve seen him play for years with the Dirty Three and Bad Seeds and whatever, Brilliant.


Portishead - 'Only You'

So is it good being back on the festival scene because you get the chance to hang out with all these people that you ordinarily wouldn’t see?

Definitely. [When] you do your own gigs, you really don’t see anyone [else].

Well you’d see your support bands, which probably aren’t your friends…

Well they are, actually. Not here, but...typically whenever we do small shows, in the US or Europe, we pick our own supports and our friends. When we were in New Zealand, there was a band we didn’t pick, and I was really distressed. Because it’s the whole deal, then. We give them everything they need and they can play as loud as they want and you come to Portishead show and you see whole thing [curated] by us. I don’t like this thing of having the support just being there. Certainly for us, and for any band really, it shouldn’t be like that.

When you say the US, do you mean this [recent] time around or last time?

Oh this time for sure. The last time we didn’t have supports We had a DJ who played with us who did a set before ours.

Convenient.

Definitely. But these dates we had a band called Thought Forms who were just brilliant . And it made an enormous difference, because the second the lights go down and the band starts playing, it’s all about our choice. Not their music, but we chose to have them.

So that kind of flows on to curating the All Tomorrow’s Parties thing as well.

Yeah it is like that. They played that as well, actually.

For me what’s interesting about that is, how do you discover new music? Because if you’re always playing with bands you know, how do you get exposed to the new stuff? Are you sitting there listening to BBC Radio or are people sending you things?

Well BBC Radio 6 is very good, but also people just tell you things and you follow it down the rabbit hole. Occasionally I see things at festivals, but I’m usually knackered. So it’s really word of mouth, isn’t it? TV, or what’s left of it anyway…

There’s none of that [music programming] around anymore is there?

No, it’s fucked.

I was telling my cousins who are thirteen that we have this show called RAGE that I used to watch religiously. I mean, that’s how I discovered your band, because when I was little, you’d get up at six on Saturday morning and there was cartoons or RAGE.

[Laughs] And you went with RAGE!

Exactly, which is how I found you guys and Massive Attack and all the stuff they couldn't play for 8am when it was chart crap. I mean it is still there, but I feel it’s lost out to YouTube…

True, but...that’s not to be knocked, is it? It’s brilliant.

Yeah, I just feel like you don’t have the same curatorial aspect with YouTube.

Well you don’t. But we managed to curate YouTube once. We just put all our stuff that we liked. There’s a section that is ours, and it’s more than a playlist. We did a little piece -- Geoff [Barrow] and I were talking and stuff. But it’s mainly about people telling you stuff, isn’t it? ‘Check this out on YouTube’ or whatever. But there’s a lot of stuff I’ve found from when I was a kid that I’d never have remembered otherwise. Some fucking geek with a VHS has gone and uploaded it…

That always amazes me that somebody would go to that effort. I mean, I love watching it, but I’d never do it.

Exactly. With my kids if I don’t want to get up, I’ll put the computer on and somebody has put those cartoons on there [manually]. It’s not the creators, so who the fuck’s doing that? It’s endless.

Do you feel in that way that Portishead fans can get access to a lot more stuff than they would have previously?

Yeah loads of it. I can check things out – if we fuck something up [laughs] – it’ll be up there before it’s anywhere else.


Portishead - 'Machine Gun' (live)

When I saw you in Serbia, there were six of you on stage. So who are the three I don’t know?

There’s Jim, John and Clive. They’ve played with us live since the very first rehearsals. Clive didn’t — even though he drummed on Dummy — but the other instruments are pretty much taken care of by us. Although Jim and John have now played on our records, too.

So they’re touring musicians, sort of.

Yes, and close friends and collaborators. We’re in tons of projects together. Clive and Jim have a band that I play in, I have a side project that they both play in. Their band is called The Blessing, and I’ve been doing a silent film from the 1920s, The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, it’s a collaboration between Will Gregory from Goldfrapp and I. We’re old friends and Jim and Clive play in that.

I assume you’re making a soundtrack, not just an hour of silence.

[Laughs] No, it’s a live soundtrack that we’ve been doing. We were doing it in New York just before I came here. We’ve [performed it] about it seven or eight times. Hopefully it gets released [with the film], I’ve just had some meetings with Criterion Films who are a really cool, forward-thinking company.

Do you find being on the road gives you more inspiration to get stuck into to other projects? Or is it something you’ve just always done?

Both, actually. I mean Geoff runs his own label – he must be fucking mad, really. But he’s very dedicated to it. That band Thought Forms I was telling you about are on that label. He’s also got Beak>, his side project. I think they give us what we can’t get from Portishead and we don’t want to give to Portishead, really. We’re very careful about what we do [in Portishead] and there are certain parameters that we set ourselves And sometimes our desires go beyond those parameters. It’s useful to have an outlet. Otherwise you just dwell on one thing. Things inspire our side projects and those side projects inspire Portishead.

Just being together, playing music together, our music, is inspirational for the future. Being together and playing is better than sitting in a studio and struggling. I mean, some people are very prolific, but we’re not. So I think it’s very healthy for us to play live.

I read an interview where Geoff got on the train with [Radiohead's] Thom Yorke one time and Thom was saying ‘Yeah, we’ve just finished King Of Limbs’ and Geoff was like ‘Oh, fuck off.’

Yeah, they’re always doing that [laughs]. Whenever I see them they’ve finished another fucking record. I remember seeing them when they’d just done OK Computer. They’d just finished and we were in the middle of our fucking turmoil.

Arseholes, right?

[Laughs] I know…


Jonno Seidler