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then living with his mother; She was just deafening
64
Marcus 1997.
65
Lewis 1994.
66
B.B.C. 2010.
" 44 "
R. J . WHEATON
& I thought my mum was going to have a right go! I was
worried about the neighbours. 67
He sensed that her reaction to his approach was also
uncertain. I think she wanted to be in this real musician
scenario, which was all she d ever known. So meeting me,
this guy with a couple of boxes making funny noises, was
pretty strange for her & I think we were both a bit wary
of each other but impressed with each other. 68
* * *
With work on Homebrew completed, Cherry and McVey
now Barrow s manager sought some time out
of the country, and offered Barrow (with his extended
collective) funding of about £40,000 and the use of
their London home with its studio.69 I just refused to
produce for Geoff Barrow, McVey told Tribe magazine.
I just kept telling him to fuck off and carry on in the
same direction he was already going by himself & I also
told him to stick with the one singer and pointed out
that he d be hard pressed to find a better name than his
hometown s. 70
The group was there for almost a year, over the course
of which, as McDonald recalls, it started to whittle
down into the main core of people. Tim Saul, who had
moved from Bristol back to London, saw in this time
a kind of natural process of distillation that having
67
McLean 2008.
68
Marcus 1997.
69
McLean 2008.
70
La Polla undated.
" 45 "
DUMMY
tried to work with a few singers Geoff recognized the
very special musical relationship that he and Beth had
got. He also recalls Barrow s style maturing during
that period, developing a strong style from minimal
technology:
you can hear Geoff developing as a producer with his
own particular way of approaching the production and
programming. The setup of an Atari 1040, Akai sampler,
combined with I think it was a Yamaha drum machine
that he used. And then starting to find the best way of
making them work together. Actually a very minimal
setup.
* * *
At the end of the year, Dave McDonald recalls we ended
up with a shedload of material, an absolute shedload
of material. With the funding exhausted and McVey
and Cherry returning to London, the group relocated
to Bristol, establishing residence with the benefit of
McDonald s connections at State of Art.
A demo tape was produced with versions of the
earliest songs that became part of Dummy It Could
be Sweet, It s a Fire, Sour Times, and a lot of stuff
that s never been released, according to McDonald. It
attracted attention from Ferdy Unger-Hamilton who
was an A&R representative at Go! Beat, a subsidiary of
prominent label Go! Discs Records.
The band also started doing remixes to raise money
to keep our little project going Depeche Mode s In
Your Room, and Walking in My Shoes ; Paul Weller s
" 46 "
R. J . WHEATON
Wildwood ; Primal Scream s Give Out But Don t Give
Up.
A remix of Gabrielle s Going Nowhere took the
original s poppy, brassy optimism, and pounded it with
the breakbeat from Lou Donaldson s Pot Belly, a
hip-hop mainstay comprised of a busy snare and cymbal
ride, a blunted bassline, and flatended organ stabs. The
break is pushed hard; the result is surprisingly unset-
tling, and by the middle of the song many of the band s
signature tricks are on display, including the impeccable,
dramatic timing with which new elements are drawn in
and snapped out. But the vocal remains at the front, the
melody at the centre of a soundscape which accrues the
qualities of a vortex around it.
On the basis of the demo and the Gabrielle remix,
Unger-Hamilton signed Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons
as Portishead. Adrian Utley drove the pair to London to
sign the contract.71
For some critics the band s name was in keeping
with the the hometown tradition of hip hop: Watts
Prophets, Sugarhill Gang, Cypress Hill, something in
keeping with Barrow s dominant stylistic influence.72
But Barrow recalled the sense of mystery that the name
Portishead somehow evoked for those not familiar with
the geographic locale:
We were called Portishead because we were all working
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