“At that time, most everybody had rinsed out the vinyl breakbeats that everybody had. So Geoff was being a bit of a drummer then, but he used me to play things he couldn’t play himself. So he’d play me a bit of vinyl and say Listen to this, can you play that, but change the hi-hat to this? Or leave that bit out? Or make it more this,” explains Clive. “He described how he wanted it different. And then we’d go into great detail, perfecting the mic, the sound, the tuning of the sound, the dampening of the drums, until he got what he wanted. The only exception was one time when I free-falled, and that’s how they got the beat for ‘Mysterons.’ The beat is entirely me playing. They took that section and looped it.”

“A lot of time I wasn’t playing to anything. So I had no idea what I was playing to or for,” Clive continues. “So it was a very microscopic focus on a drum beat, a playing style, a very careful construction of the balance of the playing. Very different from the normal recording of drums. It’s very much about balancing the relative volumes of all the parts. The level of the bass drum, against the snare drum, against the hi-hat or cymbals or whatever. Very strictly controlled playing and recorded incredibly quietly. Way quieter than anybody ever records. That’s a big part of the sound, along with a lot of other things. It was a very detailed, unusual thing. Sampling was a new experience for me. So new that when I heard the record, I barely recognized what I played. Bar on bar, looped perfectly. It was the first time I had encountered that.”

It’s a Fire

After the release of Dummy in August of 1994, led by the single “Sour Times,” Portishead quickly gained mainstream appeal, becoming the face of “trip-hop” and “the Bristol sound,” alongside fellow acts Massive Attack and Tricky, the latter who was also managed by Caroline Killoury.

“We had a lot of very cool, underground press and support. Bristol was a big scene at the time, obviously, there were a lot of things coming out of Bristol. We had the Manchester scene going on as well. People were looking to Bristol for things, so that kind of set a theme. It was kind of the cool, club side of things, as Giles Peterson and all those guys were around. So it was very much in that world,” recalls Killoury.

“And then things started to seep out a little more into the mainstream, and it really caught fire. It’s hard to know quite why these things happened the way they did. When you are in the middle of them, you can’t really acknowledge why certain things take off. You’re just kind of along for the ride, building it and building it and building it, not really that consciously,” she adds.

The album would win the Mercury Music Prize in 1995, go double platinum in Europe, and achieve gold status in the U.S., taking the band around the world.

“When it became what it did become, the first evidence of that was when we went on the first tour and when around the U.K. and especially the states. The reaction of the audiences and the atmosphere of the gigs was just astonishing. I started to realize what I was playing and what it meant to people. It was a unique thing and I was privileged to be a part of it,” says Clive.

Evidence of this is captured on the timeless Roseland New York DVD, released in 1998, which finds the band performing with a 28-piece symphonic orchestra, fully realizing Geoff’s bedroom producer dreams to, perhaps, the highest degree.