Record Rebound: Portishead reissue ‘Roseland NYC Live’ on its 25th anniversary
The Bristol-based band Portishead is anything but conventional. The core trio, consisting of Beth Gibbons, Adrian Utley and Geoff Barrow, first came together in the early 1990s. Singer Gibbons and multi-instrumentalist Barrow crossed paths at a coffee break during an Enterprise Allowance course. Realising a shared passion for hip-hop and melancholic post-punk music, the pair arranged to meet and record some new material together.
While the pair worked on their first song, ‘It Could Be Sweet’, at Coach House Studios, Utley, an established jazz guitarist, overheard the session and began to exchange ideas. Within three years, the trio released its debut album, Dummy, which became more successful than anyone had dreamt possible. Among other accolades, it won the Mercury Music Prize in 1995 thanks to its imaginative blend of hip-hop sampling, jazz, electronica and psychedelia.
Portishead was soon swept under the trip-hop umbrella alongside Bristol neighbours Massive Attack, but it’s a label with which they’ve never been particularly comfortable. The sound is trippy and contains samples, but so much more is at play. With the resounding success of Dummy, pressure mounted as the band looked towards its second album, 1997’s Portishead.
Relative to the masterfully digressive 2008 album, Third, the second studio album followed in Dummy’s footsteps. ‘All Mine’ brought the gritty spy-movie aesthetic to a whole new level with intense orchestral stabs and Gibbons’ ever-enveloping, eerie vocals. The album is perhaps best remembered for its third single, ‘Only You’, which carries a bold lead vocal through a spectral midnight scene, with a few discerning record scratches from Barrow.
While promoting their second album, Portishead decided to stage a one-off concert at New York City’s Roseland Ballroom. With such a meticulously produced studio product, they felt they could bring justice to their live adaptation by commissioning members of the New York Philarmonic. As Utley informed me in a recent interview, the orchestral backing came at a large financial cost but was worth every penny. Knowing they didn’t have the time or money for mistakes, he remembered Roseland Ballroom as a “nerve-wracking” experience.
During the performance, Portishead honoured highlights from Dummy and Portishead, many of which ended up on the 1998 live album Roseland NYC Live. “I didn’t like what we did that day,” Barrow reflected in a 2008 conversation with the New York Times. He went on to describe the endeavour as “overblown” and “pompous.” The band subsequently entered a hiatus from which they have only surfaced for Third and several tours since.
This week, Portishead breathed new life into Roseland NYC Live with a reissue to celebrate its 25th anniversary. The newly remastered album stretches across two red LPs in a visually stunning package that is appropriate for the audio within. I am afraid I have to disagree with Barrow’s opinion on the release as a brilliant celebration of the band’s first two albums. It contains several enduring classics, including ‘Roads’, ‘Glory Box’ and ‘Sour Times’ from Dummy and ‘Cowboys’, ‘All Mine’ and ‘Only You’ from the self-titled follow-up.
What seems essential to Roseland NYC Live is its willingness to reimagine the songs. Instead of copying each cinematic soundscape frame for frame, they embellish the tracks with new instrumental flourishes, live samples and scratch intrusions. Audiophiles will appreciate that live albums often fall victim to substandard recording environments and an unrefined mix. However, this album benefits from surprising clarity, and where the mix differs from the studio versions, it brings a seemingly purposeful nuance.
You can pre-order/purchase the Roseland NYC Live reissue here.
