The Cover Uncovered: The short film that led to the release of Portishead’s ‘Dummy’
For all the marvellous musical innovators that have emerged from the southwestern city of Bristol, the one claim that continues to be associated with the place I call home is the fact that it exists as the birthplace of trip-hop. Emerging from the ashes of the Wild Bunch sound system that operated within the neighbourhoods of St Paul’s and Bishopston during the 1980s, the loose and ‘trippy’ variant on US hip-hop music was primarily pioneered by the group Massive Attack and their friend and collaborator, Tricky.
However, as the band and the genre began to gain popularity, others from within the city began working on their own mutations of trip-hop that pushed it further away from its origins in dub, reggae and hip-hop and started to incorporate elements of psychedelia, jazz, and even the nascent post-rock trend that had its own cinematic style to it. Front and centre among this new guard of innovators were Portishead, another Bristol-based trio consisting of vocalist Beth Gibbons and multi-instrumentalists Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley.
Releasing their debut album, Dummy, in 1994, Portishead’s approach was just as novel as that of Massive Attack before them but created a far more introspective version of trip-hop than the club-oriented concepts their counterparts had conceived. With tracks like ‘Sour Times’ and ‘Glory Box’ utilising chopped-up orchestral samples and placing Gibbons’ haunting vocal lines over the top of taut yet disarming beats, the album was considered a masterpiece ahead of its time.
Adorning the front cover is an image of Gibbons restrained in a chair and lit entirely in blue, which looks as though it may have been taken from a film still. In actual fact, it is, but not necessarily one that would’ve seen a wide-scale cinematic release. The film in question that the image has been snatched from is To Kill a Dead Man, and it was written, shot, and directed by the band themselves. All members took acting roles in the short and composed the soundtrack.
The 11-minute picture follows themes of espionage, assassination and kidnap, taking on a neo-noir style throughout. The soundtrack that the band created for it is fitting of this, although the slower tempo of the music made for Dummy isn’t totally reflective of the energetic themes that were made for the film, which is decidedly more inspired by 1970s Italian crime dramas. However, it was on the strength of this soundtrack that Go! Discs handed Portishead a record deal in the first place, with the cinematic qualities of their music being the central appeal that drew their attention.
Within the album’s booklet are further stills from the film, and the artwork for the singles taken from the record also follows suit. The band had put a huge amount of effort into both this small slice of art-house cinema and their debut album, but with the record being more likely to gain traction, they wanted a way to draw attention to the existence of the other and pay tribute to the fruits of their labour.
The version of the film that appears on the DVD extras of their 2002 Roseland NYC Live release begins with a title card that has a message from the band, reading: “In 1994, we conceived and made To Kill A Dead Man. We realised very quickly afterwards that we had grossly underestimated just how tough it is to write, design, act and perform a short film.”
Over the course of three studio albums, Portishead continued to make music inspired by their mutual love of cinema and would often mix their electronic experimentation, unique production methods and lush arrangements together to create music that was often labelled as having the same neo-noir qualities as their short did. While it isn’t the most polished or professional product, its importance to the history of the band can’t be argued.
