Geoff Barrow sets out a number of rules for the band’s next album through his twitter :

“There will be NO free downloads. There will be NO bonus tracks. There will be NO remixes. There will be NO hidden footage.”

He continues:

“There will be NO additional content. There will be NO corporate partners. There will be NO fashion lines. There will be NO tabloid pictures. There will be NO £25 unit cost. There will be NO street team. There will be NO MySpace. There will be NO celeb producer. There will be NO Twitter. There will be NO press/blogger gig. There will be NO acoustic session. There will be NO meet and greet. There will be NO edited version. There will be NO iTunes-only. There will be NO press launch. There will be NO Asian version. There will be NO radio friendly.”

And as a conclusion, Barrow wrote: “Just music and us.”

Of course, these two tags : “There will be NO MySpace” and “There will be NO Twitter” have been probably written by mistake as everyone knows how frequently Geoff uses them in order to inform us about important Portishead news, his band (beak, beak>, whatever is called!) or in order to post arrogant thoughts about everyone but himself!

Even I was chosen in the past!!

I have received many messages asking me if I’m going to keep this website alive..
The answer is obvious: Of course I will, as Phead is the only unofficial website available in the web right know and I plan to keep it well informed as it used to be even though I don’t have even a little support from them..
It’s not what I really need and I’m not saying that they HAVE to support me but if you keep in mind that I maintain Phead since 1997 without receiving even a simple “thank you” message from them (and I’m not saying person to person.. Just an email!) is a sign that they don’t care at all..
Despite these facts, I feel good with myself keeping online this website and I do this just for me and the fans. I do this because I was 14 when I first listened to Portishead and I can tell for sure that this music still inspires me. I can’t count moments I was listening to [P] music, many of them happy, many of them sad.

And the worst part is that I didn’t expect anything more from the band but just a simple “hi”, “thanks for supporting us” or “keep up the good work” and that’s it! Instead of this, I have well received insults from Geoff many times in the past. The only one I could communicate was their manager who is a really good person.
I guess being an artist makes you superior than being a simple human even though I know several artists that don’t have this “attitude”. Maybe it was me, I don’t know..
I don’t think that it matters anymore but I felt that it was my duty to inform you about the situation between [P] and me.
For any thoughts here’s my mail: admin@pheadweb.com

PJ HARVEY, DD/MM/YYYY and S.C.U.M. added to the festival on the weekend of 23rd and 24th July 2011 at Alexandra Palace in London.
Portishead will headline both nights, with a different stunning supporting line-up joining them each day. Tickets will cost £59 per day with weekend tickets priced at £100. These are the only scheduled UK shows Portishead will play in 2011.

For tickets go here

After the confirmations of The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys and Primal Scream announced yesterday, Portishead already confirmed their first visit to the Festival!
For tickets go here

Portishead have plans for European tour in June and July and the US during September and October 2011. More details check out this page or the updated “tour dates” section (From December 1st)

Portishead are set to curate a two-day All Tomorrow’s Parties event in July 2011.

Named I’ll Be Your Mirror, it will act as sister event to the ATP festivals and is named after the B-side to The Velvet Underground’s original ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ single.

Taking place at London’s Alexandra Palace on July 23 and 24, Portishead will headline both days and will hand-pick the rest of the bill.

Already confirmed to perform are Factory Floor, DOOM, Swans, Liars, Beach House and Company Flow, who will play with their original line-up and for the first time in the UK for 10 years.

The line-up, so far, for I’ll Be Your Mirror is as follows:

July 23:

Portishead
Doom
Company Flow
The Books
BEAK>
Factory Floor

July 24:

Portishead
Swans
Beach House
Anika
Liars
The Passion Of Joan Of Arc

(NME)

Beak>, the latest musical project from Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, have announced plans to tour worldwide. Beak> is completed by Billy Fuller and Matt Williams, who were both signed to Barrow’s Invada Records as part of different acts. They started the new band at the beginning of this year, following a jam session at the Invada Records Christmas party a year previously. As part of the tour, Beak> will be playing at Primavera Festival in Spain.

Beak> will play:

28 May 2010 | ATP @ Primavera, Barcelona, Barcelona
29 May 2010 | Bad Bonn Kilbi Festival, Dudingen
04 Jun 2010 | Synch Festival, Athens, Greece (cancelled due to “personal” reasons!)
05 Jun 2010 | Casa Da Musica, Porto, Porto
27 Jun 2010 | Glastonbury Festival (PARK STAGE), Somerset, Southwest
04 Se 2010 | ATP NEW YORK , New York, New York

For more info visit the official website

Geoff posted on Myspace about some Portishead news earlier announcing a new song called “Chase the Tear” to be played exclusively on Zane Lowe’s BBC Radio 1 show tonight from 7pm – 9pm.
You can view the video Portishead performing the song in the studio and download it (not offered to all countries though) from 7 Digital here.

Info from 7digital about Portishead collaboration with Amnesty:

The Mercury Award winning trio have joined forces with Amnesty International to release their brand new track ‘Chase The Tear’ – on the eve of International Human Rights Day. Download it now, exclusively from 7digital. (See below.)

You can also watch them performing ‘Chase The Tear’ by clicking on the video above.

International Human Rights day marks the anniversary of the United Nation’s historic ‘Universal Declaration Of Human Rights’ on 10 December 1948. The UDHR set out for the first time in a single document the fundamental rights to which everyone, everywhere is entitled – including the right to life, liberty, security, the freedoms of opinion, association and expression, and the right not to be subjected to torture or cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. (For more information: www.amnesty.org.uk/udhr.)

According to BBC, a new Portishead album is going to be released late 2010 apart from other activities some Portishead members have (eg Goff Barrow with his new band “beak”).

The band is already in studio working some new tracks but nothing is clear yet especially in which record company (or not) is to be released. If we have more news, we’ll let you know.

Unfortunately, short European tour has ended. Geoff Barrow promised that the band will work on new sounds and a new lp is going to be released much sooner than the last one. Primavera was the last Portishead show and at the end, people entered the stage and they were dancing with the band. You can watch it here. The band admitted that the promotion of the album wasn’t that great as it should be:

“We seem to do everything in a way to make life difficult for ourselves. We could play the festivals this summer and not have to worry about the mortgage for a while. But we’re not! It’s always the reverse of what we should be doing really. I’m sure our agent is going nuts, and the record company’s going, But how are you going to sell the record through the summer?’ I don’t know, we’ll do what we always do really: take the difficult route.”

The worst thing is that it’s not only their agent who is going nuts but all their fans including me! The most difficult part of this madness is how to tell people that the band is going to be inactive AGAIN (inactive equals to “work some tunes in the studio”) and doesn’t want to tour in USA and other countries. As many of you know, the tour that has just finished was supposedly a European one even though they played in irrelevant and small cities like Firenze and Porto and ignored important countries such as Sweden, Austria, Norway, Greece and others. People will be (again) disappointed with the band because they were waiting patiently all these years just to see them live again. It’s not that easy for a fan just to wait several years again to see something new from them.. And I don’t think that they take the difficult route (as Geoff said) but the easiest one as anyone could easily think.. I really hope to hear some news pretty soon and not to have to wait for years…

Watch out the “Rip” covered by Radiohead here!

Geoff Barrow said the group would probably get shunned when it comes to soundcheck preparations because the solo star would take up so much attention from organisers.

He told BBC 6 Music: “It was gonna be us and Kraftwerk, which was amazing for us to play with Kraftwerk. Then I knew the tickets hadn’t been selling well for the concert, so they put Prince in.

“Prince is gonna turn up with a forty-person entourage. With the sound men not allowing us to soundcheck, then you end up with this horrible situation where you’re playing to a shed load of Americans without a sound check.”

The Coachella Festival takes place in Los Angeles from April 25 to 27. Portishead will appear on April 26th with Prince, Kraftwerk and many more artists which can be found in the official Coachella website.

To watch live appearance of Portishead at Coachella festival, Click here for the webcast schedule.

Current TV presents an exclusive premiere of British trip-hop phenomenon Portishead’s studio performance as they unveil seven songs from their new album “Third” in Portishead, England. The band is performing 7 tracks from the new album. To watch 40-minute programm go there. The show has been recorded in the school’s Art, Music and Drama department in Portishead. For several troubled years, Barrow attended this school, and it was here that he started playing the drums.

10 years since their last record, Portishead have finally broken their silence with album number three. So what took them so long, asks Craig McLean from Telegraph. You can read this amazing article here. Some interesting parts of the article:

“Then, three years ago, Portishead popped up en masse once more, playing a tsunami benefit in Bristol. Publicising the concert, Barrow said that the band were in the thick of making the long-awaited third album. What this actually meant was that they had three songs they were happy with: Magic Doors, We Carry On and Grey Skies. In fact, it was only two: Grey Skies is not on Third.

But they had some momentum?

‘Yes,’ Utley says. ‘More to the point,’ Barrow adds, ‘we had broken through.’

What of Beth Gibbons during this period? Ill with exhaustion after the second album’s tour, she retreated to Devon. Utley would visit her, and they would take long walks on Dartmoor. ‘We’d have deep conversations and she’d say, “That’s what that song is about…” But that’s as far as I’d go with it – I don’t ask her to explain them to me.’

Barrow says that he and Gibbons’s working relationship is healthier than ever. It has helped with the songwriting, to which all three contribute, with Gibbons solely responsible for the lyrics.”

“When the tour is completed Utley wants to do some more soundtrack work. Barrow aims to release more records on Invada and complete a long-mooted hip-hop project with some friends. ‘Also, writing hip-hop music helps me get something out of my system and then I can go on to something else. Then hopefully,’ he says with a smile, ‘we’ll carry on writing Portishead stuff.’

The fourth record, he promises, ‘will be a lot quicker. Unless something ginormous happens.’”

Also, watch a port of the new Portishead video of “We Carry On” song here!