Portishead’s Adrian Utley has teamed up with film director Nicolas Roeg to make a soundtrack for a silent film called ‘The Sound of Claudia Schiffer’ as part of an upcoming BBC series to be screened later in the year.

‘Sound on Film’ is a series of four collaborations between composers and film-makers. Impressed with Adrian’s work onfilm soundtracks and with Portishead, the BBC asked him to pair up with Roeg; responsible for such greats as ‘Performance’ starring Mick Jagger and James Fox and ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ with David Bowie.’It’s about interaction between musicians and directors. So it’s not a director telling a musician what to do, or a musician telling a director what to do (as with music videos). It’s a two-way thing.

Adrian admits to being overwhelmed by the limitless possibilities this project has brought about, ‘I’ve seen the images and you could almost put anything to them. It’s not just a collection of random images. He’s coming from an angle that he’s done a massive amount of research for. It can be watched on many different levels.’‘The Sound of Claudia Schiffer’ uses shots of Claudia Schiffer morphing into other images and a lot of stock footage from the inside the body. Adrian explains the complicated theories that concerned Nicholas Roeg when he shot the footage: ‘It’s all about whether people have or make a sound. I mean obviously there’s the sound of our heart and blood going round us and stuff, but Nick’s interested in another sense. A sound that we probably can’ t detect, or maybe we do detect it and we’re not aware of it. Like when you detect changes in peoples eyes or their pupils without even knowing. It’s an animal thing that you detect, a sense. Nick’s saying is there a sense of sound that we detect from other people? Do people give off a ‘hum’ or a high-pitched tone or something?

‘So does Adrian believe in the existence of such a thing?

‘I’m not entirely sure but it’s an interesting concept, that there’s a hum in the world – a really low frequency hum which only some people can hear. There are scientists who say that the world makes this noise, that in the earth there’ s this stuff going on that creates a kind of low frequency hum.’So what kind of music can we expect? ‘Nick’s interested in all that stuff and I’m reacting to it in a sonic way really,’ he says. ‘The music I’m doing includes lots of cut-up speech and weird internal head stuff, electronic music and bits of psychedelic stuff. I could’ve just sat and played my guitar or got Lupine Howl together to play live to the film and that would have been really cool. But I wanted to go that bit further and get into some sort of psychological thing.So how does this project differ from other films he’s worked on? ‘Music put to films is generally used as an emotional back up to what’s going on in the film or dialogue. I was watching ‘American Psycho’ last night, a film that I did a track for. John Cale had done the music, and there were a couple of points where he used only a high string sound, and that was all that was needed.’The project is also different in that it is a 50/50 collaboration between film and music, ‘But I wouldn’t exactly call it music,’ he says. ‘Music in inverted commas, more like really mad noises. We’re also using Latin poetry, bodily function noises and all sorts of stuff. I’m meeting Nick this week and we’re going to record some speech with different people. It was important not to use famous actors whose voices may be recognised.

‘ So how does working on film scores differ from working in Portishead?

‘It’s completely different because we’ve got our own parameters when we are making a record. There’s also two of us working together, well three of us – Geoff and I will be working together a lot and then eventually Beth will be working on stuff. So we write in a weird way. But it’s still in more of a song format so there is a set of rules there. Even if we break them, it’s there, and it feels very very different. With soundtrack work I don’t feel like I have to make it stand up on its own. I just work with the images and that’s it.

‘ So which does he prefer working on, soundtracks or albums?

‘If I’m doing films I prefer to be doing albums, and if I’m doing albums I prefer to be doing films. I need a balance of all kinds of things, which includes playing live. Playing live with Lupine Howl is incredibly important to me. I hate long periods of not playing and not being in touch with other musicians, but if I’ve been playing on tour for a year I can’t wait to get back to working on my own. It’s trying to get a balance really isn’t it, in life? If you can balance things out and plan, then I think it makes for a more productive situation.’‘The Sound of Claudia Schiffer’ is amongst many films Adrian has worked on since the release of the last Portishead album, including a New York production ‘Signs and Wonders’, ‘American Psycho’ (including a collaboration with Daniel Ash from Bauhaus), Irish independent film ‘Accelerator’ and work with many independent local filmmakers. He also recently won an award for a soundtrack he wrote for a David Attenborough BBC Wildlife.

geoff barrow in nme.com told that PORTISHEAD are about to commence work on their third album, and has spoken in support of a new website aiming to promote the Bristol music scene: www.bristolsound.co.uk. He revealed that the band are currently resting, but plan to go into the studio in the “early summer” to commence work on the follow-up to 1997’s eponymous second album.so the new portishead album is going to be released in December or January of 2000.the work will start in the coatch house studio.