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!

This is where TV and the internet meet. The internet portal through which you can watch the experimental trippity hoppers perform eight tracks from their new record is called Current TV. It’s kind of like a thinking man’s YouTube, with clips of news, news stories, virals and all the rest of it. It’s also a fully-fledged TV channel, on Sky digital channel 193 and Virgin Media 155.

You can catch the band perform on 11 April at 10pm for 40, commercial-free minutes on both the TV channel and the internet channel, and there’ll be ample opportunity to catch them again as it’ll be repeated quite a lot.

The Portishead performance is part of the multi-media channel’s new music strand, Current Fix.

Portishead interview is here

Don’t miss Current Tv for more info.

The last time Portishead released a full-length studio album was back in 1997, when artists — and the music industry, as a whole — didn’t lose sleep over the possibility of their work prematurely leaking to millions of illegal downloaders several weeks ahead of their LP’s commercial release. A lot can happen in 11 years…

“We definitely weren’t expecting that,” Portishead multi-instrumentalist Adrian Utley said of their new album’s leak, in an interview with MTV News last week. “And we’re definitely pissed about it. But I suppose there’s nothing you can do about it. We know how it leaked, and I would love to tell you, but I can’t. You can only hope that it’s not going to f— everything up for you, because I think, in this world, there are downloaders and people who buy. I don’t know if you can convince downloaders to buy. If we don’t sell records, we can’t make any more records. We’re just not rich people.”

“We were just in Paris and Berlin doing some television shows, and when we took the stage, there was the hugest cheer — it was really affirming,” Utley explained. “When you’re in the studio you have the Internet, so you sort of sense what’s going on to some extent. But we’d see each other every day, and we’d talk about biscuits or tea or politics, music — we didn’t really talk about the outside world or the world’s perception of us very much. We’ve just started to sense it now.”

When Utley and Barrow first started throwing ideas around for Third, they “didn’t feel right — it wasn’t happening really.” So they decided to take a few more years to think about what they wanted to do with the record and reconvened in 2004. “And that’s when we wrote the track ‘We Carry On.’ That was the beginning of a new us, really. That’s when we thought, ‘OK, this is going to work now.’

“But it’s never prolific and easy,” Utley continued. “It always just takes a long time, and it’s just particular to us working together, because if we work outside of this context, we can work a lot quicker. For us, every track has to live somewhere — it has to have a world that it’s going to live in, rather than just being a song straight away.”

The problem the band originally faced back in 2001 was that, while they wanted to retain some semblance of their signature sound, the songs they were working on sounded, well, not like Portishead at all, Utley said.

“This other stuff that we did didn’t work earlier on, because it wasn’t right,” he said. “It didn’t sound like us, if you like. You might have thought it was us, but it didn’t feel like it was us. One of our rules is, we don’t want to repeat what we’ve done before, and I imagine a lot of people are like that. We couldn’t possibly go back to doing a ‘Glory Box,’ or doing a ‘Strangers’ or doing a ‘Cowboys.’ It’s done. So that was one of the hard things — we had to find a new voice but retain that old voice as well, and be relevant. We wanted to incorporate some of the influences we’ve had since [Portishead], and I think we’ve done that.”

Unfortunately, aside from their appearance at next month’s Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, Portishead don’t plan on touring the States at all — not this year, or the next. And Utley is “deeply sorry for that.” But if the band were to do an extensive tour, that would make the wait for the band’s fourth record that much longer.

“To do a massive tour at the moment would be a folly, I think,” he said. “If we do a year of touring again, we won’t want to see each other for a while. It won’t be another 10 years, I swear. Man, it’s just that life passes so quickly, and you get home and do other things and you try to enjoy your life. We’ve got children now, and we just wanted to live life, rather than being slaves to this career, if you like. It’s not like we’ve gone off and spent time having children and just doing nothing but that, but time just goes by like that. We finished the album late last year, and it’s springtime already.”

Portishead are divided about touring

Portishead have revealed their mixed feelings about the touring process. Guitarist Adrian Utley explained that the band have an “unspectacular” lifestyle on the road..

Speaking to Billboard, he said: “We’ve been immensely looking forward to touring… but we’re divided about it. “Beth [Gibbons, vocals] is really nervous about playing live, and Geoff [Barrow, multi-instrumentalist] absolutely hates playing live, and I love playing live.”

Explaining their pre-gig preparations, Utley said: “We don’t really do any ritual before a gig. It’s very unspectacular. Beth does a warm-up with her tape. A few gins are drunk, and there’s some strolling around nervously behind the stage. And that’s it. We go on.”

The guitarist also revealed that Portishead want their forthcoming new album, ‘Third’, to be seen as a whole body of work, rather than as a collection of songs.

“We’re not really doing any singles,” he said. “We see it as a whole album. ‘Glory Box’ was a single, and it did go in the charts. And I think ‘Sour Times’ did. But we’ve never seen ourselves as a particularly singles-oriented band. Especially now, it doesn’t seem relevant. Billboard

Portishead appeared on Coliseum of Porto yesterday and you can see some videos from YouTube. The setlist was:

Silence
Hunter
Mysterons
Rip
Glory Box
Numb
Magic Door
Wandering star
Machine Gun
Over
Sour Times
Only you
Nylon smile
Cowboys

——–

Threads
Roads
We carry on

For more tour dates check out tour dates section.

Portishead performed their new songs in Berlin at invite only gig for a German radio station yesterday (March 19).

Surrounded by 400 guests and competition winners, the band performed a nine-song set, mostly comprising of songs from ‘Third’.

They played in the middle of the crowd for the intimate show.

Due to the nature of the session, several of tracks were restarted or performed more than once to find the perfect take.

However despite the difficulties, Portishead enjoyed a friendly atmosphere with Barrow excusing the group by explaining “it’s been a long time”.

Check out the new video of Machine Gun from the official site or YouTube. Also, in this link there is a short promo video featuring the band working on the album in studio. It’s a documentary and there is a possibility that this movie is the one included in the limited edition box set of Third.

http://island.bright-soft.co.uk/portishead/web/web1.htm

To pre order limited edition boxset go to portisheadshop.co.uk