Tour is over...

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!

Portishead have revealed that they are annoyed at Prince's addition to Coachella Festival bill.

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

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 recorded new album at German session

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

• Pre-order "Third" boxset here
• USB features the album, and 5 films
  
  Double vinyl album
  
  Etched 12” vinyl of ‘Machine Gun’
  
  Limited edition print from Nick Uff

The 5 videos are:

• ‘The Truly Spectacular Universal Conference Film’ (film)
  ‘The Rip at Mr Wolfe’s’ (film)
  ‘Ade’s House’ (film)
  ‘Machine Gun’ (film)
  ‘We Carry On’ (film)

Watch new "Machine Gun" video here (you have to sign up and login first).

Finally, the official Portishead website has been updated with videos, shop and content. Also, a new forum has been created in order to control spam messages (it was about time!), all you have to do is to sign up to the new forum.

It's already known that the new single "Machine Gun" will be released on April 14. Portishead also announced that a digital version is available from Portishead.co.uk from 8pm on April 10. However, the release does not feature any B-sides.

• Meanwhile a USB stick edition of 'Third', out April 28, features a host of extras, including the following four films:
  
  Ade's House - 'Machine Gun'
  'The Rip' live @ Mr Wolfe’s
  'We Carry On'
  The Truly Spectacular Universal Conference Film
  
  The band have also announced that they will issue a limited edition box set of 'Third', with details to be announced. The only thing we know is that it will come in a multitude of limited edition formats including a double vinyl version except from the usb format and some limited edition prints from Nick Uff will also be made available.
• To be more specific, the timeplan is:
• April 10: "Machine Gun" single , digital download at www.portishead.co.uk
• April 14: "Machine Gun" single taken from 'Third' will be released in stores two weeks before the album on April 14.
• April 28: "Third" album release in stores, also in double vinyl and usb stick format with 4 new bonus videos.

That's all we know for now.

After nearly a decade on hiatus, Portishead return this year with a new album: Third. The new collection of songs, surprisingly enough their third, hasn't been released yet and has hardly been heard by anyone, but you can hear the seminal trip hop band perform it live in Berlin next week, courtesy of Guardian/Music.

The band are set to record Third for Radio Eins in Berlin on Wednesday 19th March and we have a pair of tickets, plus flights and accommodation, to give away.

Just email the answer to the following question to kelly.nestruck@guardian.co.uk, with your full name and daytime contact telephone number supplied.

In what year did Portishead release their critically acclaimed debut album Dummy?

1991

1994

1995

1997

Please note that flights to Berlin leave from London Heathrow at lunchtime on Wednesday March 19th 2008. If you cannot make this date and time, please do not enter. You MUST supply a daytime contact telephone number and you must comply with the terms and conditions outlined below to win.

This competition closes at midnight, Wednesday March 12, 2008

Good luck!

You can also participate in XFM contest to win tickets for Berlin here

New single and video of "Machine Gun":  Check out and watch the new video from April 9 in the official site.

A few hours ago on ilxor.com, someone started a thread entitled “The thread for Portishead ‘Third’.” The album, which doesn’t hit stores until 4/28, was apparently leaked (somehow).

Here’s the mini-review from the apparent only person on Earth who has heard the record besides the band:

“Listening now to what may possibly be a raw mix, but I’m kind of hoping it’s a finalized version. This is totally stream of consciousness stuff in the best way.

I’m sure people will complain about the lack of anything like “Roads” or “Sour Times”, but those have already been made and made perfectly. Why try to recreate them over and over? Especially when you’d rather be doing (and I’d rather be hearing) things like “Hunter” with maybe the best guitar bit I’ll hear all year and “Machine Gun” which closes out with some totally John Carpenter-esque synth dabbling.”
More: Mypoprocks, Nedragget

Pheadweb.com is very strict against copyright violation and does not provide links for downloading the new album in any way. All links posted by fans will be removed immediately as well as their user accounts.

The album will be officially released on April 28th and you can pre-order it here: Amazon, HMV.

From the official blog: "Our apologies to anybody disappointed by our recently announced tour not coming close to where you live. We know many cities are missing but we're unable to add more shows this year due to personal reasons. Hopefully we'll be able to get to Australia, New Zealand, the US and everywhere else we've missed at some point".

Unfortunately, Portishead has chosen only few countries to play in Europe for the promotion of their new album for this year. Many fans are disappointed about their decision to have a limited tour period but as Geoff Barrow says, this happens due to personal reasons which he doesn't specify.

Probably, these dates are not a "strict" tour but more like a vacation for them to get rest from their hard time releasing the album. The sure thing is that many people will be disappointed much more because they will have to wait for 2009 to see their band playing again in a location near them! And what about those people who were anxiously waiting Portishead to come in their country and suddenly realized that only few countries were included in their tour dates? (For example, Portishead are playing in Italy but not in the capital or in only one town as they have a "limited" tour but in Milan and Florence which is a very small town for a mini tour and they refused other main countries and important stations for their European tour such as Greece, Norway, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden and much more). Also, no US tour will follow but just a date in Coachella Festival in Indio.

I really hope you will get over your problems. We expect a lot from you!

Adrian Utley gave an interview recently to Billboard saying that the new album is "a really strong record and it's adventurous" . "Beth [Gibbons'] voice is as powerful as ever. The uptempo tracks are never going to be drum'n'bass, but they do hit 120 BPMs in some places." He also says about Coachella Festival: "They've been asking us for quite a few years, it seems like a good place to play, being out in the desert, and it was started by what seems to be some pretty cool people."

He adds about the new album that, "It sounds nothing like 'Dummy' or 'Portishead,' but it's definitely its older brother or sister. It's the same mindset we've always had, only further down the road."

Admitting the band's creative process can be "very slow," with some tracks from "Third" percolating for four years, Utley says the members have drawn upon an eclectic mix for musical inspiration, including recordings by Can, the Silver Apples, Joy Division, early Human League and "weird doom metal band" Ohm.

"There was never no Portishead," notes Utley. "It was just we'd had enough, and we didn't have any ideas. We all got on with various different things, but we worked on each others' projects. There was always a Portishead. We have ongoing business, obviously, to deal with -- permissions and compilations and film requests, even if we're not doing anything at all."

From Billboard

The cover and tracklist of the new Portishead album "Third" revealed. Tracklist is:

"Silence", "Hunter", "Nylon Smile", "The Rip", "Plastic", "We Carry On", "Deep Water", "Machine Gun", "Small", "Magic Doors" and "Threads". The albums will be released April 14 (Europe) and April 28 (USA) by Island Records and Mercury (USA). Portishead were touring the press these days and gave an interview to the Observer. Some parts:

"Two minutes and 10 seconds in, the scene is finally set for Beth Gibbons's vocal to make its entrance. But however effectively the listener has been softened up for this momentous event, no one will quite be prepared for the pitch of ecstatic anguish at which her voice announces itself. 'Wounded and afraid inside my head,' Beth flails poignantly, as a Tardis seems to take off in the background, 'falling through changes ... Did you know what I lost? Do you know what I wanted?'", "It's stunning stuff. And this is just the opening number. Later on, once Third (for that is the title: it is, after all, Portishead's third album - well, if you don't count the live one) is properly up and running, it features a run of five or six songs which are not just worthy of the records this band were making 10 or even 14 years ago, but feel like the sonic destination which they were always meant to arrive at."

The whole interesting interview is here.

Also, Portishead gave an interview to German newspaper "Welt" and you can see a live video featuting Geoff talking about the new album "Third". The link of the interview and the video is here.

Portishead have just announced the support bands for their Spring tour.

A Hawk and A Hacksaw will appear at:

Oporto Coliseum (March 26), Lisbon Coliseum (March 27), Milan Alcatraz (March 30), Florence Sashall (March 31), Manchester Apollo (April 9), London Hammersmith Apollo (April 10), Edinburgh Corn Exchange (April 12), Wolverhampton Civic (April 13) and London Brixton Academy (April 17).

Kling Klang will appear at:

Munich Tonhalle (April 2), Berlin Columbiahalle (April 3), Copenhagen KB Halle (April 4), Cologne Palladium (April 6), Amsterdam HMH (April 7), Paris Zenith (May 5), Paris Zenith (May 6), Brussels Forest National (May 8).

For more info about Portishead shows check tour dates section.

More about the support artists

A Hawk and a Hacksaw is a band from New Mexico. The band mainly consists of Jeremy Barnes and violinist Heather Trost. The music is inspired by eastern European and particularly Balkan traditions, and is mostly instrumental with occasional vocals, shouts and cheers. Visit their official site.

Kling Klang is a 5 piece heavy experimental synthesiser krautrock orchestra with amplified vintage synths, futuristic riffs, electric guitars and live drums based in both Liverpool and Edinburgh. As you can read from their Myspace site it's an experimental band and present Liverpool's future rock. Check out their website.

"On »Third«, I can make out several treasures that most likely found their way onto the record that way. For example, »Small« reminds me of Pierre Henry’s »Psyche Rock«." 

The very German-sounding »We Carry On« sees Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley clashing Joy Division with Techno beats and Blixa Bargeld guitars. Most of all, however, I detect several references to fairly cheesy Progressive Rock – as played by the likes of Nektar or Embryo in the 1970s. Here, these references actually sound more like excerpts from the soundtracks of amazing horror B-movies. One of the album’s most interesting new tracks, »Magic Doors«, reverts to the old DJ method: Portishead take a Funk beat and slow it down, pitch it right down to half-speed, then add one of Beth Gibbons mournful litanies. In this, Portishead follow the lead of Led Zeppelin who, a few decades earlier, took Blues numbers from the 1930s and slowed them down to half their speed".

"Small", "Magic Doors", "Deep Water", first single "Machine Gun" are among the 11 new Portishead tracks we can look forward to when Third hits UK shops April 14 via Island.

No US release dates yet. For full review visit Spex Magazine here.

We have already seen some film content from ATP the previous year.

There is a video from YouTube of the ATP Channel which was programmed by Portishead.

ATP trailer leading into Brian De Palma's "Phantom of the Paradise". Watch here.

The new album is called "Third" and it will be released April 14th from Island Records. The tracklist is not yet known and there are 11 tracks and is 49 minutes 13 seconds long. However, we have some info about the names of some tracks from Liberation: In Silence, Hunter, The Burden.
Some fans have recorded some parts from the ATP and you can listen to the new songs from this site.

New songs are very interesting at least, I was totally impressed with them and especially with Machine Gun. Portishead have changed their style in a good way and I'm pretty sure the album will be great. It's  worth the wait.

Although it's very early, you can pre-order the new album from HMV :)