One of those occasions where the album cover looks like the record sounds. Mysterious, timeless, slightly sinister and eerily beautiful. This album still sounds fresh today. A blend of hip-hop beats, jazz guitars and velvety keyboards. It’s comfortably uncomfortable.
In 1995, I took the National Express coach from my flat in Liverpool to London, then onto Bristol and hitched to my first-ever music festival, Glastonbury. Climbed over the fence and spent the next five days listening to Oasis, Prodigy, The Cure, Orbital and much more. Despite the caliber of the main stage acts the performance that went down in Glastonbury history was local outfit Portishead playing in the acoustic tent.
The story goes they were offered the pick of the stages after winning the Mercury Music Prize that year but opted for the low-key acoustic tent. The performance was anything but. “It crackled with electricity” Paul Stokes wrote in the NME and that’s the perfect way to sum it up. It was heaving, with thousands stuck outside. I was on my own, but felt right at home amongst a crowd that felt they were seeing something truly unique. The best live music experience of my life to this day.