Two nights in Barcelona
British band Portishead chose Barcelona for a very special event. In our memory, their last concert as a part of the Primavera Sound Festival still remains as a wonderful experience, a deeply intense performance that ended with the audience on stage dancing along with the band. Sometimes magic exists.
Few months ago, they decided to organize a two days event in Barcelona along with other bands and soloists. Joined by MF Doom, Thought Forms, Blanck Mass, King Creosote & Jon Hopkins, Edan & Paten Locke, Bear in Heaven, Cuchillo, Anímic and more, Portishead peformed at Poble Espanyol in Barcelona on 22 and 23 June., in a party that finished beyond midnight at Razzmatazz.
The band from Bristol has released until now only three albums from their start in 1991. Dummy (1994, Go! Beat) was recorded by the band as a duo, with Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons, but Adrian Utley co-produced the album and played guitar on 9 of the tracks. After that, Utley became an official member of the band. Songs like Numb, Sour times and Glory box and the short film To kill a dead man, written by Portishead and directed by Alexander Hemming, were acclaimed by critics and public, a magnificent start that continued with the excellent second album simply called Portishead (1997, Go! Beat). All mine remains as a classic from the nineties, and the band became a major figure in the trip hop music.
But the band stopped their activity together until 2008. Then they released 3 (2008, Island), an album that represented a tour de force in their sound and one of the best albums of the decade. Officially, they are working in a new one, and we were expecting for some new tracks in their Barcelona special event. As we said, sometimes magic exists. And it did, although they didn’t play any new track their nothing new under the sun has the smell of an everlasting innovation.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero