The Portishead singer’s first solo album has been years in the making. At its first live outing in Paris, she shares the rapture.
Beth Gibbons is not talking. Not on the phone to Australia, not by Zoom or email. Not in person either, all these flying hours later in Paris, where the famously reticent Portishead singer has come to premiere her first solo album,“Beth is essentially quite a shy person,” her band leader and producer, James Ford, tells me during last-minute rehearsals at Salle Pleyel, a century-old concert hall near the Arc de Triomphe.
“Beth might get me to play an ensemble of different-sized recorders, instead of playing a keyboard part. She would take away what I did and just use one small section of it, or bin it completely, or keep it all. So it was this very iterative process.” Portishead in 1998, from left, Geoff Barrow, Adrian Utley, Beth Gibbons and Dave McDonald. Barrow has said of Gibbons: “She has to work really, really hard to sing those songs.”If that sounds ominous, well sure, but the “chinks of light” Ford mentions regularly turn to floods of rapture in performance. A few hours before doors open at the 2000-seat Salle Pleyel, he leads the handpicked band through a last rehearsal of some intense and fairly elaborate material.
“Beth is a trapeze artist,” her bandmate Geoff Barrow told me on Portishead’s last Australian tour of 2011. “All eyes are on her. She is so creative melodically and lyrically but she’s not a born performer in the technical sense. She has to work really, really hard to sing those songs.”Come showtime, there’s more than a couple of sad fans holding “cherche place” signs outside the venue.
So how does he feel about channelling that pain in the media interviews she continues to respectfully decline?
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