Portishead Quotes
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I try to imagine how we would live if we didn't know we were going to die. Would we live our lives differently? Less careful, maybe? Less scared? These are beautiful things to think about and build a song around.
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The music comes first. When Geoff has made something the inspiration comes automatically. His music is very expressive. But still is is a very difficult process: I have to add something to his music, not push it away. It has to be equal, and I find that very difficult.
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There's not only emotion in the way you sing but also in what you sing. That way I can compensate it.
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I think that after a year of Portishead I've become a little more sober.
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I've just put my heart and soul in a song and need at least a week to recover.
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I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it's a mystery and it will always be a mystery, although it is something we all have in common: everybody knows that life ends with death.
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I still don't like doing interviews. I hardly do any... I hope this will be the last one for a long while.
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We're thinking about printing the lyrics with the next record so that people can find their own meaning in them. But then they would start having a life of their own, and I think the Portishead music should stay a whole in which the lyrics come second, actually.
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I've had a wordless phase, and that's still not entirely over: what I sing is not always literally meant that way, and you can hear that in the way it is sung.
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You feel the music needs something but you don't know what. So you start searching, fitting, measuring, trying. Every time you try another angle. And sometimes that's frustrating, especially if you don't come up with something for three days.
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Most of the lyrics are over a year old, and it doesn't feel like it's about me. Time created a distance.
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Let's get one thing straight: there's no such thing as the Bristol sound.
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I am a very sensitive person, very impulsive and emotional.
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If you listen to bands like Public Enemy or A Tribe Called Quest, you can hear in the samples that the snare would sometimes go very dull - like on one snare. So, to replicate that, we’d record a drum break and Geoff would get it on vinyl, then he’d chuck it on the floor and kick it around, so it was a bit crackly, get it on his deck and just scratch on the snare drum bit to make it go dull. That’s the sort of attention to detail that made the record.
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Suffering for your art is most definitely overrated but I do get a certain, I don't know, satisfaction from being able to deal with my paranoia and insecurity.
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A lot of people question my image and why I do what I do, and the answer is because this is how I want to present myself.
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My voice adapts itself to the music. I can do a lot more than you hear in Portishead.
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I don’t think Jimi Hendrix thought about playing guitar as a guitar player, otherwise he wouldn’t have played like he did.
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The blackness of darkness, forever.
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Playing guitar can be so many things. It’s been my salvation, my way of making a living.
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We work together a lot. So we don't really sit around after five days in the studio. We've got families, so we all like to be home when we can. We're not into any rock-star lifestyle or partying or clubbing or anything. We've generally seen enough of each other by the end of the week.