Dummy (1994)

Dummy is the debut studio album by English electronic music band Portishead, released on 22 August 1994 by Go! Beat Records.

The album received critical acclaim and won the 1995 Mercury Music Prize. It is often credited with popularising the trip hop genre, and is frequently cited in lists of the best albums of the 1990s. Dummy was certified triple platinum in the UK in February 2019, and had sold 920,000 copies in the United Kingdom as of September 2020. Worldwide, the album had sold 3.6 million copies by 2008.

Background

Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons met during an Enterprise Allowance course in February 1991. They started recording their first ideas for the songs in Neneh Cherry's kitchen in London while Barrow was hired by her husband Cameron McVey to work on her second album, Homebrew (1992). In Bristol, they recorded at the Coach House Studios. The first song that they finished for the album was "It Could Be Sweet" in 1991. There Adrian Utley met Barrow while they were recording, heard this track and started exchanging ideas on music. Barrow taught Utley sampling while Utley introduced the band to unusual sounds such as cimbaloms and theremins, which led to an "amalgamation of ideas". According to Barrow, "It was like a light-bulb coming on" when Utley joined them, and they realised they could make their own samples not found on other records, and created one of the most distinctive sounds of the decade.

The production of the album uses a number of hip hop techniques, such as sampling, scratching, and loop-making. The album was not recorded digitally. They sampled music from other records, but they also recorded their own original music, which was then recorded onto vinyl records before manipulating them on record decks to sample. In order to create a vintage sound, Barrow said that they distressed the vinyl records they had recorded by "putting them on the studio floor and walking across them and using them like skateboards", and they also recorded the sound through a broken amplifier. For the track "Sour Times", the album samples Lalo Schifrin's "The Danube Incident" and Smokey Brooks' (Henry Brooks, Otis Turner) "Spin It Jig"; for "Strangers", Weather Report's (Wayne Shorter) "Elegant People"; for "Wandering Star", War's "Magic Mountain"; for "Biscuit", Johnnie Ray's "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" (not the Bacharach/David song); and for "Glory Box", Isaac Hayes' "Ike's Rap II".

Dummy was released in August 1994. It helped to cement the reputation of Bristol as the capital of trip hop, a nascent genre which was then often referred to simply as "the Bristol sound". Listing it among the best trip hop albums, Fact said in 2015 that Dummy "was soaked in the same DIY, melting pot approach that typified much of Bristol's output at the time", and "laid bare the potentials afforded by sidestepping rigid genre formats." The album helped trip hop cross over to mainstream popularity, with music journalist Simon Reynolds reporting in 1995 that Dummy had become "popular background music in cafes and boutiques" and found appeal among audiences of other genres, including alternative rock and R&B listeners.

Singles

The first song released from the album was "Numb". Two further singles were released from the album: "Glory Box", which reached number 13 on the UK Singles Chart; and "Sour Times", which was released before "Glory Box" but re-released after the success of "Glory Box", also reaching number 13 on its re-release in 1995. The success of both singles drove the sales of the album, which eventually reached number two on the UK Albums Chart. "Sour Times" achieved moderate success in the U.S., reaching peak positions of number five and number 53 on the Billboard Alternative Airplay and Hot 100 charts, respectively, in February 1995. On 3 December 2008, Universal Music Japan released Dummy and Portishead as limited SHM-CD versions.

The tracks "Roads" and "Strangers" were used in the soundtrack of the film Nadja.

Music

Philip Sherburne assessed the album's style and instrumentation: "Despite its reputation as one of the cornerstones of trip-hop, Bristol trio Portishead’s 1994 debut is much darker—and stranger—than the conventional wisdom might lead you to believe. [...] Geoff Barrow wasn’t much interested in ambient music. [...] Sampling vintage soul and channeling the spirit of old spy movies, he and 37-year-old guitarist Adrian Utley sketched out a skeletal strain of boom-bap where dial-tone buzz and homemade breakbeats swam in an ocean of silence. It was 29-year-old singer Beth Gibbons who was tasked with filling in that emptiness, but despite the warmth of her Billie Holiday-indebted croon her singing is uniformly forlorn, her presence as unsettling as it is intimate."

Artwork

The cover of the album is a still image of vocalist Beth Gibbons taken from To Kill a Dead Man—the short film that the band created—for which the self-composed soundtrack earned the band its record contract.