100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Mysterons

02 Sour Times

03 Strangers

04 It Could Be Sweet

05 Wandering Star

06 It’s a Fire

07 Numb

08 Roads

09 Pedestal

10 Biscuit

11 Glory Box

If Dummy reminded you of the soundtrack to a 1960s-style spy movie – black and white, Richard Burton’s self-loathing, no way out – there was a good reason. They’d already made one. Before they released their seminal debut album, the then English duo Portishead made their own short film. To Kill a Dead Man was the splintered story of an assassination and its aftermath, with lead roles played by the duo who were slowly hatching their own conspiracy – vocalist Beth Gibbons and instrumentalist/producer Geoff Barrow. The strategy was typical of a band that had little time for orthodoxy, and Dummy itself proved to be a slow-motion coup.

As grunge shuddered to a creative halt and the first wave of Britpop was preparing to go over the top, Portishead emerged from Bristol in England’s south-west with an album of tortured soul ballads and haunting sci-fi grooves. It was, to say the least, unexpected, and although the pair – who soon after the record’s release added co-writer and guitarist Adrian Utley as a formal member – didn’t have a great deal to say (Gibbons didn’t do interviews and Barrow liked to talk about the recording process), the record spoke with a smoky, transformative voice. On Dummy stillness roiled and noise proved satiating.

‘Mysterons’ was the ideal opening scene, with a spooked-out theremin, percussive clangs, scratching and a revolving drum part. ‘Inside you’re pretending/Crimes have been swept aside,’ declares Gibbons, a hint of condemnation in her melancholic voice. ‘Somewhere where they can forget.’ It sets the tone for an album where public and private wrongs keep swapping places. The record’s intimacy felt like a defence against a foreboding world, like Winston and Julia’s brief trysts in 1984. ‘All for nothing,’ adds Gibbons, introducing the power of regret.

The Bristol scene at the time was a potent underground that was about to become a brand. Barrow had worked as a tape operator in a local studio, a position that introduced him to Massive Attack and, in turn Tricky, but Portishead proved to be distinct from both. The newly invented genre of trip-hop would be used to describe all three acts, but Portishead were too eclectic to be easily pigeonholed. Hip-hop interested them rhythmically, but their tracks equally revealed a yen for 1930s Berlin cabaret and film scores. On ‘Sour Times’ they sampled both Lalo Schifrin’s score for More Mission Impossible and ‘Spin It Nig’ from grandstanding ’70s funk singer Smokey Brooks.

‘It could be sweet/Like a long-forgotten dream,’ Gibbons promises on ‘It Could Be Sweet’, and the album title Dummy makes you think of a mark in a film noir flick. It is full of seductive promises that can’t quite make it to the end of the song. ‘You don’t get something for nothing,’ the track later adds, and that could be Portishead’s motto. The grooves here are for reflection, not dancing, and songs such as ‘Wandering Star’, with its ominous throb and eerie samples, build up the pressure in the room until it feels like something has to give.

It takes an entire album to get there, through the gentle invocation of ‘It’s a Fire’ and the orchestral soul of ‘Roads’, but on the closing ‘Glory Box’ Portishead sound like a crackling 78 record, with Gibbons playing the jaded temptress. However, the song can’t easily hold her confessions, and cool verses are repeatedly usurped by the searing chorus. ‘I just want to be a woman,’ she quietly pleads, before a strung-out guitar coaxes out electric tangles, and just as it appears the album has finally revealed itself, the song’s opening steps back in, as if the tape was doctored and the fix was in. Some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved.