As many of you are well aware, Portishead are about to begin a month-long North American tour, beginning with the ATP event in Ashbury Park that they are helping to curate. In anticipation of this, Geoff Barrow spoke with Rolling Stone about a number of topics, including why there won’t be a Dummy reissue, and the conversation predictably drifted to new Portishead material. When asked if they had begun the new album, Barrow replied:
No, we haven’t. I’m going to start in January, I don’t know when Beth’s gonna start or when Adrian [Utley] is gonna start, but I’m gonna get my head together for January basically to start writing. Historically that could mean fucking 10 years. [Laughs] We’re only ever going to release something that we feel comfortable with or else it’s not worth releasing basically.
Barrow continued with this response concerning the time table of a new Portishead record:
If I could do it in a couple of weeks then I’d love to. The pressure it’d take off my wife is huge, but it’s less likely too. I can only speak for myself and usually it only comes around when I’m really, really infused with music I hear around me. If I hear music around me that freaks me out and actually scares me into wanting to test myself, then usually I’m pretty progressive and come up with stuff. If I don’t hear stuff around me then usually it takes quite a while.
Check out the full interview here, view the tourdates below and look for a new Portishead album sometime in the next decade.
Portishead tour:
10-01-02 Asbury Park, NJ – I’ll Be Your Mirror Festival
10-04-05 New York, NY – Hammerstein Ballroom *
10-07 Montreal, Quebec – Jaques Cartier Peir *
10-10 Toronto, Ontario – Sound Academy *
10-12 Chicago, IL – Aragon Ballroom *
10-15 Mexico City, Mexico – Corona Festival *
10-18-19 Los Angeles, CA – Shrine Auditorium *
10-21 Berkeley, CA – Greek Theatre *
10-23 Seattle, WA – WaMu Theater *
10-24 Vancouver, British Columbia – PNE Forum *
10-27 Denver, CO – 1st Bank Center *
* with Thoughtforms
