Tears, relief and a room full of love greet Beth Gibbons’ stage return

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, Lives Outgrown, after her customary very long absence.

“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. His open palms acknowledge the cliche without apology: “I suppose she believes the music says everything she wants to say.”

Sometime before COVID hit, the in-demand record producer and multi-instrumentalist received a message that Gibbons was five years deep inside her first solo album. She’d been working with drummer Lee Harris, of ’80s experimental-pop band Talk Talk, but they needed help to deliver it. Ford hopped a train from London to “the old Portishead studio” in Bristol.

“She played me the track The Burden of Life, which I instantly loved,” he says. “It’s still one of my favourite songs on the record. It sums up the mood of it, for me. It just had a very central guitar part and these quite cinematic tommy drums that roll around underneath — and of course, there was that voice.

“It’s pretty dark and foreboding. But there’s a beauty in it: little chinks of light that pop through. Some of the other stuff was in much more embryonic form, but I could see there was something exciting to pursue. Cut to five years later …” he says with a laugh.

The piecemeal process was new to Ford. His work with Arctic Monkeys, Florence and the Machine, Gorillaz, Foals, Kylie Minogue and other pop acts tends to run to a company schedule. Gibbons’ “glacial” process involved long silences, as she directed then revised sonic ideas in her own time.

“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.”

What never changed was the emotional core of the record. Judging by her Instagram announcement of February, Gibbons’ dedication to the same material for the decade-long process is related to personal circumstances she’d rather not, reasonably enough, divulge on the chat circuit.

“As usual it reflects what’s been going on with me internally,” she posted. “It has been a time of farewells to family, friends and even to who I was before, the lyrics mirroring my anxieties and sleepless nighttime ruminations.”

The title, Lives Outgrown, relates not just to phases of change but to “the time we leave this planet and our motion into the unknown”, she wrote. “Something I fear but just need to try and celebrate as a moment approaching, gifting the ability to grow beyond the restraints of this physical world.”

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.

For complex reasons he’s playing drums – pretty much the only instrument he doesn’t play on the album. Another six musicians juggle violins, Mellotron, six-string bass, guitars, singing saw, contra-alto clarinet, flutes, recorders, vibraphone and all together, a soundscape whose closest relative might be the weird end of late ’60s UK folk. Think The Wicker Man, but wilder.

Gibbons is here for the rehearsal too, but she’s mostly saving her voice – and the emotion required to work it – as she wanders from one player to the next to the sound guy for passionate, inaudible conversation. Roads is the only Portishead song in the set but presumably fans will understand the implication of the Lives Outgrown thing.

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“I’ve made a few records with what you’d call ‘older’ artists,” Ford tells me, thinking perhaps of Blur, Depeche Mode or the Pet Shop Boys, “and there’s always this kind of spectre of their previous work. You can’t let it worry you too much, but it’s there.

“Beth probably had some of that baggage herself. A lot of the aesthetic of this record probably came from trying to avoid some of the things she’d done before, just push into a new territory.

“There was definitely a moratorium on using samples and loops and electronics at all, really. She kept using the word ‘woody’. She wanted everything to be acoustic and that’s where a lot of the woodwind and the strange textures came from. A lot of times we were using odd instruments and using them in odd ways as well.”

Ironically, that seems to be a through line in her work. Portishead’s debut album, Dummy, made a rare kind of impact in 1994 with a different blend of odd techniques, instantly defining its own world in the crowded pop universe with innovative vinyl sampling, film noir drama and smoky jazz.

Gibbons’ voice, squeezed tight against a wellspring of dread and anxiety, was the perfect focal point, but the anxiety was no act.

“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” (“looking for a place”) signs outside the venue. Portishead were big here and Gibbons’ French bond tightened after a couple of duets with British/French actress and singer Jane Birkin in the 2000s. This Paris show sold out inside a week, as fast as the UK concerts that end this short run in two weeks’ time.

The veil of smoke that fills the hall is fair warning that she won’t be revealing much beyond the music tonight. Deep red and blue lights cast the band in gauzy silhouette. Gibbons keeps her back to us as they rumble through the woody, sinister intro. She’s barely more visible when she turns to cup the centre-stage microphone in both hands and croon the first words of Tell Me Who You Are Today.

A clue to the heart of Lives Outgrown is the image of “pagan sorrow” in the second verse of this opening song. This one and others sometimes feel more like incantations, spells for healing and repair invoking old times and old ways; maypole flourishes, earthy cross-rhythmic drums, scraping violin parts and unsettling choral harmony.

On the record, the spooky children’s choir in Floating On a Moment is Gibbons’ kids. Tonight it’s a band of grownups, but they’re singing the same discomforting thing as they follow the sweet chorus off a cliff: “We’re all going to nowhere, nowhere.” Some of the more devastating songs – Rewind, Ocean, For Sale – seem to address strife in a global environmental context. But something about her voice makes it all feel intensely personal.

“Beth’s channelling something from deep within her,” Ford says. “Having grown up with that voice, I was getting goosebumps in the studio. It’s like nothing else. People are in tears. She’s incredible when she goes there.

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“Even in rehearsal, it takes it out of her. You can’t do the tunes too many times. It’s tiring for her, to get to that place. You almost feel for her because she’s so lovely and such a great person to be around but when she gets in the thick of it, it feels sort of painful almost.”

So how does he feel about channelling that pain in the media interviews she continues to respectfully decline?

“It’s down to each individual artist to draw the boundary of what they’re willing to share about their personal lives,” he responds. “And I totally respect where anyone draws that boundary.”

Even with his close bonds to the pop mainstream, he’s no fan of “the modern age where everybody is so willing to give everything away for free, and there’s a lot of pressure from labels and press to be on Instagram and social media and talking to your phone camera and all of that sort of stuff”.

“A lot of the artists that I look up to and respect, be it Kate Bush or Prince or Bowie, or more lately Frank Ocean; that kind of distance, I think, is a very important and powerful thing.”

He doesn’t know how many more shows this remarkable band will be called upon to play after these dozen conclude in Edinburgh on June 11. If it’s “entirely down to how much Beth wants to do them”, tonight’s gala premiere offers no clues. All 10 songs from the new album have Paris spellbound, but the tense silhouette says not a word between them.

Only at the end, in a palpable flood of relief as the room leaps to its feet, does her anxiety appear to crack in a flood of French that leaves her stumbling and swearing with her face in her hands. She apologises for her nervousness, gives a shout-out to the late Ms Birkin, and leaves waving her arms and declaring: “Je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime!”

How that bodes for future dates in Australia or anywhere else, nobody is currently prepared to say.

Beth Gibbons’ Lives Outgrown is out now. A 25th anniversary screening of Portishead Roseland NYC is at the Sydney Opera House for Vivid on June 1.
Michael Dwyer travelled to Paris courtesy of Domino Records.