Words by Erandhi Mendis // Photography by Ian Laidlaw
It’s hard to exist in the shadow of yourself. To some extent, we all do it – dragging behind us preconceived notions and foreordained complexities that clutch at the versions of ourselves we try to outrun. It’s why first impressions matter, why undoing an image is hard and why reinvention always feels a little dishonest. There’s a stickiness to the roles we’ve once played, a gravitational pull to the expectations we never fully agreed to but somehow internalized anyway.
We perform ourselves not just for others, but for the echo of who we were the last time someone was looking. In the last 12 months Beth Gibbons was nominated for the UK music industry’s top prize, that in 1995 she won with her band, Portishead. Now, 60 years of age Gibbons’ solo career has always seemed a little like an unexpected afterthought – one of those side projects that isn’t really a side project at all, but a much quieter, more mysterious force than even the music she made with Portishead.
How do you carve out a distinct identity without competing with the juggernaut of your own making? It’s a tricky tightrope many accomplished musicians have walked, with varying degrees of success or, more often, failure.
For every compelling solo venture – think of Paul Simon stepping away from Simon & Garfunkel to create the intricate, deeply personal Graceland – there are countless others who falter. The Gallagher brothers after Oasis provide a begrudging example – both scoring hits but neither capturing the kind of universal acclaim they once commanded with Oasis.
The tension between an artist’s past and their present is rarely as evident as it is in these cases, where fans seem to want everything from the original band – except the baggage that comes with it. What makes Gibbons’ journey so fascinating is that she’s never overtly tried to outshine her own history. Instead, she’s carved out space where her voice – still as haunting as ever – can exist on its own terms.
Almost 15 years since the last time she toured Australia as Portishead, Gibbons is back for RISING Festival. Cutting an incredibly unsuspecting shape, she walks barefoot onto the Hamer Hall stage flooded in blue light and smoke. Flanked by a band that can only be described as a worldly combination of multi-instrumentalists, she is unassuming and near inaudible as the crowd claps her arrival with a deafening noise that makes you forget it’s a Sunday night.
It’s cinematic melancholy as her unmistakable voice fills the hall. She begins with Tell Me Who You Are Today, there are no band introductions, no visuals – save for some lighting – nor any audience hellos.
One of the benefits of your reputation preceding you, is having licence to explore lyrically, areas that may be less palatable to pop culture. Her record Lives Outgrown does this in a number of ways, singing openly about aging, motherhood, menopause and impermanence. Her track Oceans stands out as a poignant exploration of all of the above – melodically I find myself utterly entranced. The entire show moves with this kind of reverent restraint, never asking for attention while holding it completely. It’s beautiful, occasionally austere, and still entirely captivating.
The set is lends well to being live, with For Sale and Tom The Model showcasing beautiful range for not just her, but her band. There are marimbas, violins, timpanis, baritone sax and pedal steel all on stage – none of it feels superfluous but at times the percussive elements draw attention away from Beth’s vocal delivery.
She speaks briefly into the microphone, but she is overrun by the crowd’s applause. Because of this there are barely any moments within the set for interaction, save for someone in the audience yelling “love ya Beth – you’re a legend!” It it so loud it feels like a heckle in a venue like Hamer Hall and she barely acknowledges it, such is the nature of this kind of performance. For those unfamiliar, Gibbons’ diffidence a la Kate Bush may have felt like a barrier. With the smoke and heavy lighting, the audience couldn’t really ever see her in any true clarity.
Louder moments include Rewind – which starts with strange colourful spinning sticks raised in the air by her band. It is one of the few visual elements of the set and is welcome to break up the largely consistent lighting. Beyond the Sun involves screaming from everyone on stage and Whispering Love invites a delightful flute solo from Howard Jacobs. Knowing she’s off to Glastonbury in the coming weeks I can see that these moments will shape the centerpiece of a largely pensive album runthrough.
My partner instinctively squeezes my leg as the applause swells for the encore – the kind of gesture that comes when you know what is next. Everyone in the room knows. Only the most strident Portishead purist could have faulted the setlist so far, but there’s no denying the truth: the encore is somehow the foundation. Gibbons knows it too. It’s not that the solo work lacks merit – it’s that most of us wouldn’t have made it to Lives Outgrown without the lingering pull of Dummy. Her voice, brittle, bruised and utterly singular, is the reason this room is full. The next two songs are, for many, the ghosts they came to see.
She submits to the hunger for old work, not begrudgingly, knowing it feeds her freedom for solo work – it isn’t a shadow that subsumes, if anything, it’s historical leverage. Roads is perfect with live strings but it’s Glory Box that levels the room. It’s sultry, desolate cabaret and Gibbons sounds straight out of the studio in a venue like this. There is a maculated standing ovation and cheers from the circle as she sings the final outro. Gibbons and her band take a bow and for the first time we see her face in the stage lights.
That Gibbons has emerged, decades on, with a record as strange and searching as Lives Outgrown is less a reinvention, more a reminder that legacy doesn’t have to mean stasis. She doesn’t outrun the myth of Portishead so much as she walks beside it, entirely uninterested in spectacle. If Dummy was about atmosphere, Lives Outgrown is about aftermath; the echo. In an industry that still prizes youth over longevity, Gibbons’ return doesn’t shout – it lingers.
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