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the tremolo guitar resembling in its timbre the cimbalom
of Sour Times.
There are always trends in the studio, Wright notes,
particularly around drum sounds:
Those sort of things had a fairly long tail. You have a
year of people going, Can we have a snare a bit like She
Drives Me Crazy by Fine Young Cannibals or Word
Up, Cameo, or something like that. There was a real
kind of Bristol wave around that time. Blue Lines was the
first of those albums, and then Dummy, and Protection.
They were all kind of leading the way at that time &
It was all kind of fairly downbeat; in terms of recording
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DUMMY
you d never pull a sound off any kind of sample library;
almost every sound on there had to be spun in off vinyl
and recorded and if you just took a snare sound for
example it would come in off a record. Somebody would
go I like that snare sound there and you d spin it in and
edit it. That was just the way it got made at the time. A
combination of samples and loops and ambiences and
strings with a combination of emotive singing and rap.
Producers would acquire drum loops and sounds and
unused ideas from previous projects in Andy Wright s
case, including from Massive Attack s Protection for
use in future projects. Working with optical drives
then expensive with a capacity of perhaps just 600
megabytes, there were necessarily limits on the number
of sounds that a producer could have available at one
time.
The tremolo guitar sound on Leave Me Alone was
not an attempt to echo Portishead but instead a remnant
of the work Wright had been doing a few hours before
meeting Imbruglia to pitch a commercial soundtrack
in style of beach guitar pioneer Dick Dale.
This is how genres retain their shape. Inertia; the
constraints of technology; coincidence. Accident. Taste.
Not or not alone the calculation of commercial
prospects.
* * *
Portishead refused refused to license music for
advertisements. But Tim Saul remembers having conver-
sations with people adamant that they had heard tracks
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R. J . WHEATON
from Dummy used in commercials. Soundalike tracks
were being produced to serve as substitutes, the product
of an attitude that Saul describes as oh well if we put a
guitar that sounds a bit Bond-y over a slowed-down beat
then that s gonna work.
Adrian Utley in 1997 was sanguine about imitators,
suggesting that I think it s not that bad. They only
sound like us in a very superficial way. He pointed in
particular to Beth Gibbons voice as something that
distinguished their sound. But he did admit an irritation
with the way our guitar and singing was shamelessly
copied for a Range Rover commercial.217
Geoff Barrow was dismissive of bands working in
an immediately proximate style, not because of any
comparisons with us it s just that, literally, I don t get
any emotion from it. 218 Utley told an online chat group
in 1997 that I think people should maybe be influenced
by us and move it on one & That s part of the reason we
felt we had to reinvent ourselves. 219
Tim Saul contrasts the exhaustive production and
songwriting stages that went into Dummy with some
of the music that followed. It tended to be a little bit
like looking for that sort of atmosphere a little bit by
numbers. I think you can hear when a musician has gone
through a process. And when they ve jumped on the
fashionable thing.
* * *
217
Watt 1997.
218
Goldberg 1997b.
219
Utle, undated.
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Dummy seemed to precipitate license a resur-
gence of interest in a certain period in British culture;
a nostalgia for the 60s, for the cultural posture of the
Bond films; for John Barry, Shirley Bassey; Cold War
espionage films; London s club scene, including the
legendary Eve Club on Regent Street (where Portishead
played one of their first live media events). It was allied
to the cultural boosterism that saw trip-hop hyped
as an authentic British response to American hip-hop,
or Britpop (a similarly porous label) positioned as
a response to American grunge. Both were associated
in some ways with the Cool Britannia term which
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