Dummy at 25: How Portishead defined the Nineties while remaining completely mysterious

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “We played ‘Glory Box’ and ‘Wandering Star’ and the interest went crazy,” Barrow would later tell me of that performance. “With only three albums, Portishead brought an amazing story to British music,” says Melissa Chemam, author of Massive Attack: A Bristol Story, one of the definitive chroniclings of the city’s music scene through the Nineties.“They’re absolutely revered in the rest of Europe. “Dummy came out only a few weeks before Massive Attack’s second album, Protection,” says Chemam. “Then it’s sort of successful and you think you’ve communicated with people, but then you realise you haven’t communicated with them at all – you’ve turned the whole thing into a product, so then you’re even more lonely than when you started.” open image in gallery Geoff Barrow fell in love with hip-hop and sampling while attending youth club funk nights in rural Somerset in the Eighties If a low profile was what they wanted, difficult times lay ahead.