Beth Gibbons

I think that after a year of Portishead I’ve become a little more sober.

I still don’t like doing interviews. I hardly do any… I hope this will be the last one for a long while.

I’ve just put my heart and soul in a song and need at least a week to recover.

Most of the lyrics are over a year old, and it doesn’t feel like it’s about me. Time created a distance.

I am a very sensitive person, very impulsive and emotional.

The music comes first. When Geoff has made something the inspiration comes automatically. His music is very expressive. But still is is a very difficult process: I have to add something to his music, not push it away. It has to be equal, and I find that very difficult.

I’ve had a wordless phase, and that’s still not entirely over: what I sing is not always literally meant that way, and you can hear that in the way it is sung.

We’re thinking about printing the lyrics with the next record so that people can find their own meaning in them. But then they would start having a life of their own, and I think the Portishead music should stay a whole in which the lyrics come second, actually.

You feel the music needs something but you don’t know what. So you start searching, fitting, measuring, trying. Every time you try another angle. And sometimes that’s frustrating, especially if you don’t come up with something for three days.

There’s not only emotion in the way you sing but also in what you sing. That way I can compensate it.

I try to imagine how we would live if we didn’t know we were going to die. Would we live our lives differently? Less careful, maybe? Less scared? These are beautiful things to think about and build a song around.

Let’s get one thing straight: there’s no such thing as the Bristol sound.

I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it’s a mystery and it will always be a mystery, although it is something we all have in common: everybody knows that life ends with death.