A thousand flowers could bloom

Portishead - 'Glory Box' (Dummy - 1994)

At the very end of Portishead’s classic 1994 debut album Dummy, Beth Gibbons’s voice fades out, but we can still hear it continuing as the decibels drop, no sense that it will ever end, more that we just no longer get to hear it.

In more recent years, Dummy sometimes gets waved away as a dinner-party record, one to put on and largely ignore as the album’s analogue ethos of loops, scratching, and sampling of artists like War, Weather Report, Johnnie Ray and Lalo Schifrin is relegated to the background. This is a lousy take; it is one of the most stunning debuts of the whole decade, fully deserving of beating the strong field at the 1995 Mercury Music Prize.¹

Part of the record’s success was the release of ‘Glory Box’ as a third single that had the impact of pushing their previous single ‘Sour Times’ into the top twenty of the UK singles chart.

There was also the momentum of this outstanding performance on Later… that host Jools Holland has described as one of the very best of the show’s 30-year history.

The song samples "Ike's Rap II" from Issac Hayes’s 1971 double album Black Moses, a song sampled on another shortlisted Mercury Prize act that same year, Tricky, on ‘Hell is Around The Corner’. Without that connection, the Bristol location of those two acts and Massive Attack would already push the idea of a trip-hop scene for many people. The reality is that ‘Glory Box’ and the whole album are more eerie and distant than the claustrophobia and dread on those records. Dummy has more of a feel of a 1960s spy movie theme, Morricone soundtrack and some of Adrian Utley’s guitar playing approaches the avant-garde in places.

The band were reluctant to release the song as a single. Multi-instrumentalist Geoff Barrow told Pitchfork in 2008;

…we had a row with the record company because we didn't want to release it because it felt too commercial. Fine in a body of work, but not as a standalone track. We lost the argument really. But we bought houses! [laughs] It's great, but the other side of that, when you play live, I feel like a bit of a performing monkey sometimes.

Of course, one of the problems in releasing a song to a broader audience is the opportunity for different interpretations. Some seem to believe that ‘Glory Box’ was a call for a man to take charge in the relationship Beth Gibbons wasn’t impressed by this. She told The Independent on Sunday in late 1994;

…I was thinking you write songs and you hope you're gonna communicate with people - half the reason you write them is that you're feeling misunderstood and frustrated with life in general. 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.

In that interview, Gibbons says that the song is about men giving a woman “a reason to love you” this can probably be interpreted as both a submissive (any reason will do) and a more feminist point of view (give me some reason to love you) across the verses respectively. Then, the third time out, she’s asking him not to stop being a man but also to “Just take a little look from our side when you can”, fusing the two ideas.

At the very start that she is tired of playing with a bow and arrow - a rejection of patriarchal ideas as represented by Cupid’s arrow, and by the end of the song, we get the real sense of frustration for her whole gender - They need to be unchained, given some room so that a thousand flowers could bloom. These sound like the same progressive arguments that have been made for decades for the advancement of women in the workplace and debate around the concepts of privilege and level playing fields that are still happening now. I think this does a lot to speak to the circular nature of the song, as these points still land almost thirty years later.

At the very end of Portishead’s classic 1994 debut album Dummy, Beth Gibbons’s voice fades out, but we can still hear it continuing as the decibels drop, no sense that it will ever end……

1. Of the ten nominations, six are in Acclaimed Music’s Top 1000 albums of all time.