Heads united

Sex with Leapy Lee. Mormonism. And now, football. It's an eclectic morning of things people do that I don't really want to watch. Geoff Barrow and Phil Selway are trying to raise charity money through the medium of soccer:

Portishead's Geoff Barrow and Radiohead drummer Philip Selway have teamed up to form a charity soccer team named Heads United. A play on Manchester United and the "–head" attached to both artists' band names, Heads United will hit the pitch April 25th in Newberry, England (via Pitchfork). Barrow is hoping to raise £1,500 for the Football & Food Festival, which will donate all proceeds to the Mary Hare Foundation, a national charity that supports deaf children.

It's a good cause; they're a bit shy of their target. Go on, just one less chocolate egg and you can help out.

Amnesty secure release for Portishead track

Brand new Portishead stuff today, as they release a new track, Chase The Tear via 7Digital. The money you pass through secure servers will wind up supporting the good things that Amnesty International do. The circle is full of the virtues.

Feeder leaves Chrysalis hungry

Under-performing albums from Feeder and Gnarls Barkley have shouldered the blame for Chrysalis issuing glum predictions about its performance this year:

The downbeat outlook came in spite of strong performances from releases by Portishead and Estelle, whose single American Boy reached the top of the UK chart. However, there have been higher write-offs for new artists and the Echo recording business had performed below expectations. The new Gnarls Barkley album “just didn’t do as well as we hoped”, said Andy Mollett, finance director.

“Some of the things we thought would be successful just haven’t come up trumps.

They're now hoping that Laura Marling will pull them out the hole. Now, we love Laura's music, but we wouldn't have thought her appeal was so broad as to make up the distance.

Portishead go home

Portishead, oh blessed place of memory: it was to Portishead where you would send your stamped, self-addressed envelope to get Radio One information packs in the days before the internet. It's also where Portishead come from, and, indeed, where they went back to last December.

They played a gig at Geoff's old school, and they've made a half-hour special feature out of it.

Glastonbury 1998: Western Eyes

Yes, I'd fled by Sunday lunchtime, figuring that there was no point in staying on a site where you couldn't get from stage to stage without an hour of cautious shuffling, spending the day being miserable and wet and not being able to see the bands you wanted to - the new bands tent was constantly full of people who were just hiding from the rain.

The trains out of Castle Carey were full, too - the railway company had hopefully provided everybody with those little blue overshoes you get in model homes to protect the trains, seemingly oblivious that the large numbers of passengers clambering onboard were covered in mud from nose to toenail. And have you ever tried to pull an overshoe on a Doc Martin boot anyway?

To my dying day I will recall the toilets at Temple Meads, and the sweet joy of being able to come out with less mud on you than you came in with. I'm telling myself it was mud. Mud. Yes.

So, in tribute to Bristol, and the people of Bristol, and the sweet, sweet railway toilets of Bristol, here's Portishead doing Western Eyes.

[WARNING: quite stobe-filled]



[Part of Glastobury 1998]

More Radioheadage

Backstage, Radiohead have a crack at Portishead, and The Rip:



Via You Ain't No Picasso

Portishead at Coachella

Bits and pieces from Coachella are starting to turn up online - for example, Deaf Indie Elephants is currently hosting the Portishead live set.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

A couple of strong pieces on the New York Times today. First, John Pareles travels to Munich to meet Portishead:

Meanwhile, although Ms. Gibbons’s lyrics are wounded public confessions, she is so painfully shy that she dodges interviews. The refrain of the album’s closing song, “Threads,” is “I’m always so unsure.” (In a brief hello at the Munich sound check, she fretted that she might forget lyrics during the concert.)

Then the paper reviews a history of Clear Channel Communications, Right Of The Dial:

But when Alec Foege, a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Spin and Playboy, set out to write the definitive history of a company that possesses more radio stations than any other, he decided to give it the benefit of the doubt.

“I was not out to do a hatchet job,” he writes in the preface to “Right of the Dial,” “but rather to get to the bottom of a company that I suspected had gotten a raw deal as its bad publicity had snowballed.”

The reader need wait only three paragraphs before Foege renders his final verdict: “Having spent a lot of time talking to some of the company’s most prominent critics, as well as some of its most devout supporters, I have concluded that Clear Channel is indeed to blame for much of what it has been accused of.”

'Head out on tour

Portishead have posted a new slew of European tour dates; sales start on Wednesday on the Portishead website before going on general release a couple of days later:

Wednesday 26 March Oporto Coliseum
Thursday 27 Lisbon Coliseum
Sunday 30 Milan Alcatraz
Monday 31 Florence Sashall
Wednesday 9 April Manchester Apollo
Thursday 10 London Hammersmith Apollo
Saturday 11 Edinburgh Corn Exchange
Sunday 13 Wolverhampton Civic
Monday 5 May Paris Zenith