So Don't Despair, This Day Will Be Their Damnedest Day

Thursday May 8th, 2008. Saw Portishead live for the first time that day. No big deal. Just one of the most intense and overpowering concerts (I really said concerts?) I've ever witnessed, by a band I have been wanting to see since I was 14 or 15. I'm not sure if anything I write will capture how fuckin' ill this show was but I might as well give it a shot.

I got to know Portishead when I was in my third year of highschool. This was around the time when I was fully discovering hardcore, while listening to some hip hop on the side. My musical taste at the time was pretty limited, life was so much simpler back then: if it wasn't Sick Of It All, Madball, Life Of Agony or Wu-Tang, it was lame to me. There was this weirdo chick in my class though, who was kinda cool. I dug that she was really into music as well. From what I can remember, she was heavily into 3 bands: Nine Inch Nails, Tool and well... Portishead. She played me one of their songs (must've been "Glory Box") in class and I was shocked. I mumbled something along the lines of "this ain't so bad" but somehow what I'd just heard had hit me hard and my 15 year old brain was confused. I needed to hear more. So long story short, I got their record from the local library a couple of weeks later and copied it onto a cassette that I wore thin during the years to follow, until I bought the actual CD.

With Portishead disappearing off the radar around 1998 however, I never got to see them live... Until a few days ago. What I did get to see a couple of years ago though, were 2 insane shows on the tour that Beth Gibbons did with Rustin Mann for the increcible record they'd created together called "Out Of Season". My man Steven Tuffin knows how good those shows were. Still, it wasn't Portishead, so I was still craving more. Now, Vorst Nationaal in Brussels may be a huge, concrete monster with the reputation of having utterly horrible acoustics, but when Portishead played that shit didn't even matter. They sounded spot on. Opened with "Silence" (including the intro), the opening track of "Third" and then went straight into "Hunter". Even if both songs are off the new album, meaning the level of nostalgia is lower, it was epic. If I'm not mistaken "Mysterons" was the first "older" song they played. I felt all weird but in a cool way. Cold sweat, goosebumps... the works you know. Their setlist seemed to consist of a nearly equal amount of songs off each album, which was fine by me. It is cool and a little frustrating at the same time that they played that many new songs... It's cool 'cause the new record rules and I love it when bands just play what they feel like playing and I respect them for that, but at the same time obviously I didn't get to hear a whole bunch of older songs I would've loved to hear live. I also felt like maybe their set was a little short, but then again it could never be long enough so what am I on about? I guess an hour and a half is a good deal.

I cannot get over how amazing Beth Gibbons' vocals are. Truly bone chilling. She's still as weird as she always was, still seems to have a hard time to face the crowd and she still mumbles things inbetween songs that could've been in Russian for all I know. While it's hard to not look at her, it's got to be said that our boy Adrian Utley (now 51 years old) was holding it down on guitar... Dude looks so cool. A few of my personal highlights of the set were "Cowboys", "Mysterons", "All Mine" and "Glory Box", though I definitely loved all of their set, except for maybe "Machine Gun". I don't know how I feel about that song. It kind of annoyed me. During "We Carry On", the last song, we did witness something crazy. Beth Gibbons coming down off stage to shake hands with (and embrace) people in the front rows. Don't know what got into her, but it was quite a sight to behold. Seemed like the little lady was nearly swallowed whole by the overenthusiastic crowd at times. Perfect way to end a nearly perfect show.

After the show, while walking back to our car I was still so high on Portishead that I bought a bootleg poster off some sketchy dude on the street. Well worth my 2 euro though. Shout outs to Jonas and Stefan. More Portishead road trips, please!