3.
Portishead – Dummy
[I got into] Portishead, Massive Attack and Tricky around the same time. It was Portishead first, and you realised they were part of this Bristol scene or whatever it was called, trip hop, and I quickly hunted all that out as well. Portishead’s Dummy, it’s just such a perfect album. Again, it’s one of those ones where I could say I’ve listened to it honestly from start to finish more than a thousand times, [even though] I might not have listened to it in ten years. [laughs]
The first time I listened to it, I didn’t really get the whole album. But after several plays it was like, yeah, this is just such a perfect album – it’s so different and involving. I actually think some of the best albums play out that way – you’re not really sure what you’re listening to the first time you hear it. Anything that gets you like that, after you listen to it for a while, it’s almost like it does change the way you hear things. And that was definitely an album that changed the way I listened to things. It did confuse me a little bit [at first], but once I’d heard it a few times, I couldn’t stop listening to it, and it actually stopped me from getting pleasure in other forms of music. I wasn’t interested in listening to Soundgarden and Nirvana and things like that anymore, it just took me to a different place and showed me different things.
