Good news for Portishead fans who have been lamenting the fact that there hasn't been an offering from the pioneering purveyors of trip-hop in two years. Both programmer and founder Geoff Barrow and bassist Adrian Utely have confirmed that the band are about to head to Australia to begin recording their third album.

Barrow told the British press last spring that the band had planed to begin recording last summer, but Utley had teamed up with noted director Nicolas Roeg to provide the soundtrack for a silent film called The Sound of Claudia Schiffer, as part of an upcoming BBC series due to be screened later this year. He also submitted a track to American Psycho and scored both Accelerator (with David Holmes) and Signs & Wonders, a small French independent film directed by Jonathan Nossiter. But it looks like he's ready to put his film work on the shelf, and pack his bags for a trip down under.

Speaking to local Bristol-based Web-site bristolsound.co.uk, Utley revealed that he and Portishead chanteuse Beth Gibbons are about to fly off to join Barrow, who is already in Sydney, to begin recording their long-postponed album. The reason the band decided to go so far afield to record was cemented after Utely and Barrow traveled to Australia last March and became enamored of the place. "It's a really nice place," Utley told Bristolsound. "We decided to go back and record there because we don't need an expensive studio to work in. We've got a lot of equipment ourselves."

"Towards the end of touring last time we were all pretty fucked up and we'd had enough of Portishead," Utley confessed. "But it's going to be nice to start again. I'm looking forward to working with Geoff. We've done stuff together but we haven't really sat down and stared at each other for a while. We've got a few ideas, but we haven't got specific in anyway. We'll just see what happens."

The band has plans to release the disc by the end of the year -- which would be a record. The last album took them two years to record due to Barrow's exacting standards.

JAAN UHELSZKI
(January 5, 2001)