Portishead - Sour Times (Live)

To be absolutely clear from the start, I am not talking about the album/single version of Portishead�s �Sour Times,� that gloomy cloud of psychodrama that mysteriously started turning up regularly on MuchMusic in my youth. That one is a great song too, don�t get me wrong, but on record it is maybe a bit too restrained for me now, hampered by the otherwise great rattle and glide of the samples. Beth Gibbons is singing too quickly, too glibly. The refrain of �nobody loves me, it�s true / not like you do� is all present and accounted for, but there�s something missing.

Live, at least on the version presented on the Roseland NYC Live album, the song truly blossoms. I�m definitely not going to claim that most live albums are anything other than fans-only, but for a band that have still only produced two albums this remains the best thing they have ever done in LP format. Backed up by an orchestra and all that, yes, but also more confident, more forceful, sadder, more textured, more rock, more soul, more everything. A nightmarishly rocky early record reading of �Cowboys� serves to put the listener on notice that Adrian Utley�s guitar is going to be taking as prominent a place in the mix as Geoff Barrow�s decks and Gibbons� voice.

And boy, had she improved in a relatively short time. Capable of twisting from evil to pathetic in the space of a line, Beth Gibbons may in fact be very shy but on stage she can act her heart out. Over the slower swoop of this version of �Sour Times� she slows the pace a little and really wrenches everything from the chorus. The song now starts with a riff from Utley and the sampled rattle is replaced by high vinyl keen, live drums slowly urging the music forward.

And then the real flashpoint, four minutes in, as she keeps singing �And nobody loves me, it�s true.� Noirish twang becomes thrust and she�s shrieking, stuttering, howling� �It�s not like it seems from a distance� becomes one of the scariest things someone could say to you. If the original didn�t hide the disturbance beneath the seemingly straightforward declaration, this version of �Sour Times� foreground in the listener�s mind the fact that we haven�t heard the other side of the story�does the �you� in the song really love Gibbons� narrator? Or like them? Or even know them?

Although the feel is close enough, at least at the beginning, that I assumed the backing music was roughly the same, a side-by-side play reveals the real sonic and emotional alchemy worked on the track. The original �Sour Times� was magnificent in 1994 but in light of this version it seems pale, facile, almost immature. The raging torrent at the end of the live �Sour Times� is something much more human, in some ways, even if deranged. For all the talk of Gibbons having an amazing voice (which she does), you don�t really hear much proof of it on Dummy; you have to turn to Roseland NYC Live and her collaboration with �Rustin Man� (Out Of Season) to hear it.

Giving the quantum leap in sound quality that was Portishead, and dim rumblings from the band that there may be another album soon, it�s easy to look at the live album, so much more fulfilling than either studio effort probably merely because of the extra experience under Portishead�s belt at that point, as both the definitive statement on these old songs and also hopefully a sign of the way forward. Even at its chilliest and calmest there is a muscular and skilled quality to these version of these songs that turns �Sour Times� from a 90s box-set oddity into the classic we always knew it could (and should) be.