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Portishead  

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Portishead (formed in 1991) is an English trip-hop, electronica, and experimental rock group, fronted by the talents of singer Beth Gibbons, hailing from Bristol, England.

Prior to Portishead’s formation in 1991, member Geoff Barrow worked at Coach House studio, where he met the dance-orientated trip-hop group Massive Attack, and rapper Tricky. Barrow subsequently collaborated with Nenah Cherry on her album “Homebrew”, before making a name for himself as a remix producer, mixing tracks for the likes of Primal Scream, Paul Weller and Depeche Mode. In 1991 Barrow met Beth Gibbons and the two began wiring and performing music together, along with jazz guitarist Adrian Utley. In 1994 Barrow and Gibbons acted in and provided the soundtrack to the neo-noir spy film “To Kill a Dead Man”.

The group subsequently signed with Go! Records, who issued Portishead’s debut album “Dummy” in August 1994. Despite Barrow’s and Gibbons’ reluctance to indulge the media, “Dummy” went from strength to strength, earning critical acclaim in the both the UK and the U.S. Spawned the singles “Numb” and “Sour Times”, both of which were accompanied by mysterious music videos, the album won the Mercury Music Prize for Album of the Year over Blur, Suede, Oasis, and Pulp. The record did wonders for the trip-hop genre, already popularised by Massive Attack and Tricky, and is considered one of the greatest trip-hop albums ever made.

After a three year hiatus Portishead returned with a self-titled release in 1997. Once again the album earned overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics and charted at No. 21 on the Billboard 200, No. 1 on the New Zealand Album chart, and No. 2 on the UK Album Chart. Featuring a much darker, dirtier and deadlier aesthetic than its predecessor the album spawned the singles “All Mine”, “Over”, and “Only You”. A live album, recorded at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City, was subsequently released in 1997, after which the group collaborated with Tom Jones on the song “Motherless Child”.

The band’s third full-length album, aptly titled “Third”, was released in April 2008. Prior to the release Portishead curated the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Minehead, England, embarked on a European tour, and headlined Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2008. Upon its release “Third” surprised some fans and critics for being far removed from the Portishead sound they’d come to expect, as Barrow and Gibbons made efforts not to use instruments they had previously. Producing the singles “Machine Gun”, “The Rip”, and “Magic Door”, the album earned enviable reviews, and charted at No. 2 in the UK and No. 7 on the Billboard 200.

Live reviews

Quality over quantity seems to be a reoccurring theme in Portishead's career. They have put out three albums since the 20 plus years they've been together and it seems as though they have played only a handful of shows over the past few years (certainly comparative to other touring acts). However the albums they have released are simply some of the best of their time. Dummy has often been credited as the album that put the trip-hop genre on the map and their 2008 album Third saw Portishead take a whole new direction, trading their downtempo beats and smooth jazz vibes for jarring samples, disjointed drum patterns and overall harsher electronic sounds. Their performances are simply unrivaled. Their Roseland ballroom performance in 1997 is still being discussed today. Taking into account the 11 year gap between their "self titled" album and "Third" it is a wonder how well their songs fit together in a live setting, especially considering the opposing nature of their early and present career. The sweet warm tones which were so ubiquitous on their first album are perfectly preserved for their live offerings.The juxtaposition of their new and old renderings deepen the definitions of the dichotic nature of their music, making their tracks from "Third" seem more static and dislocating.

While their early recordings in a sense have a soothing quality lacking on "Third" there is still an underlying nagging disturbance presiding on each of their albums. This dark affinity is what seems to be enforcing the cohesive nature of their performance. On songs such as "Silence" a teasing synth pulse is backed by, krautrock inspired drumming and jagged guitar strikes. On their current tour you can expect to hear two drummers. One is sometimes equipped with mallets rather than the traditional drumsticks enhancing the primal brood heard on songs like "Nylon Smile". It seems as though all of Portishead's tracks are encapsulated in a foreboding intensity, whether it be sonic as heard on the audio assaulting "Machine Gun" or emotional such as the hauntingly beautiful "The Rip", which seemed as though it was lifted straight from Emily Dickinson's diary. Beth Gibbons vocal performance is reason alone to see the show . Channeling the fractured but devastatingly deep vocalization of Billie Holiday, both her delivery and poetic lyrics fit perfectly with the blend of industrialized electronica and downbeat jazz freak outs.

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The brilliant and mysterious Portishead have always been one of my favourite acts, but as an entity that rarely seem to play shows I had never had the chance to see their live spectacle in all its glory –they didn’t perform a single full live show between 1997 and 2007. At Glastonbury 2013, however, I got my chance, when they headlined the Other Stage. Massive Attack may have been credited with founding trip-hop, but fellow Bristolians Portishead took the genre into deeper, more soulful territory, largely thanks to singer Beth Gibbons’ haunting vocals. Their two records in the ‘90s – Dummy (1994) and Portishead (1997) – were landmark releases, but when they surprised the world with their comeback album, Third, in 2008, they had come armed with a body of work that surpassed the high standards they had previously set. Third featured darker, more experimental songs and many of these were showcased at Glastonbury – tracks like ‘Silence’, ‘We Carry On’ and the erratic ‘Machine Gun’ sounded heavy and industrial live, with the band members shrouded in darkness and backed by hypnotic visuals. Naturally, the highlights – especially for someone who never got a chance to see them in the ‘90s – were seeing and hearing their early classics brought to life, such as ‘Glory Box’, ‘Cowboys’ and a beautiful version of ‘Sour Times’. Gibbons’ voice remains one of the most captivating in UK alternative music; if only we got to hear it more often.

Seeing Portishead deliver a triumphant set at last year’s Glastonbury Festival was probably the highlight of the entire weekend; whilst The Rolling Stones were delivering a set of tracks that were predominantly about forty years old, one of the most beguiling bands in Britain were proving that you can do things entirely on your own terms and still reap the rewards. They’ve still only got the three records to their name, but there was more than enough to choose from that night - and besides, Portishead shows are less about the setlist, and more about the cultivation of genuine atmosphere. In fact, there’s something fitting about the fact that they formed so close by to a festival intrinsically tied to mysticism, because the trio are such an oddly complementary outfit that you wouldn’t be surprised if there was something of the supernatural to the way in which they came together. Geoff Barrow is responsible for the group’s trip hop stylings, bringing an obvious urban sensibility to their sound, and Adrian Utley sounds for all the world like a jazz drummer, with an uncommonly broad understanding of groove. Tying everything together, though, is Beth Gibbons’ voice; it’s the most potent tool in the Portishead arsenal, both on record and on stage, and it’s her mere presence that’s vital in making their live shows so arresting.

Portishead is one of the most timeless groups I have ever heard. I could listen to it always! Beth Gibbons seems to smoke, but yet keep that strong beautiful voice. This is truly an amazingly gifted group.

Angie Butler

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The British band comprised of Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons, and Adrian Utley have made some of the most influential music of the last 30 years.

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The English band who take their name from the nearby to Bristol town of Portishead are rightly credited with fusing electronica and experimental rock into a style that has been tagged trip-hop. To be honest that is not a shorthand term they have endorsed and as with soul mates Tricky and Massive Attack , those using it are apt to receive a frosty response. Utilising breakbeats, acid house, soul, funk and jazz the music they create has an ethereal quality with a visceral punch. The combination of Beth Gibbons haunting vocals – she cites Nina Simone , Edith Piaf, Sugarcubes and the Cocteau Twins idiosyncratic singer Liz Fraser as influences – allied to the production and instrumental skills of Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley add up to a remarkable sound.

The emphasis on sonic clarity is bolstered by engineer Dave McDonald who worked with the trio on their debut disc Dummy , a gothic and noir collection that would sweep the board at the fourth Mercury Music Prize in 1995. The spacey jazz melodies and emotional density of “Sour Times” and “Glory Box” did it for the judges. The competition was intense: the Oasis album Definitely Maybe and the Supergrass classic I Should Coco were also in contention. Previous winners were Primal Scream, Suede and M People. Dummy  has since featured in many a select list of great albums of the 20th century and it has lost none of its appeal in the following years. The self-titled Portishead charted high in the US and made #2 in Britain.

Third (2008) expanded their palette with elements of soundtrack, psych surf and a dark take on atmospheric krautrock with the results conjuring shadowy images of the scores to Blade Runner and The Terminator . Despite those denser Sci-Fi textures, Third  became a big seller. Another 2nd place in the UK and a top ten #7 on the Billboard chart heralded a return to live work after a hiatus of nine to ten years. Portishead curated the 2007 All Tomorrow’s Parties fest, embarked on a 2008 European tour and headlined the prestigious Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April that year. The Last.fm free stream of Third  was a groundbreaker in that medium with over 300,000 logging on in the first 24 hours. More awards and kudos ensured gold sales but all their works continue to find their way into discerning collections: the debut has long since gone double platinum. These are high quality, timeless albums that pretty much demand discovery and repay close investigation

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Barrow and Gibbons were born in the West Country and coincidentally both had parents who divorced. Adrian Utley, the oldest member, hails from Northampton and he brought along a love of vintage guitars and effects, jazz training and the bouncy grooves of hip-hop. A mutual love for drum loops, sampled breaks, James Brown and Blue Note golden era sounds became the background over which Gibbons’ husky contralto conjured up visions of smoky jazz lounges. Then again one detects layers of ska and swing and the riff from Isaac Hayes ’ “Ike’s Rap 11” on the monumental “Glory Box”. In that sense, Portishead are comparable to the best French house scene makers, always prone to locate the funk button. “Sour Times” samples Lalo Schifrin’s “The Danube Incident”, “Wandering Star” beds in War’s “Magic Mountain” and “Biscuit”, weirdest of all, goes to the root of Johnny Ray’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”.

The sensuous cabaret mood is everywhere on Dummy  and it remains a highpoint of 1994 while the singles “Numb”, “Sour Times” and “Glory Box” are classics in any genre.

The Portishead album showed that brilliant start to be no flash in the pan. The singles “All Mine”, “Over” and “Only You” graced the airwaves with additional horns, Clive Deamer’s click drumming, extra violin, and keyboards simmering perfectly. The outstanding opening track “Cowboys” is one of Gibbons’ most intriguing lyrics: ‘Did you feed us tales of deceit/ Conceal the tongues who need to speak/ Subtle lies and a soiled coin/ The truth is sold, the deal is done….’ Spooky in the extreme, this could be music made by androids.

With extra attention to sonic detail and smart cinematic videos to backdrop their tunes, Portishead’s scratch deck approach translated well in America where they played an epic concert at the Roseland In 1997 accompanied by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and a five-piece horn ensemble. Go Beat released a DVD of that event in 2002 and it’s one of the most stupendous things you will witness.

After three years of touring and various external issues, Barrow put Portishead on hold because he’d grown disillusioned with music in general. In 2002 Gibbons made her solo debut with former Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb using the pseudonym Rustin Man. Out of Season was a quiet success but is an essential purchase for her fans and it also went silver. Meanwhile, Barrow and Utley remained locked in their studios but emerged to produce The Coral’s’ psychedelic gem The Invisible Invasion and enthused by the young Merseysiders energy decided to reactive their own band.

Third eventually dropped in Spring 2008. Using a battery of analogue synths, ancient drum machine FX and even a hurdy-gurdy on “Magic Doors” which would be cleverly remixed later by DJ Green Lantern, the songs are perfectly Portisheadian. Other key tracks are “The Rip”, something Radiohead covered, and the pulsating “Machine Gun”, a number that became huge on the hip-hop and club circuit and would have had Portishead feted as superstars in America, had they been the types to do the social whirl. Given that Third has attained top ten placings in 18 territories it’s apparent that the band remain in demand though they haven’t released anything officially since 2009’s “Chase the Tear”, a fundraiser for Amnesty International UK.

They have enjoyed playing the festival circuits and were rapturously received at Latitude and Benicassim where their set included “Mysterons”, the crowd slaying “Sour Times” and “We Carry On”. Barrow has promised new music is bubbling away but no dates are specified. Don’t worry though because it will be worth the wait. With Portishead it always is.

Words: Max Bell

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After a Decade Away, Portishead Floats Back

By Jon Pareles

• April 13, 2008

GEOFF BARROW has an objective for his band, Portishead. He wants it to be “the opposite of rock ’n’ roll,” even if he hasn’t entirely figured out what that is. After all, it was a taste of the rock ’n’ roll life that made Portishead disappear for a decade while the band’s otherworldly mixture of modern dread, retro samples and torch-song yearning lingered on soundtracks and boutique playlists.

On the two morosely startling albums that made Portishead’s reputation when it came out of England in the 1990s, Beth Gibbons’s voice and words were bereft and bitter, floating in music that placed vintage samples in sparse, echoey backdrops, conjuring emotional abysses and the irrevocable passage of time. The band itself was self-effacing, but word of mouth, from introvert to introvert, worked as much as radio play to cultivate devoted fans. According to Nielsen SoundScan, Portishead’s debut album, “Dummy,” sold 1.1 million copies and its second, “Portishead,” sold 635,000. Then, after touring and a live follow-up album, Portishead faded out.

Now Portishead has rematerialized, resuming a career that has always moved in slow motion. “It’s amazing how quickly 10 years can go,” said Adrian Utley, who plays guitars and keyboards, over coffee at an elegant Munich hotel the night before the band’s performance. “There was no sense that we would split up or we weren’t going to do anything again. We just didn’t want to for that time.”

This month Portishead is touring Europe and making an April 26 appearance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California. (Those will be its only concerts for the rest of 2008, for “personal reasons,” Mr. Barrow said.)

And on April 29 Portishead releases "Third" (Mercury/Island), its third studio album and the sequel to “Portishead,” from 1997. “Third” is more polymorphous, more extreme, more propulsive and often harsher than previous Portishead albums. Instead of mellowing with age or returning to a signature sound, the band has fractured and splintered that sound, plunging even deeper into loneliness and anxiety.

“Third” is unlikely to become fashionable background music; it’s too bleak, too daring, too exposed. As if alluding to the band’s 10-year absence, the first song on the album is called “Silence.” Ms. Gibbons sings, “Empty in our hearts/Crying out in silence/Wandered out of reach/Too far to speak.”

Portishead — named after a coastal town near Bristol, where Mr. Barrow lived as a teenager — coalesced in the early 1990s, when Bristol emerged as the home of what would soon be called trip-hop: hazy, moody, late-night songs that blurred the desolate and the sultry. Mr. Barrow worked as a tape operator — making tea and getting sandwiches, he said — at the studio where Massive Attack, Bristol’s brooding R&B band, was recording with the rapper and trip-hop pioneer Tricky.

Between sessions for Massive Attack, Mr. Barrow assembled his own music, playing drums and using the hip-hop techniques of sampling, looping and scratching. But his music ended up a world away from the street or the dance floor.

Mr. Barrow found a musical partner in Ms. Gibbons, who had been singing Janis Joplin songs in pubs and would become Portishead’s lyricist and main melody writer. Partway through the making of “Dummy,” released in 1994, they brought in Mr. Utley, who had been what he calls a “skint” — which means barely getting by — jazz guitarist.

They were an unlikely alliance, disparate in age (Mr. Utley is now 50, Mr. Barrow 36 and Ms. Gibbons 43) and inclinations. But Mr. Utley and Mr. Barrow are both down-to-earth musicians.

“They’re both skilled in opposite ways, but it works,” said James Skelly of the Coral, whose 2005 album, “Invisible Invasion,” was produced by them. “Ade tries all sorts of different stuff and sounds, and you could be there all day and every sound would be great. Geoff would come in and say, ‘That’s the sound.’ ” 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.)

“Beth said the other night that the reason that she actually started singing was because of her inability to communicate,” Mr. Barrow said. “Since she’s done it, people think that she’s communicating, but it’s made her ability to communicate even worse on a human level.”

Mr. Utley and Ms. Gibbons were used to club gigs; Mr. Barrow is a studio creature who gets no pleasure from performing live. “I’ve never liked it, and I never will,” Mr. Barrow said. “I don’t feel any connection between me and the people listening to it. I way prefer to release records and have my connection be like that.”

What the three members of Portishead share is a methodology: building each song around what Mr. Barrow calls “a sonic world,” often just a texture. “We are very much magpies,” he said. “We really like to hear stuff that blows us away, and then we like to do our own version of it, but I think we put it together in a weird way and it sounds like us.”

Talking about “Third,” Mr. Barrow and Mr. Utley cited Black Sabbath, Sonic Youth, Kraftwerk, Ultravox, the hip-hop producer Madlib, the Viking-helmeted proto-Minimalist composer Moondog and the glacially slow heavy metal band Sunn 0))), among many others. Mistuned instruments, lopsided mixes, low-fi microphones, expressively imprecise timing: those are things Portishead prizes from the analog era and brings to its own recordings, which sound ever more peculiar alongside albums relying on computer-quantized rhythms and auto-tuned voices.

By now familiarity and imitators can dilute some of the strangeness of early Portishead songs like “Sour Times.” Mr. Utley said: “When ‘Dummy’ came out, I remember thinking, ‘This sounds weird, some of these tracks sound really weird.’ But because it was a popular record — and thanks for that! — it got assimilated into the mainstream. Maybe it changed the language a little bit.”

So Portishead set itself new hurdles. On its second album the group didn’t simply sample old recordings; it wrote passages for orchestra, recorded them and turned them back into samples to be manipulated. By then Portishead had an international following, and it found itself touring a huge festival circuit.

“It was bigger than it should have been,” Mr. Utley said. “When things get bigger, you can feel like you’re feeding this beast. If you’re making a lot of noise, the whole thing starts to work on another level that I’m not sure we really wanted to be on. It’s not what we set out to do.”

He continued: “We were all drinking lots to get the adrenaline going, and it all got a bit rock ’n’ roll, really. Which I am not averse to, but it took its toll in the end on us. Both Geoff and I, our home lives became messed up. We were divorced.”

Portishead hired members of the New York Philharmonic to play orchestral arrangements for the 1997 concert at Roseland Ballroom that they documented for a live album and video. “I didn’t like what we did that day,” Mr. Barrow said, calling it “overblown” and “pompous.” After the tour he and Mr. Utley mixed the live album; Mr. Barrow said he had not listened to it since. And when “Roseland Live NYC” was finished, Portishead scattered.

“At the end of that time there was nothing more to say about music or anything,” Mr. Barrow said. “So I just decided that I was going to go and live my life. People usually have to decide what they’re going to do from their late teens to their mid- to late 20s, when I had been a musician. I was like some ginormous child in the outside world.”

Mr. Barrow went to Australia, where he and a partner started an independent label, Invader, that releases avant-garde jazz and extreme heavy metal. Mr. Utley “went on to do as much music with as many people as I could: writing, soundtracks, producing things and playing with people.” In 2002 Ms. Gibbons collaborated with Paul Webb, the bassist from the group Talk Talk, who was calling himself Rustin Man. Mr. Utley performed on their album, “Out of Season,” and toured with their band for a year.

“I never had any fire in my belly to go and do anything or say anything musically until 2003, 2004,” Mr. Barrow said. That’s when Portishead quietly renegotiated its major-label contract, which ends with “Third.” (The band already manages itself, with its members deciding on everything from artwork to merchandising; it found an overwhelming demand for Portishead tea mugs, which may suggest something about its audience.)

Recording the new album went slowly. “There’s a lot of frustration with not being able to write music that becomes the frustration of the record,” Mr. Barrow said. “But there’s also a lot of frustration with just how stupid people are, us included.”

The band made rules for itself, then twisted them. “For instance, we mustn’t use instruments that we’ve used before,” Mr. Utley said. “Our trademark sound, once we’ve got it, we want to destroy it and move on to something else. So we have to become something else, we have to re-emerge as something else all the time but still the same. It’s hard.”

On “Third” Portishead’s imperfect instruments, the resonant hollows of the production and Ms. Gibbons’s voice — aching, mournful, distraught — make the band immediately recognizable. But the album never takes an easy path.

“Hunter,” which could simply have been a gentle guitar ballad — Ms. Gibbons sings, “If I should fall, would you hold me/Would you pass me by?” — is zapped by feedback and jittered by Kraut-rock synthesizer blips. “Machine Gun” rides a distorted stop-start beat made by the drum module of an old electric organ. “Nylon Smile” is an ominous web of backwards guitars, tom-toms and diminished chords in which Ms. Gibbons sings, “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you.”

One major shift is the rhythm. Most of Portishead’s past songs have been dirges, even when flecked with hip-hop drums. The tunes are just as stately on “Third.” But on many of the new songs, brittle double-time beats appear out of nowhere and just as suddenly fall away, adding rock’s impact and tension without the release.

The band is well aware that “Third” won’t go down as smoothly as “Dummy,” but it doesn’t mind. “The basic thing was to sound like ourselves, not to repeat ourselves,” Mr. Barrow said. “There was never a sense of throwing stuff in to freak people out. If there was, it was the healthy amount we always had.”

When Portishead arrived for sound check, Mr. Barrow’s face was glum as he surveyed the Munich Tonhalle, a utilitarian club in the middle of a recreation complex. A barnlike cinder-block shed, the Tonhalle might have been a good place, Mr. Utley said, for the Ramones — and not, he implied, for a band with the subtleties of Portishead. Munich was the stop between a triumphant gig in Florence and a large show in Berlin, where the director Wim Wenders would drop by backstage.

With its studio standards Portishead is so precise about timbre that it changes snare drums from song to song during its set. Here, the Tonhalle’s architecture, which didn’t allow the band to hang its P.A. system, demanded a full last-minute reinvention.

When the booking agent arrived, looking abashed, Mr. Barrow told him the place was “a nightmare.” Instruments made boomy echoes as the sound crew frantically tweaked every painstakingly chosen setting.

“This could be the last time we ever go on the road,” Mr. Barrow said. “It might not be, but it might be. So the reality is that playing a really bad-sounding gig — well, it hurts when we play.”

It wasn’t so bad, really. Echoes were absorbed by the 2,700 bodies in the packed house; Ms. Gibbons, clutching the microphone with both hands like someone clinging to a life raft, sang with doleful passion. As the band unveiled the relentless drumbeat, dissonant keyboard and jabbing guitar line of a new song, “We Carry On,” the shy Ms. Gibbons left the stage for the photographers’ pit, shaking hands with overjoyed fans.

“Just trying to kiss them and give them a cheap thrill,” she said backstage afterward. The tragic face she brings to her songs onstage was gone; she was giddy, even giggly. The show had turned into a rock concert, and an enthusiastic visitor bubbled over with compliments for Ms. Gibbons’s singing.

Her smile disappeared, and her face grew apprehensive. “It’s never good enough,” she said.

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• July 24, 2011 Setlist

Portishead Setlist at Alexandra Palace, London, England

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Portishead gig timeline.

• Jul 20 2011 Paléo Festival 2011 Nyon, Switzerland Add time Add time
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• Oct 01 2011 ATP I'll Be Your Mirror 2011 Asbury Park, NJ, USA Add time Add time
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Creating a Modern Town of the Future

A History of Portishead

History and heritage.

Portishead's history dates back to Roman times with its name deriving from the 'port at the head of the river'. The town was built at the mouth of a small tributary, with the water once reaching as far as the High Street. Portishead has a long history as a fishing port and the iron rings that can be seen on the stone wall at the beginning of the High Street are evidence of where the old fishing boats used to moor.

The dominant architecture in 'old' Portishead is early Victorian, with many buildings maintaining their original features. An exploration of the town will uncover many fine old buildings and quaint cottages, a contrast to some of the more modern architecture of recent years.

Early in the 19th century Portishead began to develop as a seaside resort, as well as a retreat for Bristol businessmen. At the same time industry began to expand in the area, which is when Portishead first began its growth into a thriving town and tourist attraction.

Around 1836, at the height of the iron and steel era, a deep-water dock was built to facilitate the large ships that brought valuable cargoes from across the globe and carried exported local products overseas.

The Victorian period saw day trippers visiting Portishead from Bristol using paddle steamers as transport and then rail, when in 1907 the light railway reached Portishead. Tourist attractions were developed with the Approach Golf Course opening in 1908 and the Lake Grounds in 1910.

In 1911 Mustad's nail factory was built in Portishead and in 1926 work on the first of two power stations started at the dockside. Portishead Radio was born in 1928 which saw the creation of a telephone control centre for non-direct dialled calls to maritime vessels.

Commercial enterprise continued and saw the building of the Albright and Wilson phosphorus plant and a paper mill.

Industry began to decline in the late 1970s. Portishead Radio Station sent its last message in 1978 and the power stations ceased working in 1980. The Portishead landscape, dominated by four large chimney stacks belonging to the power stations, changed dramatically when the final two were demolished in 1992 marking the end of an era in Portishead.

As the old industries closed, housing developments replaced them, new business centres unfolded and a selection of new bars, cafes and restaurants sprung up close to the dock area. The dock has been well preserved and is now the centre of a new and exciting marina development attracting interest from all over the country. The marina currently provides around 300 pontoon berths for a range of sailing and leisure craft, it has 24 hour staffing and has been awarded Five Gold Anchors, the highest award given to a marina by The Yacht Harbour Association.

The mouth of the dock sits on the edge of the deep water shipping channel of the Bristol Channel where large ocean going super-tankers and coasters, plus a host of pleasure craft can be seen regularly sailing the waters.

Avon and Somerset Constabulary has built its headquarters in Portishead making it the town's largest employer.

Portishead has, without doubt, become an attractive commercial centre and shopping destination in its own right.

Last updated: Mon, 20 Feb 2023 13:12

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Amateur Miles Russell still ballin’ after making Korn Ferry Tour history

15-year-old Miles Russell continues to play well on the Korn Ferry Tour, despite his youth and inexperience.

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Miles Russell continues to prove himself on the biggest of stages.

The 15-year-old Floridian earned a spot in last week’s LECOM Suncoast Classic on the Korn Ferry Tour and took full advantage of the opportunity by finishing in a tie for 15th. That paved the way for another exemption in Texas, where Russell opened the Veritex Bank Championship with a 3-under 68.

The left-hander opened his round with eight straight pars but finally broke through with a birdie at the par-5 9th. A long-range bomb from 30 feet followed at 11, and another birdie at the par-3 12th came minutes after. Suddenly, Russell sat at 3-under and in a solid position through 12 holes.

Russell made another birdie at the drivable, par-4 16th, which measured 329 yards on Thursday. But he made a costly mistake on the final hole, a par-5, as he three-putted from 25 feet for a bogey six.

Still, Russell played beautifully from tee to green, hitting 13-of-14 fairways and 16-of-18 greens. He scrambled nicely, too, going 2-for-2 when he missed the putting surface with his approaches.

But at the end of the day, Russell is 10 strokes behind Frankie Capan III, who shot 58 and broke Scottie Scheffler’s course record in the process.

Still, Russell has a great chance to make the cut on the Korn Ferry Tour again—one week after becoming the youngest player to record a top-25 finish on the PGA Tour or Korn Ferry Tour since 1983.

He will likely need another round in the 60s to make the cut again, but knowing how much talent this 15-year-old has, that is most certainly within the realm of possibilities.

Jack Milko is a golf staff writer for SB Nation’s Playing Through. Be sure to check out @_PlayingThrough for more golf coverage. You can follow him on Twitter @jack_milko as well.

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Frankie Capan III shoots 13-under 58 in Korn Ferry Tour event at Texas Rangers Golf Club

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ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — Frankie Capan III shot a 13-under 58 on Thursday in the Veritex Bank Championship at Texas Rangers Golf Club to tie the Korn Ferry Tour record for relation to par and match the second-lowest score in tour history.

Capan played an eight-hole stretch in 9 under, making an eagle on the par-5 ninth and following with seven straight birdies. He two-putted for par on the par-4 17th, then hit into a fairway bunker on the par-5 18th and ended up saving par with a 7-foot putt.

“Whenever you’re out there playing well and going low, I really just wanted to keep going as much as I could,” Capan said. “I know this course might be gettable the next few days, so just tried to get as many as I could.”

Cristobal Del Solar shot the lowest round in Korn Ferry Tour history with a 13-under 57 in February in the Astara Golf Championship in Colombia. There have been 13 sub-60 rounds on the Korn Ferry Tour, six in the last 370 days

The 58 broke the course record of 59 set by Masters champion Scottie Scheffler in a casual round with friends on May 3, 2020.

“When someone said it was for 58, I was excited because I know Scottie Scheffler shot 59, so whenever you can beat that guy, especially nowadays, I mean, you’ve got to take advantage,” Capan said.

The 24-year-old Capan, making his 31st Korn Ferry Tour star, played at the University of Alabama and Florida Gulf Coast He previously shot 59 in the final round of a high school state championship

“I shot 59 before, so I thought, you know, may as well break that,” Capan said. “It was a lot of fun out there. After the first four, five holes, I just felt really comfortable with my game and where I was at.”

Trent Phillips was second after a 61. Tim Widing, the winner of the LECOM Suncoast Classic last week, had a 62.

The wind gusted to 30 mph on the mostly cloudy day, with a high temperature of 78.

AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf