- Year of release
- 1994
- Global sales
- Over 2 million
- Genre
- Trip-hop / electronica
- Buy this album
- Download | Buy CD
This Bristol band almost single-handedly invented trip-hop with this, their ground-breaking debut. Consistently voted one of the greatest albums of all time, Dummy is a good deal darker than many of the releases that the band subsequently inspired.
Best tracks:
Numb
Glory Box
Sour Times
Top facts:
- Founding member Geoff Barrow worked as a tape operator for Tricky and Massive Attack before forming Portishead in 1991 – naming it after a seaside town near his home city. Singer Beth Gibbons, meanwhile, was singing in pubs, and Adrian Utley was a jazz guitarist.
- Dummy won the 1995 Mercury Music Prize, beating friend and fellow Bristolian Tricky with his Maxinquaye album, as well as Oasis' Definitely Maybe, PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love, Supergrass's I Should Coco, Leftfield's Leftism and Elastica's self-titled debut – and you should own every one of these albums too.
- The jangly sample in Sour Times is a cimbalom, a kind of hammer dulcimer from Eastern Europe, and comes from the Lalo Schifrin track Danube Incident, a theme he wrote for cult 1960s TV show Mission Impossible.
If you like this, try:
Tricky: Maxinquaye
Massive Attack: Blue Lines
Goldfrapp: Felt Mountain
Next classic album: Duran Duran >>
