Portishead (band)

Portishead are an English band formed in 1991 in Bristol. They are named after the nearby town of the same name, eight miles west of Bristol. Portishead consists of Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons, and Adrian Utley, while sometimes citing a fourth member, Dave McDonald, an engineer on their first records.

Their debut album, Dummy, was met with critical acclaim in 1994. Two other studio albums were issued: Portishead in 1997 and Third in 2008.

History

Dummy (1994)

Portishead's first album Dummy was released in 1994. The cover features a still from the band's own short film To Kill a Dead Man. The credits indicate that at this juncture, Portishead was a duo of Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons. Adrian Utley, who co-produced the album with them (and who played on 9 of the tracks and co-wrote 8), became an official band member shortly after its release.

Despite the band's aversion to press coverage, the album was successful in both Europe and the United States (where it sold more than 150,000 copies even before the band toured there).Dummy was positively described by the Melody Maker as "musique noire for a movie not yet made".Rolling Stone praised its music as "Gothic hip-hop".Dummy spawned three singles: "Numb", "Sour Times", "Glory Box", and won the Mercury Music Prize in 1995. The success of the album saw the band nominated for Best British Newcomer at the 1995 Brit Awards. In 2003, the album was ranked number 419 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The album is often considered one of the greatest trip hop albums to date and is a milestone in the definition of the genre.

Portishead

Portishead may refer to:

Band

Band or BAND may refer to:

Science and technology

Computing and electronics

Organizations

Glory Box

"Glory Box" is a single by English musical group Portishead, released in 1995. The title song samples "Ike's Rap II" by Isaac Hayes (as does Tricky's "Hell Is Around The Corner" from Maxinquaye, released the same year), which also samples the bassline of Wallace Collection's "Daydream". The song also appears as the last track on Portishead's 1994 album Dummy.

Music video

The music video is set in the 1950s, featuring lead singer Beth Gibbons as a jazz singer at a club while various office workers watch her perform. Sexual tension begins to rise between certain characters, as eventually, all of the workers, as separate couples, attend the club where Beth is performing. Apart from the band members, the entire cast of the video appear in drag.

Uses in the media

The song can be heard in several films, such as Stealing Beauty, When the Cat's Away, The Craft, B. Monkey, Tout pour plaire, Lord of War and Wild.

The song has also been used in several TV episodes, such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation ("Chaos Theory") Daria ("Pinch Sitter"), Rescue Me ("Thaw"), Numb3rs ("And The Winner Is..." ) and Ringer ("If You Ever Want a French Lesson").

Classical planet

In Classical antiquity, the classical planets or naked eye planets were the seven non-fixed objects visible in the sky: the Sun, the Moon, and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The word planet comes from the Greek word πλανήτης, planētēs, meaning "wanderer", because ancient astronomers observed how certain lights moved across the sky relative to the fixed stars. They called these objects asteres planetai, which means wandering stars.

Babylonian astronomy

Babylonians recognized seven planets. A bilingual list in the British Museum records the seven Babylonian planets in this order:

Symbols