The Rip

third

Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons and Adrian Utley wrote it for Third, Portishead's first album in eleven years, and it came out as the second single on 9 June 2008.

It began, Utley said, as a bare folk song for guitar and voice, and came through a long process of ideas added and thrown away. The Siel Orchestra sequencer they were using could not play the arpeggios, so they recorded the notes one at a time and edited them into a pattern, and there is a toy acoustic guitar on it that Utley found in a junk shop. Halfway through, Gibbons' held note carries the song out of folk and into a synth-bass loop.

backstage in st louis

In June 2008 Colin Greenwood put a video on Dead Air Space, the band's blog, of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood playing it backstage in St Louis, where Radiohead had played on 14 May, with Yorke reading the words off his MacBook. The NME had the clip up by 14 June. Radiohead have never played it at a show.

latitude

Yorke was not on the bill, though Nigel Godrich had hinted at something during the day. Near the end of Portishead's headline set at Latitude on 18 July 2015, after the encore break, Yorke walked out on the Obelisk stage and sang it with Gibbons, the two of them trading lines, and the noise from the crowd grew as people worked out who it was.