Song · Live covers
The Rip
Portishead's ballad, covered by Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood a week after it was released as a single.
2008
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 guitar-and-voice folk song, and survived a long process of ideas added and thrown away. The arpeggios are hand-built: the Siel Orchestra sequencer they were using could not play them, so they recorded the notes one at a time and edited them into a pattern. 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.
the cover
yorke and greenwood, not radiohead
Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played it within days of the single's release, two men and a guitar, and the recording circulated widely. It is a Yorke performance rather than a band one: this site's setlist archive holds no Radiohead performance of it.
on stage
Portishead with Thom Yorke, at Latitude, 2015.· onlygoodmusicwatch on youtube →
takes(2)
sources4
- Chris Whibbs, interview with Adrian Utley, Exclaim!, 27 April 2008.
- Peter Forrest, “Adrian Utley: Recording Third”, Sound on Sound, November 2008.
- “Watch Radiohead cover Portishead”, NME, 14 June 2008.
- This site's own setlist archive, which holds no band performance of it.