Will this day 'be their damnedest day'? Portishead perform at the Willesden Empire in 1995. Photograph: Brian Rasic/Rex Features
This Friday at around 9pm, Portishead will take to a stage in a holiday camp in Minehead to play their first full-band live show in over 10 years, with an album to follow next April.
Ten years is a long time in rock music - not quite up to My Bloody Valentine standards, I grant you, but a good four years more than the gap between the Stone Roses' debut and The Second Coming, formerly the accepted benchmark for a band of musicians who decided some time off was called for to build a studio/develop a drug addiction/feed the carp (delete as appropriate). Going on the relative lack of media coverage, I'm wondering if anyone still cares.
They should, of course. Portishead's debut Dummy and its dense, claustrophobic follow-up, 1997's self-titled Portishead, are the stuff of dark magic - jazz and hip-hop rhythms slowed down to narcotic speeds, slo-mo scratching that sounded like a poltergeist let loose on the turntable, and at the microphone, Beth Gibbons - a chanteuse in the Edith Piaf mould, but who sounded rather like she regretted everything.
Dummy sold 2m copies in Europe, and in conjunction with a string of fine mid-90s records that shared some of its hallmarks - Massive Attack's Protection, Tricky's Maxinquaye, Mo Wax's Headz compilations, and DJ Shadow's Entroducing - landed the sobriquet "trip-hop".
Seldom has a genre title wrought such damage on the music it stood to represent. Almost immediately, the idea of trip-hop slid away from the music and became a sort of cultural shorthand - for the middle-class metropolitan couple who wanted something slow yet edgy to soundtrack their dinner party, or for the graphic designer in artfully ripped designer jeans looking for something "classic, but modern, yeah?" to smoke a spliff to.
Inverted snobbery, basically. But it stuck - and it's still hard to shake the feeling that something of these artful, original records feels stuck in the decade that spawned them.
So what will 21st Century Portishead be like? There are clues. In 2002, Beth Gibbons released a folk album, Out of Season, with Rustin Man (aka Paul Webb of Talk Talk). Producer/instrumentalist Geoff Barrow produced The Coral's 2005 album The Invisible Invasion and also runs a independent Bristol label called Invada, which releases all manner of doom metal and sludge rock, including Julian Cope's pagan-themed Brain Donor project.
Meanwhile, the line-up Portishead have picked to accompany them at All Tomorrow's Parties is noticeably lacking in coffee-table vibes, unless the likes of GZA from the Wu Tang Clan, New York guitar composer Glenn Branca or foul-mouthed comedian Jerry Sadowitz is your ideal complement to a cup of Joe.
There have been a couple of stripped-down live appearances - a Tsunami benefit in 2005, and a secret gig earlier this year in Bristol, footage from which suggests the band haven't lost their touch for eerie, stately gloom.
What to expect this weekend? I couldn't tell you. But I'm looking forward to finding out.
