Portishead - "Half day closing"

Adrian Utley (guitars, moog, song writer): "It took us two years to make this album because we got into a really bad hole after our first album and tour. We were miserable and blocked about what we were doing. I feel that 'Half Day Closing' got us out of that. We thought, 'Let's just do this; let's just finish something.'" [could there be a song having the same effect for their long awaited 3rd studio album?]
"It was a departure for us, really, because there are no samples on it -it's Geoff and me playing live. It was inspired by an album by the United States of America, from 1967 or '69. It's a psychedelic band that people tell us is quite obscure. We tracked up loads of weird Moog stuff over the top - weird noises and odd melodies. And we put Beth's vocals through a rotating organ cabinet called a Leslie. We just sort of tripped out, really".

Geoff Barrow (songwriter, decks, drummer): "It's kind of roughly based on an old psychedelic track from the United States of America, an old psychedelic band. It's really weird because I don't know musically how similar it is. I know it's styled on it. It's the only one I play drums all the way through in, which I was absolutely chuffed with, I've actually managed to play drums through a whole track. Rather than it being based on samples, that was the turning point of the record really because what we did is that Dave put up some channels, me and Ade went into the studio, I got on the drums Ade got on the bass and we recorded it start to finish. We usually use samples and stuff like that and spend ages on arrangements but literally we just went "okay let's record it" so we recorded this track and built it up like a normal guitar band would build up a track and mixed it like it as well. It's kind of like people will say it's a bit psychedelic or whatever but I don't know. We were just on that thing of nothing mattered, the whole Portsishead thing didn't matter. We were just going to enjoy recording a track - didn't matter what it sounded like, we were just going to bang it out and be noisy and not kind of rock noisy".

"It wasn't even going to be on the album it was just something to do to really be inspired by music again and feel like you're doing it for the enjoyment rather than you're doing it because of a business. And that's pretty much how it came together and it ended up on the album and its one of my favourite tracks".

Available on the album "Portishead"