Threads by Portishead Song Info
"This is the only track with Clive and Jim playing. It was originally Beth's guitar line, which she played and then chopped up in Logic. And we talk about all this equipment here, these beautiful Calrecs that everything was recorded through, and the fantastic compressors and stuff and she just stuck the guitar straight into the computer, and it sounds cool. We had to EQ it, but it's a sound, and it sounds great. The bass line is three across four, always pushing, like a very slow triplet over the four, and it has this push all the time. And there's a soprano saxophone solo from Will. "The end is really the first time Beth has ever really cut loose and hammered it. All the meters were, like, whoa, banging on their endstops. She can sing incredibly loud and powerfully. So there's that, which is like an improv, really, and there's Geoff shouting. We were using my Clavioline, out in the room next door, with no carpet, and I'd put a Bollywood–style echo on it. Every time he talked I thought it sounded better than the line. So me and Stu in the control room just told him to shout. Then it goes into this Viking horn of doom at the end. That's a guitar with the whammy bar and a fuzz box and an Altiverb reverb, one of these massive spaces — and there's some VCS3 on the track as well, like Hawkwind. I remember seeing them in 1975 at Reading Festival, and there were these unearthly noises, so loud and so unbelievable." -Adrian Utley
