Few acts in the last two decades have been as influential as Portishead, whose debut album Dummy virtually invented the genre dubbed "trip-hop." In the month the group returns after 12 years of silence with Third, we look back at their arrival on the UK music scene with this Ben Thompson piece from 1994. -- Barney Hoskyns, RBP Editorial Director

AUTUMN 1994. The fake foliage hanging from the ceiling gives Eve's Club the air of a woodland glade. The venue for Portishead's first real live appearance has a phony '60s resonance – Christine Keeler played dominoes here for the first time, apparently – much as their music might be said to by those who don't get it. Just how little such first impressions matter is one of the things that is about to be made clear.

Portishead stand around chatting while a discreet DJ does his business, then they melt out of the crowd and onto the cramped stage, perform a handful of songs from their debut album Dummy and merge back in again. Miraculously, given the studio-based complexity of their music and the fact that this is its first real public airing, it sounds even better in person than on record.

Beth Gibbons is barely visible. Ducking down beneath the level of the front row of heads, she appears mainly as a plume of smoke coming out of a bald man's ear. Her voice – smooth as Sade one minute, rough and raw as Eartha Kitt's the next – cuts through the keyboard splashes and buoyant bass like an ambulance through a traffic jam. The drummer's muted clank is half-man, half-machine, and unassuming 37-year-old jazz guitar wizard Adrian Utley cranks out fuzz communiqués Ennio Morricone might have written for Jimi Hendrix. Behind it all is the precocious 22-year-old Barrow, crouching studiously over his turntables, using them as a musical instrument.

It's the twists and turns, the subtle shifts and the subterranean moodswings, that make this music so beguiling. If Portishead have a problem at the moment, it is an excess of mystique. This is partly their fault for doing everything so stylishly – making their own films, filling the streets outside with chained up shop dummies – but it would be a shame if the drama of their music got washed away in a tsunami of noir clichés . There's more to Portishead's music than smoky rooms and small hours drinking. It shouldn't just be the preserve of soundtrack obsessives and ambience chasers.

Beth Gibbons seems to confirm this later when she says that "you don't want to make an aura round anyone, not only because it's unfair on that person but because it makes the audience stupid." Up to this point however, Portishead's press encounters have been somewhat aura-heavy. The rapidly established ritual proceeds as follows: reporter arrives, singer leaves – often with a squeal of tyres from her battered Triumph convertible.

On this occasion, things go differently. Arriving at the appointed place – a small terraced house in the Easton district of Bristol. Geoff Barrow is ill with a suspected ulcer – he worries too much, so Beth will do the interview. Her matter-of-factness is in sharp contrast with the feelings of her record company, who had been planning to use Beth's first exclusive as a bargaining counter in the struggle for control of North Sea oil revenues.

Until the fateful day in 1991 when Gibbons bumped into Barrow at an enterprise allowance scheme induction day, her quest for potential collaborators had been a thankless one. "I went to his house and played him some of my stuff," she remembers "and he came round to my house and played me some of his." Common ground – he a teenage hip-hop fan, she an unrepentant mid-twenties song lover – was not extensive. But when he converted some of her rough ideas into "a proper song" she was truly impressed.

Dummy's beguiling blend of classic songcraft and eerie studio atmospherics grew out of a tortuous writing process. Geoff would go into the studio with guitarist Adrian, drummer Clive and anyone else he needed, record on digital tape, take out the best bits and put them on vinyl then scratch-mix the the results back onto tape "to enable him to put his own style onto the playing." Only when this tricky process was complete was Beth free to add her vocal lines – tune first, lyrics after – in the privacy of her own home.

Blithely asking "Would you like to hear some stuff?" Gibbons rifles through a pile of discs and DATs to find the front room demo she played to Geoff when they first met – "My mum still wants us to release this as a single" – and ploughs through an assortment of dummy rums for Dummy with a forthright and entertaining commentary. "This is where I tried to rip off Sinead O Connor," or "You'll like this, it's awful." Alighting with a delighted "I don't think he'll thank me for this" on some of Geoff's early studio experiments, she gives the reclusive turntable wizard's very private demos a rare semi-public airing.

"We're very kind of separate people," Gibbons says of Barrow. "If you asked him about me I don't know what he'd say. I think it may be the age gap but he never quite knows how to take me, though musically we always seem to know where the other one's coming from. I think one difference is that he's always done music – so he doesn't think in terms of there being an alternative to a, in inverted commas, 'creative life.' Whereas after ten years of working I definitely don't think of myself as a creative person. I've only got about four O levels and I packed for two years and I've worked in factories and I know that feeling of thinking that – because you haven't got any qualifications – you can't do something. Also coming originally from Devon where you're just meant to get married and have kids... I think that's one thing both Geoff and I appreciate – the feeling you get when people say 'Why don't you do something real?'"

Dropping me off at the station with a preview tape of Tricky's Maxinquaye on the stereo, Beth makes the optimistic assertion that recording of the next Portishead album will be well underway within "three or four months".

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