Beth Gibbons

Beth Gibbons (born 4 January 1965) is an English singer-songwriter.

She is the singer and lyricist for the band Portishead, which has released three albums.

For her collaboration in the album she received a nomination for Album of the Year at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards as a featured artist and songwriter.

On 7 February 2024, Gibbons announced the release of her first solo studio album in over 20 years.

The album, titled Lives Outgrown, is to be released 17 May 2024.

It was announced alongside a single titled "Floating on a Moment".

She has cited Nina Simone, Bono of U2 for his performance on The Joshua Tree, Otis Redding and Jimmy Cliff as a musical inspiration.

She has covered Janis Joplin songs and enjoys the music of Janis Ian.

At 22, she moved to Bath, then Bristol to pursue her singing career, where she met Geoff Barrow, her future collaborator in Portishead, on an Enterprise Allowance course in 1991.

With Adrian Utley, Gibbons and Barrow released the first Portishead album Dummy in 1994 and have produced two other studio albums, a live album, and various singles in the years since.

She has also collaborated on a separate project with former Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb (Rustin Man).

Before she joined Geoff Barrow in Portishead, she had auditioned for the singer's slot in .O.rang, the group formed by Webb after Talk Talk's late-Eighties departure from EMI, but Portishead's sudden success pre-empted matters.

She released an album with Rustin Man, Out of Season, in 2002, and a recording of Górecki's Symphony No. 3 with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2019.

Gibbons was born in Exeter, Devon, England and raised on a farm with three sisters.

Her parents divorced when she was young.

She attended St Katherine's School in Pill, Somerset, in North Somerset.

In October 2002, they released the album Out of Season in the United Kingdom under the name Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man.

The album peaked at number 28 in the UK Albums Chart.

It was released in the United States a year later: while touring in North America, Variety favourably described her performance with Rustin as "Billie Holiday fronting Siouxsie and the Banshees".

Gibbons was also a judge for the 10th annual Independent Music Awards to support independent artists' careers.

In June 2013, Gibbons announced plans for a new solo album with Domino Records.

She contributed vocals to a cover of the song "Black Sabbath" with the British metal band Gonga, released on 24 April 2014.

In 2014, Gibbons performed Symphony No. 3 by Henryk Górecki with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki.

Gibbons sang in Polish.

In 2018, Gibbons contributed vocal performances, along with Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, to the Spill Festival held in Ipswich in an audio installation entitled 'Clarion Calls', which uses the voices of 100 women to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.

The performance was released in 2019; reviewing the album for Pitchfork, Jayson Greene wrote: "Part of the tension comes from hearing her untrained voice scale these rocky heights. Her vibrato, tight and trilling and barely controlled, sounds an awful lot like someone fighting off a panic attack. This would get her dismissed from a traditional opera audition, probably, but it is magnificently effective at sending raw shudders through what can be a pretty well-worn work."

In 2022, Gibbons featured on the track "Mother I Sober" from Kendrick Lamar's album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.