The Rip chords by Portishead

"That's a really cheap four–quid acoustic guitar that I picked up in a junk shop. But it had a good sound. Then I had some work done on it for 25 quid, so you could actually play it. It's steel strings, but a little budget kids' guitar. "The 'sequence' isn't sequenced at all — it's chopped–up audio, played in bits and dropped in. I was trying to get the analogue sequencers to play the arpeggios, but just couldn't do it, because the chords change. Geoff came up with this double–time beat. The problem with it had been that it was always too slow. We used to have an 808 classic old–school hip–hop beat, but that sounded a bit ordinary. We're always fighting against sounding like what we used to do, or sounding ordinary; so Geoff took it into another world. And while I was prattling on about sequencing, Geoff borrowed my Siel, and just played it — learnt the shape of the first chord, stopped, dropped in, learnt the shape of the second chord, and so on. There's a bassoon, too, and some other stuff: a little synth that comes in at the end, that we put on in the mix. It sounded like it needed something else, and I had my MS20 there, so I just put it on with it." -Adrian Utley Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.