About Beth Gibbons

Beth Gibbons is an English singer-songwriter, best known as the lead singer and lyricist for the band Portishead, who have released three albums. 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. She released a solo album in 2024 titled Lives Outgrown.

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.

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 . 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. 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.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Beth Gibbons", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.