From those early busking days to their transcendent live shows now, Portico Quartet make music that is all their own - a unique blend of jazz, ethnic influenced organic sounds and pulsing, sweeping electronics - all imbibed with a Radiohead-like indie spirit. Find out how they mapped the journey from busking to album number 8…
Discovering a band all to yourself is the best type of music discovery there is. One day during the mid 2000s as my wife and I wandered along London’s South Bank, we were stopped in our tracks by music the likes of which we’d never heard before - jazzy, rhythmic, with a haunting steel drum but also with an element of ‘indie’. Right there were four very young men (then in their late teens) busking with a confident authority - more a private performance than a busk, and with quite an audience too.
That band was Portico Quartet and we were just two of many thousands of early adopter fans from those early South Bank busks outside The National Gallery. We bought a copy of the band's very first, self-pressed four-track CD for £5, one of 10,000 sold I recently discovered. When I spoke with Duncan Bellamy (drums and the hang steel drum) and Jack Wylie (sax) for The Art of Longevity, Jack told me:
"We'd go off to buy big stacks of blank CDs at Maplins, and we bought this burner machine that could do eight at a time. I think we managed to do 200-250 a day. As a student, it meant we could make a living without working in a bar. It was great fun”.
I put it to Duncan and Jack that they would have to achieve 10 million streams to make the equivalent revenues now (20 million if splitting revenues 50:50 with a record label). Who’d have thought that, as part of establishing an early following as an instrumental band, you could create your own perfectly viable business model as well? For the Portico Quartet, those early years of ‘struggle’ were more like an exercise in building a cottage industry.
A pioneering spirit might have to be one of the secrets to longevity. Indeed, Duncan was inspired by the DIY culture emerging at the time (pre-streaming, the early days of MySpace) when Arctic Monkeys were selling out shows up & down the country before they were signed to a label. It’s a nice thought that both band’s are very much in the long game.
From those early days, the Portico Quartet’s rise was as meteoric as it gets for an instrumental band. In 2008 came the Mercury Music Prize nomination for their full debut album ‘Knee Deep in the North Sea’ and one year later the band signed to Real World Records, the independent label owned by Peter Gabriel. That came with a huge leap in the maturity of their sound (2009’s Isla) and a full stop to the days of busking. As a fan, observing the band’s musical development has been a truly remarkable experience.
From those early busking days to their transcendent live shows now, Portico Quartet make music that is all their own - a unique blend of jazz, ethnic influenced organic sounds and pulsing, sweeping electronics - all imbibed with a Radiohead-like indie spirit.
I’d recommend listening to their story in their own words and then working your way through the back catalogue in order - from ‘Knee Deep’ right up to the meditative ‘Terrain’ and the trance-like ‘Monument’. Both albums were released in 2021 coming out of a rich creative period for the band. If you are short on time, take a nighttime city drive and fire up their 2017 record ‘Art in the Age of Automation’. There is no more perfect soundtrack to burning your way down The Westway. There is still a long way to go.
'Monument' is released 5th November 2021.
Mick Clarke’s cover art is inspired by Duncan Bellamy’s work on Portico Quartet’s albums.
The Art of Longevity is produced by Audio Culture in partnership with Project Melody. Original music is by Andrew James Johnson.