Beth Gibbons is an English singer-songwriter. She was born in Exeter and raised on a farm with three sisters. Her parents divorced when she was young. She attended St. Katherine’s School in Pill, 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 (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. 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 Album 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”.
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 in April 2014. 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.
In 2014, Gibbons performed Symphony No. 3 by Henryk Gorecki with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki. Gibbons sang in Polish. 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 Mor. Morale and the Big Steppers. 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. In 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 in May 2024. It was announced alongside a single titled “Floating on a Moment”.
