Portishead - Sour Times

What this video is

Released August 1994 as the lead single from Portishead's debut album *Dummy*, 'Sour Times' arrived at the apex of the Bristol trip-hop movement, alongside Massive Attack and Tricky, fundamentally reshaping British underground music's international profile. The video's noir-cinematic language — drawn from Hemming's short film *To Kill a Dead Man* — anchored the band's aesthetic in a mid-century spy-film iconography…

Why it matters

A defining artefact of the trip-hop genre's visual vocabulary, the *Sour Times* video established the spy-noir cinematic template that Portishead and their contemporaries would deploy throughout the mid-1990s. Its synthesis of performance and borrowed narrative footage within a coherent aesthetic…

The director

Alexander Hemming is a UK-based music video and film director who worked extensively with Portishead during their *Dummy* era (1994). He directed multiple videos for the band and co-created the short film *To Kill a Dead Man* (1994), which served as source…