Robbed hit of the week 9/30/19 - Portishead's "Sour Times (Nobody Loves Me)"...

"Sour Times (Nobody Loves Me)" - Portishead
from the album Dummy (1994)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #53

This week's "robbed hit" comes from the British band Portishead, who came together in the early 1990s in the southeastern city of Bristol. There, singer Beth Gibbons and multi-instrumentalist Geoff Barrow recorded their debut album Dummy with co-producer Adrian Utley, who ended up joining as an official member soon after. After an initial single, "Numb" went nowhere, Portishead released the second single from the project, "Sour Times (Nobody Loves Me)". Laid on a base sample of film composer Lalo Schifrin's "Danube Incident", the song became their breakthrough in both home and in America, where the "trip hop" movement was well underway in the UK. Trip Hop, which combined hip-hop beats (usually slowed down) to an electronica production, was dance music's alternative answer to the post-grunge music of hard rock...

While "Sour Times" climbed up to #5 on the Modern Rock/Alternative radio chart in Billboard magazine, the song stalled just under the top half of the pop Hot 100 chart in February of 1995. Originally, the same happened in Britain, where it peaked at #57, but after the success there of their follow-up "Glory Box", which hit #13 in the UK and #12 in France and Ireland, "Sour Times" was re-released and climbed to #13 as well. The song was a minor hit in Australia at #66, but Canada actually scored them a top-40 hit at #29.

While "Sour Times" would be the group's only hit in America, they would continue to be successful in the UK, where all three of their studio albums went to #2 on the sales chart. Their self-titled sophomore effort produced their highest charting and sole top ten British hit "All Mine" (#8 UK) in 1997. But after that came a ten-year break, which found the band members sporadically reuniting for one-off projects and charity work. They finally reunited for a third album, Third, in 2008. Lead single "Machine Gun" was a minor singles hit at #52 in the UK. They performed at Glastonbury in 2013, and most recently covered the ABBA song "SOS", which they created a video as a tribute to fallen member of parliament Jo Cox. But even with just three albums (plus a live set taped in New York), Portishead solidified their legacy in a genre short-lived but well-loved.

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Here's a clip of Portishead performing live on British TV to promote the album...