Album · Portishead
Dummy by Portishead
Dummy is an album by Portishead, released in 1994. 4 songs from it have charted on rock radio countdowns, with 77 countdown appearances in total. The biggest is “Sour Times”, on 49 lists with a best position of #8.
Dummy, Portishead's debut album, came out on Go! Beat on 22 August 1994, and it sounds like a smoky after-hours bar at the end of the world. Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons and Adrian Utley produced it themselves, and they built something slow, shadowy and gorgeous: crackling, dusty beats, spy-movie atmospherics and Gibbons' voice, fragile and wounded, hovering over the lot.
"Sour Times" is the haunted torch song at its center, "Glorybox" slinks along with a sultry swagger, and "Wandering Star" and "Mysterons" drift even deeper into the gloom. Nothing here hurries; every track seems to exhale.
Critics fell hard for it, and it took home the 1995 Mercury Music Prize. It is often credited with carrying trip hop to a much wider audience, and it keeps turning up on lists of the decade's best albums. By 2008 it had sold 3.6 million copies worldwide; in Britain it went triple platinum in February 2019, and by September 2020 it had sold 920,000 copies there.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs from Dummy on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sour Times | 49 | #8 | – | 1994–2026 | |
| 2 | Glorybox | 24 | #15 | – | 1995–2026 | |
| 3 | Wandering Star | 3 | #338 | – | 2019–2023 | |
| 4 | Mysterons | 1 | #113 | – | 2024 |
Only songs that appear on at least one countdown are listed. Release data from MusicBrainz.