Beth Gibbons Live: Still A Voice Like No Other

Performing her solo debut Lives Outgrown in full—with a spine-tingling encore of Portishead classics—Beth Gibbons delivers a performance that is intimate, intense, and utterly otherworldly. Her voice, still shattering and serene, remains one of the most singular instruments in music.

BETH GIBBONS

FORTITUDE MUSIC HALL, BRISBANE

TUESDAY, 3 JUNE 2025

PHOTOS BY YEJIN CHO

WORDS BY BEN PREECE

It’s a rare and sacred thing to enter a venue midweek and be greeted by rows of seats. Truly! Seated! In the Fortitude!! Hallelujah!!! There’s an unspoken understanding that what we’re about to witness demands reverence.

And then she appears.

Beth Gibbons' voice remains one of the most singular instruments in modern music. It can carve your heart to pieces and gently put it back together again. Whether whispering through Portishead’s noir-tinted trip-hop, weeping over Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, or haunting Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Mother I Sober’, her frail yet resilient timbre feels strangely reassuring—that even in a breaking world full of disposable art, something delicate still matters. To experience it live, unfiltered, is humbling. Up close, it’s breathtaking.

She floats onto the stage, much like the intense levels of smoke itself—barely lit, half-hidden behind a veil of haze that never lifts. It’s more than mood-setting: it’s intentional, almost alienating. She doesn’t so much perform as haunt the space. The smoke, while occasionally frustrating, helps blur the line between the earthly and the ethereal. Her figure flickers in and out of sight, but her voice—God, that voice—cuts through everything.

From the first breath of 'Tell Me Who You Are Today', it’s clear: she has lost nothing in her voice. Not an inch. That haunting contralto still moves like a spirit through walls. The mix is flawless, her vocal sitting in perfect tension with the band’s eerie blend of creaks, drones and orchestral minimalism. Seven musicians surround her, each offering subtle textures—bowed bass, brushed snares, strange woodwinds, wheezing keys. The instrumentation feels like it’s breathing alongside her, the very definition of flow.

The set leans heavily into Lives Outgrown, her densely layered and lived-in debut solo album, released just last year. Sonically, it exists in a different solar system to Portishead’s brooding electronics, yet the existential thread remains: songs about loss, ageing, motherhood, resilience. These are not torch songs. They are elegies with flickers of warmth. If anything, Gibbons invites us to bear witness not just to her sorrow, but to the transformation that comes after it.

Early on, album highlight ‘Floating On A Moment’ drifts in like hot breath on cold glass. The lyric—“all we have is here and now”—is delivered so delicately, irony free, it barely lands at first. But it does. The arrangement is feathery and gentle, and the song truly lives up to its name: it floats. For a moment, everything feels suspended. Gibbons doesn’t offer comfort so much as clarity—a quiet reminder to remain present, even in pain.

There’s no melodrama—only truth, often delivered in whispers, often with her back to us, as if to protect herself from the weight of her own lyrics.

All ten songs from Lives Outgrown are performed tonight—and honestly, that’s no bad thing. If you came hoping for nothing but Portishead, you should know better. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s something more present, more personal. Still, one of the few dips into earlier material is a set highlight: ‘Mysteries’, the opener from her 2002 collaboration with Rustin Man (aka Paul Webb of Talk Talk). “Oh, mysteries of love, where war is no more / I’ll be there anytime,” she sings, voice barely above breath. But it’s the moment that follows—when she turns away from the mic and releases a sharp, wordless cry—that truly stuns. It pierces through the theatre like a wound. Wordless and raw, it sounds less like a note than a reckoning, as if she’s signalling that peace might still be a long way off.

Throughout it all, the band are nothing short of extraordinary. Seven players form a kind of chamber ensemble built for ruin and rebirth—elegant, unshowy, but totally commanding. The arrangements are sculpted, not played, with layers of bowed bass, strings, spectral keys and soft-as-silk percussion stitched together into something both intimate and immense. Clearly more than hired hands; they’re conjurers, shaping the air around Gibbons without ever pulling focus. Every swell, every silence, is intentional. And when Gibbons steps back, turning from the mic to collect herself, they hold her—and us—together.

And then comes the encore.

The opening notes of ‘Roads’ land like a gut punch. The Fortitude holds its collective breath—and then the cameras go up. They’re not allowed, of course, but that doesn’t stop the same few culprits from raising their screens, drawing attention and security in equal measure. The distraction is frustrating, to say the least. But still, somehow—time stops. Her delivery is completely shattering: fragile, defiant, utterly present. “We got a war to fight,” she sings, and it’s as if the world narrows to just her and the words she barely dares to say.

Then comes ‘Glory Box’. Who knew we’d ever get to hear this live again? That creeping bassline, the seductive pulse, building steadily until the guitar solo absolutely rips the air apart. And then: “For this is the beginning / Of forever and ever.” That line drops and the whole place drops with it. There's a wave of sound and emotion that hits way harder than any rDUMMecording ever could. It’s spine-tingling, surreal—quite unbelievable. Hearing these Dummy classics here, now, in this space, is something as powerful, as staggering, as anything this humble reviewer has ever seen performed live.

Beth Gibbons doesn’t command the spotlight—she folds herself into it. Shy, elusive, shrouded in smoke and shadows, she remains an enigma. Yet the spell she casts is undeniable. As the final notes of ‘Reaching Out’ drift away, it feels like we’ve undertaken a quiet transformation—touched by something fragile, fierce, and utterly unforgettable.