"Sour Times" is a song by English trip hop group Portishead, released as their second-ever single in August 1994. Written by all three members of the band, "Sour Times" features on Portishead's debut album Dummy (1994). The song uses a sample from Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin's "Danube Incident", and was itself sampled in the 2004 single "Teardrops" by The 411.
The original 1994 release initially reached only number 57 in the UK, but after the success of "Glory Box" in 1995, it was re-released and peaked at number 13 on the UK singles chart in April. It is also the band's only song to date to appear on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, at number 53. The "Sour Times" music video is made of footage from Portishead's short film To Kill a Dead Man.
"Sour Times" was covered by Bryn Christopher on his album My World. The Blank Theory also covered "Sour Times" on their Beyond the Calm of the Corridor release, which was featured in the trailer for Wicker Park. More recently, "Sour Times" was covered by Marsha Ambrosius on her debut solo album Late Nights & Early Mornings. Also "Sour Times" has be covered by The Civil Wars in 2012 on their Billie Jean 7". Sour Times was also used as the theme music to the ITV drama series The Vice.
Read more about Sour Times: Track Listing
Famous quotes containing the words sour and/or times:
“The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!””
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 23:36,37.
“The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us.... Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison.”
—Paul Gauguin (1848–1903)