Launching the latest Heineken Weekender in a conspicuously laid-back fashion, the award-grabbing Bristol act Portishead packed the Opera House for a set that was hypnotically sweet in tone and ultra-smooth in delivery.

Singer Beth Gibbon is Portishead personified. As she chain-smoked her way through a languid selection of blue-beat porch songs, the travelled and seductive voice carried a perfect essence of lonesome heartache and bittersweet regret.

The lyrics are lovelorn and plaintive, matching the music's down-tempo hush. These are songs that tell of lost chances, old wounds and failed affairs, with Beth bravely bearing the strain of a weighty emotional rucksuck.

We're talking baggage, and plenty of it.

The band's musical guru and turntable wizard Geoff Barrow, meanwhile, is a moody and spectral presence, solemnly twirling knobs and conjuring up spookily-scratched beats from behind the technics. His elegantly-crafted soundscapes are lushly underscored by a yearning guitar and funky percussion, infusing the tunes with a jazzy sophistication.

Now this might well sound a tad long-faced and maudlin, and there's no denying that it is.

But this is the manner in which Portishead has epitomised the urban unease of pops' neurotic nineties, becoming one of the most acclaimed acts of the decade and spawning an angsty generation of copyists.

The material was pretty evenly culled, from the band's two albums, 1994's Breakthrough Dummy and last year's eponymously titled Grower.

The rapt audience perhaps seemed happier with such oldies as the timeless Glory Box and Sour Times; but the whole package was received in a suitably spellbound manner.