You know who doesn’t like being put into a box? Musicians. (Unless you’re Motörhead, who will happily remain in a headbanging box that rocks and they don’t even want to see your great selection of other boxes, thank you very much.)

Back in the 1990’s, Portishead helped popularize a new genre and, once labeled as such, immediately started climbing out of the box so they could stomp on it and throw it in the recycling bin.

It all started when Geoff and Beth met in the same government-sponsored class in Bristol, England where unemployed people could learn how to start their own business. Bootstraps 101. The duo bonded over their shared love of playing music and decided to take their entrepreneurial lessons and apply them to real life by starting a limited company — namely a band, which they called Portishead.

They began as a duo, but then met Adrian while recording their debut and he ended up co-producing, playing on most of the songs, and eventually he was asked to join as a full-time member. They built the album, called Dummy, using a number of samples of scratchy, jazzy, spy movie, spaghetti western type sounds, with slow burn vocals over hip hop beats. Along with artists like Massive Attack and DJ Shadow, the press dubbed this new musical style “trip-hop,” and Portishead’s debut became its bestselling proponent.

The proponents quickly became the opponents and tried hard to shed the trip-hop label. Their second album featured the band playing all the instruments themselves with only a couple of samples, resulting in a more original sound and identity. To separate themselves even further from the idea that they were nothing but a DJ-driven group of knob-twiddlers rather than an actual band, for their third album, Portishead recorded a live performance at the Roseland Ballroom in New York (and a couple of other venues) with backing from a full orchestra.

From that eponymous second album came their highest charting single, “All Mine,” which reached the Top 10 in the UK in 1997. But here we’ve got the live version from 1998, with its 70’s soul horn stabs, full-bodied strings, and a vocal that turns “All Mine” from a torch song into a house fire. Bye bye boxes.

So make no mistake, you shan’t escape. Render your heart … to Portishead.