She released an album with fellow English musician Rustin Man, Out of Season, in 2002, and a recording of contemporary Polish composer Górecki's Symphony No.

To pursue her singing career, she then moved to Bristol, where she met Geoff Barrow, her future collaborator in Portishead, on an Enterprise Allowance course in 1991.

[8] It was released in the United States a year later: while touring in North America, Variety favourably described her performance with Rustin as "Billie Holiday fronting Siouxsie and the Banshees".

[12] In 2018, Gibbons contributed vocal performances, along with Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, to the Spill Festival held in Ipswich in an audio installation entitled 'Clarion Calls', which uses the voices of 100 women to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.

The performance was released in 2019; reviewing the album for Pitchfork, Jayson Greene wrote: "Part of the tension comes from hearing her untrained voice scale these rocky heights.

This would get her dismissed from a traditional opera audition, probably, but it is magnificently effective at sending raw shudders through what can be a pretty well-worn work.

[19] She has cited Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Bono of U2 for his performance on The Joshua Tree, Otis Redding and Jimmy Cliff as inspirations.