By Paris Pompor
There’s a three-piece suite at the centre of Barry Adamson’s latest album that comes on like a crazed locomotive. Furious bottle-slide guitar mimics train horns and the mounting rhythm suggests that we’re heading for derailment. The disaster arrives soon enough with the real sounds of an almighty screech, bang, and cacophony of wrangled metal. It’s not unfamiliar territory for soundtrack composer, Barry Adamson, especially when the second and third sections throw up rain-soaked back-alley jazz and throbbing electronica. What is surprising is that real life events inspired the largely instrumental suite.
It’s based on the true story of two young people on their way home from a music festival who became victims of a fatal accident involving a decapitation. The tragedy unfolded on a Texan highway ahead of Adamson and his Bad Seeds bandmates while they were on tour in the US. With choppers overhead and suspended in a foreign landscape, the scene is indelibly imprinted on the memory. “Matt Crosbie, the sound guy for The Bad Seeds, came up to me one night, leaned over to me in this strange nefarious way, and said, ‘You should do a track about that crash,’ and walked away.”
Creepy. Now a few years on, musician, writer, composer, filmmaker and photographer, Barry Adamson, is on the phone from the UK, saying that’s exactly what he did. The result is his new track, “Texas Crash.” “I turned it into a slice of cinema really, rather than reality,” says Adamson. That’s probably quite a healthy way to process witnessing something that he describes as “really awful.”
Since 2013, Adamson has been back on the road with his old ‘80s bandmate, Nick Cave, and a highway accident isn’t the only thing that he’s witnessed on the tour to inform this latest solo project. “It’s funny because it was only supposed to be three months,” says Adamson of the three-year touring stint. He originally began life in The Bad Seeds in London back in 1983 for their debut LP, From Her To Eternity. During the 27-year break that followed his departure from the band in 1987, Adamson did many things, including scoring Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, working with Derek Jarman, and then David Lynch on the Lost Highway soundtrack, plus countless other scores for shorts, TV series, computer games, and even the music for an Olivier Award winning ballet. All the while, he continued releasing albums, with the early ones arguably the first to coin the sub-genre: “soundtracks to films that were never made.” More recently, Adamson began making films.
It’s a pity that he wasn’t moonlighting as a filmmaker back in the ‘80s when Cave and Co. were more of a camera-ready mobile scene. They were the kind of musical misfits that many film documenters would kill to have unfettered access to. These days, the band is certainly a different beast compared to those debauched post-punk days when Cave, Berlin’s Blixa Bargeld, and drummer/guitarist, Mick Harvey, would wade through seedy clubs “fresh” from a bus towards a stage, to be greeted by an audience foaming at the mouth for an unhinged performance. Their growing notoriety was for gigs where anything might, and probably would, happen. “I guess that was the currency, the expectation of what you might get,” confirms Adamson. “The band was chaotic, the audience was out there, everybody was in for this strange, excessive thrill. There was quite a sense of abandonment about the whole thing. In Berlin, from my memory – I didn’t spend an awful lot of time there – it was a playground for that. That was the selling point as well: that it wasn’t safe. It was edgy and really different.”
Back then the touring must have been quite different too? “They were D.I.Y affairs. We would take turns driving, and you never knew if you were going to make it. It was all a bit chaotic. It’s really interesting going back to something that was in a different place when you left it,” chuckles Adamson. “It’s pretty much like chalk and cheese. I remember in the old days standing at an airport waiting for a drum stick or a guitar to come around on the luggage belt…now someone carries your luggage for you. It’s a well-oiled and organised, slick machine, which is the antithesis of how it used to be…as a junior anthropologist, it’s quite interesting.”
By 1987, four albums into The Bad Seeds long trajectory, Adamson went solo with his career-defining debut LP, Moss Side Story. It was a concept album of sorts, not so much a “soundtrack to a film that was never made”, as a film that Adamson is yet to make. In a nod to the taglines of classic 1940s American cinema, Moss Side Story’s cover boldly proclaimed: “In a black and white world, murder brings a touch of colour.” The expanded compact disc version featured a nod to one of his favourite film composers, John Barry, with a “For Your Ears Only” section featuring titles like The Man With The Golden Arm and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His connection with Australia now extended to Dave Graney, who provided the album’s liner notes. Adamson followed up Moss Side Story with the Mercury Prize nominated Soul Murder and seven more studio albums before releasing Know Where To Run earlier this year.
The new album’s accompanying booklet of photographs were all taken on tour with The Bad Seeds over the last few years. “It was weird. There were stop offs, where we’d come back to the UK for a little bit,” which is where the new album began to take shape, says Adamson. “To be honest, I didn’t put any credence to the writing at the beginning. It’s great that The Bad Seeds were there, but I realised that I’d started to let go of my own career, and that caused me a little bit of angst. It’s a case of identity for me. Taking the photographs was just a sideline, but when I started looking at them, I thought, ‘There’s something in them.” Then one day, I started to write the song, ‘Come Away’. I put the the chords together, and thought that it could be something that the band could use…but it doesn’t work like that anymore. Chiefly, Nick and Warren Ellis write everything. I had this piano sequence and then some words appeared. It seemed to be quietly referencing the photographs. I realised that it was calling me back to myself.”
Having taken a backseat, Adamson became excited again about the prospect of his own projects and writing again “despite the lure of a reasonably comfortable life” as a Bad Seeds member, but essentially a “sideman in the shadows.” Yet the shadows is where Adamson seems to lurk a lot, whether as a footnote bassist on the first two “Fade To Grey”-era Visage LPs, or as a masterful chronicler of the seedy side of town and its slippery characters, in his own songs. “Maybe it’s a life of observation, a life of curiosity about the way the world works, the human experience, and what we’re made up of,” says Adamson, trying to explain why his songs are littered with suspects, suspect devices, and even more suspect vices. “I’m a film noir fan,” the 58-year-old confesses, as if we hadn’t all suspected it. “Light and shadows is very much a way to describe the world; black and white,” he says. “The seediness is in the grey areas. I like that as a starting point, as a place to work from.”
When it came time for his former label, Mute Records, to compile a kind of “best-of” in 1999, The Murky World Of Barry Adamson was an on-point title. Still, laughingly we agree that repurposing one of his former group, Magazine’s stand-out tunes into “Songs From Under The Floorboards” would have worked just as well for any of his 15-plus solo albums/EPs.
Whether writing film scripts or song lyrics, anyone starting off with a murderer or embezzler as a protagonist, knows that the plot possibilities are endless. People on the run can, and will, do surprising things, and the element of surprise keeps your audience engaged. Edgy characters give writers a licence to thrill. “Exactly,” agrees Adamson, “because it’s a desperate position. I find myself looking at it in an almost old school noir way. [There’s] a book called ‘Nature’s Son’ by Richard Wright. This guy commits this crime, a crime he has to commit because of who he is, what he is, and where he is in America. And it’s a weird read because even though he’s committed this crime, you want him to be okay because of his circumstances. It’s out of desperation.”
Character empathy is also key to holding on to your audience. “I look at real life, and I’m horrified, so I turn things into a film noir thing and think about the human experience and what it would be like in that desperate place and where it can it go then.”
Did cinema have a big impact on him early on? “It really did,” says Adamson. “I was quite overwhelmed by the experience of going to a cinema, and watching whatever it was play out. And then you left and it would still be with you. You would want to embody the character, be the character, adopt the character for a while. You would kind of embrace the escapism as well. You’re out on the street in this other world and there you are having adopted this character. I used to do that all the time. I was coming out and being the central character for a while, whereas everyone else probably shrugged it off: ‘Alright, what’s next?’ But I’m still in the movie.”
And now those characters are in his songs. “I had an experience of this when I was quite little, on holidays with my parents. It was raining, and there was a double feature of Goldfinger and The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. Both of those films really impacted me at the same time. So I learnt about composition: what it was doing in the Bond film, through to the pop music and how it can be used, its narrative function. Those two films together on that day pretty much changed my life. I was seven-years-old. I remember every scene of each film…especially the Bond film. The music! I was like: ‘Oh my god, what the hell is this?’”
With so much hyper-real visual stimulation on offer for seven-year-olds these days, can film still hope to have the same impact? Is the magic of cinema still there? “I think audiences are going back into the cinema, because you can watch it on your phone, sure, but the whole sensorial experience – the sound, the pictures, the immersion, the whole weird thing of sitting in the dark with strangers and having paid money to be manipulated – is incredible.”
It’s little wonder that Adamson called his 1992 EP, Cinema Is King. The last time that Adamson visited Australia for a solo tour in 2012, he also premiered his directorial debut: a dark 40-minute psychological thriller called The Therapist, which he also wrote, edited, and scored. “I did another film last year called The Swing, The Hole And The Lie,” Adamson offers. “It had its first screening at Cannes, which was quite exciting. I’m doing a promo at the moment for one of the tracks off the album, which will be like a funny little mini-film around the first track. That will probably be available to preview late September/October. I have a couple of days a week where I just sit down and write…I’m trying to head towards a feature. I feel like it’s going in the right direction at the moment.”
Currently in negotiations for scoring a French thriller, Adamson still gets soundtrack work offers, but as he notes: “Everyone does soundtracks now.” Favourite soundtrack composers? “I’m old school…Mancini, Morricone, of course, John Barry…”
As we sign off, Adamson tells me that he is guest curating a month long season of films in Manchester. The films – some of which he will introduce or talk at length about during the season – are all selected because the soundtrack is integral. His own David Lynch collaboration, Lost Highway, will be a highlight, with a rare 35mm print screening, while the rest of the titles read like an Adamson album track list: Cape Fear, Psycho (both Bernard Herrmann), Anatomy Of A Murder (Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn), Shadows (Charles Mingus/Shafi Hadi), Touch Of Evil (Henry Mancini) and the most contemporary, the sci-fi horror, Under The Skin (Micachu).
He’s a nice, upbeat guy. Really.
Know Where To Run is out in Australia via The Planet Company. For more on Barry Adamson, head to the official website.
