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The Cat Is Back

August 2012

  • Phil Kakulas

Barry Adamson returns to Australia with a tour and new album I Will Set You Free

Barry Adamson tells me that despite his considerable achievements he still has at least one unrealised ambition: “feature film directing – I’ve finished a script I’m really pleased with and I’m going to start shopping it around.” It seems fitting given that film, especially film noir, has inspired so much of the hard-boiled, jazz-inflected sounds he’s been producing since the release of his first solo album, Moss Side Story, in 1988. 

Conceived as the seedy soundtrack for a fictitious film, the album featured a brilliant interpretation of Elmer Bernstein’s Man With The Golden Arm that singlehandedly dragged old school noir soundtracks into the contemporary spotlight. It put Adamson on the map and before long he was writing music for real films like David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers

The ever-stylish Adamson says that the idea for the fictitious film soundtracks came to him after listening to a compilation of film music put together by a member of German industrial band, Einstürzende Neubauten. “It had all sorts of different stuff, like Mancini… Morricone, some classics… but it was the way they went together which was unique because it was cutting between composers. In film the music changes with the scene and I thought how fantastic it would be to make an album that’s instrumental and it changes genre, like film.’

These days Adamson can also add singer/songwriter, award-winning fiction writer and short filmmaker to a resume that starts with him playing bass guitar in post-punk group, Magazine in Manchester in 1977. Adamson joined the band after a few days spent hastily practicing on a newly acquired two stringed bass, “…so I went to get the other two strings… and that was when I saw the advert for Magazine. I called it in, they said come round tomorrow…” 

Magazine enjoyed considerable success, but it was his years with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds in the mid-eighties that Adamson says really shaped his artistic ethos. “I certainly entered into the spirit of that band, which was about experimentation and finding something that was unique… It’s about challenging yourself, not just defaulting to the status quo… by sticking your neck out, and evolving as an artist.”

 

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According to ex-Bad Seed Mick Harvey, Adamson brought much to the group. Together, he says, the two of them laid the bedrock of the group’s early sound. It was at the start of the Your Funeral, My Trial sessions that Adamson told Harvey he was leaving. “I knew he needed to go,” says Harvey, “that he wanted to do his own thing… but from my point of view, I was sorry to see him go.”

Now, more than twenty-five years later, Barry Adamson is still doing his own thing. His latest album, I Will Set You Free, features an array of heavy grooves, Scott Walker-like balladry, cinematic instrumentals and atmospheric production tricks. It also sees him incorporating some of the post-punk sounds that, up to now, he has steadfastly avoided using in his solo work.

The renewed interest in rock ‘n roll, Adamson says, was sparked by his recent involvement in Magazine’s triumphant reunion tour, the success of which left him at odds with the rest of the group. When they called for a five-year commitment to a new album Adamson reluctantly bowed out. “I really enjoyed it. I was willing to put maybe a couple of years in to take those (old) songs around the world but they weren’t interested. That left me sad actually.”

Instead Adamson will be touring his own songs with a band he describes as a “rocking, lean machine – the four of us just kicking it as hard as we can.” Performing material from throughout his multi-faceted career, the tour will also mark the achievement of another lofty ambition. For after years spent playing the front man while another musician has played his bass lines live, Adamson has finally taken up the challenge to do both. He says it will be “hard, cool fun”.

 

Barry Adamson plays the Corner Hotel on September 11 supported by The Dames.

cornerhotel.com

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