timeline

Barry Adamson

A Manchester bassist who left Magazine and the Bad Seeds to score films that did not exist, and whose imaginary soundtracks won him real ones.

Origin
Moss Side, Manchester, England
Years active
1977-present
Genres
film noir soundtrack, jazz, post-punk, funk
Labels
Mute, Central Control International

Moss Side

Barry Adamson was born in Moss Side, Manchester, in 1958 to a white mother and a black father. He learned the bass almost overnight. A school friend gave him one with two strings, he saw an advertisement for musicians from Howard Devoto, who had just left the Buzzcocks, and he bought the missing strings, practised for one night and auditioned the next day. Devoto hummed a riff, Adamson played the open E string, and he was in Magazine. He made it a personal mission to bring the bass to the front and play melodies, and a Boss chorus unit helped give his bass its distinctive sound.

He played on all of Magazine's albums until the group broke up in 1981. He then filled in for Tracy Pew on two songs on the Birthday Party's Junkyard, and was part of the first consistent line-up of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, playing bass and keyboards on their first four albums. He has said that the title song of the first Bad Seeds album, which carries a group writing credit, defines that era for him: edginess and risk-taking.

A calling card

Film had become Adamson's passion. He wanted to write for the cinema, and found that to write film music you already had to be doing it. His answer was an album that sounded like a film. His first solo single, in 1988, was a slowed-down version of Elmer Bernstein's theme from The Man with the Golden Arm, which reached 12 on the indie chart: The Man with the Golden Arm. Then came Moss Side Story (1989), the soundtrack to a crime film that was never shot, with song titles that read like a plot outline.

Adamson called it a calling card, and said some people thought it belonged to a real film. Hubert Selby Jr. wrote to him care of Mute to say he loved it. About nine months later Adamson was in Hollywood working on Carl Colpaert's film Delusion, his first actual soundtrack, released as Delusion in 1991. Oliver Stone would later use three of his tracks in Natural Born Killers.

The triptych

Soul Murder (1992) was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, and the six-track The Negro Inside Me followed in 1993. In 1996 came Oedipus Schmoedipus, which he came to see, with its two predecessors, as a triptych. On it he began moving toward song structure and invited guests he admired: Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave and Billy MacKenzie of the Associates. Cocker sang Set the Controls for the Heart of the Pelvis, Cave sang The Sweetest Embrace, and MacKenzie sang Achieved in the Valley of Dolls. The album reached 51 on the UK chart.

Straight after finishing it Adamson flew to Los Angeles to work with David Lynch on Lost Highway. He suggested a track from the new album for the party scene where Bill Pullman's character meets Robert Blake's Mystery Man, and Lynch kept it. The track was Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Songs, and his own label

On As Above, So Below (1998) Adamson became the singer of his own songs, and he has stayed one since. He made one more studio album for Mute, The King of Nothing Hill, in 2002, and the next year wrote the music for Broken Fall, an Olivier Award winning ballet by Russell Maliphant, Sylvie Guillem and the Ballet Boyz. In 2006 he left Mute after the EMI takeover and started his own Central Control label, releasing Stranger on the Sofa to wide praise.

In 2013 he played bass on two songs on the Bad Seeds album Push the Sky Away and ended up touring with them for years, stepping in for the injured drummer Thomas Wydler. Know Where to Run (2016) grew out of photographs he took on that American tour. A double-album anthology, Memento Mori, marked forty years as a professional musician in 2018, and a memoir appeared in 2021. Trouser Press called him an acknowledged influence on trip-hop acts such as Portishead.

Records

Songs

Magazine, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Jarvis Cocker, Angelo Badalamenti, Portishead

Where to go next

Official

Reference

Discography and data

Writing and criticism

Interviews

Fan sites and communities

Sources

  1. Barry Adamson, Wikipedia
  2. Memento Mori: The Strange World Of... Barry Adamson, The Quietus (2018-10-30)
  3. The Mancunian Candidate, frieze (1997-01)
  4. Barry Adamson, Trouser Press
  5. Barry Adamson, Mute
  6. Biography, Barry Adamson
  7. Barry Adamson interview, 2014, Brighton's Finest (2014-10-03)