While it would be easy to characterise Barry Adamson as having a colourful career to date – having played with Magazine, Visage and Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, not to forget collaborations with the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Billy Mackenzie and more, it’s his comic outlook and film noir style that sets his solo work apart.
The music can be dark, like a pulp-fiction writer delving deep into the darkest secrets of people who inhabit inner city life. His debut from 1989, Moss Side Story, lends plenty of weight to that description.
Thirty-five years on, with his latest release, Cut to Black, there is still that undercurrent of mischief, of murder soundtracked to soul, jazz and gospel.
There are more lyrics than in previous albums across the ten tracks to enjoy his deep soulful voice, with horns, brass and gospel choirs adding to the cinematic arrangements for which he so obviously enjoys bringing to the fore.
The opening track, ‘The Last Words of Sam Cooke’ is a toe tapper in the Northern soul tradition. A tragic story shouldn’t be this joyfully told.
The title, Cut to Black, meanwhile lowers the heart rate with spoken word to the orchestrated backdrop that forces you to listen intently to the story he is telling us.
‘These Would Be Blues’ is again laden with the spoken word, augmented with an angelic choir imploring us ‘to lay your burden down’. Listening on vinyl we’ve reached half time. Time to re-charge the soul batteries?
Maybe not the uplifting start to side B we might have hoped for, however, ‘Please Don’t Call On Me’ could come straight off the Nick Cave template of storytelling, it’s so compelling in its simplicity.
Unsurprisingly, the darkest song is found on the final track. ‘Waiting For The End Of Time’. Barry Adamson is as much known for his movie film scores as his more popular music escapades and this last track encapsulates everything that he has picked up along the way writing for and directing films. Dark films no doubt.
Barry Adamson is a fine storyteller, part autobiographical, part fantasy and he combines his musical compositions to complement the scenes set in his own world.
In its entirety, Cut to Black doesn’t veer too far from what we have come to expect from Barry Adamson over the past three and a half decades. The stories are meaningful if set in a fantasy world environment.
As we head to King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut on Friday night to see him play live, I’m sure some of these fantasies will become a little more like realities on the night.
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