Alright, a couple of mea culpas first. First, I’m four days late getting this up. And second, it’s another old-ish dude. We hadn’t intended this to be just an old-ish dude talking shop even if we are old-ish dudes, and we’re absolutely going to mix it up more - it’s just the way the dice landed vis-a-vis people’s availability etc etc…. BUT! We are back into the swing of getting this rolling fortnightly. AND! Even better, this one is an absolute banger, really couldn’t be better, the best one yet in some regards. And it links in so nicely to what’s come before. Another film score genius coming out of underground culture like David Holmes, and like him coming to composing and thence to Hollywood from a music love built on working-class escapism, but on such different paths in other ways. And so many intersections with other interviews - the third citing of Hard Day’s Night as a vital influence after Maria Uzor and Andy Bell, but from such different angles, and each of them from a different generation.
Barry Adamson is really too cool for words. He’s been in Magazine, The Buzzcocks, Visage (!), The Bad Seeds, he’s worked with Jarvis Cocker and Lydia Lunch and Robin Guthrie and David Lynch and Gazelle Twin and on and on… His music is absolutely pitch dark, glamorous, thrilling, witty, noisy, refined, ambient, all of it - as brilliant now as ever. He’s also quite the dandy, incredibly charming and reels out fully-formed philsophical paragraphs like breathing. This was another Zoom interview sadly, after Brian had photographed him for a separate project - and one of the first where I really lost track of time, so we had no time really to go into his 21st century work as he had to get off to pack up for moving house and I had to DJ a primary school disco. Nonetheless, he scintillated, took us from Elvis to addiction to being in a lift with the Wu-Tang Clan, and sparked off some really interesting lines of enquiry right off the bat: as you can see!
Right, let's start with what's keeping you busy now - what are you working on the moment?
Well I've just finished a new album, and earlier last year I also did a score for a documentary about the Scala cinema1 - which has been getting some great responses - so last night I was at an event talking about that with a panel of people: Mark Moore, Jah Wobble, Caroline Katz, Douglas Hart2, pretty much doing the promo bit. So that's been taking up a bit of time as there's been a few promo things there, and having finished the album I'm also relocating back up north from Brighton so that's been taking a lot of time too. I've got the work stuff out the way, having done those two projects, to move up north - then after that there should be another film score going on, but also the album will be ready to come out and I'll be busy with preparing for live shows and promotion and on it goes... the wheels keep on turning, Joe!
Obviously something like the Scala project must involve quite a bit of retrospective thinking, even nostalgia - is that something you're prone to anyway, or...?
Well I think that's important for what the film's about. It sort of glues you to the subject matter, and also hearing other people's experiences of their entry into film and all the stories of teenage tearaways looking for the sort of kicks that the Scala cinema seemed to provide. I think there's a general coming together of people in a nostalgic way here, not sentimentality even, just a recollection of events that led you where you are artistically or where you are with regard to the world of the work you admire.
Fantastic. This couldn't really be a better start for this - I can't remember how much Brian or I have spelled out but everything in this Substack is about how subcultures are made up out of every individual's life experiences, i.e. exactly what you're describing there. So to go back to the source, so to speak: can you remember the first time you realised that music was more than just sound, that it had something attached to it?
Yeah. I was getting ideas about that pretty much from the radio to begin with, seeing how it changed the mood in the house. It was a pretty tense place to be, but then something would come on the radio and I could feel a shift in mood, and I started to see what was happening in how different members of my family were relating to the music and how it would shift their perception of reality. So I saw that therefore music gave a way out of what you were feeling at the moment if it was something that was difficult to be with. This music would suddenly come on and be quite uplifting. Then where it really came together for me - and I go into some detail about this in my memoir, Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars3 - a trip to Morcambe on a rainy day when there was nowhere else to go but the cinema. I saw a double bill of Hard Day's Night and Thunderball4 and I saw the escapism in the pop music and the Beatles running around like crazy people and people laughing along with their jolly japes, and then in the John Barry score for Thunderball I saw the emotional attachment between what was going on in the film and what was going on in the music - and suddenly I thought, wow this world is more than I realised.
I'd thought it was just this straightforward, mundane, people arguing about this, people moaning about that, nothing's fair, bit like life today [chuckles], but then this music comes on and also there's this other escape through characterisation, and the music is added to that. So I saw the power of that then. Then I'd go home and watch shows like Danger Man5 and Man in a Suitcase6 and these kind of espionage type shows, and I was like, right, that's it, one day I will go to London and I will write for these kind of shows, wearing a pinstripe suit. And that kind of happened! That's how it sort of happened. So I knew that this subculture of writing music for film or cutting records and connecting to people through those things was much more powerful than the daily reality which I was being told was the way it should be, the way reality was supposed to shape itself.
That's really interesting. Very early on you were twigging that these effects and connections were material - they're not abstract or metaphysical, the construction of the music is material and so is its effect on people's lives.
Yeah the music joins it up. I guess maybe some of it is metaphysical because there's that power going on that people are connecting to each other through, that being in the music. But I saw that as being a bit more powerful than the work-job-pay-live, get relief by whatever means, daily grind. There's a whole other world of connection that exists, and yeah that hit me quite hard. I knew that's where I had to go to find my place in life.
It's a nuanced use of the word “escapism” as well. Because what you described - literally altering social relations within a confined space - that's not running away from the world, it's altering it. I always had that feeling about rave, for example: people would call it escapist disparagingly, and yes it's escapist but you're escaping into something, not just running away.
Exactly. I think it's quite spiritual, if you see as spiritual an idea of enthusiasm because you're about to become connected to something. It's almost like you can lock onto it, like the way you talk about going into a rave must be like how people went into church looking for a community - and then the celestial ties are brought up through the music and bring it all together. And I could see that, exploding and then shrinking back down, in a small way, within my family, in the house. I knew it was quite powerful to cut through normality - because when you're a child the family is all-knowing and all-powerful and it's the law, the word of the land, it's how it is and there's nothing else. Yeah.... I see what you mean about the nuance of escape because you're escaping to something, not from. Even to a different version of something.
Again on the material nature of that, I was just listening to a discussion with Jennifer Michael Hecht, one of my favourite thinkers7 - she's very much atheist, a materialist but still about looking for the magic in life - and she reminds the listener in this that “spiritual” in its original sense means the breath. And the effects of music work on that - the changes it engenders are expressed in breathing faster or slower, shoulders dropping, chest out, whatever, and communal experiences come through people breathing in sync.
Yeah, yeah absolutely, like why people like singing together.
So what were the songs that had this effect in your home?
I think... Elvis Presley, “It's Now or Never” would come on the radio, and as soon as the record would start you'd feel this... exactly as you say: shoulders would drop, my parents became more relaxed, the soothing backing vocal of that intro would take the foreground and you knew what was coming - so much, that my dad, who was a carpenter at the time, I kid you not, all getting a bit biblical now... so there's a clave part on the song, “it's now or never,” DIT DIT, DIT - and I would tap out the beat, so he made me a pair of these claves so when the record came on the radio my mother would go “go and get them bloody claves, Barry” - so there'd be an actual communion thing, the three of us would come together and forget our woes. My mum - who was an amazing singer, never did anything with it but was up there with anyone I heard - she'd sing along, and my dad, he was like the DJ, because he was always fiddling with stations looking for something that would put out a vibe we could all relate to.
Interesting it's that song. With that and John Barry, you obviously had an affinity for overt romanticism and soaring melody that perches right on the edge of kitsch...
Exactly. Yes. It's heightened somewhat, I guess, in order to bring the listener in touch with themselves and their own romanticism, romantic notions or whatever. I think alongside the glamour that's slightly unreachable, just out of reach, it all comes together into that ultimate escape, sense of escaping towards...
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