What you are about to hear is the work of one of the most original, inventive and distinctive voices in British contemporary music at the height of his considerable powers. With a full consignment of brass and strings and a wealth of musicology behind him, Barry Adamson is about to take you on an epic adventure in sound. It’s time to get Back To The Cat.
Barry’s eighth album is where it all comes together, a life’s passions poured into ten tracks that at once sound strangely familiar and yet dazzlingly new. A musical odyssey through noir jazz, sun-drenched pop ballads, fractious urban funk, devilish gospel, heavenly blues and subversive soul... not to mention a Hammond organ salute to the late, great Jimmy Smith.
As befits the man who invented the idea of the imaginary soundtrack album with his 1988 solo debut Moss Side Story, every song is rendered in vivid widescreen, with a narrative as compulsive as an Alfred Hitchcock chiller. With a wicked sense of humour and a beady eye for detail, Barry charts the complexity and duplicity of human nature, often deliberately contrasting stories with sounds.
Back To The Cat takes you places you never expected to go. ‘Straight ‘Til Sunrise’, for instance, sounds like some lost, late-Sixties Bacharach swinger – until police sirens bring the listener’s attention to the fact that the narrator appears to be fleeing a murder scene. ‘Walk on Fire’ is a hot, sexy funk of a song about the madness of desire; and ‘Civilization’ a heady gospel lament from an incarcerated Prince of Darkness. ‘I Could Love You’ comes over like a righteous Sam Cooke lament, which somehow manages to sneak in a wink to David Bowie’s blue-eyed soul. There is even a mournful steel guitar to breathe a country sigh over the archly amusing ‘People’. Book-ended – or maybe taken full circle – with the heady, big-band jazz of ‘The Beaten Side of Town’ and ‘Psycho_Sexual’, the album relates the perils of desire, murder, envy, rage, love, lust and divinity across a vast lyrical landscape between the city and the desert, the slums and the stars.
Back To The Cat – which was debuted live with the BA Big Band on the South Bank last November as part of Barry’s curatorship of London Jazz Festival – has been informed by Barry’s love of some of the greatest musicians of the past 50 years. From Sly Stone to Charles Mingus, Roxy Music to Miles Davis, Jimmy Webb to Quincy Jones and beyond… You’ll hear their inspiring echoes in the grooves as each tune propels you towards the dancefloor. But only one man could put the whole lot of them together without the aid of a sampler and turn it all into his own, joyously infectious vision of what a perfect record should be.
Barry Adamson has been doing things differently ever since he strapped on a bass guitar to play for Magazine as a teenager in late Seventies Manchester. Five seminal post-punk albums later, he went on to play a vital part in Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, learning every instrument and recording technique he could along the way. In 1987 he was ready to step out alone, with a reinvention of Elmer Bernstein’s ‘The Man With The Golden Arm’, echoes of which can still be caught in the fevered pulse of ‘The Beaten Side of Town’.
Barry was thinking Big Screen and from his imagination and the streets of his hometown he conjured Moss Side Story. The album so effectively told the story of a film that doesn’t exist that it wasn’t long before calls were coming in from David Lynch, Allison Anders and Derek Jarman. The following Soul Murder was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 1992 and also caught the ear of Oliver Stone, who lifted three tracks in sequence for his groundbreaking movie Natural Born Killers.
Barry would continue to alternate between writing soundtracks and the acclaimed albums Oepdipus Schmoedipus (1995), As Above, So Below (1998), The Murky World of Barry Adamson (1999), The King of Nothing Hill (2002) and Stranger on the Sofa (2006). While exploring new sounds and styles with each release, Barry’s lyrics continued to investigate the themes closest to his heart: identity, sexuality, race, spirituality, society and the all façades in between. His ongoing fascination with pop culture, graphic design, film, art, crime and outsider fiction have constantly brought new angles and details to be poured over by a constantly fascinated and fascinating mind.
Back To The Cat reflects a life’s dedication to the Big Themes both in music and life. It is The Big One – the boldest, most brilliant album of his career.
Barry Adamson plays Studio 5 Live Thursday June 19th. Don't miss it!
