Reel to real

Like Oscar Wilde said: Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you his truth. After almost a decade of carving out a niche for himself as a composer of soundtracks for imaginary films (and later, actual ones) ex-Magazine/Bad Seeds multi-instrumentalist Barry Adamson took the plunge and stepped up to the mike as a vocalist on his 1998 album As Above So Below. His latest opus The King Of Nothing Hill finds him taking the role even further, in the process switching the focus from European arthouse to Isaac Hayes/Barry White- style blaxploitation grooves on tracks like ‘Cinematic Soul’ and the single ‘Black Amour’. Here, deep in character, Adamson might’ve found Wilde’s truism instructive.

“That’s so appropriate for this record,” he says, sitting on the roof of his abode in London, looking down at the migrating masses. “People have been saying, ‘Is the person in ‘Black Amour’ a character or is it you?’ and I’m going, ‘Well, I’m calling on all these ideas of black male sexuality’, and I’m thinking it is a fucking character, I have to train almost to get into that voice register ’cos I don’t speak like that normally.

Still, it’s a brave move for a guy who made his name as a shadow player to give it a shot as a singer, especially when one considers the very nature of scoring often involves writing music that is unobtrusive, always in service of the image. It’s as if Adamson has switched from DP to leading man.

“I’m glad you say that ’cos, its not done, y’know?” he says. “Mancini don’t sing Mancini. If you set yourself up as a composer, then that’s what you better be doing. Of course I was pretty fuckin’ uncomfortable singing As Above So Below and I thought I was having aural hallucinations, thinking, ‘That sounds about a twelfth of a semitone out’ and all this kinda craziness – it was a matter of confidence. That done, I felt great and could relax and really have fun.”

Hence the hot buttered soul and Cuban-heeled wah-wah riffs. Very Streets Of San Francisco.

“I’ve loved those kind of things since I was a kid,” he says, “Isaac Hayes and Barry White and black film composition as well, people that suddenly step up and speak in a very low voice and suddenly it’s a pop song rather than a film soundtrack. I saw Isaac Hayes a couple of years ago and for me the high point of the evening was ‘Shaft’, the arrangement, the flutes and all that wonderful compositional stuff.”

Elsewhere on The King Of Nothing Hill, black jazz finds its second home in Paris in the form of ‘Les Matin Des Noire’. Built around an Archie Shepp/John Coltrane sample, the effect is not unlike Mingus’s ‘Chill Of Death’ meets Wim Wenders’ Hammett, if the whole thing were scored by Angelo Badalamenti.

“Badalamenti does it for me,” Adamson confirms. “I had the incredible privilege of working with him on two projects now – and never met the guy. On The Beach I was handed six DATs of his orchestrations to remix and add drums and hip-hop things. It’s like a master class, you put on the DATs and it’s just un-fucking-believable, the fact that someone’s still writing music that has the old school composer mentality: 110-piece orchestra? No problem!

“I saw Ennio Morricone perform last year with a 100-piece orchestra and a 100-piece choir and just fucking wept like a baby,” he continues. “The greatest living composer in film, alive and trying to do something. And I can still listen to Bernard Hermann and go, ‘Fucking hell, the idea’s rooted in the image and the ideas of suspense – absolutely brilliant’.

Hearing Adamson speak brings to mind his breakthrough into actual soundtrack work, when Trent Reznor included selections from Moss Side Story in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. From there it was a short step to David Lynch’s Lost Highway, again overseen by Reznor and in collaboration with Badalamenti.

“Talk about obsessive,” says Adamson. “I got a call from David Lynch saying that he’d been listening to my music eight hours non-stop and then decided that I was the man for the job. I was very pleased about that. And then when I read the script it was almost like the script that I would’ve wished had been written for Moss Side Story, the idea of split identity and escaping into this other thing ’cos you can’t bear the idea of possible guilt, the whole sex-death-redemption bit, I was like, ‘Fucking hell, this is actually what I meant but couldn’t put it that well’.”