Murder Brings a Touch of Colour

Barry Adamson was in Magazine and had played for Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds when he made his first solo record, Moss Side Story, back in 1989. It’s an elaborate mock soundtrack, the score to some imaginary piece of black & white Britflick suspense, and listening to it is always a fascinating experience on levels both abstract & visceral. There’s that great jazz-noir swing, for one thing, like Ellington’s Anatomy of a Murder but brittler, grittier, defaced with ’80s industrialisms. But of course the songs also create stories in your mind, or indistinct echoes of stories, or suggestions of stories, or anyway vague waves of unease or tugs of anxiety, like you know there’s something you have to do but you can’t remember what it is but you should try to remember because you have an idea what’s about to happen next and you know it’s not going to be good.

It’s interesting too that even though most of the record does indeed sound like incidental music for images we can’t see & dialogue we can’t hear, actually adding those images/dialogue would diminish the effect instead of enhancing it. Take the opener, “On the Wrong Side of Relaxation” (and note that the panting & screams are courtesy of Diamanda Galas) – I sort of think if we had a specific situation to pin it on, the sounds might just sound like hackneyed damsel-in-distress button-pushing. But since we don’t, since all we have is what we hear, it always leaves me jittery, nervous.

I could have easily posted just about anything else from this record as well – or from the CD bonus tracks, which include a cover of “The Man with the Golden Arm” and a deconstruction of the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” theme – but I went with the little mini-suite “The Swinging Detective.” And if you dig this buy the whole record here.

• Barry Adamson, “On the Wrong Side of Relaxation”
• Barry Adamson, “The Swinging Detective”