Barry Adamson - Moss Side Story - 1989

1. On The Wrong Side Of Relaxation - Adamson
2. Under Wraps - Adamson
3. Central Control - Adamson
4. Round Up The Usual Suspects - Adamson
5. Sounds From The Big House - Adamson
6. Suck On The Honey Of Love - Adamson
7. Everything Happens To Me - Adamson/Beaghen
8. The Swinging Detectiv - Adamson
9. Autodestruction - Adamson
10. Intensive Care - Adamson
11. The Most Beautiful Girl In The World - Adamson
12. Free At Last - Adamson
13. Alfred Hitchcock Presents
14. Chocolate Milk Shake - Adamson
15. The Man With The Golden Arm - Adamson

Barry Adamson - Taming of the shrewd EP - 1989

1. Diamonds (Samplers Against Apartheid)
2. Bopping Out / Eternal Morning
3. Splat Goes The Cat

Barry Adamson - Soul Murder - 1992

1. Preface
2. Split
3. The Violation Of Expectation
4. Suspicion
5. A Gentle Man Of Colour
6. Trance Of Hatred
7. Checkpoint Charlie
8. Reverie
9. Un Petit Miracle
10. 007 - A Phantasy Bond Theme
11. The Adamson Family
12. Cool Green World
13. On The Edge Of Atonement
14. Epilogue

Barry Adamson - Negro Inside Me - 1993

1. The Snowball Effect - Adamson
2. Dead Heat - Adamson
3. Busted (Michaelangelo Version) - Adamson
4. Cold Black Preach - Adamson
5. Je T'Aime- Moi Non Plus - Adamson/Gainsbour
6. A Perfectly Natural Union - Adamson

Barry Adamson - Oedipus Schmoedipus - 1996

1. Sets The Controls For The Hearts Off The Pelvis - Adamson/Cocker
2. Somthing Wicked This Way Comes - Adamson/Blackwell
3. The Vibes Ain't Nothin' But The Vibes - Adamson
4. It's Business As Usual - Adamson/Bozlavich
5. Miles
6. Dirty Barry - Adamson
7. In A Moment Of Clarity - Adamson
8. Achieved In The Vally Of Dolls - Adamson/McKenzie
9. Vermillion Kisses - Adamson
10. The Big Bamboozle - Adamson
11. State Of Contraction - Adamson
12. The Sweetest Embrace - Adamson/Cave
13. Set The Controls Again - Adamson

Barry Adamson - What it means - 1998

1. Radio Edit
2. Skylab Plucked Chicken Mi
3. Subsonic Legacy Master Mi
4. Skylab A Smokin Japanese

Barry Adamson - As Above So Below - 1998

1. Can't Get Loose
2. What It Means
3. Deja Voodoo
4. Come Hell Or High Water
5. Jazz Devil
6. Still I Rise
7. Girl
8. The Monkey Speaks His Mind
9. Goddess Of Love
10. Jesus Wept

Barry Adamson - Murky World Of Barry Adamson - 1999

1. The Man With The Golden Arm
2. Jazz Devil - Adamson
3. The Big Bamboozie - Adamson
4. What It Means - Adamson
5. The Vibes Ain't Nothin' But The Vibes - Adamson
6. Mitch And Andy - Adamson
7. The Snowball Effect - Adamson
8. Can't Get Loose - Adamson/Pomus
9. 007 - A Fantasy Bond Theme
10. Something Wicked This Way Comes - Adamson/Blackwell
11. Walk The Last Mile - Adamson
12. Saturn In The Summertime - Adamson

BARRY ADAMSON: The Man With The Golden Arm (Mute)

NME 15th October 1988 by James Brown

Two months after he was chinned with a brick for a brain - ex-Bad Seed Barry Adamson releases his version of the Elmer Bernstein soundtrack to the filmof The Man With The Golden Arm - Like a tube of thumping dynnamite it throbs and glistens and whistles like the outcast wind through deserted warehouses.

Teaming with raw sax and grievous bodily brass construction 'The Man With The Golden Arm' sounds like something The Blues Brothers could only dream about - A huge gnarled fist glittering with knuckle dusters - it plants itself between your eyes and has layed out another ten victims before you recover - - - etc. - - - etc - Basically it's a heaving g - pounding soundtrack that oozes blues and clanks with a polished metallic grin.

All we need now is a re-showing of the film and re-publishing of the Nelson Algren novel -

The King of Nothing Hill - 2002

• Cinematic Soul
• Whispering Street
• Black Amour
• When Darkness Calls
• The Second Stain
• Twisted smile
• Le Matin Des Noire
• That Fool was Me
• The Crime Scene
• Cold Comfort

Barry Adamson - The King of Nothing Hill - 2002

4/5 stars (Mute)

Maddy Costa - Friday August 30, 2002 - The Guardian

Barry Adamson. Photo: Steve Gullick

A gunshot rings out. Footsteps sound across a warehouse floor. A helicopter swoops down and a police siren suddenly blares. We are at The Crime Scene, and the chase is on. Our anti-hero ducks through back alleys, skirts scrambled voices, dodges a volley of bullets and dives through a dimly lit window, surprising the dopeheads inside listening to reggae. The music that plays through his head as he runs? A palpitating riff that could have been written for Mr Bond.

Welcome to the world of Barry Adamson - the murky world, as he dubbed it on his 1999 best-of compilation. It isn't a place that takes much imagination to enter. The landscape Adamson's music inhabits is familiar from countless movies and their soundtracks - by 1960s icons John Barry and Bernard Herrmann, soul heroes Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes, barflies Tom Waits and John Lurie. Many current instrumental music writers claim cinema as an influence; what sets Adamson apart from this crowd is his playfulness, the way he relentlessly undercuts any hint of cool with a deliciously self-deprecating sense of humour.

Adamson has always been an actor in his own songs, teasing listeners with chameleon appearances, just as Alfred Hitchcock did on film. On his 1992 album Soul Murder, he presented a list of cheeky alter egos: Oscar de la Soundtrack, Mr Moss Side Gory, Harry Pendulum - the last of the big-time swingers. Ten years on, he is the king of Nothing Hill: a blaxploitation hero in a city where the streets are dangerous, the women are beautiful, and the sharpest suits hide the darkest criminal hearts. In his promotional photos he even dresses the part, donning a leather jacket and polo-neck top that could have come straight from the wardrobe of Shaft.

That chic image is rapidly undermined by the lyrics. "I had been held down, cursing everybody," he sings in the opening track, Cinematic Soul, "till I realised the hands were mine." In Whispering Streets, he is a hitman improbably claiming: "I don't even know how the gun got in my hand." Better still is his plea to his lady in That Fool Was Me: "Please don't feed me the way you do, 'cause mama I'll be bigger than you."

Although the soul-fired music couldn't be more different, these songs make you think of No More Shall We Part, Nick Cave's most recent album with the Bad Seeds (the band Adamson helped found in the 1980s). There, Cave took a slanted, sardonic swipe at his own image, singing with a twisted smile of kittens and white churches, prompting laughter and admiration in equal measure. Here, Adamson takes his reputation as a writer of soundtracks to invisible movies and gives it a joyful kicking.

He does this most entertainingly in Cinematic Soul, a self-referential celebration of cinema and funk that commits a remarkable array of musical faux pas. Here are tacky shout-outs inviting the musicians to take the solo spotlight, cheesy Hammond licks that have been out of style for 25 years, a squeaky vocal appearance from Adamson's young son. It all adds up to one of the most irresistible pop songs of the year. When Adamson announces: "This is the stone groove I've been dying to rock with all my life," you believe him wholeheartedly.

This, you think, is the real Adamson, and two songs later he returns. Black Amour, though, is far more caustic. Adamson starts out by fluffing up the velvet pillows and beckoning a lady in his best Barry White croon. But can he deliver? He may call himself Satisfaction Jackson, but has to admit that: "If I ain't on the money, it's because I'm in traction." It is an unexpected, hilarious yet discomforting reference to the physical problems that have marked Adamson's life: the dislocated hips that it has taken three operations to put right.

Throughout its history, cinema has been the most escapist of art forms, and throughout his career Adamson has seemed to be escaping his life: physical pains, the deaths of his parents and sister, the mixed-race background that left him feeling alienated from black and white communities simultaneously. In The King of Nothing Hill, he finally seems to be coming to terms with himself. "The worse neighbourhood," he recognises in Whispering Streets, "is the one right inside your head."

As a result, the album radiates confidence: in the way he uses his deep, impassioned voice (he only began singing on his 1998 album As Above, So Below, two decades into his musical career), in his lyrics, in the bold sensuousness of his melodies and striking experiments with twisted electronic sounds. There are some great songs here, proper songs, with choruses that are impossible to dislodge from the brain, and lyrics that you can't help but sing along to - and, as Adamson says in Cinematic Soul, "What is a song if you can't sing along?" More than anything else, it is this confidence in his songwriting that sets Adamson apart from the composers of atmospheric, "cinematic" music who follow in his trail.