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Barry Adamson: “Autodestruction”

From the album Moss Side Story (1989)

A concept album imagined as the soundtrack to a non-existent film noir, Moss Side Story was the first album by the British composer and musician Barry Adamson, born in Manchester in 1958.  Before launching his solo career, Adamson established himself in the 1980’s avant-rock scene as a member of the post-punk band Magazine and, later, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Moss Side Story is one of those albums that joyously flouts all efforts at genre categorization.  The musical style is unmistakably cinematic— to me it sounded like a soundtrack even before I knew the story behind the album.  But it is the other layers of sonic signification that make this album so strange and interesting. Beyond invocations of the well-codified conventions of film music— for example, cinematic string swells and what can only be described as “chase music”— Adamson embraces a number of more or less identifiable stylistic materials with a polyglot flair.  The use of sound effects, sometimes quite recognizable, sometimes of a suggestive but unidentifiable quality, connects the album to the tradition of the experimental radio play, in which a story is told largely by means of sounds, with only minimal verbal narration.  Altogether it is a compelling piece of work that has aged well, considering it was released over 20 years ago.

The imaginary film music of Moss Side Story would turn out to be a warm-up for the real thing, as Adamson went on to contribute to the soundtracks for such suitably dark films as Natural Born Killers (1994) and Lost Highway (1997).

January 15, 2011, 3:22pm