#STRANGELAND MOVIE SOUNDTRACK FREE#

It’s probably to do with the fact that I’ve always been given the room to experiment, to do what I want. Your albums seem to have predicted revival booms in easy listening, 70s soundtrack music and lounge. You do seem to have been very prescient with your taste in music over the years. I probably nicked the idea from someone myself anyway. It was almost like, why wouldn’t you end up at that point? It was a kind of post-punk paranoia. I think you can look back and it’s almost like a kind of art that’s a logical conclusion to get to, given the kind of mysterious things going on in film at the time, like David Lynch films and Angel Heart. I think when something’s in the air, it’s in the air. Do you see your influence in younger, cinematic bands, like Portishead or Tricky? Going back to the beginning of your solo career, in the late-80s it seemed such a radical departure to be scoring these imaginary films, but now it’s become more accepted.

I want them to be delighted and shocked, I want them stay with the narrative. With what I do, I’m asking a lot of the listener and I’m aware of that. And that’s fine, because it’s all about the overall effect. I recorded it, and when I played it back I realised that I was going to have to write another four or five pieces of music and slot them in. As Daniel Miller (Mute boss) would probably tell you, I record every album twice! And I did it with this album as well. Without that order, it isn’t going to work at all. It’s about placing an order on the elements. To use a painting reference, it’s all about the composition. One of the delightful things about your releases is the number of disparate elements they often contain. It was just him and his piano at eight the next morning. I was reading this piece on Bernard Hermann, where he was going on about all the awards that he had won and saying that they were all well and good but the day after the awards ceremony, they don’t mean anything any more.

It’s not about showing the world I can do it or anything like that. Is this another example of you trying to wrest back artistic control? So not only is Stranger… on your own label, but it doesn’t contain the usual raft of weird and wonderful guests that you’d usually expect from a Barry Adamson record. And in doing so, I realised that the time was right to move. ‘Is it true that Mute are going to let you go?’ And I said, ‘Where have you heard that? It’s absolute rubbish, just gossip.’ I know I’m not this year’s most commercial model but… what do you do when a relationship becomes like that? You take a step back. I was speaking to Nick (Cave) and he said. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened, but it made me think. And you know, I’ve got too much dignity to be told by a total stranger that I’m not wanted any more. And I was thinking, ‘Something’s up here.’ And lo and behold, EMI took the label over. Then it came to be people from EMI walking about with Diamanda Galas albums under their arms so they could take them home and learn who this person was. It felt like people were looking at figures on my piece of paper and then comparing them to the figures on Moby’s piece of paper. It seemed to be more and more about figures on paper. I enjoyed being on Mute but I started to feel more and more separate from it.

#STRANGELAND MOVIE SOUNDTRACK FREE#

From the whisky-sodden shanty of first single The Long Way Back Again, to the aqueous dub of Free Love, via the Lalo Schifrin-like car chase music of Who Killed Big Bird, this is Adamson’s greatest album to date. Stranger On The Sofa is a bravura effort, and one that delights as much as it startles. But more to the point, it has allowed him to deliver on the promise of his debut. This summer, however, has seen a move away from his long-time label to set up his own imprint and production house, Central Control International. Also incorporating sampled news reports and shuffling funk breaks, it became the blueprint for ‘intelligent’ trip-hop as proffered by the likes of Portishead and Tricky in the mid-90s.īut for years, it looked like he would never come close to equalling the inventiveness and magpie tendencies of this album, despite some honourable attempts (1996’s Oedipus Schmoedipus features stunning collaborations with Cave and Jarvis Cocker, and had several tracks featured in David Lynch’s The Lost Highway). The result, Moss Side Story, welded punishing industrial drum programming to sensuous jazz, strictly cheese-free lounge, angular post-punk and nerve-shredding vocals by Mute labelmate Diamanda Galas. Deciding to quit Berlin (and the company of Nick Cave, Blixa Bargeld, Mick Harvey et al) in the late-80s, he set about recording an album which he described as a soundtrack without a movie. Despite being a core member of two of the most influential bands of the post-punk era, Magazine and The Bad Seeds, Barry Adamson has ploughed a peculiarly unfashionable furrow ever since.

Strangeland movie soundtrack