Barry Adamson

Komedia, Gardner Street, Brighton, Wednesday, March 2

RECENTLY Barry Adamson has returned to his past – playing with his reunited former band Magazine and spending the last two years on tour with Nick Cave in The Bad Seeds.

So perhaps it is not surprising that the now Brighton resident has returned to his solo career with a flourish – combining the release of Know Where To Run, his first solo album in four years, with a book of photographs which helped inspire the songs.

Added into that is his ongoing parallel career as a film-maker, which saw him premiere his second short film The Swing The Hole And The Lie at Brighton’s CineCity Festival in 2014.

The golf noir has since gone to the Cannes Film Festival and London Short Film Festival.

“I don’t see photography, film-making and making music as separate things,” he says from his Brighton home, where he moved four years ago from London.

“They all seem to come under the same umbrella. This is my angle on being an artist and how I produce my art. They all bond together – and always have done.”

That variety of focus perhaps reflects his eclectic approach to music.

His 1992 third album Soul Murder – which mixed a cover of Shuman and Pomus classic Suspicion with a reimagining of the Bond theme - earned him a Mercury Music Prize nomination.

On Know Where To Run the styles vary from the intense electronic John Carpenter-inspired opening instrumental In Other Worlds, to the percussion-heavy organ-driven paranoia of CineCity, to the bright strings, breezy piano and driving acoustic guitar of Come Away and the funky pop of Death Takes A Holiday in just the opening quartet of songs.

Part of that variety comes from the way the album was written.

“Each track is like a country in its own right,” says Adamson. “I have always been a mixtape sort of person. I like film soundtracks – that idea that you have one thing happening, then another scene and another.

“I want to feel free to go wherever I wanted to go. One minute you’re in New York, the next minute New Orleans, the next in San Francisco. They are all very different environments.”

The inspiration from the album came from his US tour with Cave, where he played percussion and keyboards, standing in for long-time drummer Thomas Wydler who had fallen ill.

Adamson had been in the original line-up of the Bad Seeds, Cave’s post-Birthday Party band formed in 1983.

“It was really strange being on tour and quite an insane thing with Nick,” admits Adamson. “We learned something like 55 songs for the tour in a week.

“I had said ‘no’ to Nick at first – I knew it would take a big commitment. I initially said a few months, but it turned into a few years. It made it harder to leave. I didn’t want to be back in a position where I was just playing an instrument again.

“That said I couldn’t resist going back and having a look.”

It was a similar situation to returning to Magazine back in 2009. Adamson was the original bassist for the band, which was begun by former Buzzcock Howard Devoto in 1978.

Following four albums – including the classic Real Life – and hit singles Shot By Both Sides and Song From Under The Floorboards, the band disintegrated in 1981.

“When it all finished the first time around it wasn’t like: ‘See you in 30 years’,” says Adamson. “It’s extraordinary to think about it.

“Being back in Magazine inspired me to move on – it was a bit like anthropology, looking at everyone’s faces and remembering things from 30 years ago. The behaviour hadn’t changed.

“But when you got on stage and started playing all the material like The Light Pours Out Of Me and seeing people getting it – I did like that.

“Seeing what Nick had done and has built up over the years was just amazing.

“It was hard to stop, but I needed to come back to my own career path.”

Stepping off the tour bus Adamson went back to his Brighton home with a camera full of photographs from his travels – which are now not only being put into a book form, but also informed his songwriting.

“We were on tour for a long time, but apart from the intense concentration of playing a show there was a lot of spare time,” says Adamson.

“I started taking photographs as a more conventional way of taking a walk every day, without being touristy. I would spot something and go back and take photographs. I started to build up something and writing musical ideas.

“I realised the two were working hand-in-hand. Know Where To Run was almost a photograph album – I have included a lot of photos in the album artwork.

“The photographs transport you into some of the music. When you travel up and down a country you do get to see some different things. I was thinking back to the great pioneers and how that must have been for them.

“When I came back to Brighton I sat here and let myself work to digest the whole thing.”

Adamson first came to Brighton to work on his 2008 album Back To The Cat.

“I was looking for an analogue studio,” he says. “I’ve been coming here for five, six, seven years. Now I’ve moved here [four years ago] the studio is just down the road.”

He admits it’s now harder to get into Church Road Recording Company in Hove. It has become in demand for recording sessions by the likes of Fear Of Men, Fujiya And Miyagi, Esben And The Witch, and The Fiction Aisle, as well as hosting live sessions for the Bowlegs web film project featuring Julia Holter, Dinosaur Jr, Sharon Van Etten, Quasi, Silver Apples, Courtney Barnett and Matthew E White.

“I got in for a couple of days each week over a few months,” he says. “I recorded my last three albums here.”

He finds the music scene in Brighton pretty inspirational.

“I was in a rehearsal room at Brighton Electric [in Lewes Road] the other day walking through and every room was booked,” he says. “There was music blasting through every door at 10am – and it was all different.”

But his biggest inspiration is much more natural.

“It sounds a bit arty-farty but I’m inspired by the light on the sea,” he says. “It was something I used to pick up on when I brought a bike down to the studio. I would cycle down from Hove to the pier front and back. It was inspiring. I say to people they should go and look at it - every day the sea is different, it’s never the same two days in a row. I find it fascinating. The way the light plays on it brings up something from the past, or your emotional make-up.

“I find visual imagery inspiring – the soundtrack if you like. The trick to songwriting is staying open to the soundtrack playing in your head. I’m quick to note it down, record it on my phone, or take a picture, or make a note about what was going on at the time.

“You still have to do the 80% perspiration, over 20% inspiration though.”

Aside from his music he is currently working on a script for a future film project, building on the short films he has already made.

Film and cinema has always played a major role in his solo work.

His first EP was headed up by a reimagining of Elmer Bernstein’s opening theme to The Man With The Golden Arm, and he described his first album Moss Side Story as the soundtrack to a non-existent film noir.

He now sees that album as the start of things in his film soundtrack work, as it brought him to the attention of film-makers, including the legendary David Lynch. Adamson worked with Angelo Badalamenti on the score for Lynch’s classic Lost Highway, as well as contributing music to the seminal movies Gas Food Lodging, directed by Allison Anders, and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.

More recently he has scored Nick Love’s reboot of The Sweeney and the 2003 BAFTA-nominated short World Of Interiors.

Although he now has two short films under his belt – including 2011’s dark thriller Therapist – Adamson is yet to embark on a feature of his own.

“Younger people often come in and do their first feature straight away,” he says.

“I like to test the water and be a bit experimental. See what works. It’s part of my learning, craft and discipline. Having worked on it from a soundtrack point of view I know there is tons to learn about film. That excites me, I don’t want to stop learning.”

He compares the advent of digital film technology to the explosion of punk which inspired him to join Magazine in 1978.

“A few years before Magazine I had seen Led Zeppelin at Earl’s Court,” he says. “I remember thinking: ‘How do you get from here to there?’ It seemed light years away.

“Then with punk suddenly you were in the pub and the person next to you picked up a guitar and walked on stage to play. Suddenly music was accessible – and it’s now the same with film production.

“Before you needed a cast and full crew to make something – now you have this fantastic digital means and great software that gives a look not far away from a big camera crew.

“Working with Lynch was like being invited backstage with Led Zeppelin to join them – it was an opportunity to learn from one of the greats.

“The cost of getting a feature off the ground is not something you can do off your own back – a short film is doable in a short time.”

As for the future Adamson is concentrating on releasing Know Where To Run, getting it out on the road and releasing the accompanying book.

“I don’t believe in doing everything at once,” he says. “It would be too much of a complex thing to take on – may be a bit overwhelming. I’m going to try to introduce each section over the next six months.

“What I would like to do is perhaps find some small galleries and do little events – have the photos there on the wall, a place where you can buy the book and maybe do a show for half-an-hour.”

Support from Dog In The Snow.

Doors 7pm, tickets £15. Call 0845 2938480 or visit www.komedia.co.uk/brighton