Barry Adamson: The sound of movies

Barry Adamson can write music to suit any occasion - Flake adverts, cop shows, feature films. And he finds his inspiration in the cinema, rather than the record shop. The former New Wave bassist tells Andy Gill how he made the transition from Magazine to Morricone

Perhaps it's just a function of our increasingly "cross-platform" culture, but pop music and movies grow closer every year. It wasn't all that long ago that Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets astonished audiences with its daring application of pop songs; now, no movie is complete without its pop soundtrack, or compilation of music "from and inspired by the film", to use the current weasel terminology. The influence operates the other way as well, with phalanxes of ambient/chillout albums featuring sampled smears of evocative film music laced around their beats. Sometimes you get the feeling, listening to a piece of music, that you're missing a crucial part of the experience, or being subconsciously pulled in a different direction because of those buried movie memories; just as, so often nowadays, you get the feeling that you're watching a promotional music video rather than a movie.

The buzz word for this blurring of media duties is "synergy", but it rarely involves the expanded experience that the term implies. But recently, there has been a small wave of British artists operating at the confluence of the two disciplines whose work fulfills that synergistic potential. Both David Arnold and David Holmes have successfully brought maverick movie-music sensibilities to bear on pop, while Barry Adamson, one-time Magazine bassist and former member of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, has for several years been quietly carving himself a unique niche in the country's pop scene with records such as Moss Side Story (1989), Oedipus Schmoedipus (1996) and As Above, So Below (1998), albums which employ the vivid narrative drive of movie music styles to push their stories along. His latest album, The King of Nothing Hill, may be his best, a dazzling work which brings together the moods and manners of film noir and blaxploitation movies in daring jazz-pop pieces such as "Cinematic Soul", "Whispering Streets" and "Black Amour".

Born and raised in Manchester's Moss Side, Adamson was just a child when he experienced his first revelatory movie moment. It wasn't Citizen Kane or The Seventh Seal, but a James Bond movie. And it wasn't so much the movie, as the music that moved him. "I very clearly remember going to see Thunderball with my parents on a wet Morecambe afternoon," he recalls, as we sip fizzy water on a rooftop terrace above the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road, west London. "Until then, it was almost as if I didn't realise there was music in movies, that it could bring a kind of third dimension to the drama. There was an underwater scene, and an alto flute starts playing, and vibraphone, and I sort of got what was going on in the scene. Suddenly, this world of communication, this new language, opened up in front of me. It was this magical thing where you go and pay money and sit in the dark with strangers and suddenly everything else falls away, and we're all of us involved with the same thing. To this day, I still don't quite get what that moment meant to me, but it was really profound, and began a life-long thing for me."

The new album, Adamson feels, is more immediately accessible than previous efforts, though he admits he still gets to "chew the noir fat" over the same themes of guilt, redemption, isolation, separation and spiritual angst that characterise earlier works. So where do those themes originate?

"God knows!" he says. "I guess I'm digesting similar themes from a whole plethora of movie ideas, literature and art, and somehow relating to them, recognising them in my own life. My life has been pretty full-on, there have been moments I can look back at and go, 'Uh-huh, Personal Tragedy, Volume Three' or whatever; I've stared death in the face, walked to the edge of my own personal abyss and had a good look in. So it's from all these things."

Wherever they come from, those themes make Adamson's compositions far more engrossing than your average Hollywood movie. In "Black Amour", for instance, he gets a chance to wear his Trouble Man hat. "With a record you get a great opportunity to put a case forward, to discuss a myriad themes, under the guise of Trouble Man," he explains. "So I can talk about the acceptance and threat of black male sexuality and the stereotyping of it, and I can also discuss this central theme of longing and desire and emptiness and desperation. And I can just have a good old tune that plays itself. But then maybe somebody who reads Sight & Sound could go in there and find all this stuff that I like to put in."

He acknowledges the potential pitfalls of employing imported American stereotypes like these, but claims that there's a critical element to their use. "It's no surprise to me that if you ask a British 11-year-old what to do in an emergency, he'll probably say, 'Call 911'," Adamson admits. "In my music, I do try to celebrate everything that's fantastic about that idea, and everything that's awful about it, too."

Alongside his own albums, Adamson has developed a parallel career as a bona fide soundtrack artist in his own right, with an expanding CV that includes the scores to Derek Jarman's The Last of England, Allison Anders' Gas, Food, Lodging and David Lynch's Lost Highway, as well as two series of the TV cop drama City Central and a slew of advertising work, including writing the music for a Cadbury's Flake commercial – a long-held dream. Writing for other people, however, is a totally different matter from writing for himself.

"It's their vision, their film, and the film is the boss," he explains. "I can say, 'Have I got one for you!', but if it doesn't fit, it doesn't go in. It's an organic thing – the film tells you what it wants. You can try and inflict your style on it, or be subversive by offsetting dark moments with comedy, or whatever, but ultimately the film is the boss. I love what Danny Elfman [soundtrack composer best known for his work with Tim Burton, and The Simpsons theme] says about writing for pictures: you do all this incredible work, as you see it, and then you sit in the theatre and you get feelings of quiet desperation and suicidal impulses! I've had the same thing – you work all night and drive up to Air Studios at five in the morning to deliver your 18 cues; then later you switch on the telly and say to the wife, 'You'll love this bit!', and there's just silence... Noooo!

"TV is a great disappointment, but also a great discipline: if you want to get the stuffing knocked out of you, and stop your ego getting in the way, that's the way to go. But after a while, the good stuff arrives, because you're working with the thing, rather than trying to impose yourself on it."

Over the years, he's learnt the orchestrator's craft – the way the cello brings sadness, and the flute brings uplift – while trying to broaden that semiotic palette to encompass the new electronic sounds. Not that he finds those old clichés restrictive; instead, he views them as a challenge, taking the genre's maestros as examples.

"That cliché-ridden thing brings out the best in the Morricones, Barrys and Mancinis, because they find this voice," he believes. "And it's not only their voice, it's a voice which speaks for the film as well. That's my inspiration, to try to find something that has its own voice. But composers need directors who will encourage them to pursue that freedom: Morricone needed Sergio Leone to let him do his thing, to bring his avant-garde approach to the Hollywood score."

It's those old masters that continue to provide Adamson with his main inspiration, and continue to move him on the deepest emotional levels. Last year, he went to a Morricone concert and was transfixed by the maestro, reduced to tears by the experience. "I watched Morricone conduct this orchestra," he says, "and I wept like a baby! It touched the very soul of me." He shakes his head in wonderment. "I tell you, my obsession with movies, sometimes I wonder where it's all leading to."

'The King of Nothing Hill' is out on Mute