O nce upon a time, Barry Adamson was the bassist with 80s experimentalists Magazine, and then Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. However, since the day he went solo and multi-instrumental, he's carved a musical niche all of his own. By mashing together pulp-fiction aesthetics, sleazy jazz rhythms and the sound of the Mancunian streets where he was raised, he's transformed these influences into soundtracks to imagined movies and become the undisputed king of urban noir music. For his latest release, Stranger On The Sofa, the maestro ups the ante and takes his cinema-obsessed MO even further.

Whereas your past work has more defined leanings towards noir cinema, you seem to play with different cinematic genres this time.

Things change as you go further down the track, and I guess part of my main strength is the characterisation of my music. But I've added a few strings to my bow over time and now I look at things slightly differently. There's the part of me that likes walking to the edge of the abyss and staring in, but also at the other views to the left and the right.

Did you script the album before recording it?

I think I start with an idea of a basic premise, which was an idea of where we are in society, where technology is king and we're overwhelmed by everything that's currently happening - this is the Stranger On The Sofa bit really. Sometimes I want to go back to a simpler time where you could just put on a piece of music with a good melody and a good hook and relax knowing that's what was going on for that moment, rather than being bombarded. There's also a future/past kind of thing going on, so that was a sort of theme. A couple of songs had already started to take shape when the theme started to juxtapose the songs. I was like, "Hang on, these seem to reflect the past and these others seem to reflect the future," thus making up a presence to work on.

This future/past thing, did it fall into place as you were writing new material?

I noticed it coming up more and more, and I noticed my own feeling about it. Then I noticed the way the shape of the album was happening. It was also to do with some stuff I was reading at the time. I'm influenced by the author Michel Houellebecq [Atomised] and a lot of the stuff he writes about cloning. He's the same age as me, and I think, "This is the same brain, at the same time, shaped by the same things," and there he is using flashbacks so you're not quite sure where you are. That was an inspiration.

Would it be fair to say movies and music are pretty much inseparable to you these days?

I've kind of made a point to forge them together throughout my career. I don't know if that's to justify an end in some way, but you know what it is, I need to get out and make a bloody film, don't I?

STRANGER ON THE SOFA

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