Here’s a fun oddity, a “soundtrack” album for a film that doesn’t exist. Adamson was in the band Magazine, and this album is kind of an audition reel to try to get himself some actual soundtrack work. Moss Side is an area of Manchester that at this time was fairly notorious for race riots, and the imaginary film is a gritty crime drama (with a dash of film noir) with the tagline “In a black and white world, murder brings a touch of colour”.
Track titles like Round Up The Usual Suspects, Tales From The Big House, Suck On The Honey Of Love, and Free At Last conjure up images of a central character trying to escape the underworld with his lady love, continuously dragged back into a life of violent crime. The tracks are instrumental, and my first thought of the overall sound was that it was Industrial meets Laurie Johnson (composer for such classic TV themes as The Avengers and The Sweeney, camp Sixties adventures and gritty Seventies policing respectively), but what it reminded me of most was Roy Budd’s score for Get Carter.
It’s both nostalgic for the Sixties and yet very modern as well, a good mix of glamour and grimness, where one could imagine actor George Sewell as a crime boss lounging by his pool before he gets a shotgun in the face.
Adamson did eventually get to do the soundtrack to a crime film – 1991's Delusion (no, me neither) but he seems to have more success as part of The Bad Seeds with Nick Cave. A shame he didn’t really make it into the soundtrack scene, as this would have been good – it's better, I think, than the blaxploitation soundtracks we’ve had on this list (Shaft and Super Fly). Not that they were bad, but this one sounds more like a film soundtrack, oddly enough.
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