Thankfully, this is one of those rare moments when it all makes perfect sense. Most days it’s really just a case of working through a steady stack of discs all purporting to be ‘eclectic’ or ‘unique’ but rarely amounting to much more than entertaining in parts and as original and inspiring as a fridge magnet souvenir. So when the archly surreal and transgressive, Magazine and Nick Cave collaborator, Barry Adamson starts high-kicking it like some acid-dropping Frankie Lane on the predatory opener, ‘The Beaten Side Of Town’ you can pretty much take it as red that you’ve entered somekind of paradise. Adamson is the man who puts the word ‘sundry’ in ‘all and sundry’, the ‘mag’ in magnificent, the ‘super’ in ‘superlative’ and the ‘ass’ in assorted. Influenced by the likes of Ennio Morricone, John Barry and Elmer Bernstein his records play like the aural equivalent of a smoky cocktail lounge occupied by all manner of poets, junkies, vampires, and crooners, or, in the words of Adamson himself, ‘agnostics, Buddhists and Mormons and Christians, Caucasians, junkies and luggerheads, moonlights and deadbeats, homos and headfoes, negroes and downloads’. It’s a place where anything goes and where anything could happen and usually does. If you ever wondered what happened when the sun went down, the streetlamps came on and the big hand hits the midnight hour, then slinky jazz workouts like ‘Straight ‘Til Sunrise’ should fill you in. In some ways it’s a bit like having Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jnr and Peter Lawford grab you by your lapels and escort you through a throbbing boudoir of girls, poker games, Mafioso deals and ‘happening’ big band shenanigans punctuated by brass stabs, swirling Hammond organs, fingersnaps, hissing cymbals and funky bass riffs.
For those who share Jarvis Cocker’s tastes in music, Deano’s taste in malt, Cave’s taste in bats, Patrick Bateman’s taste in violence, Tony Bennett’s taste in suits, Manchester’s taste in cream and Frankie Lane’s taste in doors it’s an absolute must. And for everybody else? It’s an absolute must too. There’s simply no getting away from it: this is genuinely inspired.
‘BACK TO THE CAT’ RELEASED 22.04.08