Barry Adamson: 'I'm just trying to be the artist-in-residence in my own skull'

“(But) I’m quite proud of the fact that I’ve been able to get there – to be honest, it’s not a bad innings, I guess I see it that way – and hopefully as I go on the work gets stronger and more relatable. The communication of the work is important to me. I like the idea that people absorb it, get something from it and enjoy it. I think they’re the skills, really, that I’ve been trying to hone over the last (37 years) to make 10 albums: to get a bit of clarity, a stronger voice and all that sort of stuff.”

While writing an eye-opening memoir, Up Above The City, Down Beneath The Stars, during lockdown, Adamson said he found himself starting to imagine his own life without him in it. He sees Cut To Black as a continuation of that author-as-observer frame of mind. “I think more than I’ve realised that is an approach that I’ve taken anyway in my work and I think that strangely that takes its cue from cinema,” he says. “It’s like audience as observer and then the ability to see yourself in the character’s shoes, and then almost like with a memoir, you are the character but you’ve been working on these ways of seeing things.

“I don’t want to overanalyse that, but it gives it this cinematic feel and I think that is sort of a door that I was able to walk through and present the work. I wanted to be slightly different about it rather than straight ahead and actually imbue the work with these traits that I try to put in a lot of my stuff – to have nods to cinema, nods to literature – so I think that’s the way that came about with the memoir and I’ve kind of carried it on with a bit of a stronger note into this album. It is, I suppose, a kind of overview of where I’m at, which is a sort of portraiture thing, where I might be going, the world as it stands. Just trying to be the artist-in-residence in my own skull, mostly.”

The collaboration with the artist Siena Barnes on the album’s opening song, The Last Words of Sam Cooke, came about through Adamson producing a track for Barnes’ band Saint Severin. “I noticed that she had quite a way with words,” he says, “and as I was getting going with this album I thought, maybe there’s an angle she could bring to the table which I’m not quite seeing here. I had this whole set-up with Sam Cooke and I had the ‘Lady, you shot me’ bit and the sketch of the story, but she was able to bring to it a particular angle that she has when she writes her songs. She put the main framework of that together and I was almost like the director and it worked out pretty quick, which was an indication of how strong the idea was.”

The Last Words… is one of four songs at the start of the album that Adamson sees as an exploration of black music in a performative sense. He says he’d been thinking about the Black Lives Matter movement and how civil rights had moved on – or not – in the last 50 years. “It’s exactly that – thinking how it’s moving on and not moving on at the same time,” he says. “In lockdown I was really quite affected by what happened with that movement. I just found that it enabled me to have a voice that I possibly hadn’t ever had, which is evident throughout the memoir as well.

“A lot of the (personal) troubles were a result of not having that voice, or turning around to someone and telling them where to shove it, but you can’t because of the way the thing’s set up. All of that came to fruition more and I guess that influenced me to look at my own work in those terms.

“Being of mixed race, I wanted to balance the books because for want of a better phrase, I’d sort of played the white man for a long time. I thought well, how would it be to take the other things that have really influenced me as well and use them as a source to comment on where I am and where I think the world is and isn’t.”

Musically, Cut To Black journeys through many styles. Adamson believes genre-hopping has been a “trademark” of his records since 1987’s Moss Side Story. “That’s another film idea where music in a film won’t be from the same source or you may use an orchestra and the orchestra has a certain sound but it’s able to switch moods depending on what’s going on with the album, so I tried to look at the album like that.

“It’s like my very own mixtape if you like, it feels like different bands playing each track, and I feel like, again, I’ve approached each of the albums in that way. It’s a little bit of a signature for me, but it serves me as well to be able to talk about the sort of things I want to talk about within each genre and each specific style​​​​​​​. That’s something that I’m aware of being part of me. I kind of do whatever is required wi​​​​​​​thin each song​​​​​​​ to put whatever it is across, I’m not really held down in any way. I quite like that freedom, as long as I feel it’s working and communicating the idea.”

Cut To Black is out now. Barry Adamson plays at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on May 30.