BARRY ADAMSON
Bad Seed/noir cineaste picks songs of crime, angst and murder.
1 ENNIO MORRICONE GLI INTOCCABILI (TITOLI) (From Gli Intoccabili [aka Machine Gun McCain] OST, Jolly Hi-Fi, 1969)
“I bought a few ‘mafia movie’ scores at a nerdy soundtrack fair back in the ’90s and this track, weird, jazzy and tense, really stood out and became a crime jazz reference point for future inspiration. I used it in a hitman movie I made whilst at film school in New York and it lifted the scene way beyond its worth! Plus, the film stars the great John Cassavetes as a bank robber who, released from prison, gets involved in a Vegas heist with his son and a Mafia hood. As the track builds, I still get the same thrill when the dissonance of the strings jar up against the guitar. Ennio Morricone is a genius. This is the killer version where the reading of the score and the execution of the music is precise and gutsy and compelling.”
2 TUBBY HAYES AND JOHNNY SCOTT SKIN FEVER (From All Night Long OST, Fontana, 1962)
“I first came across this slice of cool many years ago on a compilation tape that Mufti, then from the band Einstürzende Neubauten, was listening to, a great tape he made up of scores from different movies, with composers like Quincy Jones, Henry Mancini and Bernard Herrmann. I knew nothing about where this piece came from for a long time, then came across the movie All Night Long with its jazz score. Staple stuff for a late ’60s kitchen sink interracial drama, but then Patrick McGoohan from The Prisoner is seen playing the drum solo to the track flawlessly! Worth checking out on YouTube: McGoohan’s looks add to the drama of the solo and he just kills it. And everyone in the room.”
3 SEXTILE CAN’T TAKE IT (From A Thousand Hands, Felte, 2015)
“I haven’t heard of them outside of the LA community they spring from. They play like their lives depend on it. I hope they become huge. I can listen to this on repeat and often do: it’s a great combination of sloppy synths that lull you into the landscape, and then when the guitars kick in we arrive at a disparate and desperately beautiful place. Experimental and at the same time totally accessible. I guess to me it feels like great rock music of the past, but then at the same time it lurches magnificently into the future. A video of the song is in production. The whole album is brilliant. I could bang on about Into The Unknown with the same feverish excitement.”
4 EDDIE KENDRICKS MY PEOPLE… HOLD ON (From People… Hold On, Tamla, 1972)
“I heard it first on the ‘Black Power’ compilation Stand Up And Be Counted (Harmless, 1999) which I bought initially for a track by The Last Poets. Eddie Kendricks was synonymous with the song Keep On Trucking, which was a light-hearted ’70s disco romp, whereas this cut is dark and political. The haunting backwards FX and African drums set the scene brilliantly before a Curtis Mayfield-style vocal that imagines panning shots across a war-torn inner city ghetto. Also worthy of note on the same compilation is a track by the guy who sang the soul heartbreak infidelity song, Me And Mrs Jones, Billy Paul. The track’s called East – a lurid tale of inner city angst.”
5 RBX THE EDGE (From The RBX Files, Premeditated, 1995)
“Having just recently seen the awesome Straight Outta Compton, I started reminiscing about ’90s hip hop in general and remembered being turned onto this guy RBX. What was and still is great about this whole record is not just the Doctor Dre diss – ! – but the acute descriptions of mindless violence in the songs, made cinematic by a constant barrage of extremely high quality, ’Welcome To Hollywood’ FX tracks. Guns and helicopters and police radios pepper the terrain, making it so that each song puts you in the centre of the narrative, and this one is the best example of this almost casual idea of shooting and killing somebody. Lyrics like ‘bullets will be zippin’ zappin’, bodies collapsing’, still resonate menacingly in what is an enthralling musical, albeit chilling, landscape.”