The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Punk was my great escape
Barry Adamson on life in postpunk legends Magazine and The Bad Seeds
LET’S start with the Simple Minds story. It comes in the middle of Barry Adamson’s new memoir Up Above the City Down Beneath the Stars. It’s 1979 and Adamson is playing bass with Magazine, the post-punk band fronted by ex-Buzzcock Howard Devoto. They have a gig in Leicester and Simple Minds are the support act. And their saviours.
Adamson and his bandmates are playing when racist thugs rush the stage. Simple Minds come to their rescue.
“I remember being in fear of my life and looking stage left and seeing the guys getting stuck in,” Adamson says approvingly when I bring it up.
If only he had been so bothered about saving himself sometimes you might think if you read his book. It’s a memoir full of arrogance and ignorance (some of it his), of abuse and addiction, but also loss and grief and mental illness. It also takes in being a mixed-race kid in post-war racist Britain.
It is a very revealing book. It is also very good, a recalling of a noirish past told with widescreen brio and humour. The result is often dark, sometimes disturbing, but also genuinely compelling.
Adamson is a good storyteller on the page and on the phone. He is honest and articulate and it helps that he has a great voice and a showman’s swagger. These days he’s best known for the music he makes under his own name (there’s a new EP due soon) which has also turned up in films now and again. But Up Above the City Down Beneath the Stars is devoted to his early years, from childhood innocence to twentysomething stupidity, you might say.
“I was a complete a***hole a lot of the time,” Adamson admits. “People gave me room to figure the stuff out, which I eventually did. To the point where I could be a pretty decent human.”
This is partly the story of youth, of course. But context matters too. That snapshot of late-1970s England we began with speaks to the wider context of Adamson’s childhood. Born in 1958, Adamson had a
Jamaican dad and a mum from Manchester whose family were far from happy with her choice of partner. Growing up, he found himself hovering between black and white and accepted by neither.
The young Adamson buried himself in comic books and James Bond movies and music. An escape into the imagination. The real escape came with the arrival of punk, however. He was an isolated teenager who had finally found his tribe.
“When punk came along for me it was like, ‘Are you getting on the bus?’ And I looked at the bus and I saw the other people on the bus and thought, ‘They’re my kind of people.’”
That said, his arrival in that world seems almost accidental. He bought himself a bass guitar and saw an advert which began: “Howard Devoto seeks other musicians to perform …” He eventually called.
Magazine should have been huge. Maybe they could have been huge. But when the band performed their song Shot by Both Sides on Top of the Pops, Devoto delivered what Adamson describes in the book as a “purposely lacklustre performance.” The record slid down the charts the following week. Was it a deliberate sabotage on Devoto’s part?
“Well, it’s possible. It’s a question for Howard really. At worst it was sabotage and at best he was defining himself for himself. But if that was self-sabotage then that’s unfortunate because I do actually think we could have gone all the way if we had played the game.”
When Scottish guitarist John McGeogh then left the band to join Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adamson says he experienced a kind of grief.
“Yes, it felt like something had died. After Howard, he was the strongest character in terms of defining the group’s sound and I think it’s the fact that he’d had enough made it seem like this is something that can end.
“And also, in my mind, my world, I’m just beginning to slip into this unhealthy mental space. The rot sets in in the group and I internalise that and then start on my own path of selfdestruction.”
Drugs do begin to distort the picture. But so does desire. In the early days of Magazine, he has an affair with Devoto’s then girlfriend, the artist Linder. It is the first of a series of sometimes inappropriate relationships in the book.
“The early twenties are thrillseeking and raising the stakes on the risk,” Adamson points out. “And then you’re listening to songs on the radio …” He starts singing at this point. “‘Danger and excitement fascinate the ladies…’ Right OK. Got it.
“And you’re fearless at that age. You don’t think you’re going to die. You just go all out and throw yourself against brick wall after brick wall.”
There is another relationship he talks about in the book, one with Pete Shelley the other founding member of Buzzcocks. He describes coming onto Shelley whilst they are working on the latter’s solo album. Does he understand why he did that, I ask?
“I didn’t really understand at all,” he admits. He sees it in context of something that happened to him as a child. When Adamson was eight, another boy forced himself on him. Perhaps, he says, it was a reaction to that. “What Sigmund Freud calls the
compulsion to repeat the trauma.”
As for Shelley, he says, “I was there out of longing. I was there out of the need to have some sort of connection with another human being that wasn’t about drugs, that wasn’t about something external.
“There wasn’t even an attraction there. That’s the truth of it. And I feel very sad about that.”
Perhaps we can overplay this small part of his story. By this time Adamson was deep into drugs and paranoia. It’s hard to know where his head is. His description of working with Mick Harvey and Nick Cave in The Bad Seeds sounds fraught, to say the least. Was that them or was that you, I ask? Part of it was his paranoia, he says. But not all of it. “People can be not very nice at times. People can be absolute twats. I’m trying to strike a balance between the fraught tensions between us, the massive egos of us in our early twenties. But then how my paranoia is ramped up to a place where I can project it onto the situation.
“I think there’s enough praise for Nick Cave despite what’s going on. I
want to make that clear. I think he’s a wonderful artist. I think the book has praise for Nick Cave and Mick Harvey.”
On the page this is all riveting, albeit scary. “For the reader I’m trying to take them downhill very fast in a car where the brakes have been cut. But I try and relieve … if that’s the right word because it obviously gets very dark, and the lights go out and there I am in psychiatric hospital … I have to pull the reader out of that very dark place.”
And he does. That’s the key.
There is something we haven’t talked much about, I say, near the end of our conversation. The importance of music in this story.
“Well, there you go. But that is the glue to everything. Without that I don’t know what I would have done. The thing that has brought me the most joy and comfort in the world is music.”
Up Above the City Down Beneath the Stars by Barry Adamson is published by Omnibus Press, £20. His new EP, Steal Away is out on Mute Records on November 5