(An edited version of this article first appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post's EG supplement. This is the extended remix.)

I read with some amazement that this will be your first ever solo tour. Why now, and why never before?

This is the question on everybody’s lips at the moment! That sentence has been taken a little bit too much to heart. I’ve always played live, but I’ve never done a consecutive string of dates. So I think that’s where the gasps of amazement are coming from, as if I’ve never left the house for thirty years. And sure, the last time I played Nottingham was at Rock City with the Bad Seeds, or maybe with Magazine, which is eons ago.

But the “why now” is a fair question – and it’s because the new album [Back to the Cat] just screams to be played live, that’s all. Funnily enough, I was able to play it live as a preview, right after it was written. It went down really well, which gave me an indication. So I thought: OK, let’s just do it. Let’s go out, night after night, and play it. And I think I’ve now got a sufficient body of work, as well.

Also, I wasn’t really a band. I was this guy who sat with a keyboard, twiddling away and making these scores, and I didn’t feel comfortable taking that out on the road. I’m not really a band now – but it sounds like it’s a band, and it’s presented in a band way.

So you don’t generally define as a band leader for most of the time?

I do now, and I feel like I can take that out.

Are these people that you’ve worked with many times before?

Yes, they’re regulars. They’re the same people that play on the new record, and on the other records.

So there will be quite a full line-up, I guess.

It’s funny, because people think there’s eighty people playing on each track, and there’s not really. There’s only four or five, or seven at most, and they’re the people that I’ll be bringing with me, so sonically it will be fine. People do seem to think that we’ll be coming on ten buses.

You do imagine an orchestra, somehow.

Yeah, but there’s not one there. That’s how it works today. A keyboard can sound like an orchestra, which it does on the record.

Tell me more about the Back to the Cat album. Are there particular unifying themes?

I guess there always is with me, because I’ve got that film head. I guess I work in the background. I run around from theme to theme, from the psychological set-up to the next beat of the movie, and I pull it together in that way.

But what’s interesting about this record is that there wasn’t a lot of pre-meditation. The first song that popped up was Walk On Fire. I thought: well, that’s pretty upbeat, even though it still has the same flavours of noir, and a dark leaning in some ways. It set me off, and then it was a bit like watching a garden flower, really. The songs sprang up one after the other, really quite quickly.

It’s funny, because I usually keep such a tight rein on the themes. I put it down to experience, and having a bit more confidence, just to let things happen.

It’s more stylistically diverse than I was expecting. I had a pre-conceived notion of your music as being very much down the John Barry and Leonard Bernstein route.

Yeah, I’ve always been linked to the Bernstein/Barry ends of film composition, but maybe there are newer elements that I’m adding.

The standard description which gets applied to you, over and over again, is that you compose soundtracks for imaginary movies. Is that the way that you approach the composition process? Does an imaginary movie spool in your head?

I think it does, actually. I’m writing from an idea, which is driven from character – but you do almost drift, from station to station. You go into each place, and inhabit each world on the record.

I think it was more applicable in the early days. The pieces were instrumental, and so they were like soundscapes, where you could apply your own imagery. In that sense, they were open. There wasn’t a narrative, and there wasn’t an idea that was verbalised. But I still think that that’s the thread of the record, yeah. I still think they have a sense of that.

A track that I visualised particularly strongly was your instrumental Flight. To me, it suggests men in trench coats and trilbies, running down dark alleyways at night, with police sirens whooping behind them and lights chasing them…

All that for a little cat, running down the alleyway! But I know what you mean, of course. It does hark back to that way of working. I actually find that track quite out there on its own. It’s not like anything I’ve done before, but at the same time you kind of know what it means. And it’s exactly the description you’ve made there – that’s what’s going on in it.

So basically, you’ll start from a narrative standpoint, as opposed to an emotional standpoint. You don’t really write about personal emotions, in terms of spilling your heart out and letting a particular personal situation inform a song.

Well, no. I’ve made mistakes in the past where I’ve attempted to do that, and I don’t think that’s good art. Well, I can’t do it, put it that way.

What I tend to do is use symbolism and metaphor, that drop quite definitely into the emotions. Then you can get a sense of where I’m coming from, and of the feelings which come behind that, which are in some ways therefore biographical.

So what I enjoy is mixing up those states, and moving from the head to the heart, if you like, and back again. Being abstract about that, and then covering that, and then mapping that, and then purposely not revealing that, and then revealing something when you think: well, that’s all obviously made up. It’s very much a filmic way.

Truffaut had this idea that you should write 25% of yourself, 25% from a friend, 25% from what you read in the newspaper, and 25% totally made up. That’s what makes up a narrative.

To what extent, if any, should the album be viewed as a quote-unquote “retro” project?

I think that would be a cheap shot. I think that would be a slightly cynical way of brushing off something, in order to get back to reading the News of the World.

But it has a retro-istic standpoint, and on purpose. Because, if you think about it, where we are now musically: there’s nothing going on. I don’t think anything’s really going forward. I think we’ve driven to the coast, and we’re looking to build a boat. So all I’m doing is saying: while we’re building the boat, just think this. This is what’s got us here anyway, so let’s go and build the boat. To be honest with you, that’s what my thinking is.

Mm, okay…

“Mm, grunted Mike!” (Laughs) No, go on!

Well, yeah, there is an undeniably retro feel – but to me, there’s an element which reminds me of the music that I grew up with in the Sixties, which is very formative music for me. There’s something very reassuring about some of the Bacharach/David elements, and so on.

That’s true, but there’s another thing going on there, Mike. Why? Why? Why is he doing a record like this? There’s something else going on there. You’re right: I’m taking comfort from that in some ways, but I’m also saying: this is where the buck has stopped. You know, if it was 1977, well, I wouldn’t be making that kind of record.

You’d have been tearing up the past?

Yeah, exactly. But I don’t see that happening now. And when it does happen, I’ll gracefully bow out, and do something else. But until then, I’ll create these worlds, and use the past to inform a future.

When you do see people attempting to tear up the past and start afresh, it all seems a little bit unconvincing to me. Maybe I’ve just been around too long, and I’m not taken in by it. Maybe we’ve reached a point where we can’t do it anymore.

I’m not convinced that you can ignore history, ever. In artwork, or in music, or whatever.

Finally, I have to commend you for playing on one of my absolute favourite singles of all time, which is Magazine’s A Song From Under the Floorboards. It came along at just the right time for me, especially with the way that it revels in self-abasement, in a way that I found very appealing at the time. I guess you must have been responsible for that lovely popping bassline, that goes all the way through it…

That’s true, yes. Well, you see, even then that was kind of new for me – a case of: oh let’s just try it and see what happens. It was taking an idea that I’d heard on a Sly Stone record, and then from something that was going on in a David Bowie record at the time. I was trying to fuse them together, and to make this thing that was bubbling underneath the surface – which was like the floorboards, from my end of the story.

(Photo of Barry Adamson taken on June 1st 2007 by Angel D, and reproduced under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license.)

Labels: eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

Following its ground-breaking adoption of blogging technology, our little Derbyshire village is now taking its second giant step towards integration with the 21st century.

Click here to read more.

This article first appeared in Issue 22 of LeftLion magazine. You can download the entire magazine in full colour PDF format, or you can pick up a physical copy from one of these Nottingham venues. Many of the main features can also be read online.

Highlights of this issue include splendid interviews with Public Enemy's Chuck D and Nottingham city centre's very own Fish Man, as well as an eye-witness account of the "Stop The City" riot by local author Nicola Monaghan and a chat with Nottingham's only goth plumber.



To the surprise of many, a 2004 report named Nottingham as having the seventh highest gay population in the country. Who, us? Could that really be true? After all, we hardly enjoy the high profile of gay destinations such as Manchester, Brighton or Blackpool. Our scene may be reasonably sized, but it makes few waves.

For a whole generation of misty-eyed middle-aged queens (trust me, for I know of what I speak), things have never been the same since the early 1980s glory days of La Chic: Part Two. Recognised in its day as possibly the best gay club outside London, Part Two mixed old-school glamour with a new-school aesthetic, in a way that was unique for its time. It was the first club in town to embrace beat-mixing, with an upfront policy that Graeme Park has cited as a key influence. On a typical night, you might find Su Pollard whooping it up on the floor to the latest American imports, while Justin Fashanu silently prowled the cruising alley and a regal Noelle “Nolly” Gordon – the Crossroads matriarch herself - wafted around in a diaphanous evening gown, flanked by stage-door johnnies. In the upstairs bar, you could even avail yourself of the services of a resident chaplain, on hand to dispense spiritual advice to the morally bewildered (as well they might have been, given the pitch-black sex room round the back). From sin to absolution in the space of one evening, Part Two had it all.

Following its 1985 demise, a long dark night of the soul descended upon our club scene, punctuated only by the ground-breaking, long-running and massively popular mega-discos (ooh, we had coach parties) at Barry Noble’s Astoria (later MGM and Ocean), on the first Monday of every month. Sure, there was something faintly demeaning about being shipped in under sufferance on the quietest night of the week – but in the absence of anything better, we were grateful for small mercies.

At weekends, the late 1980s were dominated by the twin scourges of Gatsby’s – possibly the grimmest gay bar in human history, and proof that ‘Gay’ stopped meaning ‘bright and colourful’ a long time ago – and its equally joyless sister venue on St James’s Street: Club 69, later renamed L’Amour. By the early 1990s, the place had upgraded itself to Nero’s, more or less scraping the lower levels of basic acceptability in the process. It was succeeded by the altogether groovier Kitsch on Greyhound Street, which surfed the handbag house boom before coming to an ignominious end, thanks to Donal Macintyre’s televised exposé of the city’s drug trade. While it took months of patient undercover work to nail the Evil Mister Bigs of the day, all it took to land the hapless Kitsch in the doo-doo was for McIntyre to walk in, approach the front desk, and bellow his request. (“HELLO! CAN I BUY ANY DRUGS IN HERE, PLEASE?”)

In the wake of Kitsch’s demise, the Admiral Duncan on Lower Parliament Street enjoyed a riotous renaissance, just ahead of its rebirth as “stylish pre-club feeder bar” @d2. Sure, the Dunc was a skanky old cesspit – but it was our skanky old cesspit, and some of us became rather fond of lurching around to Insomnia in pools of spilt beer and broken glass on the tiny, ever-rammed dance floor. Sundays were particularly weird. At 10:15, the place would be virtually deserted. By 10:30, when that week’s stripper took to the floor, it would be jam-packed with folk who had “just popped in for a quick one”, none admitting their true motives (“I’ve not copped off all weekend and I’m gagging for a glimpse of cock”). By 11:00, the place would be empty all over again. Tsk – men, eh?

This plucky make-do-and-mend spirit served us well, but by the time that the 750-capacity NG1 club opened in 2000 – a symphony in clean surfaces and sleek modernism – grateful gays from all over the East Midlands flocked there in droves. Seven years on, the place is still going strong, despite the increasing threat posed by online hook-up sites such as Gaydar, and their brutally pragmatic ethos of “why go out when you can order in”.

(Indeed – and I shouldn’t really be telling you this, so not a word – NG1 is actually one of the best places in town for heterosexual males to cop off with the opposite sex. Like most decent gay clubs, it represents a safe haven for women who want a hassle-free night out – and while this is only right and proper, it also affords a certain window of opportunity to those with sufficient reserves of patience, subtlety and stealth. That’s all I’m saying. You didn’t hear it from me.)

Ironically, the other potential threat to the established scene is posed by the very social advances that we had been crying out for – as in these newly non-judgemental times, there is consequently less need for separate gay spaces. Gone are the days when we were an oppressed minority, huddling together for warmth. The only trouble is that some of us rather liked being part of a shadowy twilight subculture, and it’s tempting to feel that by emerging into the light, something has been lost along the way.

Then again, maybe our status as a gay-friendly city has less to do with the size of our commercial scene, and more to do with the strength of our community. By and large, we’re not overtly cliquey, bitchy or ridden with up-ourselves attitude, and our roost is not ruled by gaggles of vicious queens slagging off anyone with a slight paunch, a receding hairline, or sub-optimal pecs-n-abs. (“What’s she come as? Scar-eh!”)

Away from the scene, we flourish as a community. Special interest groups cover everything from badminton players to “bears”, from historians to hill-walkers, and from church-goers to SHAGGERS (that’s apparently the “Stately Homes Appreciation Group for Gay Enthusiasts in Rural Settings”, although one has one’s doubts). The long-running Breakout group provides an ideal starting place for newcomers and the newly “out”, and indeed for anyone who might baulk at the prospect of propping up the bar alone, straining to look “friendly and approachable” rather than nervous and desperate. (Hey, we’ve all been there.) Situated inside the Health Shop on Broad Street, The GAi Project provides sexual health counselling, Hepatitis B jabs and anonymous HIV testing, as well as free condoms and lube. Our annual Pride festival remains truer to the event’s original spirit than most, displaying all the homespun charm of a mildly sexed-up village fete, complete with market stalls and bandstand. We even have our own ghettos: Forest Fields for the lady-lovers, and the Viccy Centre flats (aka “Fairy Towers”) for the metropolitan poof on a budget. Oh, and there’s also the Vic Centre Tesco Metro, whose immediate catchment area makes it Nottingham’s cruisiest supermarket…

But more than that, there’s an all-pervading and reassuring sense of relaxed openness about Nottingham’s gay life. We can nurse our pints of Flowers in the Lord Roberts (yes, there’s even a gay pub with decent beer), just a few doors down from raucous circuit bars such as Revolution, and not feel remotely threatened. And even if we did, we’re fortunate enough to have a dedicated police hotline for homophobic incidents (0800 085 8522), manned by specially trained staff. As we stroll through Hockley on a Saturday night, without a thought to editing our public conversations, the city centre’s reputation for violence and intimidation scarcely registers on our radar. Or maybe we’re just tougher little cookies than some might give us credit for.

Labels: gay, nottingham