As stories that personify punk go, Barry Adamson’s start in music is so lo-fi it would make Malcolm McLaren blush.

Growing up around the burgeoning punk scene in Manchester, Barry had an epiphany that music might be the way to go after watching a young and unknown Pete Shelley walk from the bar to the stage at an early Buzzcocks gig – transforming him from zero to hero in front of Barry’s eyes.

“I hit music just at the right time, as I was about to flower at 17 or 18,” says Barry.

“I had very little direction in life and I looked around at the social culture and I just felt so out of the whole thing: Love Thy Neighbour, three-day working week.

“Suddenly this force arrived in the shape of punk that made everyone at my age say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not going to head into a no-future future, I’ve got to do something’.

“That meant upturning the old for the new.

“A week before seeing the Buzzcocks, I’d gone to see Led Zeppelin at Earls Court or somewhere – these tiny specks on the stage, and I’d thought, ‘How do you get from here to there?’

“Watching Pete Shelley just walk across this room and get on the stage really inspired me to get involved. It was call to arms stuff.

“I was nine months into a college course and I left the next day – this was what I wanted to do.”

About the same time, he saw an advert written by former Buzzcock Howard Devoto looking for band members for his new project, Magazine.

When Barry bumped into an old pal who offered him a bass guitar, a plan swiftly came together.

“It had two strings on it, I went and bought the other two, sat up all night practising and went the next day to try out for Magazine.

“The first song Howard showed me was The Light Pours Out Of Me, which was one note. I thought, ‘If I just keep playing this E, then I’m in’.”

Being a 17-year-old boy who decides he wants to play music may not sound like much of a strategic career breakthrough, but Barry’s life is one punctuated by hindrances.

He was born with all his limbs out of their sockets, a rare condition that affects around one in 100,000 births and one that Barry vividly remembers left him feeling isolated as a child.

“We moved to Withington when I was about eight, and I was the only black mixed guy in school,” he says.

“I went to Withington on my first day in this oversized pram, in plaster from my chest to my ankles. So I arrived – a mixed race mummy; there was no other person that looked like me.

“I remember the horrors of being six or seven and getting a constant line of visitors bringing built up shoes and talking about joining the disabled schools.

“I had it out with my parents and said, ‘No, I’m gonna join the rugby team, actually’, which is what I did.”

The condition has dogged him all his life, but he’s not cynical about it.

He talks about enduring hip replacement operations and spells spent in wheelchairs as if they’re minor hiccups, not the life-changing moments they would be for most of us.

And it’s that positive and powerful approach to life that has made Barry an enduring writer and musician for over 30 years.

Post Magazine, he has occupied studios and stages with some of the most innovative bands around: Visage, Depeche Mode, Iggy Pop and Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. “I seem to be attracted to these strong characters,” he laughs.

“I knew Howard Devoto was ‘the guy’, same thing with Nick.”

Since 1988, he has constantly pushed the musical boundaries as a solo artist – a stall he set out in acclaimed style with his debut album Moss Side Story in 1989.

And, in more headline grabbing moments, he has even written film soundtracks for Natural Born Killers (directed by Oliver Stone) and Lost Highway (David Lynch – a man who Barry fondly refers to these days as ‘Lynchy’).

“I don’t really like this attitude I have of, ‘Oh, I can do anything’,” he laughs. “But I suppose it comes from those punk days.

“But when Lynchy called, his timing couldn’t have been better. He said, ‘I’ve been listening to your music for 10 hours straight’. I thought it was a prank call.

“I was so down at the time, wheeling myself up and down corridors at home; that was a silver lining on a very dark cloud.”

As if that isn’t illustration enough of Adamson’s restlessness, he’s also recently released his first feature film, Therapist – it’s exactly the kind of noir experience you might expect from an artist as musically dark and divergent as Barry.

“There are shadows and light in everything and then this murky greyness in the middle,” he says about the inspiration for his work.

“Without trying to analyse myself, it’s embarrassingly obvious to me that there’s black and there’s white and I’m somewhere in the middle of those two, and that I was quite separated and afraid as a child, and film noir people use that language of childhood as an unspoken fear.

“Noir somehow resonates for me – it’s the place I feel I can express myself. I don‘t do happy-clappy very well.”

On Wednesday, Barry will be the latest Mancunian hero to sit in Dave Haslam’s hot seat as part of Manchester International Festival’s True Faith programme.
 
He seems pretty relaxed about his public interrogation, but says he’s always happy to be honest – in music and in life.

“My career has been great,” he smiles. “but it’s all been made by magical moments with other people. I don’t really think I’m that known, but when people find out who I’ve worked with they’re like, ‘Oh, that guy!’.

“Hopefully there’ll be a few people interested in what I’ve got to say.”

Pavilion Theatre, Wednesday, £5.

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