Barry Adamson - Back To The Cat (LP) - Clear Vinyl

Barry Adamson has always felt like the cool uncle who sneaks you into the late screening, buys you a choc top, then spends the walk home talking about camera angles and basslines. Back to the Cat, released in 2008 on his own Central Control International label, is that feeling pressed into grooves. It leans hard into the film noir world he has made his own since leaving Magazine and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but it does so with a showman’s wink, like he knows you’re here for the mood as much as the melody.

What grabs you first is how completely he inhabits his imagined city. The record plays like a set of short stories told from street corners and cocktail lounges. He’s a master of scene setting, and his palette is rich but precise. Brushed drums and vibraphone flicker at the edges, trumpets curl like cigarette smoke, and the bass, his first instrument, slips through it all with unfussy authority. Adamson produced the album himself, and you can hear the confidence. The horns don’t just decorate, they drive. Strings glide in when a twist arrives. The mix is cinematic, yet the arrangements are tight enough that every cue lands.

The Beaten Side of Town is the entry point, a late night walk through puddles and neon. It’s not a pastiche of noir, it is noir, the kind that remembers melody and narrative as much as shadow and grit. Adamson’s voice has that worn velvet quality, crooner in one breath, narrator in the next, and he never forces it. He trusts the song to carry the drama. That’s always been his edge over lesser pretenders to the soundtrack throne. He writes songs that live beyond their concept, and Back to the Cat has several that lodge in your head long after the lights come up.

There’s a playful side here too, the cat in the title as jazz slang as much as alleyway feline. You hear him tipping his hat to lounge exotica, spy themes, and classic soul, but he links those worlds with a very Manchester sense of narrative grit. Coming off Stranger on the Sofa, which leaned heavier on instrumental mood pieces, this one pulls the mic closer. The storytelling is front and centre. Characters step out of the haze. You feel the pull of bad ideas and the glamour of bad places. It never slips into parody because Adamson still writes like a rock musician who fell in love with cinema, not the other way round.

Musically, the band swings with that slightly ominous swagger he’s honed since Moss Side Story. The rhythm section knows when to hold back and when to clench. Guitars twang and slink rather than shred. Keys colour the corners, sometimes like an old theatre organ, sometimes like a cool jazz club piano after last call. He has always been canny about texture, and Back to the Cat is one of those records where you keep catching new details. A muted trumpet figure you missed before. A ghostly backing vocal that turns a line from romantic to uneasy.

If you collect Barry Adamson vinyl, this sits in that sweet spot between his early noir world building and the later records that broadened the palette again. The sequence is clever, the pacing unhurried, and the sound rewards a good stylus. Back To The Cat vinyl can be elusive on the shelves, but it is worth the hunt. I’ve spotted copies tucked in the corner of a Melbourne record store next to Magazine reissues, and it always makes sense seeing them together. If you buy Barry Adamson records online, keep an eye out for clean pressings, because the quiet passages on this album really bloom when surface noise stays out of the way. Among Barry Adamson albums on vinyl, this is one that turns a living room into a cinema simply by dropping the needle.

There’s a personal pleasure in hearing an artist double down on what they do best without coasting. Back to the Cat feels like a return to the club where the barman still remembers your order, but the set list is new. It carries the signatures, sure, yet it keeps surprising with melodies that stick and arrangements that slide between genres with a cat’s grace. For anyone crate digging through vinyl records Australia wide, this one is a quiet prize. Put it on at twilight, let the room go soft, and follow Adamson down those alleys. The stories are better told here, and the city he builds feels lived in, not just lit well.