Barry Adamson on Howard Devoto and Nick Cave

Good to know that back then Charlie Burchill and Jim Kerr were on the right side of the 1970s culture wars. “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.

When we speak it is early September, a few weeks away from publication date, and Adamson, admits his current mood is somewhere in the region of nervous anticipation.

“It’s like, ‘OK, time to really take your clothes off and walk down the street on a chilly day,” he says. Well, yes. It is a very revealing book. It is also very good, a recalling of the past told with widescreen brio and noirish atmosphere. 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 (both David Lynch and Danny Boyle have called on his services).

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.

His family, particularly his sister, offered support at least. They didn’t have a choice, he suggests.

“I think we were a unit that was slightly isolated. There wasn’t a welcoming within the community particularly with the racial divisions. I see that more now than I did then.”

There was strength in that family unit, but also conflict. “How do you hold the tension from outside within?” he asks. “And I think the cracks begin to show and I feel we each had a role to play in that.

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.

“For me it did represent a way out of a tough time that lay ahead. No prospects really. The only interests I had were art and music and I wasn’t particularly qualified.

“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.’

“For the first time, outside of race, outside of anything else, I was in the right place at the right time and the right age and was able to hop on the bus quite easily.

“I was able to fit in a way that I never could fit in anywhere, which spurred me on to want to do something in that world.”

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 …”

Devoto was already a giant in the Manchester music scene because of his time in Buzzcocks. But Adamson had to be cajoled into calling by his flatmates

“They have to goad me slightly . My self-esteem … Underneath there was a bit of me that felt a little bit oppressed, squashed and battered in some way, that goes I’m not sure you can do it.”

Turns out he could.

Barry Adamson, right, with Howard Devoto. Photo0graph Kevin Cummins

Fronted by Devoto, Magazine also included Scottish guitarist John McGeoch. What was Adamson’s role in the band? Was he the person who glued the band together? “I think there was a bit of a gluing going on, a bit of an anchor man. There is a tradition of the function of what the instrument does for a start. It nails down the world between the rhythm and the melody.”

It’s perhaps difficult to recall now how important Magazine seemed at the time. They 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 sabotaging on Devoto’s part?

“Well, it’s possible. It’s a question for Howard really. I’d love him to write a book. I’m only trying to read between and above and below the lines and I’ve tried to express in the book there were various scenarios. At worst it was sabotage and at best he was defining himself for himself. ‘I think, I write, my bat, my ball. This is the game we are playing. It’s my game.’ And I admire him for that, if that was going on.

“But if that was a mask to self-sabotage then that’s unfortunate because I do actually think we could have gone all the way if we had played the game.”

Does that upset him? “I stand by Howard,” Adamson says. “Although my anger did come out towards the end of the group. And particularly when the group did the reforming thing my anger was there, was visible. Which is for another book, another time.”

When McGeogh then left the band to join Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adamson says he experienced it as a kind of grief.

“Yes, it felt like something had died. Magazine as we know it. 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. I refer to it as the rot setting in. The rot sets in in the group and I internalise that and then start on my own path of self-destruction. I think that’s the point there, so grief is covering many bases.”

Drugs do begin to distort the picture. But so does desire. It is one of the book’s strengths that Adamson owns up to this aspect of his story. 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 thrill-seeking 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 don’t think anything’s going to happen. 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 now, 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 he 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 in some way, to have some sort of connection with another human being that wasn’t about drugs, that wasn’t about something external. But I couldn’t do that with myself, connect with myself in some way. I always had to connect with something outside myself. So, I think I was always creating mess after mess after mess.

“I am unable to see that I am trying to get something from somebody to quell the things that are going on inside of myself, the darkness inside myself.”

“There wasn’t even an attraction there. That’s the truth of it. And I feel very sad about that, and I felt I had to write about this. I could have left it. I felt it was important for me to own it and I felt it was important for me to say it as well and try to come to terms with the way that I was functioning in the world at that time. And to own it, as painful as it is to be honest.”

Perhaps we can overplay this small part of his story. By this time Adamson was deep into drugs and paranoia. He was also about to become a father.

It’s hard to know where his head is. Adamson's description of working with Mick Harvey and Nick Cave 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.”

You’re all the same age and you’re all doing the same messy things, I suggest.

“Exactly and 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 the artist and Mick Harvey and knowing that we were creating history and I’m trying to expose it from the inside.”

When you came back to work with them again did you discuss those earlier days? “No, it’s a lot worse,” he says laughing. “But that’s another story.”

On the page this is all riveting, albeit scary. So much pain to be lived with (the death of his sister is a heartbreaking piece of writing). So many mistakes.

“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. We didn’t touch on that, did we? But that is the glue to everything and that is the place to always come back to and I think that is the thing that has held me together throughout my life. Hopefully in the book that is very evident.

“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. That has helped me sustain the whole of my life.”

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