My exclusive interview with the legendary Adamski. First published in the May 2011 issue of Colchester 101 magazine.
A little piece of Colchester’s cultural history is set to come to an end as Mangled, once voted one of the top 10 nights in the UK by Rave Magazine, prepares to hold its final ever party in June. So, it is only fitting that the originators of the Essex rave scene will bow out with a PA from dance music legend Adamski, one of original pioneers of the music genre that was the backbone of rave culture which exploded across Britain in the late 80s. I caught up with Adamski ahead of his visit to Colchester to find out a little more about the man who took dance music into the mainstream.
Born Adam Tinley, and then living near Southampton, the young Adamski’s musical tastes evolved whilst listening at night to Radio Luxembourg and John Peel on a radio under his pillow. Inspired by punk, post punk and numerous other styles he heard, he formed his own punk band, Stupid Babies, with his younger brother Mark, and recorded Babysitter, a single which hit number three in the independent charts. He was still only 11. “My older brother was at senior school. He was 15 or 16 and playing in bands. I was jealous and wanted some of that too. For as long as I could remember I had always wanted to make music.”
He used the record company’s £100 advance to buy a piano and took a couple of lessons, “The teacher sacked me. He said I was un-teachable, so I taught myself, playing along to 2 Tone records and trying to make my own versions of the melodies and chords. 2 Tone was a big influence on me making dance music, and also, living in a small town where you didn’t see any black people, 2 Tone opened up the idea of multiculturalism to people outside inner city areas across the country.”
These were changing times where music was playing an important role, and Adamski was at the centre of it all. He recalls the next few years as being inspirational times for him. “Every few months there was something shiny, fresh and new appearing, such as Electro Pop, New Romantic, Psychobilly, Hip Hop. Everything really happened during the five years I was at senior school. It was the aftermath of punk and disco and the evolution of the synthesiser and drum machine.”
By the time he was 20 he was living in Camden and creating his own style of music with a sequencer and 909 drum machine. “I used to make House and Techno tracks in my bedsit, then that same night I could go out and play them to thousands of people. I still do it now. I’ve had a studio in the past but I prefer working on a laptop in my bedroom. The important thing is the ideas in your head, not the standard of the equipment.”
He had come a long way from the 11 year old that made music with a ukulele and a kazoo, recording it on a cassette recorder. The rave scene had come a-calling and he soon became a favourite on the illegal rave circuit in the UK, and the emerging club scene in Ibiza. 1989 saw him release his debut album Live And Direct which contained a short, live version of his first single N-R-G, but it wasn’t until the release of Killer, on which he collaborated with the then unknown Seal, that Adamski set himself firmly on the record buying public’s radar.
This was 1990, the media was indulging in a feeding frenzy about the danger to Britain’s youth of the rave culture, drugs, and illegal parties, then along came this techno-blues masterpiece with its haunting beat, which claimed the number one chart position for four weeks. Killer became a worldwide hit. Adamski and Seal were both propelled to global stardom. Suddenly rave had become mainstream.
I ask him if he had any idea when he recorded Killer that he had made something special, and how big it could be? “No, absolutely not. I remember doing an interview with The Face, and Sheryl Garrett saying she thought it would be number one, and I thought she was taking the mickey. When we recorded it I did have this feeling that it was a good record, I was really pleased with it but I thought it sounded a bit too unusual and underground, it was a kind of sparse, minimal kind of groove and I didn’t think it was particularly jolly like a lot of the house tunes that crossed over. They were all happy records.”
Killer was unlike anything else around back then and has been covered many times. As well as George Michael and The Sugarbabes, there are also Norwegian and Finnish Heavy Metal versions, “To me it’s still a quirky, unusual track and people from different genres covering it is most flattering and never ceases to surprise me.”
He had always wanted to appear on Top of the Pops, his favourite programme as a child. “That was the Holy Grail, and just because I came up from the underground I wasn’t going to be some kind of purist like the Clash or the Prodigy.”
His first TOTPs appearance was performing NRG. “It should have been the best day of my life but I was really upset because they insisted I had these cheesy dancers with tinsel tied to their trainers. There wereuntold people from the club scene I could have brought along if I’d known, but instead I had these BBC theatre school dancers. They were friendly enough girls but they had nothing to do with where I was coming from. It was like having Legs & Co brought out of cold storage and it put a downer on the whole thing.”
He recalls performing Killer on TOTPs. “I’d done a lot of drugs and saw people in the studio wearing hats like I wore, these big oversized baseball caps, and it kind of freaked me out.”
Watching his TOTPs appearances on YouTube, it is obvious how much fun he later had performing The Space Jungle, on which he sings Elvis’s All Shook Up to a dance backing. He jokes, “I enjoyed that one the most, probably because I was singing too and I had something to do instead of just standing there like a plum pounding away at the keyboard. People saw that single as self-sabotage though because I’d had this massive hit with this great singer then next thing it’s me singing, and I’m not really a proper singer, doing an Elvis cover. This alienated a lot of the people who were into me, but I didn’t really think much of it at the time, I was off in my own little world. I went off to LA for a few months and got lost in developing the LA rave scene and hanging out with the Happy Mondays and doing gigs with them. You can imagine what that entailed and the effect it had on my state of mind. I probably could have auditioned great singers and milked what I was doing for all it was worth. But to me it has never been about being a huge pop star, it’s about expressing myself. That’s part of the artistic thing with me.”
When he moved to Italy in the late 90s he had bought one of the early vari-speed CD decks and mastered beatmatching. This was at a time when it had become trendy to book pop stars and musicians to do DJ sets and having come out of dance music the Italians though he was a DJ so DJ bookings followed.
“Italians are quite a hard crowd. They have very technically proficient mixers and my style was so free-style and random I had to work really hard to keep people on the dance floor. So I really learned my trade there.”
More recently Adamski has been re-recording and updating some of his old material, including Killer with vocalist Gerideau replacing Seal. Two years ago he re-recorded it with Nina Hagan ‘The Godmother of German Punk.’ “I thought, if I’m going to do it then no way do I want it to be a corny remix of the old version. So, having been completely bored with it for 15 or more years, to get myself interested in myself again I approached it as a new thing and I made the music more driving, with an attitude that would suit Nina.”
But complications with Hagan’s management meant it was never released, so he decided to re-record it again, this time with his friend Gerideau singing. “He has a completely different style to Seal and I’ve had a lot of positive DJ, reactions to it so far."
So what of the future? He’s still making music, he’s DJing and he’s producing.
“I’m developing a new style of music called Neo-Waltz and that’s what I’m mainly interested it at the moment. I’m trying to single-handedly start a revolution of people waltzing on the dance floor. I’ve been collaborating with a lot of interesting people from the punk era through to now and made an EP with a really great Grime MC, I’ve made a track with Rat Scabies from The Damned on drums, and one with Siouxsie and the Banshees drummer Budgie. Right now I’m trying to spread the word and get people interested, and I’m hoping that the re-release of Killer will lift my profile and give me a platform to present it to people from.”
Adamski performs Killer at the final Mangled at Essex University.
Black and White photography by Nat Finkelstein (deceased).
All other photography with special thanks to Harland Payne.
I run Media48, a Colchester based graphic and website design and marketing agency where we know a thing or two about how to market a business. If you would like to find out more about what we can do for your business then give us a call on 0800 756 1470 (we even pay for the call) or email me simon@media48.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment