BARRY ADAMSON - Scala !!! (film score, motion picture soundtrack)

Barry Adamson, former member of Magazine and Bad Seeds, has always been drawn to the relationship between music and image, and has already lent his personal blend of jazz, noir, funk, electronics and neoclassical music to major names in cinema, including David Lynch.

“Scala !!!” is in many ways a summa of this artistic journey, a soundtrack for the documentary film by Jane Giles and Ali Catterall centred on the twenty years of activity of a legendary London underground cinema (Scala 1973-1993), a cinematic phenomenon that stirred interest and admiration among major film figures such as Derek Jarman, John Waters, Russ Meyer and David Lynch himself.

A tasty opportunity for Barry Adamson, who across these 22 tracks and forty-two minutes of music unspools his entire sonic and cinematic knowledge, moving from the late-sixties echoes of the opening track, "Scala!!! – Opening Title", to the Henry Mancini-style suppleness of "Babs Johnson Is Divine", reconciling underground languages and the revolutionary spirit of independent cinema, referencing with apparent fragmentation and renewed pioneering verve every variable of a musical universe that in recent years has found itself under the critical and public spotlight.

Funk–soul filtered through Blaxploitation ("Scala Cats"), new romantic gambles ("Spandau Politics"), sounds hovering between sexy movie and porn ("Sodom And Tomorrow"), rock culture ("Iggy And Lou And Mick Rock Too") and disco contaminations ("Barry's Iranian Embassy Blues") form a unicum in which the logic of those B-movies that altered the language of cinema prevails. An alternate universe where western films have lost their heroic connotation ("Black Leather Lovers"), where comedy (grotesque and noir) and action (spy-story and kung-fu) merge with sarcastic elegance ("Back To The Cats", "Timelines"), borrowing from horror cinema its low-cost techniques ("Pink Narcissus") and emotional suggestion ("Another Allnighter") – cinematic languages that "Scala!!!" makes tangible through a varied sonic puzzle rich in visual references.

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25/01/2026