What was Barry Adamson before he went solo - A Seed by James Brown Barry Adamson has meandered memorably from Magazine (Hiya Howie!) to The Bad Seeds (Heh Nicky Nobhead!) to solo soundtracks (To Art!). Supersleuth JAMES BROWN took a walk on the wharf side with the man they call Baz. across the Thames at St Pauls - power-brokers shovel power-grub down power-necks into power-guts. Every meal they seal another deal. Every day - over the best roast beef in London - these supposedly sharp business heads continuously drink themselves short of brain cells and win themselves inches of fat around the belly.

Meanwhile - on the Southside's clean concrete walkways - skateboarding gangs flit in and out of pedestrians. Expectant middle class actors rabbit about the LWT drama role they think they've just clinched - and slightly wiser business couples run through the afternoon's agenda under the protective warmth of a rare late Autumn sun. A lifeless length in rotting clothes - toes pushing through the soles of purple nylon socks - lies invisible on an opened sleeping bag. Nobody notices the destitute when it shines.

Barry Adamson - musician - cuts his way through the parties of comfortably dressed sixth formers to look at the book stalls that hide beneath the permanent shadow of Waterloo Bridge. He glances for a second at the greasy hardback coffee-table tomes - shivers momentarily - and walks hastily back out into the pleasure of the low tide and sun.

Making his way along the bankside - his eyes and thoughts sunk deeply into the dark river - Adamson scans back to the sunrise he'd watched that morning from the deck of his own shared house boat moored upstream at Chelsea.

The sun had reached down and spread it's glow throughout Barry's dark body. For the first time in two months his jaw didn't ache. His mangled wisdom teeth had been removed the week before and the swelling had subsided.

He cast his right hand down his jaw and let his fingers run through the stubble and dimple on his cheek. It felt good - the wire had been off for weeks - the mouth was ready to use again. He would finally make the NME interview. turns round to the other guy and goes - 'And you're my brother and you do that to me' - and walked away. It's one of the most dangerous places going.

Barry Adamson isn't describing the Limelight - where he had his jaw broken - but a bar he visited to fry and recruit extras for the promotional video of his debut solo single 'The Man With The Golden Arm' on Mute. In the end the assorted Irish whiskey men couldn't be dragged away from their small glasses down to Crazy Larry's in Chelsea for the shoot - so Adamson used a selection of suitable looking friends and acquaintances - including Kid Congo of The Bad Seeds and Marcia Schofield of The Fall.

The promo video of 'The Man With The Golden Arm' is a classy lurch into the same sort of seedy sawdust-on-the-floor romanticism that is evoked by Adamson's 88 version of the classic Elmer Bernstein booze'n'blues soundtrack.

Shot in sepiatone - and beginning and and when I say fight I mean one guys' hand was covered in blood up to here. And then finally he ending focused on Marcia Schofield's leggy body - the video draws the viewer into a eye-rubbing state of double take and fascination. One scene in particular - where posters of Adamson on a white bedroom wall are transposed through a spinning camera with a similar portrait of Kim Novak - is captivating.

"Musically I wanted to draw out the nightmarish aspect of the subject - so the video needed a story rather than just three minutes of flashing images. We deliberately didn't do a pastiche of a clip from the film as we wanted to keep well away from it altogether."

"In the scene you mentioned I was trying to get across the idea that the girl in the video is obsessed by me and I'm obsessed by Kim Novak. And we did it in the same room so it did get weird and mixed up. So the viewer would ask whether or not it was the same poster in the same room."

The Man With The Golden Arm is a '50s film - directed by Otto Preminger - starring Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak - about a heroin addict's comedown. Winning Academy Award Nominations for Sinatra and Bernstein - though little critical praise - the film was taken from the novel of the same name by Chicago street writer Nelson Algren. The same author also wrote a book called Walk On The Wild Side which a certain Lou Reed later borrowed for a title.

Though I only stumbled across Aigren a month ago my infinite knowledge and understanding of contemporary American fiction (which sort of begins with Hunter S Thompson and ends with the lyrics to 'It Takes A Nation of Millions') leads me to believe that Nelson Algren is by far the most astute - economical and pngted chronicler of slum-life ever to spit in a gutter.

This will be no revelation for lit fans - people have been praising Algren since he wrote his major works in the '50s - but to put a little perspective on it let me tell you that he's like Bukowski (remember Badly?) without the wanking. In fact he's far better than that. This isn't an NME English lesson - simply a reminder of and tribute to the fact that literature is and always will be far superior to pop music. Of course there are some who will always do their best to dent this bit of fact and feeling.

Barry Adamson is one - his version of 'Man With The Golden Arm' is a strong treatment of a powerful soundtrack. Although sticking to the overall original structure he's teased out the delicate suspense-creating parts of the Bernstein score and maximised the crescendos. He's added the sassy guitar clank that he planted in The Bad Seeds - and in doing so he's taken the song away from the dance halls of the States and left it in some hard little blues/noise den in Manchester or Berlin.

The idea to do a cover of 'The Man With The Golden Arm' came to Adamson seven years ago whilst watching the film with then Magazine drummer John Doyle.

"We both agreed it was a brilliant piece of music and I thought that if I could ever construct a piece of music that conveys its subject so well it would be a perfect vehicle to use to get into writing serious soundtracks."

Seven years after the split of Magazine - after helping form The Bad Seeds with Nick Cave - Adamson finally got around to making what he hopes will be his vehicle into soundtracks.

He's already written a piece for the score of Derek Jarman's The Last Of England and was approached to re-write his version of 'The Man With The Golden Arm' for atop American business show - "which I turned down because basically they wanted me to make it sound tamer."

"I wanted to make my version of the song quite frightening and intense. There was a lot of complicated orchestration on the original which was quite hard to fathom out during my research - and of course I couldn't get a 40-piece orchestra so I had to fashion it with the tools I had -'88 style."

Adamson's next release in the New Year will be 'Moss Side Story' - an LP on Mute - which is a "soundtrack to my own imagination".

"I had all these scenes in my head and I was putting imaginary music to them so I thought. . why not? It's also a different approach to making an LP as well."

"When I was 18 and just starting out in Magazine - Howard (Devoto) said to me - 'You've got to decide now whether you're going to be a musician or a celebrity. And I've never once really given it any thought until now."

And with that Barry Adamson pushes his coat over the crook of his arm - places one foot in front of the other and begins weaving his way back to Chelsea along the banks of the River Thames. Across the city bridges the power-brokers are encouraging each other's power-coronaries and - Southside - the destitute lie dying in the sun.