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Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars
Hamilton-esque books, authors..
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Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars by Barry Adamson
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That rang a bell, and I found a nice review of the book in November 2021’s Mojo (Let It Be cover). I can’t give a URL, sorry, as I get the virtual edition courtesy of Aberdeen City Libraries’ largesse in sponsoring Pressreader. I may have read an interview with Barry too, but I can’t remember if or where.
Although, via copy and paste:
If Barry Adamson was simply known for his groundbreaking work as a founder member of Magazine, he would have had more than enough material for an autobiography. Yet he is also able to draw here on his time playing bass for Pete Shelley and for Iggy Pop, standing in for Tracey Pew in The Birthday Party and being a key member of The Bad Seeds during their first four albums. It’s such a rich seam that this book finishes in the late ’80s, just before the start of his varied career as a solo artist and movie soundtrack composer. To those achievements, he can add the writing of a compellingly honest and evocative memoir, giving equal weight to childhood experiences alongside subsequent band tensions and rivalries, all illuminated along the way by pin-sharp pop culture references. A nuanced and ultimately very positive meditation on illness, love, race, identity, loss, football, substance abuse and the transformative power of great music.
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My appetite is further whetted
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This is great
Mark lavished Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars with five stars and urged me to get hold of a copy. Here's a place for anyone so inclined to comment
A member of seminal new-wave band Magazine, the original bassist in the legendary Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, a Mercury-Prize-nominated solo artist, and pioneer of the imaginary soundtrack album—no matter where Barry Adamson’s career has taken him, the result has been consistently impressive. Covering his early life up to the 1990s, ‘The Barry Adamson Story’ addresses Adamson’s Mancunian and mixed-race roots, beginning in the late 1950s, through to the highs of his momentous musical achievements and the lows of psychiatric hospitals and drug rehabs. Using a ‘noir’ style of self examination, he also investigates the acute loss of his parents and sister in his early twenties, multiple failed relationships and arrives at the beginnings of a successful Hollywood soundtrack career.