Pure
Pop
In
the small courtyard to the rear of Pure Pop are assembled the lucky few who
grabbed one of the 50 tickets made available for this unusual and special
occasion. Famous for being a founding member of Magazine, short term member of
The Birthday Party, long-term member of The Bad Seeds, but mostly renown for
his solo and soundtrack work, Barry Adamson is an unpredictable creative force.
Tonight he’s showcasing the first Australian screening of his directorial debut
Therapist, a 40-minute short film
that, true to form, is dark, bizarre, difficult to explain and totally
compelling.
Once
the schmoozing dies down and MC Dave Graney takes to the stage to introduce the
film, we go from boozy hubbub to reverential silence. The film itself concerns
a filmmaker seeing a therapist to help with his suppressed fears, while the
film he’s writing (entitled The Gemini
Complex) or flashbacks he is having, are playing out between these highly
stylised scenes. About 20 minutes into the film, during a scene in which a
traumatic rape may or may not be happening, a woman in the front row collapses
with a heart attack, is lead out by her neighbour, and followed by most of the
front row. In this alternate psychological reality Adamson seems to broadcast
from, it seems a reasonable response to the questions raised. His musings on
memory, identity, duplicity, how a character is created and how they splinter
under analysis is done in using lingering shots, stilted dialogue, chiaroscuro
lighting and his trademark neo-noir moodiness. It’s powerful stuff.
While
no one pretends to understand it (in a pre-screening interview Adamson states:
‘it’s a hard story to explain, that’s why I made a film about it,’) we’re all
rapturous in our appreciation. It is incredibly
stylish, well acted, and Lynchian in its obsession with the extrication of the
macabre from the mundane, which, as one audience member points out ‘is great,
because David Lynch hasn’t made enough films, so even something like one of his
films is a good thing’.
Following
an illuminating Q&A, Adamson performs three songs acoustically, all of
which are featured on the forthcoming album I
Will Set You Free that he’s promoting in May with a backing band at the
Corner. Irritating feedback aside, The
Sun and The Sea is a song that doesn’t relate to any previous concept you
may have about Barry Adamson. It’s a sprightly pop number concerning optimism
and transcendence of the mundane and, like the following songs, highlights his
wonderfully warm, expressive and remarkably young-sounding tenor. A powerful
instrument that occasionally slips into a near-vampiric basso profundo that Dario Argento could base an entire film around.
Which
is nothing compared to the song he is most proud of, a piano ballad entitled If You Love Her, which Seal could
probably cover and make Adamson a millionaire from if he so chose. Hearing this
sort of naked emotional soulfulness that has previously been channelled into
complex arrangements, crafted into the soundtrack to a fictitious film or used
to offset some frantic chase music, is a revelation. Quite how his following
takes it is another thing, but it’s unlikely he cares, or should care. True to
the form of an auteur, he’s already drawing from the next creative well and it’s
bound to be just as fascinating, personal and bizarre.
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