Barry Adamson has announced details of his original score for SCALA!!! – the anarchic, uproarious, and ultimately heart-breaking documentary about London’s notorious rep cinema. The 22-track album is set for release via Mute on limited edition “banned blood” vinyl, CD and digitally on 16 January 2026.
Adamson’s music for SCALA!!! Or, the incredibly strange rise and fall of the world’s wildest cinema and how it influenced a mixed-up generation of weirdos and misfits (Jane Giles, Ali Catterall, 2023) brings his noir filmic sensibilities to their spiritual home: the legendary Scala cinema in London which ran from 1973-1993. During that time, the cinema hosted truly eye-popping film programming, with double-feature screenings, unforgettable All-Nighters, occasional live performances, and frequent showcases for auteurs such as John Waters, Russ Myer, Derek Jarman and David Lynch, and became hugely influential to generations. The documentary features revealing, hilarious and touching interviews with regulars, staff and artists such as John Waters, Peter Strickland, Mark Moore, Ben Wheatley and Barry Adamson, who talks about the cinema’s impact on his own creative vision.Adamson’s score captures the cinema’s spirit: late night underground screenings that opened up new vistas to its clientele, the intoxicating world of subversive art, sticky floors, dubious stains on the upholstery and, of course, the cinema’s resident cats. Referencing some of the films that screened, the artists that played and the eventual court case that would lead to the cinema’s demise across 22 tracks, Adamson conjures moods that shift from brooding and cinematic to playful and chaotic, echoing the wild programming and cultural rebellion the Scala embodied.
Brought up in Manchester’s Moss Side, Adamson learnt to play the bass overnight for Magazine. When they disbanded, five albums later in 1981, his singular style was spotted by The Birthday Party, with whom he played several times. His establishment as a solo artist came after a three-year stint with Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds with the release of his classic first solo album, Moss Side Story – the ultimate soundtrack to an “imaginary film” – which raised Adamson’s name as a composer of diverse complexity; able to tell a story with music, where the images were those supplanted in the minds of the listeners. Adamson has worked with some of the film industry’s most intriguing mavericks including Derek Jarman (The Last of England, 1987), David Lynch (The Lost Highway, 1997), Oliver Stone (Natural Born Killers, 1994) and Danny Boyle (The Beach, 2000).
Having released ten studio albums, including the 1992 Mercury Music Prize nominated Soul Murder, 1996’s Oedipus Schmoedipus, an album celebrating his 40 years in music, Memento Mori (2018), Adamson’s talents are as much in demand by new generations of artists as he was after his first solo release, with collaborations in recent years across a variety of art forms, including an Olivier Award winning ballet performance by Sylvie Guillem and the Ballet Boyz scored by Adamson. His most recent studio album, Cut To Black, was released in 2024.
