Moss Side Story

Moss Side Story is an album by Barry Adamson released in 1989. The album is a concept album. The music is almost completely instrumental except for occasional screams, samples and a choir. The concept is the score to a fictitious film. To achieve the effect the song titles are descriptive of a film noir plot outline. The inner sleeve came with a short story written by Dave Graney which added to the concept. This complemented outer sleeve which displays the tag line: "In a black and white world, murder brings a touch of colour...".

Contents

• Barry adamson on snub tv moss side story manchester
• Legacy
• Track listing
• Personnel
• Songs
• References

The NME review of the albums describes it as a "Grand filmic suite intended as the soundtrack to a "provocative film thriller set in Manchester's Moss Side" and that Moss Side Story is "one of the best soundtracks ever, the fact that it has no accompanying movie is a trifling irrelevance."

The overall style is reminiscent of the work of Angelo Badalamenti who often collaborates with the film director David Lynch.

CD versions came with three bonus tracks. Two of them - "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and "The Man With The Golden Arm" (composed by Elmer Bernstein) - are drawn from TV or film themes. "Alfred Hitchock Presents" is a reworking of the theme to the series of the same name, Charles Gounod's "Funeral March of a Marionette."

Moss Side is a district near the centre of Manchester in Great Britain, where Adamson was born. The album title is a play on words and a reference to Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story. The title of "The Swinging Detective" plays on Dennis Potter's series of television plays The Singing Detective, while "Round Up The Usual Suspects" is a line made famous by Claude Rains in Casablanca.