A Man Called Adam – ‘Fight or Flight’ from ‘The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart’

Somehow I completely missed the fact that A Man Called Adam had made an album in 2019 (the fabulous ‘Farmarama’) so for me at least it felt like this year’s ‘The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart’ set was some kind of magical return from the void. Now one hates to use the despicable genre-term Intelligent Dance Music, but 1991’s ‘The Apple’ and 1998’s ‘Duende’ were certainly records that appealed as much to the intellect as to the feet. In the days when I was doing the Tangents website, the incomparable Kevin Pearce kept the flame burning and we warmed ourselves as much on his texts as on the sounds conjured by Sally Rogers and Steve Jones. He used to insist that ‘The Apple’ was the best album of the ‘90s and from this distance he was surely on the money. In hindsight he might have been a little cooler on ‘Duende’ than I remember, but context of time and space are everything.

In the context of 2023 ‘The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart’ sounds reassuringly like A Man Called Adam. It’s in Sally Rogers’ voice of course, but it is also in the, ahem, vibe of the whole sound. House meets Jazz meets ambient techno experimentalism on the library steps (if you can find one that the Tories have not managed to close down). It is a sound that is esoteric without flying over one’s head, that is often rooted in rhythm whilst acknowledging that, for some of us, some of the time, the beat is not enough. That’s said not as a pejorative, performative dance stance you understand, but more of a gentle observation. Shrug the shoulders and walk into the sunrise. If you know, you know.

‘The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart’ then resonates both with the magnificent treasures of their past and with what feels like natural preoccupations of the present. In other words it is a record of Balearic spirit that conjures memories of Rogers’ Teeside youth as ghosts which filter through contemporary landscapes. Time slips and pauses, passes and rewinds. Magical mesmerism.



I am glad that A Man Called Adam are back in my life.