Sally Rodgers and Steve Jones’s music has long been associated with blissful beach scenes. Early evangelists for the Ibizan Balearic aesthetic, and stalwarts of untold chillout compilations, as A Man Called Adam they make the sort of music people call “sun-dappled”. So it may surprise casual listeners to find that their new album, The Girl With a Hole in Her Heart, was inspired by abandoned steelworks, poisoned shellfish and the harsh North Sea winds of the Teesside coast where Rodgers grew up.
It’s not really a radical departure, though. It’s still full of disco, electropop and lush, lyrical downtempo moods – with the lyrics poetically abstracted rather than agit-prop or kitchen-sink realist. The pair first put it together remotely, during Covid lockdown, then together in north-east England just as allegations of corruption around Teesside’s de-industrialisation were emerging. And this, Rodgers says, “provided us with something to be angry about, something to be proud about, all kinds of emotions. It prompted me to write about my childhood, too, and gave this record a sense of place.”
The duo have been a musical partnership and close friends since 1987, when Rodgers, a mod and northern soul fan who’d been in a couple of short-lived bands, recruited Jones, then a rockabilly and doo-wop obsessive, as a keyboard-player. At first, they were funk and acid jazz aligned, but in 1988 they were swept up musically and personally in the acid house explosion. Rodgers calls the era “a little Camelot, a golden moment” – and says that, of all musical styles, house is the only one she feels comfortable being affiliated with “because it’s more a church than a genre”.
In their studio in Rodgers’s semi-detached on the coast between Redcar and Saltburn, the pair’s relationship quickly becomes clear. She does 95% of the talking, while Jones will interject with a dry correction or apposite phrase. She is the poet, he the technician – though they co-produced from the start. When they signed to Big Life in 1990, there was an attempt to groom them as a pop-dance act. However, they were making tracks like Barefoot in the Head (named after a Brian Aldiss psychedelic sci-fi book) and Chrono Psionic Interface (with 12-minute Andrew Weatherall remixes). Although beloved of Balearic crowds, this was not chart fare.
In 1993, they went DIY with their own Other label. Since then, they’ve managed to navigate a line between the house underground, crossover success with lush chillout ballads, academia (both have PhDs), and soundtracking art installations as Discrete Machines. But when Covid hit, they found themselves separated, Rodgers looking after her elderly mother in the north-east, Jones in a small apartment in Paris. Piano-playing was Jones’s outlet: “I started putting hands on the keys. It became a way of coping – then I’d find nice little chord progressions and jot them down. I’d make sketches and send them to Sally.”
She started putting beats and lyrical ideas to them, capturing her own sense of solitude. “While Steve was plunking the piano in Paris,” she says, “I was walking the dog five hours a day on the coast.” When Jones joined her to complete the songs in 2021, she says, “things were getting quite intense round here”. Thousands of jobs had been lost in the 2010s, and scandals were brewing around the sale of the Redcar steelworks. Then there was the mass die-off of shellfish alleged to be caused by old industrial pollutants stirred up by the dredging of the estuary for the Rishi Sunak-championed Teesside Freeport. Their vision for the record was drawn from what Jones calls “this beautiful natural environment with decaying industry layered over it”. “And,” adds Rodgers, “60, 70 years of pollution being stirred up!”
As always in their records, beauty remained vital. “If we have a manifesto,” continues Rodgers, “it’s to make music that touches people, but that they can project their own emotional life on to. The songs have to have deep strata. People will say, ‘Oh, that was our first wedding dance song, our funeral song.’ You don’t want to tell them, ‘Ah, that one was about depression, that one was about suicide, that one’s about an angry breakup.’” There will be more direct reference to their inspirations in People Powered: Stories from the River Tees, an exhibition in collaboration with Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and the National Portrait Gallery, which the pair are soundtracking this summer.
But, with this album, A Man Called Adam have created one of the most potent, bittersweet records in their 35-year career. For all its grit, The Girl With a Hole in Her Heart still carries the optimism of acid house and Balearic beats: Rodgers’s “golden moment” of 1988. “It stays in your heart,” she says, “and you wish it would for everybody.” There’s sunshine on the beaches of Teesside, too.
The Girl With a Hole in Her Heart is out on 26 May on Other Records
