A Man Called Adam – The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart review

Whilst Steve Jones – one half of A Man Called Adam – was more or less confined during lockdown to his tiny Parisian apartment, Sally Rogers returned to her native Teesside, a place where she grew up as part of a family involved with running the then thriving network of working men’s clubs. Having originally fled the region’s dying industrial corona in favour of London before her eighteenth birthday, the time spent back in the North East was cathartic, providing inspiration for much of what makes up The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart.

There is a plurality to acts who make “dance music” which experiences like the pandemic accidentally unlocked. At one level it’s function is as old as civilisation, but stripped of that context, there became a different onus, one that communal hedonism had no use for. Rogers accompanies the album with a 4,000 word essay taking in the gross environmental impacts of capitalism on her childhood home, of ancient sea and bird life and how a bricolage of influences ranging from Larry Levan to Virginia Astley shaped it’s contents.

In these notes she makes it very clear that whilst it might not be expected they should unpack their process in so much detail, that shift in their music’s purpose made such a reckoning with it inevitable. Accordingly The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart is not a collection solely of four to the floor bangers, as more nuanced tracks like Starlings and In Favour of Storms reveal, and even when in supposed conventional mode (Fight or Flight, Frankie’s Theme) there are nods to jazz, funk and disco. Those nostalgic for the old times can still get their groove on with closer It’s Science Baby. But Sally Rogers has been to the past, and it no longer exists. Where A Man Called Adam go from here, nobody knows.

You can read a full review here.