The Singing Detective

A Yale-educated professor of biology, Bridget Stutchbury roams forests studying the social lives and sexual antics of birds, sharing with us the curious reasons for their strange behaviour, bright colouring and elaborate songs.

Daniel Feeld (Albert Finney) is working on a fictional play for television. The play, entitled "Karaoke", concerns a beautiful young woman working in a sleazy karaoke bar run by Arthur "Pig" Mallion. Fiction and reality begin to intertwine when Feeld overhears snatches of his dialogue in the world around him – and encounters real people bearing his character's names. The lines between the world he has created and the world in which he lives begin to blur – and a desperate struggle to control both becomes enmeshed in his evolving sickness and a terminal diagnosis. Re-writing his will to right wrongs, leaving his body to a cryogenics laboratory, and plotting to go out with a bang, Daniel Feeld is about to write an ending for one world that will have great repercussions in the next.

Moss Side Story is an album by Barry Adamson released in 1989. The album is a concept album, a soundtrack album to a non-existent crime film. The music is almost completely instrumental except for occasional screams, vocal samples and a choir. To achieve the soundtrack 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…". The overall style is reminiscent of the work of Angelo Badalamenti who often collaborates with the film director David Lynch. Adamson would go on to contribute music to Lynch's film Lost Highway (1997). Moss Side is a neighborhood in the city of Manchester, 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. The album was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.