Adamski – Killer

A Camden instrumental that became a number one

In 1989 Adam Tinley, who recorded as Adamski, was making instrumentals in a flat in Camden, with a drum machine and keyboards set up at home. He already had a hit that year with N-R-G. One of the new pieces he called The Killer, because it sounded to him like music for a murder scene in a film. He played it as an instrumental in DJ sets, including, by his account, the closing party at Amnesia in Ibiza in the late summer of 1989. He did not think it was a single.

Seal, then Sealhenry Samuel, had been singing in blues bands and had come back from a year of travelling with a demo tape. He and Adamski met on New Year’s Eve 1989 at a London club called Solaris. Adamski asked him to pick an instrumental and sing on it. Seal chose The Killer. Adamski has said the vocal was recorded on 27 January 1990, the same day about 10,000 people gathered in Trafalgar Square, not far from the studio, for the Freedom to Party demonstration against a government crackdown on raves. Adamski went to that rally himself.

Seal wrote the words with him. The lyric pushes at whatever holds a person back, including a line about racism among “future kids.” The title only makes plain sense once Seal sings that loneliness is the killer. On the record the voice sits over a hard, repeating keyboard line and a drum-machine pattern that stays simple so the vocal can cut through. Adamski produced it. The original single is credited to him alone, even though Seal is the singer.