Sonny E. is the reinvention of ‘Acid House & NRG King’ Adamski aka Adam Paul Tinley, who released his new track ‘Time’ on 5th September – available across all the usual platforms.
“I know there’s an infinite number of songs about time but not as many as there are songs about love and/or sex and dancing so I’m very happy to add to the tradition. Aptly, for the subject matter, it’s taken me around half of my life to complete this song …one or two lines every couple of years …I’m not sure if spending so much time on a simple two-minute song means I’m a good or bad artist? but I’m in no particular rush and very satisfied with the end result. It is also a hybrid of my two main passions – rockabilly, a timeless sound, which has of course existed since the birth of pop culture as we know it, and AI which for me is the most inspiring technological development since the advent of sampling as an artform. Therefore, I consider myself a teddy boy timelord and this is augmented reality rockabilly …. cyberbilly.” SONNY E.
LISTEN TO TIME HERE: https://on.soundcloud.com/CMggmLlrNJcCWTjtj9
Sonny E. was a teenager in the era when new and exciting youth subcultures frequently sprang up, and the new and updated musical genres affiliated with them constantly mutated and fed into each other. As an avid music junkie and driven by aesthetics, Sonny absorbed the best of these deep into his psyche; most significantly Rockabilly and its wilder offspring, Psychobilly, Electro (both mainstream and underground), so-called ‘GenderBenders’ and the heavily automated electronic music that set the stage for Acid House and Techno…some of the key artists that had a profound influence on the spongelike Sonny were The Cramps, The Meteors, Alan Vega and Martin Rev (both their solo works and together as Suicide), Devo, The Human League, Mantronix and a plethora of predominantly American 1950s trailblazers…
Consequently Sonny E. had now truly embarked on his Cyberbilly odyssey. He taught himself to play simple chords and used the preset basslines on a Casiotone MT-40 home keyboard, then with a rudimentary synthesizer built by a school friend from Maplin components he progressed to making plinky plonky dance beats. He also spent many, many lonesome hours in his bedroom working out how to play twangy rockabilly riffs on cheap Woolworth’s guitars…
So obsessed by music was Sonny that he “left school at 16 unqualified and unwilling to do anything work related, and was soon after ejected from the family home by my father”. Aged 17 and living in squats in Hackney he was further fuelled on his mission by attending some early Sigue Sigue Sputnik gigs. “I loved their look, live sound and manifesto,” he says. “Still do!”
Not long after this he was to discover the music of pioneering American DJ /producers like Adonis, Dj Pierre and Derrick May, who formed the basis of what evolved into the seemingly unstoppable global Rave culture we now know… He became captivated by their other worldly sounds and the thrilling social scene they begat.
He also visited the island of Ibiza in the days before it was taken over by ‘superclubs’ and rampant consumerism and had his mind blown by the extremely diverse and influential Balearic style being spun by DJs Alfredo, Pippi and Cesare – ‘The Race’ by Yello having a particularly preemptive impact.
Sonny was engulfed by this whole shebang for many years to come, spending three decades in the greatest nightspots of the world providing sci-fi beats for hedonists – under various guises – but in recent years has eschewed all that to focus on his primary passion, and is now spurting all his creative juice into what he terms Cyberbilly – a very literal description of his music which has its basis in original Rockabilly (the Big Bang of popular culture) while embracing the sounds and methods of contemporary technology…. a one-man band like psychobilly originator Hasil Adkins, the self-styled Teddy Boy Timelord comes armed with simply a laptop and a microphone, swaggering down the information superhighway to source the most rockin’ elements from 1955-2099. This is Cyberbilly. this is Sonny E.
