Adam Zindani

Adam Zindani has an enviable wealth of respect among his peers, rock fans and guitar aficionados, but when he embarked on his first album in his own name, he really only had one listener in mind: himself. 

As happens with some of the best records, an artist who thinks they’re creating music at an essentially personal level, turns out to be making a record for everyone. That’s the deal with Black Eyes Blue, a new album that will connect with Zindani’s existing rock fraternity and reach far beyond to a whole new crowd.

The Birmingham-born musician and songwriter has a lifetime of experience to his name in a range of guises. That included major label tenures with Head, aka Northstar, and as frontman with Casino, who were also known for an intermediate spell as SpiderSimpson. But his highest profile, of course, is via his 15-year, ongoing tenure — and a friendship that goes back much further — as guitarist, singer and songwriter with Welsh rock heroes Stereophonics. 

That has continued apace in 2022 with the multi-million-selling band’s wildly-acclaimed arena tour, hot on the heels of their latest UK No.1 album Oochya! This most recent reminder of the South Wales megaband’s incredible durability is their eighth UK chart-topper, and includes no fewer than three co-writes by Zindani, among them the single ‘Do Ya Feel My Love.’

But now the spotlight falls on the infectious Black Eyes Blue, a project with an aura about it that makes you wonder why Adam waited so long. That said, it came together at the right time and for all the right reasons. “I never really set out to make any type of record apart from something that I would want to listen to myself,” he says cheerfully, adding that he’s never been so happy with the way he’s sounded. 

“I'd had all these ideas, and I’d made records in the past, but for whatever reason, they never turned out quite the way I wanted them to. So I batted a few ideas around in my head.” Some of the songs on the record go back to 2018, and one is from the Casino songbook. The first track to emerge, almost instantaneously, was the arresting ‘What About Love.’

Then came lockdown, which closed many doors for all of us but opened up the possibility of taking this further. “The original premise was nothing more than being creative,” he says. “I left it for a bit, then suddenly there was all this time, and I just thought 'I'm going to make a record.' 

“I’ve got a studio where I live here, so I thought, why don't I just put some demos down, and see how that works. I was really adamant about not getting in the way. I made it with a friend of mine, Dean Deavall, and that was the whole basis of the record. And the guys that played the drums [Jack Taylor] and the bass [Antonio Angotti], I'd never worked with before, I just took a chance. I very purposely just said yes to stuff I would never normally have said yes to.”

What came out was an album with elements of his rock background, but more from the spheres of soul, pop, singer-songwriters and more. Hence everything from the Stones/Prince vibe of ‘Black Eyes Blue’ to the singalong pop-rock of ‘Wanna Get Into You.’ 


He wrote ‘I Just Wanna Feel Something’ at two in the morning in Barcelona. “I was looking to other things to make me happy and I'd got to the point where I realised that was never going to happen,” he confides. “What I really wanted was to feel something real. There's definitely an element of looking in the mirror there.” But ‘Dance,’ on the other hand, is “about someone going ‘Come on, let's just go and have a good time.’ That's how I was feeling. I didn’t want to be deep and serious.”

Growing up, music arrived in Adam’s consciousness from every angle. “I’ve always been influenced by lots of different music. Every artists says that, don't they, but I grew up with seven brothers and sisters and it was a very musical family. There was soul, like Marvin Gaye and big ‘70s groups like the Chi-Lites and Earth, Wind & Fire, and Queen and The Beatles, of course. From my brothers, I got the Specials, Bowie and everything in between. Then it was the Smiths and new age.

“I started to play the guitar when I was 16, so I was kind of a latecomer. So when I did this record, I was very much in the mindframe of not wanting it to be a rock record per se, with lots of guitars on it.”

Zindani’s playing world was initially informed by rock, but that’s expanded with the passing years. “It was rock music that got me into first playing the guitar, and that became me for a while. But then the older I got, the more I found myself realising I like lots of different types of music, and that leads us to the record I have today. What's also really influenced me is my kids, and listening to the stuff in lockdown that they were listening to, like The xx.”

He and the ‘phonics knew each other from early years. “When Head got signed to Geffen, they'd just got signed to V2,” says Adam, “and we played on the same bill in front of, like, five people at the Varsity in Wolverhampton, in 1997. We were the band of the moment where we lived, and the 'phonics were doing their first tour. We’ve always been really good friends since that point. We were into similar types of music. Me and Kelly bonded over AC/DC, and that was that.

“When my record deal finished, he rang me up and said ‘How you getting on?’ He'd asked me a few times to get involved with the band, and I'd always said no, only because I was so involved in doing my own thing. At that point, I just wanted a break to do something else, so I just jumped on board to do a few gigs. Next thing I know, it's 15 years later.”

Now, all of Adam Zindani’s decades of musical experience give us Black Eyes Blue, putting him centre stage for the first time. “I've never done anything like this before,” he says. “I'm just interested in being as creative as I can, and that really is what goes through this record. And not taking myself too seriously. 

“People have been sought out to work on it because they're really talented, and that's the bit that I've really enjoyed. Making this record has completely changed my life,” he concludes. “I’m so happy to be able to say that, and mean it.”