Deaglan
New Member
Touring their second album ‘Stand Your Ground’ which was released at the start of the year, Barrie Cadogan who used to be a hired guitarist with Primal Scream steps into the fray in his own right with this Nottingham trio
POD Concerts presents
LITTLE BARRIE
Support: tba
Wednesday May 23rd
Crawdaddy – Harcourt St – Dublin 2.
Doors – 8pm
Tickets €12.25 (inc. booking fee) available from Ticketmaster, Road Records, City Discs, Sound Cellar and usual outlets. www.ticketmaster.ie
www.littlebarrie.com
www.myspace.com/littlebarrie
Reviews for ‘Stand Your Ground’
“A sweaty, dirty cellarful of noise” Mojo
“Barrie is a compelling frontman; pitting street-corner punk vocals against volleys of reverb and twang” Guardian – 4 stars
“There’s something addictively funky going on here” Q
"It feels like a new band now, with all the stuff that's gone on," says Barrie Cadogan, the guitarist, singer and songwriter who gives his band, Little Barrie, their name. He's referring to the trials and tribulations he and his group have been through since the release of their debut album, We Are Little Barrie, early last year. It's been a year of confusion and rejuvenation, but Barrie, bass player Lewis Wharton and new drummer Billy Skinner are the sort who feel that if it doesn't kill you, it'll help to make you stronger. And they're still standing, which means they must be ready to move mountains.
To tell the whole story of the new album, though, you have to go back to the beginnings of the band. The first Little Barrie single, Shrug Off Love, was released in 1999 on the tiny Stark Reality label, and was the work of Barrie and his friend, drummer Wayne Fullwood.
Portsmouth-raised Wharton, who bought copies of the single for the shop he was working in at the time clicked instantly with barrie and wayne at a subsequent gig and joined the band on their move to London. More singles followed, and by 2004 they had signed to PIAS/WALL OF SOUND imprint Genuine.
The band’s debut LP, We Are Little Barrie, was recorded with the legendary Edwyn Collins in what time the producer and studio owner had to spare. It was released to rave reviews and strong worldwide sales in February of 2005, and the band toured the UK, Europe, the US, Australia and Japan. Somehow, Barrie found time to continue his part-time gig as guitarist-by-appointment to bands looking for some superlative freelance fretwork (his CV includes stints live and in the studio with Morrissey and most recently Primal Scream). But just as it was time to start work on the follow-up, drummer and vocalist Wayne decided he had had enough of the treadmill and left the band.
"Wayne did an amazing job," says Barrie, recalling the early days of the group. "He became a drummer simply because we needed one, which was incredible really. But I guess drumming wasn't something he wanted to do forever."
"You have to put up with loads of shit being in a band," Lewis reasons, "and I think that all got a bit too much for Wayne."
Finding a new drummer didn't turn out to be a huge problem: both Barrie and Lewis knew Billy, although for years neither of them knew he could play the drums. "I was in a country-rock band," Billy says, "so I guess I kept that a bit quiet!" Like Lewis before him, Billy became part of the band almost by default, his energy, dynamism and unpredictability not a direct replacement for Fullwood's solid dependability and backing vocals, but giving the band something different at a time they needed to move in a new direction. The first rehearsals went like a dream – jam sessions that yielded new songs (Pretty Pictures was written in a delirious 20 minutes during those first sessions together) and mapped out new horizons for the band to explore. But even before Billy had had a chance to settle in and make the LB drum stool his own, things had moved on: work on Stand Your Ground had begun with the band between drummers………
In a moment of inspiration, Barrie and Lewis headed off to New York to record with producer Dan "the Automator" Nakamura, an old acquaintance of the band’s manager, and their temporary drumming vacancy was filled by a friend of Dan's, Blues Explosion sticksman Russell Simins, a confirmed Little Barrie fan.
"We had a lot of fun playing with Russell," Lewis recalls. "One night while we were in New York he suggested we should play a gig together. We thought that sounded cool, so he hooked us up with a night at a very hip bar/club called LIT. I think someone got it announced on the radio so there was quite a crowd in. Dan even joined us on stage – he sat in a fold-out chair with a cup-holder and played a bit of percussion. It must have been a good gig – I can't remember too much about the end of the night..."
"We learned a lot with this record," Barrie says. "We worked on 16 tracks in New York, some of them with really complicated drum parts, and Russell learned them all in four days' rehearsals. I don't think we fully appreciated what he'd done 'til we got back and started working on the mixes. He’s incredible. He's played with everyone from Tom Waits to RL Burnside"
"Hubert Sumlin dropped by the studio too," adds Lewis admiringly of the legendary blues guitarist who famously worked with Howlin' Wolf.
Back in London in the New Year, the band took the work they'd completed with the Automator and Russell, and added to it. Four of the tracks on the album – Love You, Green Eyed Fool, that new jam-session song Pretty Pictures and the album's hidden eleventh track, Girls & Shoes – were recorded in London with Billy on drums and Mike Pelanconi, who mixed Lily Allen's debut and produced Graham Coxon's 2004 album, Kiss Of Morning, at the controls. Barrie also overdubbed and re-recorded several guitar parts from the tracks done in the Automator sessions, which were mixed anew by the band and Pelanconi. Finally, the record was ready.
Cut to the present and LITTLE BARRIE are excited – understandably so – by their new record. With a harder, tauter sound, Stand Your Ground stretches Little Barrie beyond even the expansive boundaries they mapped out on their debut, and adds to the rich sources of inspiration they nodded at before (The Meters, the Stone Roses, Shuggie Otis, Jimi Hendrix). They've stirred in some other icons of authentic rock and roll abandon: The Sonics, Gene Vincent and The Cramps have all been on the LB stereo over the past 12 months, and there is a consequent directness and frill-free intensity to the music.
"We thought it might be a bit more of a stripped-down, southern fried soul sort of thing," Barrie begins, explaining that Stand Your Ground even surprised the people making it. "We expected it would maybe almost have a Lee Dorsey, Tony Joe White influence. But then we started getting into different things – started toughening the beats up, and getting into mad '50s reverb on the guitars. I became interested in the energy of those sounds, but still keeping the soulful thing in it. It sort of went a bit darker. We wanted this record to be less psychedelic than the last one, and there's less guitars on it."
While the sound might be leaner, the songs are just as richly detailed. "Just Wanna Play is dedicated to some friends of mine who got burned by a record label," says Barrie, running down some of the songs' stories. "Bailing Out was just a string of thoughts I wrote while we were on tour with DJ Format – 23 dates in 24 days: I'd forgotten about it, then played it in rehearsals, and this kind of bastardised Bo Diddley thing came out. Yeah We Know is just a string of thoughts on things I saw leaning out of a window where I used to live, the Marquis Estate in Islington, which was pretty notorious but we never had any problems. Green Eyed Fool is about a bit of jealousy and cynicism you get from people who haven't had the balls to do things for themselves. They were all finished and written quickly. We did Pin That Badge and Yeah We Know in the same day."
"It wasn't a contrived or conscious thing to change," Barrie concludes, "it's just that you don't want to be doing the same things all the time, and it's all happened quite naturally. It isn't fashionable to play guitar certain ways at the moment, being influenced by blues isn't fashionable; I guess sometimes looking like you give a shit about the music you're playing isn't very fashionable. But you've just got to use your judgement. We wanted to make a harder-hitting record, without it being a rock record: we've come full circle, through all the changes, and I think this album really sums up where we've been."
POD Concerts presents
LITTLE BARRIE
Support: tba
Wednesday May 23rd
Crawdaddy – Harcourt St – Dublin 2.
Doors – 8pm
Tickets €12.25 (inc. booking fee) available from Ticketmaster, Road Records, City Discs, Sound Cellar and usual outlets. www.ticketmaster.ie
www.littlebarrie.com
www.myspace.com/littlebarrie
Reviews for ‘Stand Your Ground’
“A sweaty, dirty cellarful of noise” Mojo
“Barrie is a compelling frontman; pitting street-corner punk vocals against volleys of reverb and twang” Guardian – 4 stars
“There’s something addictively funky going on here” Q
"It feels like a new band now, with all the stuff that's gone on," says Barrie Cadogan, the guitarist, singer and songwriter who gives his band, Little Barrie, their name. He's referring to the trials and tribulations he and his group have been through since the release of their debut album, We Are Little Barrie, early last year. It's been a year of confusion and rejuvenation, but Barrie, bass player Lewis Wharton and new drummer Billy Skinner are the sort who feel that if it doesn't kill you, it'll help to make you stronger. And they're still standing, which means they must be ready to move mountains.
To tell the whole story of the new album, though, you have to go back to the beginnings of the band. The first Little Barrie single, Shrug Off Love, was released in 1999 on the tiny Stark Reality label, and was the work of Barrie and his friend, drummer Wayne Fullwood.
Portsmouth-raised Wharton, who bought copies of the single for the shop he was working in at the time clicked instantly with barrie and wayne at a subsequent gig and joined the band on their move to London. More singles followed, and by 2004 they had signed to PIAS/WALL OF SOUND imprint Genuine.
The band’s debut LP, We Are Little Barrie, was recorded with the legendary Edwyn Collins in what time the producer and studio owner had to spare. It was released to rave reviews and strong worldwide sales in February of 2005, and the band toured the UK, Europe, the US, Australia and Japan. Somehow, Barrie found time to continue his part-time gig as guitarist-by-appointment to bands looking for some superlative freelance fretwork (his CV includes stints live and in the studio with Morrissey and most recently Primal Scream). But just as it was time to start work on the follow-up, drummer and vocalist Wayne decided he had had enough of the treadmill and left the band.
"Wayne did an amazing job," says Barrie, recalling the early days of the group. "He became a drummer simply because we needed one, which was incredible really. But I guess drumming wasn't something he wanted to do forever."
"You have to put up with loads of shit being in a band," Lewis reasons, "and I think that all got a bit too much for Wayne."
Finding a new drummer didn't turn out to be a huge problem: both Barrie and Lewis knew Billy, although for years neither of them knew he could play the drums. "I was in a country-rock band," Billy says, "so I guess I kept that a bit quiet!" Like Lewis before him, Billy became part of the band almost by default, his energy, dynamism and unpredictability not a direct replacement for Fullwood's solid dependability and backing vocals, but giving the band something different at a time they needed to move in a new direction. The first rehearsals went like a dream – jam sessions that yielded new songs (Pretty Pictures was written in a delirious 20 minutes during those first sessions together) and mapped out new horizons for the band to explore. But even before Billy had had a chance to settle in and make the LB drum stool his own, things had moved on: work on Stand Your Ground had begun with the band between drummers………
In a moment of inspiration, Barrie and Lewis headed off to New York to record with producer Dan "the Automator" Nakamura, an old acquaintance of the band’s manager, and their temporary drumming vacancy was filled by a friend of Dan's, Blues Explosion sticksman Russell Simins, a confirmed Little Barrie fan.
"We had a lot of fun playing with Russell," Lewis recalls. "One night while we were in New York he suggested we should play a gig together. We thought that sounded cool, so he hooked us up with a night at a very hip bar/club called LIT. I think someone got it announced on the radio so there was quite a crowd in. Dan even joined us on stage – he sat in a fold-out chair with a cup-holder and played a bit of percussion. It must have been a good gig – I can't remember too much about the end of the night..."
"We learned a lot with this record," Barrie says. "We worked on 16 tracks in New York, some of them with really complicated drum parts, and Russell learned them all in four days' rehearsals. I don't think we fully appreciated what he'd done 'til we got back and started working on the mixes. He’s incredible. He's played with everyone from Tom Waits to RL Burnside"
"Hubert Sumlin dropped by the studio too," adds Lewis admiringly of the legendary blues guitarist who famously worked with Howlin' Wolf.
Back in London in the New Year, the band took the work they'd completed with the Automator and Russell, and added to it. Four of the tracks on the album – Love You, Green Eyed Fool, that new jam-session song Pretty Pictures and the album's hidden eleventh track, Girls & Shoes – were recorded in London with Billy on drums and Mike Pelanconi, who mixed Lily Allen's debut and produced Graham Coxon's 2004 album, Kiss Of Morning, at the controls. Barrie also overdubbed and re-recorded several guitar parts from the tracks done in the Automator sessions, which were mixed anew by the band and Pelanconi. Finally, the record was ready.
Cut to the present and LITTLE BARRIE are excited – understandably so – by their new record. With a harder, tauter sound, Stand Your Ground stretches Little Barrie beyond even the expansive boundaries they mapped out on their debut, and adds to the rich sources of inspiration they nodded at before (The Meters, the Stone Roses, Shuggie Otis, Jimi Hendrix). They've stirred in some other icons of authentic rock and roll abandon: The Sonics, Gene Vincent and The Cramps have all been on the LB stereo over the past 12 months, and there is a consequent directness and frill-free intensity to the music.
"We thought it might be a bit more of a stripped-down, southern fried soul sort of thing," Barrie begins, explaining that Stand Your Ground even surprised the people making it. "We expected it would maybe almost have a Lee Dorsey, Tony Joe White influence. But then we started getting into different things – started toughening the beats up, and getting into mad '50s reverb on the guitars. I became interested in the energy of those sounds, but still keeping the soulful thing in it. It sort of went a bit darker. We wanted this record to be less psychedelic than the last one, and there's less guitars on it."
While the sound might be leaner, the songs are just as richly detailed. "Just Wanna Play is dedicated to some friends of mine who got burned by a record label," says Barrie, running down some of the songs' stories. "Bailing Out was just a string of thoughts I wrote while we were on tour with DJ Format – 23 dates in 24 days: I'd forgotten about it, then played it in rehearsals, and this kind of bastardised Bo Diddley thing came out. Yeah We Know is just a string of thoughts on things I saw leaning out of a window where I used to live, the Marquis Estate in Islington, which was pretty notorious but we never had any problems. Green Eyed Fool is about a bit of jealousy and cynicism you get from people who haven't had the balls to do things for themselves. They were all finished and written quickly. We did Pin That Badge and Yeah We Know in the same day."
"It wasn't a contrived or conscious thing to change," Barrie concludes, "it's just that you don't want to be doing the same things all the time, and it's all happened quite naturally. It isn't fashionable to play guitar certain ways at the moment, being influenced by blues isn't fashionable; I guess sometimes looking like you give a shit about the music you're playing isn't very fashionable. But you've just got to use your judgement. We wanted to make a harder-hitting record, without it being a rock record: we've come full circle, through all the changes, and I think this album really sums up where we've been."
