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tutor on the course. She’s also one of the regular Demon Barber dancers who, with two other Roadshow stars Fiona Bradshaw and Tiny Taylor, ended up dancing on three rather precarious-looking green barrels to enthral the Saturday shoppers at the climax of Hazlewood’s TV show. The whole thing was exciting, exhilarating and oddly mov- ing, suggesting that, far from being totally indifferent, hostile and anaesthetised to its own traditions in the Simon Cowell age of shallow glamour, the great big mass public is fascinated and rather thrilled to be rein- troduced to its own traditions.
So the Barbers have every right to dream that their imagination and enter- prise in formulating a vibrant show dis- playing the connections between one very old working class dance tradition and a very different, thoroughly modern dance style born of a similar premise of self- expression and lack of money, will hit the right chord and open up a whole new audience both to their own music and two apparently alien cultures.
“I’m still a bit nervous about it,” con- cedes Damien, deep into his third coffee. They plan to hit the road with it in the autumn and hope the people who came out to give standing ovations on the two performances so far weren’t all friends and family.
“We thought we had a good show but
we didn’t expect that reaction,” he says. “Basically we just didn’t want to end up looking like tits. It’s difficult playing around with traditional dance while stay- ing true to both it and the people you socialise with yet pushing it somewhere else. This is still just the beginning, there’s still a lot of ideas we can look at as we dis- cover more about how the two cultures can work together.”
“I
t will develop organically as we get to know each other better,” agrees Bryony. “The first show we did was a bit ‘us and them’, but the sec-
ond one came together a lot more. See, we’re not used to theatre performance, either. It’s all very proper and it’s sort of acting because we’re having to play our characters on stage throughout the per- formance, even though it’s a safe environ- ment because it’s set inside a bar and we’re used to being in bars.”
The name Demon Barber was origin - ally coined for Damien by his late friend and defining influence Peter Bellamy. Both came from Norfok and Damien cut his teeth at a local folk club listening to Wal- ter Pardon, the great traditional singer Bellamy himself had discovered. And when Damien left East Anglia he wound up in Yorkshire, tramping the same Keighley roads to which Bellamy had gravitated.
Bellamy subsequently became some- thing of a mentor to the young Barber as he set out on the folk scene singing and playing traditional folk songs. Barber clearly acknowledges the debt he owes to Bellamy and other seminal heroes of the 1970s club scene like Dick Gaughan and Mike Wilson in a lovely tribute album, Under The Influence, released in 2009.
He also partnered Fay Hield in a singing duo and involved himself in morris and rapper, while carving out a solo career. However, a trip to the Folk Alliance confer- ence in America, where he appeared as a solo act, led to a radical re-think and a change in direction.
It was there he met the band
Cordelia’s Dad, and their amalgamation of rock and traditional music left a deep impression on him. They talked long and
hard into the night about their approach and the conflicts surrounding playing both full-blooded rock and hardcore traditional music back to back, with all the confusion it instils in audiences.
Damien returned to Yorkshire with a firm plan to form an electric band to back his traditional songs. The band – which he decided would make its debut at Whitby Festival – was to be Cordelia’s Dad bass player Cath Oss (now Tyler), Gina Le Faux on fiddle and Gareth Turner of Little Johnny England on box. That was the band in his head anyway. In reality Cath Oss couldn’t get a visa, Gina Le Faux went into hospital and Gareth Turner was too busy with Little Johnny England so it never happened. “That beautiful baby I’d creat- ed in my mind is still in Whitby some- where,” says Damien ruefully.
The idea, however, stuck with him and took firm root when he recruited Bryony Griffith to play fiddle with him. “I only said yes because I thought he was asking if I wanted a pint,” says Bryony.
Damien and Bryony had originally met at Whitby several years earlier when the then 14-year-old Bryony persuaded her reluctant mum – an A-level music teacher – to take her to the festival. Mum had big plans for Bryony, a gifted classical violinist who could read music before she could read words. But she became disenchanted with classical music and, listening to the crashing beats of The Mission, New Model Army and The Levellers pounding through the wall from her brother’s bedroom next door, she got out her violin and started playing along with that instead.
“It sounded much more exciting than the stupid Bach concerto they were mak- ing me play. My mum had high hopes for me. I was quite good at classical music but
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