I became uninterested. I was a stupid, stubborn teenager. I didn’t enjoy the study. I thought it ruined it when you were told to listen to something and then write a big essay on it.”
“So I heard this other stuff and thought it sounded loads more interesting and I could play along with it by ear. That led me to delve into folkier stuff like Steel- eye Span and Fairport Convention and I found this whole new world and thought wooowwwww.”
Her dad hated folk music (“he used to say ‘why are you listening to this miserable shit?’”) but her mum agreed to take her to Whitby. “So I was there at the front in me stripey folk trousers and Damien Barber was on and I was amazed because he was about the only young person there. I went up afterwards to get his autograph in my programme but…I chickened out. I ended up with Ged Foley’s autograph instead.”
She’d previously played in an orches- tra with Will Hampson (“he was sitting at the back of the third violins not having a clue what was going on”) after which he turned to the more organic comforts of a melodeon and formed Cajun band the Butter Mountain Boys with his step - brothers. Bryony jumped at the offer to join them on fiddle and her folk career – and enduring partnership with Will – was under way. They formed the ceilidh band Bedlam and, after moving to Newcastle in the early 2000s, Bryony teamed up with housemates Fay Hield, Becky Stockwell and Gillian Tolfrey in the Witches Of Elswick, primarily singing unaccompanied.
“Oh, the Witches was brilliant,” she says. “It was so easy, ‘cos we didn’t have any gear to carry around. Just our voices. We’d do soundchecks in five minutes. The Demons is a bit of a nightmare compared to that. Mind you, we did have some bad
gigs when nobody came. Our worst one was in Huddersfield where I’m
from.Very embarrassing. None of my friends turned up. My dad took us and stood at the back and I could see him thinking ‘this is an hor- rific experience…’ We didn’t normally play our fiddles because we couldn’t be arsed to fit them in the car with all the clothes, but we took them to that gig. On the way home me dad said ‘Yeah, I liked it when you played your fiddles…’”
The Demon Barbers made their official debut at the Metropole during Whitby Folk Week. It was a disaster.
“We couldn’t hear a thing,” winces T
Bryony.“ The Metropole is a fantastic acoustic venue but once you put a PA in it’s awful. All you could hear was the drumkit bouncing back off the wall. The general comment was that it was bloody awful but people still liked the idea. That gave us the confidence to try and do it better.”
he idea of using dancers as an extended band was forged early on following a Damien Barber & Friends show at Whitby when several of the ‘friends’ hap- pened to be dancers. Not a totally new concept, of course. The Albion Band fea- tured morris dancers back in the day and various others like the Doonans have done it since, but it was still sufficiently novel to arouse considerable interest, though not everyone understood the concept, with promoters wary of booking what sounded to them like a travelling ceilidh.
“For me it was normal to play for dancing,” says Bryony. “I used to go to Holmfirth Festival a lot and I always played for dancers – Bedlam, Dog Rose, Rivington, Newcastle Kingsmen…”
They also had problems with Damien himself who, in 11 years as a solo act, had
developed a maverick individuality, essen- tially pleasing himself in terms of reper- toire, timing and lyrics. He initially found it impossible to adapt to the regular disci- plines of band life.
“I’d make up verses, put in new things, add extra bits and everyone would wonder what the hell was going on. I knew what I was doing and I assumed everybody else did too. I thought that was how bands worked – telepathy. Basically this lot are far more academic than me. I can’t read music and back then I didn’t even know what a time signature was. I’d been solo so long I didn’t need to know.”
Bryony: “He didn’t know that when you count something in you do it at the speed you play at. He just went 1-2-3-4- go!”
“That’s what the old punk bands used to do, innit?” says Damien, a little affront- ed. “I had a basic idea of what I wanted at the start but now they’re in charge – I’m just a puppet front man. All I need to do is keep the beads in me hair and a big smile on my face and get a new tattoo every five years just to keep public interest going…”
Bryony, Will Hampson and bass player Lee Sykes gradually reined him in though there were still plenty of seat-of-the-pants moments, including the festival they were booked to headline in 2004 when their drummer quit less than two days before they were due to appear.
As they scratched their heads and fret- ted how they could possibly play such a rhythm-driven set without a drummer, Bry- ony said “my brother Ben plays drums”. Indeed, he did, but only in rock bands and he had no experience or apparent interest in folk music. She called him anyway and, after agreeing to bail them out, he was locked in a van with a copy of the band’s
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