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Uncut album hours before the gig and told he wouldn’t be let out until he’d learned the set. It worked fine until they intro- duced a song not on the album. There was another hairy moment when the rest of the band left the stage, leaving Ben to play Drum & Clogs, a call-and-response routine with Tiny Taylor’s clogging mirror- ing Ben’s drumbeats. Unsurprisingly, he froze and the showpiece interlude turned into something wholly more random and freeform. Seven years on, however, Ben proudly remains a Demon Barber who dresses up as Jasmine The Betty and can now count Jeremy Vine from Eggheads among his fans.
They’re a closely knit unit (“all hus- bands and brothers and girlfriends and best mates,” as Damien puts it) and during the occasional chaos and financial strife, they’ve often needed to be. The early days of the Roadshow involved a cast of 20, but now they’ve cut it down to a more man- ageable dozen. It remains a labour of love for them all and they have to fit in day jobs around Demon gigs.
Damien: “We’ve always wanted to get to a point where we can earn a living from it and hopefully in the next couple of years we might be able to get there. There’s a lot of people to be moved around the country and be put up in accommodation and that takes a lot of money, so it’s diffi- cult. The dancers are all in full-time work or education so it’s a hobby for them but it still needs commitment. If we weren’t such a close group of friends with that social connection I don’t think it would have sur- vived. Most weekends they come with us to festivals so virtually all their free time is taken up with us.”
Promoters still find it hard to separate the concept of Demon Barbers the concert band, from the Demon Barbers Roadshow,
the music and dance extravaganza. Their name is now so synonymous with dancing that the basic five-piece concert line-up has been somewhat marginalised with promoters always wanting the Road- show… until they realise how many peo- ple are involved.
excitement and drama into recorded work. None of their releases has yet sold in vast quantities, not even last year’s The Adventures Of Captain Ward, though it was a determined effort with its striking cartoon superhero sleeve and some strik- ing material, from the Bellamy-related title track to Grateful Dead’s Friend Of The Devil and a rare Damien Barber origi- nal song, Rise Up.
A
“Basically that was our live show banged on to a record,” he says. “It’s a lit- tle bit quirky and a little bit jumpy, but what we’ve found is that the music people like to hear us play on stage isn’t necessari- ly the music they’ll put on at home, cer- tainly not when they have friends round for dinner or whatever. The album hasn’t sold particularly well and we have to look at that and work out why.
“There was a comment – actually, I think it was you – talking about produc- tion and saying it would be interesting to see what an outside producer would do with us. It’s not something we’d thought about before because we rehearse in Bry’s parents’ spare bedroom and create music we love and find exciting and our audi- ence find exciting, and we bang it on a CD. But now we’re thinking about that and…”
He pauses, wondering if he should divulge the next bit.
nd when you have such a big reputation as a spectacular award-winning live band, it poses a perennial puzzle of how to translate that level of
“Well, we’ve been talking to Simon Emmerson about producing us. The guy’s a legend. He knows his stuff. That whole Afro Celts thing and some really interest- ing stuff with Imagined Village… so it would be really good to get his opinion on what might work better on CD. I think we need to make an album for its own sake. It’s a completely different form. With the live stuff we generally think about what will get everyone going and how we’re going to keep them entertained and what we’re going to do with rhythms and move- ment…those are the things we think about when we’re creating music for a live show but it’s not necessarily what people want for an album. Simon did say, though, that he loved our punky independent atti- tude and we shouldn’t lose that. We don’t want to sound contrived. That’s why we need to involve someone like Simon, he has so much experience…I’m really excited about it.”
If the moon is blue, it may include another new song – or possibly even two – written by the reluctant composer Damien Barber.
“With Good Old Days and Rise Up, I started writing them about 20 years ago. They’d been in my head that long. I’ve got two more songs in my head now. One is about something important to me, it’s all about the lyrics; and the other one is more for the live show, that’s party time. Maybe they’ll surface in 20 years.”
So, look out for the Demon Barbers
Roadshow. You can’t miss ‘em, Damien with his beads and tattoos, Bryony’s ram- paging fiddle, bearded Ben as Jasmine The Betty, clog dancers all over the shop rock- ing and reeling all around the land. Ask nicely and they’ll even show you their pho- tographs with Tamsin Greig…
www.thedemonbarbers.co.uk F
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