Barringtone Confront Total Failure
Published 29 months ago
The new band from Clor's Barry Dobbin.
"Yeah, yeah, Barrington Levy," says Barry Dobbin, swigging from his real ale in the Bricklayer's Arms as we chat about how his new band's name sounds like it could be a dubstep project."When Clor started and we were first in the studio together we were trying to produce a ragga record, and we discovered how phenomenally difficult it was to really nail it."
Anyone familiar with the short-lived, under-lamented Clor will be pleased to know Dobbin's new project is a rougher-hewn yet still idiosyncratic collision of every left-of-centre ongoing art/music vector you can think of. The rougher sound comes from a key change in the creative process: "With Clor everything was written in a studio, but with Barringtone everything is done in a practice room and then we take that into a studio and try and record that sound - that's what makes it exciting, the prospect of total failure."
The four-piece band's debut 7" is the first release on Simian Mobile Disco's new This Is Music label. The connection goes back a few years: "I ended up singing on the Simian Mobile Disco record, and then one day I just got a phone call from Jaz saying he had a couple of free days in the studio, so we did it and then his manager said 'I'm starting a label, I'll put this out.'" What was it like working with such an in-demand property? "We really enjoyed it, he's not what we expected - he didn't try to make it into polished dance music - he just listened to our demo and came and saw us rehearse a couple of times, and we talked about arrangements and about how we might produce it and decided that we should simply stand there with drums, bass, guitar, all done in one. He was really intuitive."
The resulting single, "Snake In The Grass", is hook-laden and unpredictable, a little like a lost children's theme re-recorded by Brian Eno. "I'm flattered by any comparisons to early Eno, because it's not a love song. That's what Eno was doing, he said he'd never write a song that had 'love' or 'me' or 'you' in it, so from that point of view it's a little quixotic although it is actually based on something concrete, it's not just a flight of fancy."
