Who's the other bloke?

Was watching John's TOTP appearances the other day, and was wondering who the other bloke was who appeared alongside John, Eddie, Sunshine and Hiang Kee...

The John Barker who gets an additional synths credit on 'Metamatic' perhaps?

Does anyone know?

WB

It was John, who actually played MOST of the synths on Metamatic.

Although John Barker was credited with additional synthesizers on Metamatic this somewhat downplayed his roll. In fact I read elsewhere (can't remember where) that Barker in fact played a lot of the synths on the album, particularly the more complicated parts. As for the guy appearing with John in the clip,sorry I can't help you there.

It definitely is John Barker if it's 'Underpass' being performed on TOTP.

Just FYI

And here he is, on the right there...

Thanks for clearing that for me.

Does anybody know more about John Barker's musical career?

Chris C

I had quite an E-Mail exchange with John (Barker) not that long ago - I'll try and put the relevant bits up on the Metamatic website.

Rob

That'll be great. Cheers Rob.

Just been at discogs website and mentions that John Barker was involved with the first B.E.F album and the second Heaven 17 album. To be precise on the cover of It's Over, Crushed by The Wheels of Industry, Who'll Stop The Rain and The Best Kept Secret. Also, on the single version of Temptation. He's credited on these tracks for orchestral arrangements.

http://www.discogs.com/artist/John+Barker

Chris C

There was a web page somewhere once that had him going through the work he did on Metamatic (I assume I got the link from here as it was a few years ago now). Who played the best riff in synth history (Underpass lead line)? Not JF. 'Twas John Barker. Or so he said on this page anyway...

Here's the feller

http://johnwesleybarker.madasafish.com

I was viewing the Site Statistics for my humble website and saw some "click throughs" from this Forum Topic. So hi. Yes. It is me looking very uptight with John Foxx on TOTP doing Underpass. And yes I was quite surprised to see the word 'additional' in front of synths as my credit on the sleeve of Metamatic, as you rightly pointed out. But John is the artist, it was his record. Great to read that you think the synth riff of Underpass is the best riff in synth history, I did play it, but John wrote it. In fact, John wrote all the parts I played, although I did make "additional" suggestions. My involvement was an important Rite Of Passage into the world of commercial music brought about by my friendship with Gareth Jones. The sessions also presented fiendish technical challenges. There was no MIDI then. Syncronisation and Polyphony came out just after we finished the album. While recording No One Dirving at Sarm East, we saw Trevor Horn's PolyMoog.

Enough!

So quite a day back in the day. Thanks for your interest guys, and for popping by at www.johnwesleybarker.co.uk .

John, it's fantastic to see you here! Thanks a lot for your work on one of the best electronic albums! I've always wondered what exactly did you do on "Metamatic" - and to know that you played THAT riff on "Underpass"... Wow!

Did you play on all tracks recorded by John in 1979-1980?

Thanks Vladimir. I didn't play all the synths but many of the parts, yes. I don't know how John decided which parts I should play. You've made me listen to Underpass on theMetamatic CD to check which parts are mine. The lead synths line and bass part then the string chords at the end.
The chord sequence: is identical to my Rise & Fall written for Lost Jockey which you'll find on the MP3 player of my site.

Thanks John for appearing here. Excellent performance on Metamatic.

From Metamatic as synth player you moved on to get involved with Heaven 17´s Luxury Gap in some of their orchestral arrangements for some of their songs. How did that come about?

Perhaps one was expecting your continual involvement with John Foxx in The Garden, church like orchestrations which is truly your cup of tea. What happened here?

Thanks again

Chris C

The orchestral arranging came from working on It's Over with the wunderkind Billy MacKenzie on the BEF Music Of Quality And Distinction Vol 1 which was recorded at The Garden studio in Shoreditch (where incidentally I was involved in putting up the ceiling plaster board). The BEF project introduced me to Martyn Ware, Glen Gregory and Ian Craig Marsh and that lead on to The Luxury Gap orchestral parts. I have Gareth Jones to thank for all this in the first instance, and then of course John Foxx. It was an unfortunate evening when I let down John by not turning up to do the strings on Your Dress but rather chose to stay out with Philip Glass (yes THE Philip Glass), as he was making a film with Peter Greenaway during the Almeida Festival and my priority music group at the time was The Lost Jockey. I had scored the parts for Your Dress from John's synth playing, so was not an original arrangement. I still don't know if the string session with Mike Howlett went ahead. Incidentally, has anyone got a history of The Garden studio? After dropping out of John Foxx's world, I never visited the studio again. It was mighty fine little studio.

BTW I have two 7" reels of the Metamatic album, copy stereo masters. They need spooling, if not playing.

John

Thanks for your informative reply.

One final question, you appeared on Top Of The Pops for the Europe After The Rain single. Were you involved in any way with this song and the album The Garden? I feel there's something John Barker with this album. Perhaps the church like sound.

Best regards
Chris C

Hi John,

With regard The Garden studio. A number of interesting artists recorded there during early/mid 80s.For example Depeche Mode recorded 'Construction Time Again' in '83. Produced by Daniel Miller and your old mate Gareth Jones, who went on to produce two further DM albums (although not at The Garden).

I didn't appear on the TOTP Europe After The Rain single (did I?... no fairly sure I didn't) I was around The Garden when John started working on the second solo album. I remember we pitched to do the theme to Superman 2 (the movie). The word on the block was that they (remember the Superman movies were produced by the cast and crew - revolutionary in Hollywood at that time) wanted a synthesizer score rather than the full John Williams orchestral treatment. So I transcribed the John Williams score from the first Superman and multi-tracked with Gareth one day using the Yamaha CS-1 we'd borrowed from someone (?) and my Casio VL tone (YES - the little very cheap Casio, I used it to play the fast string lines at a few points) then John Foxx came in a added some wooshes on the Arp Odyssey. Obviously we didn't get the job, but it went to Ken Freeman I believe, of Casualty BBC theme fame. I have a cassette of this recording - monitor mixes.

Aha! that´s the other soundtrack John Foxx was talking about at the time of The Identification of A Woman (Italian film).

John I believe it´s you here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZjYw12Buao

You appear on the left side of the screen as you are watching the video at 50s , 2:02 and at 3:14

Perhaps you could release some of your recordings. Even team up with John Foxx as a production unit for these.

Chris C

Sorry Chris... not me on that TOTP. I did Underpass and No One Driving appearences. But thanks for the YouTube link. As for releasing recordings with John Foxx, that is not going to happen. I tried to contact John a couple of years ago (?) when he was in Edinburgh where I was living at the time. I was trying to blag complimentary tickets to a gig he was doing there but didn't go in the end as I was playing myself, I think I had an Infinite Trio gig at the Shore Bar in Leith and he didn't get back to me in any case.

I asked John Foxx about The Garden studio when I met him at Wembley record fair in 2001. He said he sold it to Matt Johnson (The The).

that's interesting ... but i think that matt doesn't own it anymore , so who's the current owner of it - if anybody here is in the know then ? *indeed_very_curious*

Well if anyone's in the vicinity, check out the building. The Garden was in the basement of the building on the corner of Holywell Lane and Shoreditch High Street (A10) in Tower Hamlets, London. The entrance to the basement was in Holywell Lane. The red brick Victorian building was a toy factory before it was divided into working spaces by various artists. It had a rather nice clock tower. I explored the whole building when it was empty, finding tools to make toys. Fascinating! Another building John looked at for making a studio is now the Almeida Theatre.

Cheers John. Thanks for your input. Good to hear about Metamatic and The Garden studio from somebody who was there. Glad to see you're still involved in music in various ways.

It is interesting reading John Barker's comments on this thread in the light of the new "Metal Beat" interview CD that Foxxy has been selling on his current "play all of Metamatic" tour.

Foxxy does finally get around to mentioning that John Barker played on Metamatic towards the end of the interview, although frankly with, to my ear, slightly parsimonious undertones. Indeed, he makes a point of insisting that John Barker didn't play the lead synth line on "Underpass" (What one imagines happened is that Barker did literally "play it" during the studio sessions, but that wasn't the take which got used on the final mix, presumeably Foxxy decided that his own playing of it was good enough.... )

Well... I didn't play the lead line!? We have to take John Foxx's word for it. I could have sworn I played it. Nevermind.

Well either way, it was one of the best synths riffs ever.

Thanks for coming back, and for the instrument list on this thread from your last visit.

http://www.ultravox.org.uk/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=000528

well, you know what these pop stars can be like... :rolleyes:

For what it's worth, I was looking on the PPL's http://www.catcouk.com database there, and the musicians on UNDERPASS are listed as John Foxx synthesizer & vocals, Jake Durant bass and John Christopher Wesley-Barker synthesizer.

the only other foxx recordings which list Mr Barker on synthesizer are "A New Kind of Man", "Burning Car" and "This City".
(I think this is merely cos whatever rather lazy record company personnel have submitted the details to CatCo/PPL for the various re-issues since the whole notion of CatCo and Performer royalties and ISRC codes came about, hasn't bothered typing in any performer info. Which is, of course, reprehensibly slack. But you know what record companies are like :rolleyes: )

EDIT - yeah the 1993 Virgin CD is in the PPL database, but there's no performer info at all in the record for it.
The 2003 Esdel CD is there too, and just has performer info for the 4 aforementioned tracks (I think because they've also appeared on other compilations)
The 2007 edition CD isn't in the database at all yet.

Since performers are entitled to Free Money from PPL when records are played on the radio etc, this is a jolly poor show

Interesting feline1. You seem knowledgeable about things PPL. I have not received a penny in PPL for my work on Metamatic. Or any other money for that matter. I was paid £30 per day in cash. Money and music don't mix, at least not in my life. If you know of a way for me to get any more money out of Metamatic every little bit would be appreciated.
Visit my Homepage 2.0

Well, as i said THANKS FOR COMING BACK and clearing up the matter.

Nice to know the final studio version was played by the great man himself.

Well, I've been making music for years and I dunno if I've ever even made £30 *ever*, never mind per day LOL and certainly have never played on any famous records yet!
But I do know how all that PPL/PRS/MCPS etc etc gubbins works I suppose.

Sure, you can read about it on the http://www.ppluk.com/ website - the section you wanna click on is "PERFORMERS". I suspect you are already a PPL Performer member though? (cos I see you linked in on their CatCo database against those tracks, plus some Heaven 17 and other stuff...).
If you're not a PPL performer member, you should be! It's FREE to join! Get in! :p

The thing with this whole PPL Performer Royalties stuff (which only came into being in the late 1990s, I think? Due to some new EU rule?) is that although in *principle*, any time a recording is played on the telly or radio or a dentist's waiting room etc etc, performers are meant to get a few pennies in royalties (instead of it just being the songwriters and the record company) - but in *PRACTICE*, it'll only work if (a) the performer in question is a member of PPL and (b) the recording has an ISRC number and is logged in PPL's CatCo database with all the performers listed.

One of the obstacles to this is that performers can't register recordings and their performances themselves (or even search PPL's CatCo database to check it!) - instead, data is only fed into CatCo by *record companies*. Since the record companies often haven't bother to retrospectively go back through their old deleted back-catalogues and feed all the info into CatCo, many of these old records, which may actually quite routinely get a modest bit of airplay, aren't properly logged in the database at all and so nobody's getting any performer royalties on them
(I can only poke around in there cos I run a couple of tiny zero-budget labels myself.....)

PPL do maintain what they call an "Active Recordings List" (ARL), which is tracks that they've collected non-trivial amounts of cash for, but haven't managed to pay it to performers yet for the abovementioned reasons (a) and/or (b)...
I *think* when I did a search there on PPL's site that "Underpass" by John Foxx came up on what was the ARL, and it certainly had a flag saying "This Track is eligable for Express Claims", so if I were you I'd get on the blower to the PPL Performer Helpdesk (020 7534 1234) and "clarify your situation" with them...

I mean who knows - there seems to be a lot of grass roots discontent in the music bizz these days that these big collection societies are dubious behemoths who are pretty poor at getting the appropriate royalties to the little guys.
Surely to goodness you should be getting some stuff from PPL for things like Underpass, as it's even been on BBC2 on "ToTP2" etc, never mind radioplay...

Erm...do you know that for sure? I don't...

well its interesting JF came out and said that specifically; I guess he'd been to John's site.

Mind you, John Foxx is no Billy Currie when it comes to bitchin' about what's on people's websites

Don't disagree. I don't think there's any doubt that John Barker played the riff under discussion and to be completely fair, it's not like he's claiming he wrote it either. The current point is whether the version that JB played is the one used on the track and/or the album. I've never recorded music and never been in a music studio so I have no idea how takes of the same music are labelled and then decisions made on which one to use.

To be honest, it's also something I've never really given much thought to either but to the players themselves I guess it's a matter of pride and maybe a matter of being able to recognise something you created.

There are plenty of Foxx fans here and musicians, so any ideas?

well Foxxy says got Mr Barker to play parts cos his own timing/playing was too sloppy, and he needed it done tight and precise...
the timing on the lead riff on Underpass is pretty tight on the record! So fair play to John if he managed to finally do a good enough take of it himself If they'd used Mr Barker's take, I presume it would've sounded just the same *anyways*, cos you couldn't really play it more tight than the take they ended up with!
I'll say this much though: the *sound* John and Louis used when they put the same riff into "Invisible Women", and played "Overpass" on the Exotour, was complete pants <img border="0" alt="[Puppy dog eyes]" title="" src="graemlins/sad5.gif" /> what were they thinking?!

Im only going by the fact that John (Foxx) stated playing it in hes recent interview, and that John (barker) accepts John's word for it now. Its the closest to an answer there can be, given that they were there.

Theres plenty everywhere with ideas for months about the subject, thats why JB accepted John's word to help clear it up. I think John's recent intereview and F1's take on it (at metamatic) was probably closest to what happened.

Ask the same question to the people im accepting the answer from, John and John.

Oh yeah, last week Si questioned why you agreed with him even.

I'm sorry. Do you have the impression I'm picking on you, Ken? :rolleyes: I'm not.

Could've sworn I was just raising a question that seemed not to have been answered but glossed over. On the scale of it, to me at least, it's not that important but I would guess to John Barker (and presumably to John Foxx) it's quite important.

No Sicastic, I mean Si

I just think its not just me that can be sure, or not. But we have to accept even if there is some glossing over. Questions could go on forever but this is the most likely truth so im prepered to accept it. And to be honest, no-one can ever be 100% sure about any artists role in their own music, even if theres no dispute.

Coz I'm a wild eyed loner standing at the gates of oblivion...

Not YOU as well Simon, i thought i'd cornered the market. LOL.

We've all done it Grant. Its that time when you walk into a record shop doorway, the year after Numans 'dance' was released.

Once my recording sessions were complete, it was then John Foxx and Gareth Jones who finished Metamatic. Whether I recorded the lead line on the album or not, I cannot now be sure. If John says he played it, I see no reason why he should lie. Whatever I played, it was strictly under John's supervision. The exception to this was the repeated patterns at the end of Touch & Go.

Haha you should be a psychologist, you're good at it ; "Dance" is nowhere near his worst, but it was the start of a downward spiral till almost the mid 90s.

Thanks to John for the on the ground Foxx info - all very interesting.

Grant, you're wearing too many sweaters.

That ran through my head when reading this thread... Whatever the truth on who played THAT line Mr Barker, congratulations on contributing to one of the seminal albums from the early 80s; just a pity you weren't better recompensed.

That's one of the best bits on the whole album!

Also perhaps explains why it was missing when John's been playing Touch And Go recently (he and Louis do this slightly dodgy "looking out through the moving windows" vocal caper instead...

I thought it was hats !! :rolleyes: