Who is Barry Starr? It's just *you* isn't it?

'Ok, what's all this claptrap in the last post about this "fictitious eponymous protagonist" Barry Starr,' I hear you say. 'It's just you in sort of alternate-universe-mode, isn't it?'

To this I would answer simply: yes.

But a proper answer is a bit longer. This project first crept into my consciousness when, strumming the mermaid guitar one day, my fingers happened upon the chords of a song I'd written a while back, Claire - the girl with the boofy hair and I sang it through. 'Hey - that's not a bad tune I thought.' So I went back to some others I'd recorded years ago and never done anything much with beyond doing a demo and played around with some new effects to really change their character. And there were a couple I'd never recorded before at all that I uncovered in old note books.

I had actually been working on another concept - an album about life in Japan. The Barry concept was so strong, though, that it has interrupted the Japanese one for now.

Anyway, as I went through these old tracks I began to consider the different phases I've gone through. While some musicians are happy to do the same thing for their whole career (The Rolling Stones come to mind), I've worn many hats: ultra-serious high-school covers band, musical comedy, musical theatre, jangly-guitar-rock, acoustic stuff, funk-ish stuff, and so on. So this motley group of tunes began to form into Barry's discography:

• 1996 Folks, Rock! - acoustic based indie-folk
• 2000 The Barry Starr Show - post-discovery radio-friendly quirky pop-rock
• 2002 Fame & Misfortune - more of the same but with a darker edge
• 2007 Fools, Freaks & Me - label-less introspective bile and philosophising

And this line up lead perfectly to a tune I'd written called Barry O'Donnell, named for no reason other than it was meant to be an unremarkable name. This is the closing track, 'The part I play.' At the time I was playing with three guys, two from the US and another Kiwi, in Japan under the name Wasabi - possibly the best band name I've personally been involved with except for the Kanazki Love Triangle (we incorporated a triangle). These guys were very adventurous musically speaking and didn't bat an eyelid at the idea of playing a bossa-nova-ish crooner's tune about a faded actor looking back at his career. So, as you'll read in the biography that goes with the tracks on bandcamp, this provided the perfect platform for the newly-named Barry Starr to fall from grace gracefully - and for his vibraphone player and biographer to return too.