Category: Beats

Words by Dave Waller.

A few years ago, many followers of Mass Appeal’s Rhythm Roulette series noticed a glitch in the Matrix. Alongside the regular films of 9th Wonder, El-P and Large Professor testing their beatmaking chops on random records, there emerged a clip fronted by a middle-aged English bloke in wire-frame specs, a needle-sharp v-neck sweater and a lemon shirt, clutching a carrier bag from Lidl. “I’m Barry Beats,” he said, before ducking through the door of a record shop. Inside, he blind-picked an INXS 12”, some AC-DC and the Hair soundtrack. Then he got busy in Pro Tools and duly unleashed heat.

The clip somehow found its way into Mass Appeal’s official rotation, and has since racked up close to half a million views and hundreds of comments – the vast majority of which can’t get over how someone as unhip-hop as this guy could be banging out that kind of beat. There are a lot of Ned Flanders comparisons. Walter White. Lenny from Memento. He was called the ‘dirty old man of hiphop’, and a ‘korny ass mutha fucker’.

Then there was this: ‘If this cat had 2-3 dead boys n his closet and one cut up and stuffed in his bed I would tell anyone thats not even the craziest shizt I seen him do.’ [Sic]

Indeed, despite all the confusion, there was one sentiment that drove the response: this weird-looking dude is lit.

Digging for a living

Should you ever find yourself in the town of Camborne, deep in the rural English county of Cornwall, you’ll feel the past. The town is dissected by long terraces of granite cottages built back in the 18th Century, for men who spent their lives underground in a perilous hunt for tin. Back then, Camborne was the richest mining area in the world. But all that bustle, industry and purpose is now a distant memory, hanging heavy over the town like the mist that still hugs its hills. These days those streets are dotted with bored kids, old folk and shops struggling to survive.

Today I’m in a particularly weird example of the latter, one full of thick carpet, lavender and trinkets. I’m here following local resident Barry Beats, clad today in slick bottle-green wool-felt slacks. He strides purposefully up the stairs, past Miss Molly’s Tea Room and a terrifying display of old Dutch dolls, and through a room of floral drapes and paintings of pink carnations. Well-honed instincts lead him to a corner annex, where he discovers a rich vein of old vinyl. “This one looks good,” he says, extracting a battered copy of Non-Stop Latin Party. Price: 20p.

Newcomers may be happy speculating over the contents of Barry’s locked attic, but those of a certain vintage may be aware of the man’s real secret – he was once half of production duo The Creators, going under his old alias of Si Spex. As well as doing remix work for Dilated Peoples and Nas, The Creators released one full-length LP, The Weight, back in 2000. It was a transatlantic banger, with Mos Def and Talib Kweli, El Da Sensei and Dilated all gracing the mic.

In the wake of that LP, Barry got hit with label troubles, and his MPC got shut in the loft while he went out delivering Chinese takeaways to make ends meet, and to fund a troubling addiction to model railways. But now Barry is back and dropping his debut solo release, the instrumental ‘2 Sides of Barry’, on King of the Beats records. The sound is what Barry calls ‘new bap’: crisp, tight and funky with hard drums and playful edits. On the first side of the record, everything is sampled. On the other side, Barry deftly twists software instruments to perfectly ape ’70s easy listening LPs from the charity shop crates.

It’s a sound he knows well. “My brain is programmed with a default mode to sniff out records wherever,” he says. “The other day I went to the car park at Carn Brea Leisure Centre, which had three stalls of records. One guy just kept pulling Bags for Life with records in out of his car boot. Then I popped into Pool Market, which had four stalls next to a fun fair – one of which was a pick-up truck with the entire back-end full of records. I’ll always be diverted to get records.”

I watch as Barry contorts among the cramped shelves, hunching his back, his knees creaking to the floor. These days he could just sit on his arse with a mug of Yorkshire Tea and sample stuff from YouTube. But, he says, “the discovery is the joy”. He goes off to pay for his pile, smiling as he recalls once finding a solid break on a Wombles record. Then, much to the bafflement of the shop owner, he tries haggling for 50p off.

Chopping it up

We head back down the stairs and sit in Molly’s Tea Room, to share a couple of saffron buns and blow the dust off Barry’s stash – which includes Peter Skellern’s ‘You’re a Lady’, a Pebble Mill LP and a flexidisc selling the Magicair ‘salon-style home hair dryer’. It doesn’t look promising. But, as Barry says, that’s the alchemical art here: creating gold where you really have no right to.

“Pete Rock’s work on Rahzel’s ‘All I know’ is ridiculous,” he says. “He uses Dorthy Ashby’s ‘Windmills of your Mind’, and what he gets out of it is just bonkers. The original isn’t really funky, but the way he chopped it is. That’s probably my favourite chop of all time – you can hardly even hear the little bits he took.” He bites into his bun, and then starts salivating over the back catalogue of DJ Premier. “He’s great at taking something from nothing,” Barry says. “On Royce da 5’9”’s ‘Boom’, the original is by Marc Hannibal, ‘Forever is a Long Long Time’, which is just really lightweight and terrible. Premier makes it sound so powerful and meaty.”

Many subscribers to Barry’s ‘School of Beats’ YouTube series have the same reaction to him. With his idiosyncratic approach to Ableton, he’s inventing his own methods to get the sounds he wants from the gear, recalling the early days of DJs first manipulating turntables to turn forgotten funk records into hip-hop classics. He’s a craftsman: drums are sampled, cleaned and chopped, and days can pass while he perfects a particular bass line. Barry points out that he came up in the age of the MPC, when it could take 40 minutes just to fill the pads – only to find what you had was crap. He’s now happy building a community around his generous online tutorials, but he still mourns that lost sense of struggle. “There’s no secrets in beat making now,” he says. “Back in the day you had no internet and had to learn it yourself.”

Barry’s own route in to hip-hop was typical for rural British kids in the ’80s (meeting breakers at the local monster truck show, getting LL Cool J tapes in Woolworths). But he was soon taking it further, following a growing curiosity into playing with four-tracks and early samplers. It was after a chance meeting at a Cornish holiday park that he hooked up with fellow Creator, Juliano, and the digging became serious. In the mid-90s, when break insanity was at its peak, and the top US producers were paying crazy dollar for records they knew their rivals hadn’t touched, Barry and Juliano would travel to the US to serve them with these mysterious European slabs. “The likes of Buckwild were getting paid $10k a track,” says Barry. “They’d do two or three tracks a week, and would go out and chuck thousands of dollars around at record fairs. We’d go over there with Top of the Pops records, and we could trade them for killer US funk breaks. I couldn’t tell you how many Playschool records we took over.”

It was, he says, an insane time – and not just because of the inflated market for local charity shop finds. Here was a Cornish lad who’d scored a backstage pass to the centre of hip-hop’s Golden Era. “After one record fair, I’m sat in the driver’s seat of Q-Tip’s Mercedes, next to Pete Rock. Tip’s in the back, and they’re playing our demos. They’re both freestyling over the beats, going: ‘Yep, that’s a good one’.”

And then?

“A week later I’m back in Cornwall, stood at the bus stop in Troon.”

Or your Honda or your Beemer…

There was a story about jeeps that emerged back when Q-Tip and Tribe Called Quest were still yet to release Low End Theory. The group would apparently make copies and rush them direct from the studio to the parking lot to hear how the bass sounded in the ride. They were crafting an album for a particular context, a certain time and place. A few weeks after our sojourn to Molly’s Tea Room, Barry offers to give me a test drive of the still unfinished ‘2 Sides of Barry’. I’m stood waiting in the centre of Camborne when a dark blue Hyundai i30 pulls up, and Barry stretches across to the passenger window. “Jump in, pard,” he says. I sit on a Fruit Salad chew.

Barry kicks off my tour of Camborne’s back streets. Pointing as we pass one property, he tells me it’s home to local ghost hunters, Terry and Tracy. “They reckon they’ve got the best ghost footage in the UK,” he says. “They wanted me to clean up the audio on it. It’s probably just interference from local radio, but they’re convinced it’s little girls.”

The album kicks off with the familiar bells and Fender Rhodes from Bob James’ ‘Take Me to the Mardi Gras’, instantly mangled into new shapes under some scratched spoken word. Barry explains how, for the first side of the record, he wanted to take hip-hop staples and find a way to flip them in a way that still feels fresh. Soon massive uplifting drums rumble under ‘Harlem Shuffle’, while Bobby Byrd’s ‘I Know You Got Soul’ is chopped to within an inch of its life under an extended cameo by Clay Davis from The Wire. This all serves to set up the sample-free second side, where somehow the absence of crusty source material doesn’t change the quality of the sound at all. Everything feels like it’s culled from the same crates.

As the sound bounces off the surrounding pebble-dash, Barry keeps interjecting to explain bits he’s added and bars he’s cut, or to ask whether a particular vocal sample really works. This is minor detail stuff, but like a true beat scientist he only hears all the details that are missing. Judging from his mental unrest, Barry still has hours yet to spend trawling through arcane hair dryer sales records before he’s happy. In an age of constant throwaway ‘content’, he’s like an industrial craftsman seeking the precise nugget that will give the whole work the timeless cohesive sheen.

“A scratch may take only minutes to do, but you could be there for days trying to find the sample,” says Barry, as he pulls up to a red light. He slips a Fruit Salad into his mouth, dropping the wrapper casually on to the slip-on resting patiently by the clutch. “I don’t know how Premier does it.”

***

Barry Beats’ 2 Sides of Barry is out now . Download via Bandcamp here. Vinyl copies available from King of the Beats,  complete with free Barry poster and postcard. The vinyl release will be marked with a secret LP drop in charity shops around the UK. Check out Barry’s Instagram/King of the Beats for clues.