RIP Jack Barron

Saddened to hear of the death of Jack Barron - who wrote for Sounds and then NME among other places - after a long illness. 

I didn't know Jack well but I really enjoyed the couple of encounters we had.

 The first was when we were both sent as representatives of our respective music papers (Sounds then still, for him) to Warsaw to cover the first ever East-meets-West festival of alternative music in March 1987- the Carrot Festival, aka Marchewka. (You can read my report on it in this RIP post about David Thomas, who performed there).

Jack looked then almost exactly the same as in the much later photograph above, minus the eyepatch (which gives him a bit of a salty sea dog look)

Jack was already a seasoned veteran of visits to the Eastern Bloc countries and he had come prepared. His suitcase appeared to be entirely full of cassettes - advance copies of albums he'd been sent as a journo but that as released records would be extremely hard to get hold of behind the Iron Curtain. He told me that these advance tapes, once gifted, would then be copied, and that copy would be recopied, and so on.... ultimately circulating throughout Communist Europe. 

I was very impressed by this act of munificence and the following year, when there was a second Carrot Festival, in Budapest (my report can be found in the same David Thomas tribute post), I came prepared myself, with a large cache of advance tapes of recent alternative releases. 

However I could get no takers for them - and ended taking them all back home with me.

 Hungary then was one of the most liberal and permissive of Soviet-aligned nations - I remember being struck by a billboard of a glamorous, made-up female TV presenter, whereas Warsaw had been completely devoid of advertising, apart from the odd propaganda poster, a fabulously desolate and grey place. And because of that relative freedom and the country's proximity to Austria, Hungarian hipsters could get hold of all the music they wanted. Indeed they all seemed quite blasé about the festival and the weirdo-rock visitors from the U.K, whereas the first Carrot was treated as an enormously significant event by the Polish media (Jack and I were both interviewed by TV reporters) and by all the Poles we met.

Jack had a dry, low-key manner with just a gruff hint of baleful - which he possibly deliberately developed. At one point he mentioned having studied (I think in college - doing linguistics?)  how speech patterns and conversational cadence could be deployed to exert an almost hypnotic control over people. Something to do with speaking slowly and quietly and with pauses of a certain length - this compelled attention, the listener would be forced to lean in and couldn't break away. 

 Which was not unlike the way he spoke when telling me this...

The second time we met was when I was researching Energy Flash and I interviewed him along with his partner Helen Mead (both of them working for NME) and Barry Ashworth from Dub Pistols. These three friends were veterans of acid house from its early days. 

Jack had some extraordinary tales about his adventures with MDMA. Let's just say that he plunged into the scene with great commitment and intensity and took it as far as almost anyone at that time. 

 

He seemed none the worse for wear, though - his characteristic dry wit intact. 

A fine writer and one of those unusual characters who found a place in the menagerie that was the UK weekly music press. 

Here's an early-ish singles review in which swipes amusingly at Paul Morley while acknowledging the greatness of Art of Noise. 

 

And here's an interesting take on the Cocteau Twins

Early on, Jack was one of Sounds's main writers about reggae and dancehall. Jamaican music,  as I noted here, received sustained and serious coverage by the paper, far more than you'd imagine given its reputation as an oracle for Oi! and NWBHM. You'll find many pieces by Jack in that post. 

As I also noted in an earlier post here, his pen name is possibly an alias taken from the science fiction novel Bug Jack Barron. 

Looking at the Rock Back Pages bio, I see Jack actually wrote for a while for Melody Maker, in 1998, a good while after my time there was up. This makes him one of those rare examples of the "inkie clean sweep" - someone who wrote for all three leading UK weeklies. (Another would be Vivien Goldman). 

 (Sorry - I don't count Record Mirror as "leading". Mind you, there are even-rarer examples of people who wrote for all four, I believe). 

Lester Bangs - On the Road with the Clash, 3-part epic (NME, 1977)

 

The Stud Brothers - The Housemartins - Melody Maker, 1987

 

Paul Oldfield - The Bible - Melody Maker, May 1987