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). 

Sounds and Reggae

Picking up from the other post, one thing that has struck me for a while now, thanks to Soundsclips and Zounds Abounds scanning issues of Sounds from the late '70s and early '80s, is how regularly they covered Jamaican music.

You think of Sounds and the things that spring to mind would be Oi! and Bushellism, and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. And maybe if you knew your British rock paper history, you would also think about Jon Savage and New Musick, and the "grey overcoat" Fac-loving thing associated with Dave McCullough, at least until he flipped for Postcard and his own version of poptimism. 

But alongside all that - the many flavours of ROCK -  Sounds consistently covered reggae and dancehall. Put Jamaican and Black British artists on the cover. 

(They also covered funk and soul, did pieces on early rap and hip hop). 

NME was probably even better at covering these areas, but Sounds did a creditable job.  

Especially considering this was verily the Dark Age of Rockisme. Or so we are told. 

A lot of the late '70s coverage is coming from Vivien Goldman, before she jumped to first Melody Maker and then to NME. But there were other writers who kept it going deep into the Eighties, including Eric Fuller, Jack Barron and Edwin Pouncey. 

And not just the roots-rock-rebel stuff, they also covered reggae at its poppiest - lover's.

Fuck me, they even had David Rodigan review albums

Even Gaz Bushell wrote a bit about reggae now and then

And not just reggae...